Of the Adagio and Cadenzas:

To any musician, personal expression is the key to an authentic performance. While people can drill their technique to the point of (near) perfection, if the music lacks emotional ties the performance is empty. This is easier to grasp with a contemporary piece of music, but when performing the Baroque, it is necessary to understand to context of the time period.

It is easy to think that the adagio will be simplest to learn because it lacks the speed to make it technically challenging, but it is actually complex to interpret. This is especially true about the Baroque adagio, which is meant to be ornamented by the performer. While anyone can sit down and sight-read an adagio movement, they are not taking the time to realize all of the nuances that go into its expression and Quantz would be horrified with the resulting sound.

Before attempting to play the adagio, it is important to understand the different types. There are French and Italian styles. The French uses the ornamentations we talked about last time to lightly highlight the pre-existing melodic structure and would seem dry without them. Harmonic understanding is not required in order to appropriately ornament. In the Italian style, the harmony is essential to understand when developing extensive embellishments over it. Harmonic movement drives the Italian adagio.

Adagio, Italian for “at ease,” is meant to be realized gently and expressively down to each individual note. Quantz states that in order to play one well, the performer must insert calm to the melancholy mood of the piece. He loved messa di voce and flattements in the context of the adagio. Messa di voce is when there is a dynamic swell through a long sustained note of a whole or half bar. It will conclude with a flattements, which is using the fingers to produce a light vibrato. It must be remembered that vibrato is used as a light ornament in Baroque music whether you are playing on a Baroque or contemporary instrument. The moving notes that follow a held note can be played out and it is a good practice to think of dynamic growth between each individual note of the adagio. Using a slightly different method of ornamentation each time will make each repetition more expressive for the performer and more interesting for the listener. Be very careful of proper phrasing, as it is easy to disrupt the flow of the movement by breathing in the wrong place.

Cadenzas are also characteristic of the Baroque era. They are virtuosic unaccompanied lines written by the performer that are at the conclusion of a movement. These long embellishments of previously heard themes are popular in Italian music. Regular meter is rarely observed in the realization of a cadenza. They should sound to the audience as if they had been improvised. They use the principal theme of the movement combined with repeated fragments of other themes. Be sure not to move into unrelated or distant keys when writing a cadenza. Typical harmonic motion is from the tonic to the subdominant to the dominant and then back to the tonic.

It is important to pay attention to how both the Baroque Adagio and Cadenzas are performed because they need to have a quality that is appropriate for the time period the piece was written. When either of these sections are performed incorrectly, it takes away from the work as a whole. Just be sensitive to the style of the time period when interpreting how to perform a piece!

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Further Reading:

Quantz, Johann Joachim, and Edward R. Reilly. On Playing the Flute. Fir paperback ed. New York: Schirmer Books, 1966.