Appoggiatura (pronounced uh-poj-uh-too-r-uh or uh-poj-uh-tyoo- r-uh or ahp-pawd-jah-too-rah (Italian))
In musical
composition, an ornament consisting of a non-harmonic note (short or long) preceding
a harmonic one either before or on the stress (a note of embellishment
preceding another note and taking a portion of its time).
1745-1755: From the Italian appoggiatura, from appoggiare (to lean; to
prop; to support) from the Vulgar Latin appodiāre
(present active infinitive of appodiō,
from the Classical Latin podium) and related to the French appuyer, the Spanish apoyar
and the Portuguese apoiar. The meaning in music is for the sense of one
note “propping up” another.
The Appoggiatura
As in many fields, fashions in music change. There was a period, during the sixteenth century, when the rules of counterpoint were strict and discords permissible only if they were prepared and resolved in ways used in the previous sections; the only discord normally allowed on the strong beat was the suspension. There the discord is prepared by the note being tied across from a weak to a strong beat and resolved onto the next weak beat; a type of syncopation. In the mid-century however, there was a relaxation of the rules of voice leading which included experimentation with unprepared discords, the most important of which was the appoggiatura. The appoggiatura started as a decorative note which displaced the first part of a note of a melody. It occurred on the strong beat of the bar and could be either dissonant or consonant but in either case, the appoggiatura resolved (upwards or downwards) onto a consonance but, unlike the suspension, did not require to be prepared or tied from a previous note. In order to overcome the earlier rule that all discords had to be prepared, the appoggiatura was originally shown as an ornament but later was written out in full.
An ornament: Bach, Orchestral Suite in B minor for flute and strings: Menuet.
That was just a fudge, a composer paying respect to a rule while breaking it because, as played, an appoggiatura is not a short ornament, it takes usually up a full half of the length of the note that it resolves onto and if resolved onto a note three beats long, it takes up a third or two thirds the length. The appoggiatura is usually connected with the main harmony note by a slur and is normally played with a small degree of emphasis.
Haydn: Sonata in G major XVI:27 Allegro con Brio.
Haydn shows appoggiaturas at *1, *2 and *3, now written out in-full as was normal practice in the classical period. Their identity as elaborating notes is given away by the presence of the slurs.
December
2 2023 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the singer Maria Callas
(1923-1977), the soprano who remains still more famous than any other and the
subject of a cult, something attributable certainly to her art but the
tempestuous life she led off the stage attracted many; in the very modern sense
of the word, Callas was a celebrity.
What Callas is in 2023 is thus a construct, a mix of myth, discography,
and public persona although it’s more correct to say she’s a number of
constructs; the criteria of trained musicians and critics likely to differ from
those who just listen. She was neither the
most technically accomplished nor the most refined singer and yet, as Sir
Rudolf Bing (1902–1997; General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York
(the Met)) famously noted, “having once
heard Callas, it was difficult to listen to anyone else sing the same music”. That was because whatever the technical flaws
or deliberate departures from what had become the accepted techniques of the
mid-twentieth century, Callas brought to every performance a thrilling
intensity which made the characters come alive in a way even the most virtuosic
of her contemporaries couldn’t quite match.
The critics impressed only by technical ecstasy liked to label Callas a “singing actress” and there’s something in that but not in the way they mean; the “acting” wasn’t there to compensate for the voice, it was a part of the voice. There are several recordings of the “madness” scene in Gaetano Donizetti's (1797–1848) Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) in which, as an exercise in singing, the performances are more accomplished yet it’s the Callas version which is the definitive because only she can send a shiver down the spine. It was in the interpretation, just as it was when, in Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813–1901) Otello (1886), she played with layers of vocal tones variously to convey feelings of warm nostalgia, paranoia, depression and impending death. Whatever was in the score to be expressed, it’s there but it wasn’t done with vocal pyrotechnics, indeed Callas, in both studio recordings and live performances often eschewed the cadential trills and appoggiature which, although unwritten, had entered Opera in the seventeenth century and become a signature of sopranos since at least the early nineteenth. What she did with her voice has been called a kind of “operatic word-painting”, a lending of emotional depth which enabled her, more than any other to transcend the theatrical artificiality of opera and it’s this quality which means even roles for which she seemed an improbable choice (such as Giacomo Puccini’s (1858–1924) Madam Butterfly (1904)) demand attention.
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