La fortuna austro-tedesca di Dario Castello. L’arte della sonata in trasformazione

Abstract

The innovative power of Dario Castello’s sonatas (1621 and 1629) is usually confined into the limits of an extravagant and irregular stylus phantasticus. In stark contrast to this interpretation stands the rigorous creative method of this Venetian composer and instrumentalist. Castello in both his publications systematically adopted a relatively simple formal scheme consisting of three parts perfectly balanced. The beginning is formed by a fugue and an imitative stretta interspersed with a short pause in slow tempo. The middle part, consisting in two or three soloistic sections, is wandering and unpredictable like a fluctuatio animi and for this reason it performs an effective function of contrast and formal imbalance. The ending, which instead has a resolutive function, takes up the features of the stretta that close the first part although in some compositions it is constituted by the recapitulation of the initial fugue. The correct identification of the formal and narrative organization of Castello’s sonatas allows us to accurately measure their fortune, which was not only Italian. Thanks to his clarity and constructive effectiveness Castello established himself as a model in German-speaking countries, so much so that the formal scheme he conceived is found in a significant number of sonatas (about thirty) by Bertali, Schmelzer, Becker, Förster, Buxtheude, and others. The present article reconstructs for the first time this particular tradition and contextually highlights the profound stylistic change that affected it. In fact, the original dramatic coherence of the Castello sonatas, grounded on a purely musical syntax, gradually was broken by mimic suggestions favoured by new aesthetic instances close to opera, cantata and dance.