DISCOVERING MUSIC

Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music’s technical terms

IT’S A LONG TIME since I heard anyone described as ‘acting the giddy goat’. Perhaps it’s just too innocent an expression for angry and anxious times like these. But that’s what the term ‘capriccio’ ultimately means, rooted as it is in the Latin ‘caper/-pri’ (‘a goat’). I don’t know if goats fully deserve their reputation for skittishness or whimsicality, but that’s how we end up with both ‘caprice’ and capriccio.

In Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768, it’s defined as ‘A kind of free music, in which the composer, without subjecting himself to any theme, gives loose rein to his genius, and submits himself to the fire of composition’. That helps explain how, before Rousseau’s time, capriccio could signify both a madrigal and a composition in a fugal style which didn’t necessarily obey all the rules of strict counterpoint (how naughty!). Some Baroque composers, however, ran with the older meaning of the word, introducing sudden changes in style or tempo, imitations of birdsong or horncalls, and other pleasingly disruptive elements. JS Bach’s early and (relatively) flighty Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother also belongs in this category.

To make things more complicated, some 18th-century composers started using capriccio to indicate a freely improvised cadenza; then others appropriated it to signify a virtuoso technical study, hence Paganini’s brilliant 24 Caprices – though there may also have been an element of boasting there. (‘What is hard work for others is mere caprice for me.’) The Romantics returned to the source again. In Mendelssohn’s capriccios, playfulness is centre stage. In Rimsky-korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, there are undertones of the kind of goatish fun and games to be found (ideally) in warmer Mediterranean climes.

Given what we know of Walton, he may have entertained similar thoughts in composing his ebullient Capriccio burlesca. But Rousseau’s notion of ‘loose rein’ and ‘submission to the fire of composition’ seems more appropriate in the case of Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, and it may explain how Janáωek’s gritty, fantastical Capriccio for Piano Left-hand got its name. Originally this was entitled ‘Defiance’, and what better way for a war-disabled pianist to show that quality than be demonstrating that he can still, as Janáωek put it, ‘dance on one leg’? Now I’m sure I have seen a goat do that.