Cesare Bendinelli (1542-1617)

This article continues the series started in Brass Bulletin 17 (1977). There the biographical information on Bendinelli appeared in a first section. In this second section Bendinelli’s Tutta l’arte della Trombetta (1614) is discussed.

Part II: The Trumpet Method

As we know today, Bendinelli presented the Accademia Filarmonica of his home city, Verona, in 1614 with a trumpet made in 1585 by Anton Schnitzer and a book entitled Tutta l’arte della Trombetta («The Entire Art of Trumpet-Playing»)¹. A note is preserved in the archives of the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona to the effect that Bendinelli gave the trumpet and the method, together with a letter which has not survived, to Count Agostino Giusti, and that Giusti was requested to thank the donor in everyone's name². This donation was incorporated into the library of the Accademia Filarmonica and began a slumber of centuries.

Although Giuseppe Turrini mentioned both the trumpet and the method in his catalogue of the contents of the Accademia Filarmonica library, a catalogue which was published in 1941³, they only became known to trumpet scholarship in 1970. The musicologist Lorenzo Bianconi⁴ came upon them while cataloguing the contents of Italian libraries for the source lexicon RISM⁵. When Bianconi traveled with me in 1970 to the International Musicological Congress in Bonn, he told me about the trumpet method.

Was I familiar with it? No — but on my next Italian tour I headed straight for Verona. Prof. Enrico Paganuzzi, head of the library of the Accademia Filarmonica, was very helpful and cooperative; and thus it became possible for the Bärenreiter publishing house to bring out a facsimile edition in 1975. Since then, Bendinelli’s trumpet method has been discussed in several publications⁶, and the last sonata contained within it, the Sonata No. 336, has been printed⁷. Since the reader will be able to form a clear idea of the method through these recent publications, I would like in this article first briefly to show its importance and then to call attention to just three of its aspects: 1) the table of the trumpet's range at the beginning of the method, 2) the military signals, and 3) the five-part sonatas.

Until now, Girolamo Fantini’s Modo per imparare a sonare di tromba (Frankfort 1638) was considered to be the first trumpet method⁸. Bendinelli’s work now enjoys this distinction. Other important documents on trumpet-playing from this time are, in chronological order: 1) the notebooks of two German trumpeters at the Danish court, Hendrich Lübeck (written down c. 1596–1609) and Magnus Thomsen (written down in 1598)⁹, 2) Claudio Monteverdi's five-part Orfeo-toccata (1607)¹⁰, 3) valuable instructions in the third volume of Michael Praetorius' Syntagma musicum (Wolfenbüttel 1619)¹¹, and 4) the military signals transmitted to us by Marin Mersenne in his Harmonie universelle (Paris 1636–1637)¹².