<i>Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi</i> (review)

involved, highlighting the main points by centering upon a limited number of works, and gathering the rest of his useful, detailed information for hundreds of pieces in suitable appendices. Including this immense number of operas within the main narrative also means exposing oneself unnecessarily to oversights and errors. I may point out but one: Buch states that in L’arbore di Diana (Vienna, 1787), the composer Vicente Martín y Soler “limited musical evocations of the supernatural to the ensembles for women’s voices” (p. 237). In fact, the score contains a number of occurrences of Buch’s “marvelous” and “terrible” topics, specially in the second finale, which includes incantations, storms, pedal points, recitative that interrupts an ensemble, “elegant” heavenly music and so forth. Moreover, I have suggested in the foreword to the modern edition (Madrid: ICCMU, 2001, pp. xxiv–xxv) that this celebrated Italian opera is a major source for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. A consideration of this proposition might have given a different twist to Buch’s definition of that masterwork: “a kind of ambitious German version of recent opéra comique with an oriental fairy-tale text” (pp. 345–46). Finally, given the wealth of interconnected concepts to which the author resorts, a theoretical discussion of how he understands the semantic functioning of these earmarks would have been desirable. In cluded here and there are brief explanations of the genre’s designators: fantasy, supernatural, marvelous, magic, terrible, and so on. But the relation of these to, for example, the affect of fury or the description of a storm is not made clear, at least for the music of the earlier part of the century. Perhaps more importantly, “genre,” “style,” “topic” and other analogous categories are apparently used interchangeably and without a methodologically necessary clarification. In the end, no matter what quibbles one might pose, this book is an indispensable tool for anyone who pretends to understand eighteenth-century music, and the rich insights it offers more than make up for its minor imperfections.