Interior of Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice (1837)

Epilogue


I believe my research suffered from a boomerang effect.


My goal was to prove that reading and trusting the sources could be a wonderfully inspiring methodology, leading to creative solutions previously unimaginable through the tools already present in our minds. I wanted to make a statement in favour of the approach advocated by the Early Music pioneers, by demonstrating that such methodology still has a lot of value to my generation. In other words, I wished to prove the effectiveness of an inductive methodological process.


However, reality proved to be much more complex than I first expected. In my research, I had to deal with a profound lack of relevant sources and, as a consequence, I had to make artistic choices based on my previous knowledge and experience. My methodological process became, therefore, deductive.


This methodological twist left me wondering whether I really managed to answer my research question (“How can we play Saverio Mercadante’s flute works according to a historically informed performance practice?”).


My conclusion is that I was not able to provide a musicological answer. I do believe that my research helped bring together several pieces of the puzzle, allowing us to get a better picture of the complex Italian and Neapolitan flute history in the first half of the 19th century and of Mercadante’s relevance for the flute repertoire. However, such new knowledge remained purely academic and could not offer scientifically sustainable tools to interpret Mercadante’s flute works. In other words, I did not find what to do when dealing with appoggiaturas, accents, tempos, and so on. My answer, therefore, is not concerned with content.


However, I still aimed at offering a possible and personal solution to the artistic problem I had to face. I do not expect – nor want, or wish – readers of this dissertation to follow my same path, but simply to understand how and why I made my choices without relying on sources that are specifically related to the repertoire. My research answer, therefore, can be seen as concerning the question of form.


In this regard, Act 5, in true postmodern fashion, broke the proverbial fourth wall and brought the audience to the stage and behind the scenes. Through two case studies, I showed how a research process at the base of a performance can develop while facing the vulnerability of being an Early Music performer-researcher working in non-ideal conditions.


To overcome such vulnerabilities, I had to let go of my expectations of being able to find the ideal sources: maybe one day a flute method by, for example, Pasquale Buongiorno will be unearthed somewhere; until then, I can only rely upon what I currently have at my disposal. Moreover, I had to accept my subjectivity as a valuable tool to craft a performance. My personal war against my own biases (i.e. pre-existing aesthetical ideas), which I constantly tried to challenge, was in fact a bias as well—the bias of a HIP approach, which aims at justifying most artistic decisions through objective evidence or inspiration, and which is not the only possible approach.


I would therefore conclude that the emphasis of my research question should not be “How can we play Saverio Mercadante’s flute works according to a historically informed performance practice?”, but rather “How can we play them?”.


All along, my thesis was not about Mercadante and the Neapolitan flute school of the early 19th century.


It truly was a dramma buffo on the historically informed approach.


[To Bibliography]