Sonates du rosaire

Description

If it is true that music transforms us, opens up new worlds to us, and emancipates knowledge, Biber’s Rosary Sonatas would certainly be one of the finest illustrations of this. In the 17th century, theorists such as Mersenne or Kircher attached great importance to sympathetic resonance. According to Leibniz, it moves us because our soul would be a string in tune with music, which he considers “an unconscious equation of the soul.” This is the time of the suggestive neo-Pythagorean idea of “the harmony of the spheres”: a resonant universe, whose driving force is Eros, which sustains it. The first mystery lies in the 15 tunings, or different ways of tuning the violin, a common technique in 17th-century Germany, but one that had never been pushed so far. The violin part is written as if the violin were tuned normally, but, because of these special tunings, the pitch of the notes differs from what is written, as if one were playing on a keyboard from another country, and in 15 different ways. Something that has to be deciphered and that only an experienced violinist can tackle. This scordatura makes certain chords possible — Biber’s virtuosity is never gratuitous. Some intervals are certainly more immediate, but they can also be difficult to execute (there are countless awkward fifths that sound like sixths or octaves). Moreover, it is practically impossible for the strings, subjected to such stretching, to guarantee perfectly true fifths.