The Short

566 PORTAMENTO
and close parallels between the varieties used in all cases. As a general rule instrumentalists seem to have taken vocal
music as their starting-point.
Vocal Portamento on Notes between Different Syllables
Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century treatments of portamento generally focused on the type for
which the term cercar la nota or cercar della nota was sometimes used. In the 1780s it was discussed by Johann Carl
Friedrich Rellstab and Domenico Corri. Rellstab, referring to the opening of Graun's aria ‘Ihr weichgeschafne Seele’
(Ex. 15.4(a) ), commented that a good singer would use the cercar la nota on the rising minor third, and notated the
ornament as a dotted rhythm with the short note anticipating the pitch of the following note. (Ex. 15.4(b) ) 1102 Corri
included it in the ‘Explanation of the Graces’ in his Select Collection, where it appears without a name, and again in his
The Singer's Preceptor (1810), where he called it the ‘anticipation grace’. In both cases he indicated it by a small note, but
elucidated this by showing the same dotted rhythm as Rellstab. Here, as elsewhere, the rhythmic representation must
not be taken too literally; the short note would almost certainly have been made much shorter in most instances. This
is implied by many verbal descriptions of the execution of portamento, for instance, that of G. G. Ferrari in 1818: ‘In
carrying the voice from one note to another, the second must receive a slight intonation, previous to being
articulated’. 1103
Ex. 15.4.Rellstab, Versuch über die Vereinigung, 37
In his earlier publication Corri illustrated only a rising form of this type of portamento, saying: ‘As this has the peculiar
property of uniting two notes of any intervals, in executing it, it is necessary to swell the note into the Grace, and the
Grace must melt itself again into the note following’. 1104 In the later tutor he illustrated both rising and falling forms
(Ex. 15.5) and made the distinction: ‘In
Ex. 15.5.D. Corri, The Singer's Preceptor, 32
1102
Versuch über die Vereinigung der musikalischen und oratorischen Declamation (Berlin, [1786]), 37.
1103
Breve trattato di canto italiano (London, 1818), cited by W. Crutchfield in ‘Portamento’, inThe New Grove Dictionary of Opera, iii. 1070.
1104 A Select Collection, i. 8.