Giuseppe Cervelli’s Principii

With regard to musicological studies on eighteenth-century Naples, the Neapolitan students’ keyboard training before they endeavoured to study partimento and intavolature has attracted little attention. Numerous intavolature, most of which showing a clear pedagogical function, document Neapolitan keyboard training preceding partimento; yet, those pieces clearly assume a certain familiarity with the keyboard. What were the Neapolitan students’ very first steps in learning how to play keyboard instruments? This study attempts to answer this question by bringing to the foreground a primary pedagogical source that thus far has not been thoroughly studied: Giuseppe Cervelli’s c. 1790 Principii ed intavolature per cembalo (Principles and Intavolaturas for Harpsichord), a manuscript source now in the library of the «Giuseppe Verdi» Conservatory in Milan. The stage of keyboard training reflected by this source, as I will argue, precedes intavolature, owing to the fact that its lezioni are centred on single technical elements (stepwise scales and leaps) that are not related to partimento or schemata. Intavolature, on the contrary, were more than just technical exercises. As Robert O. Gjerdingen claims, their aim was to introduce basic galant schemata.