Padre Martini’s Closed and Enigmatic Canons with Solutions by Luigi Cherubini: A 19th-Century Guide into Renaissance Music Riddles . By Luciane Beduschi

Luciane Beduschi’s project on Luigi Cherubini’s collection of solutions to puzzle canons by Padre Martini arose in large part through several favourable circumstances coming into alignment. As a doctoral student, she accidentally came across a collection of canons in Cherubini’s hand when looking for the solution to one of the musical enigmas that Sigismund Neukomm sent to Cherubini as part of their exchange of such pieces. Good fortune is also related in a letter that Beduschi reproduces near the end of the present volume (pp. 317–18) by the librarian and musicologist Henry Expert to the Administrator of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1924 recommending purchase of a manuscript that had turned up amongst books and items of furniture sold by one of Cherubini’s granddaughters in 1911–12. This manuscript includes Cherubini’s solutions with commentaries to Martini’s set of seventy-two canons published in his Storia della musica. Beduschi was also fortunate in being able to draw upon Bonnie Blackburn’s recently published ‘Catalogue of Enigmatic Canonic Inscriptions’ (in Katelijne Schiltz, Music and Riddle Culture in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2015), 367–477). Many of these inscriptions appear in the collections by Martini and Cherubini. The result of such serendipitous circumstances is a fascinating study on a little-known episode in the reception and transmission of canons. The word canon here refers to both its earlier meaning as a short verbal text, often enigmatically expressed, accompanying a notated example, and its later meaning as a contrapuntal technique involving derivation of two or more voices (or instrumental parts) from a single melodic line. Elegantly produced and easy to navigate, Beduschi’s book provides readers with access to a treasure trove of canons of many different kinds. Overall, the book is an important contribution to the reception of musical riddles in the nineteenth century, and, equally importantly, to elevating Martini’s status as a major figure in the history of canon and canonic techniques.