Among the numerous programmatic works Mauro Giuliani composed for guitar during his Viennese period and his subsequent years in Italy, the Rondeau La Chasse (La Caccia), Op. 109, dating from 1826, occupies a distinctive position. It emerged during a phase in which Giuliani—following his return from Vienna and his settling in Rome—increasingly turned to shorter, audience-oriented character pieces suited to salon performance and private use, without sacrificing compositional refinement. Wikipedia
The title La Chasse invokes a genre tradition widespread in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century instrumental music: the musical imitation of the hunt, typically characterized by dotted rhythms, fanfare motifs in parallel thirds or fifths evoking horn calls, and an animated 6/8 meter suggesting the motion of riding. Giuliani transfers these topoi—inherited from orchestral and keyboard tradition—onto the guitar, using deft position shifts and bariolage technique to imitate the sonority of hunting horns, a task demanding considerable compositional ingenuity given the instrument’s limited registral range.
Formally, the work is structured as a rondeau, whose recurring principal theme carries the hunting character, while contrasting couplets offer more lyrical, cantabile passages, thereby introducing a measure of variety against the piece’s essentially virtuosic disposition. This design is characteristic of Giuliani’s later output, in which the rondeau—alongside the variation cycle and the potpourri—became a preferred vehicle for compact, self-contained character pieces.
Notably, the work’s numbering is somewhat entangled: certain editions list the piece additionally as “Op. 9, 109,” suggesting a later reissue or renumbering in the context of posthumous collected editions—a phenomenon not uncommon within Giuliani’s oeuvre given the often inconsistent publishing practices of his time.
Musico-historically, La Chasse can be read as an instance of how Giuliani reconciled genre-specific extramusical programmaticism—here, the hunting idiom—with the technical possibilities of the classical guitar, thereby contributing to the expansion of the instrument’s idiomatic expressive repertoire in the early nineteenth century.
