# VENICE and VIVALDI

By OLGA RUDGE

Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena, Italy

“A NTONIO VIVALDI, priest, composer, violinist-virtuoso, opera manager, director of music to the Ospe-dale della Pietà, and ‘Musico Veneto’.”*

Venetian musician, this is the title he takes after his name in his earliest published works. It means more than the simple patriotism of a Venetian, proud of his city. It is Vivaldi’s claim to a place among a group of musicians who, for several generations, had made the city of palaces famous as the city of music.

Venice is, as always, a joy to the eye; but today the pleasures of hearing are for the most part of a negative order. The city is praised for its silence, or criticized for allowing its possibilities of nearly perfect stillness to be marred by bursts from loud speakers or gondoliers.

Two hundred years ago Venice was a pre-

cious shell vibrating to music which equaled her painting at its best. The city was then in the truest sense a music-centre. It had its own music, written for its needs by Venetian composers and performed by its own musicians, not that there was any thought of “keeping out the foreigners”; they were there too, giving and talking freely.

Women played an important part in the musical life of Seventeenth Century Venice. This was due largely to the four celebrated convent music schools where poor girls were received and given the best vocal and instrumental training available. The convents rivaled one another in concerts which attracted connoisseurs of music from all over Europe. The best com-

*There are so many reasons for an awakening interest in Vivaldi's music that one almost needs an index to them. Back of the music itself is an intelligence capable both of understanding Dante's *Paradiso* and of dealing with the business details of an opera and ballet company.

The very human letters (which I translated recently for the *Listener*, London, and which Mr. Lawrence Gilman quoted extensively in the *New York Herald* for January 3, 1937) show Vivaldi in his later years struggling with outraged archbishops, court performers, and the natural stir then caused, and that would be caused now again, by the sight of a priest attended by a staff of prima donnas.

Music does not wear out. The great beauty of Vivaldi's melodic line in the slow movements is not

a gift for one age, nor does it appeal to any one fashion alone. It is new now, or has a renewed life; modern critics see it as akin to the live line in the surrealist paintings of Miro. It must be admitted, however, that the general public know of Vivaldi only as “one of a number of early Italian composers.” Yet the music that Bach admired and transcribed two hundred years ago is admitted and transcribed today by such modern “advanced composers as Alfredo Casella, the American, Walter Morse Rummel, and in Germany by Gerhart Münch; and in *The Encyclopedia of Chamber Music* edited by W. W. Cobbet in his eighty-first year (the fruit of a long life devoted to music of all periods) we find this summing up: “Vivaldi is among the early writers (Continued on next page)

JANUARY, 1938

● Antonio Vivaldi

PAGE SEVEN

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THE DELPHIAN QUARTERLY

posers of the day were engaged as teachers and music-directors, usually with a contract stipulating that they compose a certain number of new works for the concerts.

This is the system Vivaldi found ready for him when, as a young man, he got his first engagement with the Ospedale della Pietà. He was to hold it "over thirty years with never a scandal" as he writes to his patron, Marchese Bentivoglio.

The "thirty years" were by no means uninterrupted nose-to-the-grindstone. Vivaldi was a violin virtuoso, invited to other cities; "Even His Holiness wanted to hear me," he wrote. His fame was probably not displeasing to the directors of the Pietà, and prolonged leaves of absence were granted him. Vivaldi's father was still a well known violinist among the musicians attached to the Ducal chapel of Saint Mark's. Thus he was conveniently on the spot to keep his son's place warm for him.

The production of his many operas must also have taken Vivaldi away from strict attendance at the Pietà, which last may have been useful as training ground for future opera singers, to say nothing of opera composers. In those days the production of an opera was accompanied with as much intrigue, scandal, and storms in a horseshoe as at any Metropolitan. Vivaldi pulled wires, wrote letters, took sides, vigorously as he did everything. One wonders where he found the time and, as he con-

sidered himself a confirmed invalid, the energy.

He suffered from a "constriction of the chest" as he puts it, and was unable to walk much, never going any distance except in a gondola or carriage. All his best work was "done at my desk." In a letter he wrote towards the end of his life, he tells how, very shortly after his ordination he was obliged to renounce saying mass, as on several occasions he had been taken ill at the altar. This gave rise to a deal of gossip, but there is no reason to doubt Vivaldi's explanation of his position, and no proof of his having been suspended from his religious functions by the religious authorities is known.

A story, repeated by several generations of musical historians, that Vivaldi, in a fit of absent mindedness, left the altar in the middle of his mass to note down a musical theme, and escaped the Inquisition only on plea of illness, seems unprovable. When the incident is supposed to have occurred, the young priest, who had received minor orders in 1693, had already had ten years' experience of ecclesiastical ceremonies. Vivaldi has been accused of bigotry by his contemporaries and his displays of piety have been considered a pose.

Among the liveliest pages in Goldoni's memoirs is an account of his meeting Vivaldi. He had been sent to the then elderly composer to rearrange the libretto for his opera *Griselda*. He "discovers" the composer surrounded by

whose composition, especially his violin works, may be said to have a future."

There is, though, a world of Vivaldi still unexplored that no one now living has ever heard, music which Bach could love and learn from, but music which could also appeal by its clarity, brevity, and the beauty of simple melodic line, to the public of today weary of the general cheapness, or the constant attempts to be clever, or the over-intellectualism of modern composers who write only or mainly for musical experts.

It is often easy to say what a man is not than to say what he is. In respect to Vivaldi we can say "he is never a bore." He knows when to stop. His sense of form is so strong, so defined, and so simple, that a feeling of the shape of the composition is inherent in the first few bars. With him one has never the feeling "how long will this go on" that assails so many music lovers during the execution of works

of even their favorite composers, a feeling that they try to conceal even from themselves!

Vivaldi has a sense of the value of reiteration which is as strong as Stravinski's, and which links him up with primitive music. He will repeat a phrase again and again with cumulative, nearly hypnotic effect, but he never weakens his effect with wearisome "variations on a theme."

The press notices of recent work by Mr. Watson Davis (*Science Service*, Washington) and Dr. Leonard Sayce* speak of microphotographic process but say nothing of its use for the study of music; where it is much more needed and will be much more beneficial than in recording news, or very old printed books.

OLGA RUDGE

*Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureau, Cambridge (England) Conference, September, 1937.

JANUARY, 1938

● Olga Rudge, American musician, who has rendered distinguished service in bringing the work of Vivaldi to the attention of the public.

Page Nine

music, breviary in hand the whole scene as he describes it being punctuated by Vivaldi's signs of the cross, and Latin invocations.

Yet, if one consider (what has not been sufficiently noted) that is, the peculiar quality of sublime serenity inherent in much of Vivaldi's music, one might incline to the belief that his displays of piety were more than a pose. To give the impression that he was a mystic would be exaggerating. He was certainly mundane to a degree. He knew his world, a world satirized by his contemporary, the composer Benedetto Marcello in the *Teatro alla Moda*, some of whose shafts seem aimed in the direction of his colleague.

Vivaldi's dedicatory epistles to patrons were, according to the convention of the time, flowery and humble supplications, but never servile. Benedetto Marcello, whose imaginary composer "kissed the hops of the fleas on the feet of the dogs of Your Excellency," is very sarcastic about dedications. But Marcello was a noble, a patrician inscribed in the Golden Book of Venice, and all the rest of it. He could not supplicate with propriety, even had he needed to. He dedicated his book to himself.

In the passage where he ridicules a composer claiming to have tossed off a work in a few days, Marcello does hit Vivaldi in a weak spot. We have the manuscript of his opera *Tito Manlio*, with the note "written in five days." The French traveller, Charles de Brosses, writes that Vivaldi prided himself on writing a concerto more quickly than a copyist could transcribe it. In one of his famous letters from Italy written in 1693 de Brosses writes:

> Not that I lack music here, there is hardly an evening without a musical reunion somewhere. The populace run to hear it from the canal with as much enthusiasm as if it were for first time. Vivaldi has made himself one of my intimate friends, to sell me some concertos, and not cheap. He has succeeded in part, and so have I in what I wanted, which was

to hear him and hear some good music often. He is a "vecchio" with a prodigious fury for composing. I have heard him boast of composing a concerto with all its parts more promptly than a copyist could copy it.

De Brosses, whose opinions on music are worthy of attention, writes also: "Where I go the most often and enjoy myself the most is the Opsedale della Pietà. It ranks first for the perfection of its symphonies. What well drilled execution: That is the only place to hear a first attack from the strings such as, quite undeservedly, the Paris opera is renowned for."

A glance at the composer's original MSS shows the nervous dash with which he worked. His script is one of the most beautiful of music scripts, for its freedom, elegance, and rhythmic movement.

The bulk of this most Venetian of Venetian composer's manuscript is not to be found in his native Venice, which has nothing to boast of, but on the other side of the peninsula, owing to a series of those chances which mysteriously occlude and mirculously restore hidden treasure.

The city of Turin, which no record connects with Vivaldi in his own day has acquired, since 1927, the largest existing collection of his manuscript. This collection comprises a set of twenty-seven volumes which had been scattered. Eleven of the volumes were given to the National library by the Foà family, the remainder by the Giordano family. In both cases the presentations were made in memory of children, and the volumes have each, as frontispiece and touching remembrance, the portrait of a small boy. Vivaldi thus makes

● Vivaldi's own manuscript, "Fantasms," from "The Night"—"a man's character is shown in his pen strokes."

JANUARY, 1938

his reappearance fittingly accompanied by two young acolytes.

The collection is for the most part autographic and it lays Vivaldi's whole life as a composer open in cross cut. We have here works of all periods: works hastily sketched in, and careful copies,

second, third, copies of the same work; works written for the French court, with praise of "le Grand Louis"; works written for the "orchestra of Dresden," works written for the Pietà, the names of girl performers noted against their parts in the margin Ambrosina, Chiaretta, Apollonia. On an opera score the name of the famous singer, Farinelli appears against his arias. The opera *Rosmira* has arias inserted which are the compositions of famous contemporaries, Handel 1685-1759, Pergolese 1710-1736, and others, and awakens curiosity as to the circumstances of the collaboration.

Vivaldi was not the first to write program music, but he wrote much which comes under that heading, such as *Storm at Sea, The Hunt*, the MSS of which are all here. There are two exceptionally fine examples of *Night*, notable for sheer beauty of penmanship, Vivaldi at

his most dashing. There can be no doubt of his exact meaning for the passages in the Presto marked "Fantasms"; the groups of waving semiquavers, in thick very black ink, are veritable, if unintentional, ideograms.

In the Turin collection there are no fewer than three hundred and nine instrumental works, besides nineteen complete operas, an oratorio, innumerable sacred works, *motetti*, arias. We know that they are there, and that is as much as we are likely to know about them or, under present conditions, of any other of the

great MSS collections existing. We trust they are safe. Turin is not likely to have another fire such as the one which within living memory, destroyed many of her libraries' most precious possessions. We hope not.

Another, not unreasonable, hope would be that besides precautions against fire and damage, collections such as these should be protected from total loss by simply ensuring that microphotographic copies be taken. This method would have the added advantage of allowing music students, at present obliged to depend on arrangements, transcriptions, fragments, to have access to the whole of an author's works in their original form and at small cost.

In Vivaldi's case editions of his works in the form of which he wrote them do exist, but how many, ten, a dozen?

A composer who can lay claim to have influenced J. S. Bach may still be considered worthy the attention of music students!

There is a curious stone on the wall just inside the front entrance to the Doge's Palace. It records that in 1703 Gio:Vivaldi, a customs officer, was found guilty of frauds. He may or may not have been a relative of Antonio's. The name is not uncommon in the city of Venice. In either case the reminder can have

(Continued on page 56)

● A part of the first page of Miss Rudge's catalogue of the Vivaldi compositions in Turin. Each line is divided into three parts, a line indicating a concerto, and its parts, the beginnings of the different movements. The first page indicates 55 concerti. The whole collection contains 309, apart from vocal works, operas, and church music.

● Microphoto film containing two pages of music, supplied by Dr. Leonard Sayce, of King's College, Newcastle, England. the English leader of this type of work. He predicts that in the near future twelve volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica can be easily contained in one drawer of ordinary card index files.