Vivaldi

Michael Talbot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754628842
• eBook ISBN: 9781351537308
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: History

Since 1978, the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi's death, there has been an explosion of serious writing about his music, life and times. Much of this has taken the form of articles published in academic journals or conference proceedings, some of which are not easy to obtain. The twenty-two articles selected by Michael Talbot for this volume form a representative selection of the best writing on Vivaldi from the last 30 years, featuring such major figures in Vivaldi research as Reinhard Strohm, Paul Everett, Gastone Vio and Federico Maria Sardelli. Aspects covered include biography, Venetian cultural history, manuscript studies, genre studies and musical analysis. The intention is to serve as a 'first port of call' for those wishing to learn more about Vivaldi or to refresh their existing knowledge. An introduction by Michael Talbot reviews the state of Vivaldi scholarship past and present and comments on the significance of the articles.

Part I
Biographical Studies

[1]
THE FORTUNES OF VIVALDI BIOGRAPHY, FROM PINCHERLE TO THE PRESENT

Michael Talbot

The bedrock of biography is, naturally, facts. Scholarly investigation and observation tends to increase the volume of known facts; the ravages of time and the vagaries of preservation tend to diminish the pool of facts capable of being discovered. But it takes a long time to exhaust the pool of discoverable facts, and once a fact has been recorded in modern scholarly literature its survival is guaranteed even if its accuracy is sometimes not. So the history of Vivaldi biography sees an incremental accumulation of facts — in some periods rapid, in others slow.

But facts alone do not make biography. The other vital element is supplied by the interests and attitudes of the biographer, which although in part purely personal can always be related to a wider social, national, and religious or ideological framework. Even before the available facts are evaluated under the reader’s scrutiny, they will have been thoroughly sifted: some will have been passed over in silence, others marked out for special emphasis. Indeed, whatever efforts the biographer makes to augment the factual basis of his account through his own investigations are likely to be governed to a great degree by his personal interests, since such investigations are necessarily very selective.

The mutual confrontation of facts and attitudes produces a third category: that of inferences or conjectures. In many respects these are what imparts the strongest flavour to a biography and provides the greatest stimulation for the reader. A scrupulous writer will always distinguish meticulously between fact and inference, but there is no guarantee that the reader will do so. So there is always the danger that inferences will spill over into the realm of facts and become accepted as such. The tradition of Vivaldi biography in the present century, especially in anonymous, derivative versions intended for popular consumption, is full of inferences masquerading as facts. As we all know, many of these inferences, which seem to strike a responsive chord in the public mind, persist stubbornly, even when factual evidence has long since invalidated them.

My purpose is not to chart the advances of Vivaldi biography from 1948 to the present day in an exhaustive or even systematic way, nor to score easy points over fellow Vivaldians of an earlier generation. (Indeed, I would be most imprudent to criticize mistakes in others self-righteously when I have to acknowledge so many errors in my own writings on Vivaldi’s life and works that appeared in 1978).¹ What I intend to do, rather, is to select certain biographical ‘themes’ or ‘topics’ and examine how their treatment has evolved since they were discussed in Pincherle’s famous book Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale that came out in 1948.² Pincherle was not in fact the first Vivaldi biographer to produce a complete book, since he was preceded both by Michelangelo Abbado, whose short study of 46 pages appeared in 1942,³ and by Mario Rinaldi, whose account, published in 1943, is very comparable in length and scope.⁴ But the sharpness and clarity of Pincherle’s writing, his great insight into musical processes, and his ability, born of a remarkable familiarity with the eighteenth-century repertory, to relate one composer — Vivaldi — to a dense network of musical activity before, during, and after his lifetime established him in most eyes as the leading international authority on Vivaldi. His position as a non-Italian, which disadvantaged him to some extent in his efforts to gain access to musical and archival material in Italy during the Fascist era, became instead a great benefit to him when the time arrived to convey the fruits of his long researches to an international musicological community which in the immediate post-war years was dominated somewhat more than it is today by scholars from the German and Anglo-Saxon worlds — scholars who for the most part were much happier reading French than Italian.

To understand the outlook of Pincherle’s great book it is important to be aware of two things. First, Pincherle was a good violinist who was particularly interested in technical questions concerning his instrument; the study of violinist-composers forms the heart of his scholarly œuvre. Second, his researches into Vivaldi began over forty years before the appearance of Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale; even in 1948 his research findings bear traces of their early origins.⁵ That Pincherle chose to devote his book entirely to Vivaldi’s instrumental music, reducing mention of the vocal music to the absolute minimum (when the existence of large quantities of it had been known since the late 1920s), probably reflects, first, the lack of any great personal interest in vocal repertories; it may also owe something to a kind of inertia with which every scholar is familiar — the reluctance, when a task is within sight of completion, to broaden its scope as a result of receiving unexpected new information.⁶ There is of course a broader context for the emphasis on instrumental music: Pincherle was heir to the nineteenth-century view, still influential even today, that instrumental music, ‘uncontaminated’ by the extra-musical associations and precise meanings inherent in verbal texts, was the highest, purest, and most characteristic form of music. Further, Pincherle’s emphasis on the concerto genre almost to the exclusion of the sonata reveals another bias typical of the time. According to the then dominant ‘evolutionary’ view of musical history and aesthetics, composers were held to have made their greatest musical contribution in those areas where historical testimony and musical analysis showed them to have been most influential. Vivaldi’s concertos were admired and imitated by his contemporaries: his sonatas were not. Ergo the concertos were better music than the sonatas, hence more worthy of the scholar’s attention. Pincherle’s own justification for the neglect of the sonatas is so neat as to be almost a reductio ad absurdum of my explanation. He writes:

Je ne me suis pas appesanti sur les sonates. Il n’en sera question qu’incidemment. Plusieurs ne manquent ni de charme, ni d’éclat, mais la part d’innovation est faible. Jusque dans le choix des thèmes, il se comporte en disciple respectueux de Corelli. C’est dans le concerto et la sinfonia qu’il se révèle créateur.⁷

This bias towards instrumental music in general and the concerto in particular meant that in his own biographical investigations Pincherle’s main concern was to establish the context in which the concertos were conceived and performed during the composer’s lifetime. He did not, for instance, conduct investigations of his own into Vivaldi’s theatrical activities, although he naturally profited from existing studies and available documentation concerning them.

Although Pincherle’s account of Vivaldi’s concertos marked an important advance in knowledge — even today, some of its insights are as fresh as ever — the biographical sections were little more than a summation of the data that Pincherle and a number of Italian scholars had been able to glean in the inter-war period. The biography proper, entitled “La Vie”, occupies twenty pages (15–34), while a further twenty-six pages (35–50) first sketch in the Venetian background (“La vie musicale à Venise au début du XVIII^e siècle”) and then deal at greater length with the Venetian ospedali and the Pietà; more information on Vivaldi’s activity at the Pietà, including some transcriptions of documents, is found in two appendices (pp. 291–293). Most of the biographical information contained in the book was foreshadowed in two major articles published by Pincherle much earlier. An essay on the life (Antonio Vivaldi: saggio biografico) first came out in 1929 in “La rassegna musicale” and reappeared the following year in a French-language version in “La Revue musicale”.⁸ The composer’s association with the Pietà was discussed in an article, Vivaldi e gli ospedali di Venezia, published in “La rassegna musicale” in 1937; this reappeared in English one year later (as Vivaldi and the ‘Ospitali’ of Venice) in “The Musical Quarterly”.⁹

Pincherle’s account of Vivaldi’s life was unrivalled for its time in the use it made of eighteenth-century travel literature and critical literature, particularly from northern Europe. Pincherle was not alone, however, in his efforts to reconstruct a biography from primary sources preserved in Italy. In 1928 Arcangelo Salvatori produced a prize-winning essay on Vivaldi’s life published in the “Rivista mensile della città di Venezia”;¹⁰ 1938 saw an article by Rodolto Gallo that presented new facts about Vivaldi’s family and provided the first confirmation of the date and place of his death (1741, Vienna);¹¹ five years later, Mario Rinaldi synthesized the state of knowledge in Italy in Antonio Vivaldi. Pincherle, as he admits in the foreword to his book, was embarrassed by his apparent in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES
• PART II SOURCE STUDIES
• PART III ANALYTICALAND GENRE STUDIES
• Name Index