Program Notes

During the Baroque era, the Italian national identity was much more marked in the artistic than in the political sphere. Italy was divided into principalities established around real citystates, but it celebrated an indisputable unity thanks to the arts, especially music, even though the great musical centers (Naples, Venice, and Rome, mainly) had obvious specificities. The Italian masters, while asserting strong personalities, all evolved in an immediately recognizable musical universe. In the same way, music for the theater and for the church shared a common rhetoric, even if the sacred repertory could not completely match the virtuosity displayed in the operas. The situation in Rome, in particular, was paradoxical. The papacy imposed important restrictions, even forbidding all lyrical works at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but inside the aristocratic palaces, such prohibitions were skillfully circumvented and the oratorios did not hesitate to display a pyrotechnic vocality— we will take as an example those of Handel at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

A prolific composer at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “official” father of Neapolitan opera, oratorio, and chamber cantata, Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) is often mentioned as the founder of the Neapolitan school. However, while there is no question of disputing his immense influence, it should not be forgotten that he held prestigious positions in both Naples and Rome (his wife was Roman, by the way), constantly moving back and forth between the two metropolises, and even to Venice. The chromatic language typical of Naples could not be deployed in all its languorous sensuality in the Eternal City, where the papacy took a dim view of any aesthetic that was too hedonistic, calling for clearer and more honest harmonies.

Sometimes classified as a cantata (it is true that the text, although Latin, does not explicitly mention either God or Christ), the motet Infirmata, vulnerata is part of this quest for relative simplicity. The voice is accompanied by two violins, and takes up the eternal theme of love and its torments. According to the composer’s manuscript, it was composed in October 1702—it is extremely difficult to propose a clear date for much of Scarlatti’s sacred output. His first aria relies on numerous effects illustrating disarray, particularly delays. Carried by a concentrated, almost bare singing, which does not however renounce delicate modulations, the emotion is palpable but always modest, without exuberant outbursts. Little by little, the motet evolves toward more light, ending with a lively aria where the unrequited love sung by the soloist seems to give way to hope.

The Neapolitan chromaticism and harmonic rubbing are undoubtedly present in the music of Francesco Durante (1684–1755), who spent his entire career in Naples, with the exception of a stay in Rome around 1718. As his Concerto No. 1 for strings in F minor shows, the skillful distillation of chromatic lines goes hand in hand with a consummate art of counterpoint that is too often ignored when the Neapolitan school is mentioned. One of the few composers of this school to abandon opera for sacred music and instrumental literature, Durante gradually gained the reputation, sometimes negative, of a strange and whimsical composer: this image undoubtedly stemmed in part from his taste for a style that was certainly colorful but largely oriented towards early polyphony. He directed three of the great Neapolitan conservatories: the Conservatorio Poveri di Gesù Cristo from 1728 to 1739, where he counted Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) among his students; the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, where he succeeded Nicola Porpora in 1742; and in 1745 added the directorship of the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio a Capuana, where he had studied in his youth.

Pergolesi is surrounded by an almost legendary aura due to his premature death at the age of twenty-six and the universal fame of his Stabat Mater for two voices, commissioned by the brotherhood of the Cavalieri de la Vergine dei Dolori to replace the older one by Alessandro Scarlatti. The beauty of the

Stabat Mater (but also of works such as the intermezzo La serva padrona or the operas Adriano in Siria and L’Olimpiade) makes one dream of “what Pergolesi could have done” if death had not taken him away so soon. He completed his Stabat Mater when he was at the end of his strength, leaving also his Salve Regina for reasons that remain unknown to this day. This score was written in two versions: C minor for a soprano voice, and F minor for an alto. From the very first measures, the similarities with the Stabat Mater, both in the vocal lines and in the harmonic discourse, which obviously gives pride of place to subtle modulations, are undeniable, with an equally striking expressive intensity. This Salve Regina represents a journey toward the light, which we like to think accompanied Pergolesi during his last days. On the manuscripts of these two final compositions, Pergolesi inscribed a moving note: “Finis, Laus Deo” (I have finished, God be praised).

At the other end of the Italian boot, Venice radiated a prodigious artistic vitality that brilliantly concealed an irreversible political and economic decline. The cradle of public opera, La Serenissima counted among its greatest impresarios a man of the cloth, the “Prete Rosso” (‘Red Priest’) Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). However, for a long time Vivaldi was considered only the father of the concerto. Whether in string or solo concertos, the acrobatic performances of the “Prete Rosso,” a violin virtuoso of seemingly diabolical skill, earned him the reputation of a musician who composed his music “by the mile” and lovingly knitted pleasant but superficial pages. This negative opinion is, however, undermined by concertos such as the one on this program. Vivaldi’s more than forty concertos for strings, i.e., without a soloist, were probably written for the composer’s astounding pupils at the Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage for girls of which he was music director from 1703. The whole of Europe celebrated the virtuosity of these musicians, and it is not surprising that the Concerto for strings in G minor, RV 156, is both restrained and breathtakingly vital, especially in its finale. We admire here a harmonic frankness and an absolutely irresistible efficiency, but also a masterly art of singing and counter-singing.

Fortunately, this opinion, largely inspired by a lack of knowledge of the Vivaldian opus, is no longer really held today. The revolution in the perception of his work over the last few decades has been largely in the methodical exploration of Vivaldi’s vocal music, both secular and sacred. The Sonata al Santo Sepolcro in E-flat major, RV 169, is regularly associated with Vivaldi’s sacred scores.

Knowledge of his sacred production is based essentially on the fame of certain works, such as the Gloria (RV 589), the Stabat Mater (RV 621), and the Nisi Dominus (RV 608). While the Stabat Mater remains paradoxically shrouded in mystery as to its destination and the circumstances of its creation, it is almost certain that the Nisi Dominus was written for the Pietà, which also had remarkable voices. Intended for the Feast of the Visitation, this motet is distinguished by the presence of a viola d’amore, which sweetly intertwines its lines with those of the voice in the “Gloria Patri,” and musicologists have not failed to point out the talents of a pupil of the Ospedale, Anna Maria, whom Vivaldi took particular care to train in view of her precocious gifts. For the rest, Vivaldi shows an undeniable poetic diversity: vocal virtuosity in the opening “Nisi Dominus,” the “Sicut sagittae,” and of course the concluding Amen. Above all, there is the famous “Cum dederit,” one of the great hypnotic pages in the history of music, in which immense note-holding tests the breath of the voice, on the impalpable carpet of muted strings. This is enough to dispel the prejudice that Vivaldi could not write for the voice. n

ANTONIO VIVALDI

Engraving by François Morellon la Cave (1725)