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Tomaso Albinoni, a Venetian amateur musician Tomaso Zuane Albinoni was born in Venice on 6 June 1671, the eldest of the six children of Antonio Albinoni and Lucrezia Fabris. The Albinonis were not natives of Venice: Antonio was born in Castione della Presolana in the province of Bergamo, and came to the city around 1652, where he found employment in the workshop of Angela Mina, who manufactured playing cards. The Albinoni family fortune dates from 1684, when Mina, a childless widow, bequeathed her flourishing concern to Antonio. He proved so adept at managing the business that his son Domenico was able to attend university, and two of his three daughters were married with considerable dowries (5000 ducats each). It was in these comfortable circumstances that Tomaso began his musical education, possibly – at least during the early years – with no professional goal in mind. The description he gave himself in his published collections up until 1710 – musico di violino dilettante veneto (Venetian amateur violinist) – might suggest that he considered his compositional work as a mere pastime. This would be in keeping with his privileged position as a man of some wealth (at first he was even excluded from the stationery business, which was managed by his younger brothers, as laid down in his father’s will of 1705). At that time, Albinoni was nevertheless better known as a composer of operas than of instrumental works, and over the course of his long career in the theatre, which began in 1694, he produced a considerable number of stage works. In the libretto of his penultimate opera Candalide (Venice, 1734), Albinoni claims it to be his 80th, although in 1979 Michael Talbot gave a more reasonable estimate of around 50 authenticated works. It is likely that Albinoni included in his calculations not just works that came entirely from his pen, but also collaborations or re-workings on which no information has come to light. In any case, the total figure should be re-assessed: a first indication of this came with the attribution of the pasticcio La caduta de’ decemviri (Milan, 1723), thanks to documents discovered by Klee Vlaardingerbroek. Further confirmation emerged in research conducted by the present writer: two miscellanies held in the library of the Conservatorio di S Pietro a Majella in Naples suggest that the otherwise anonymous L’Eraclea (Genoa, 1705) should be attributed to Albinoni, while revealing the contribution of Giuseppe Aldrovandini to Il più fedel tra’ vassalli of the same date, which was formerly attributed to the composer.
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While composing may initially have been a diversion for him, the death of his father and then the premature deaths of his brothers between 1718 and 1726 led Albinoni to become more active professionally and produce more publications to support his own family (in 1705 he had married the Verona-born soprano Margherita Raimondi); at the same time he took over his father’s business, which was now in crisis. However, his income from music was not sufficient to maintain the same standard of living as before. After the death of his wife in 1721, Albinoni was obliged by financial considerations to move house, and in 1748, when he had by then been absent from the opera house for more than seven years, he was exempted from paying certain taxes. He died in Venice on 17 January 1751.
Pirates of another era: Éstienne Roger and a double Opus 4 From the time of his Trattenimenti armonici, Op.VI (Amsterdam, 1712) onward, Albinoni stopped describing himself as a musico dilettante: composing and teaching were now indispensable to being able to support his family. It may have been a desire for greater success and increased income that led Albinoni to entrust himself to the ‘famous hand of Monsieur Roger’, the promising French publisher based in Amsterdam, rather than the customary Venetian printers, whom Vivaldi had already condemned for their failings. Thanks to the potential offered by engraving on copper plates, Roger had managed to win the custom of Vivaldi in 1711 and, shortly afterward, that of Albinoni and numerous other Italian composers. The beautiful graphic qualities, faithful reproduction of the text and the possibility of preserving the plates made Roger’s prints much preferable to those available from Italian printers, who still used movable type. As a result, the Dutch firm had an immediate success with both clients and customers. It is possible that it was Roger himself who first took an interest in Albinoni’s output, rather than the other way round: while the composer was supplying his Trattenimenti, Op.VI, the publisher was reprinting the collections that had been brought out in Venice by Giuseppe Sala, with one particular exception. Unlike instrumental music, Italian vocal music was difficult to promote on the northern-European market, for the obvious reason of comprehensibility of the language. For this reason, Roger always printed instrumental music, and since he was not going to republish Albinoni’s Cantate a voce sola, op.4, he reassigned the opus number to a collection that he himself
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assembled of Sonate da chiesa. The fact should not surprise us in a period in history when the concept of author’s rights was unknown. This ‘second’ Op.4, republished several times in London by different companies, was widely circulated, and achieved far greater success than the Op.4 cantatas that Sala published. These were in fact thought to have been lost until 1907, when Edward J. Dent discovered a copy with the title page missing. The need to satisfy an increasing number of customers, and to keep the flow of new publications going, if possible at a low cost, led Roger to put together unauthorized publications, creating collections of the best that could be obtained through indirect channels: this is the case with the Sonatas here, which include inauthentic material – Talbot questions the authorship of the third sonata – and yet continue today to spark the interest of scholars and listeners. 훿 Giovanni Andrea Sechi, 2011 Translation: Kenneth Chalmers BIBLIOGRAPHY: RUDOLF RASCH, ‘La famosa mano di Monsieur Roger: Antonio Vivaldi and his Dutch Publishers’, Informazioni e studi vivaldiani (1989), XVII: 89–135. MICHAEL TALBOT, Preface to ALBINONI, Twelve Cantatas, Opus 4 (Madison: A–R Editions Inc., 1979), vii–xiii. MICHAEL TALBOT, Tomaso Albinoni: The Venetian Composer and his World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). GASTONE VIO, ‘Per una migliore conoscenza di Tommaso Albinoni’, Recercare (1989), I: 111–121. KEES VLAARDINGERBROEK, ‘Faustina Bordoni applauds Jan Alensoon: A Dutch Music-Lover in Italy and France in 1723–4’, Music & Letters (1991), LXXII: 536–551.
Cover image – Terrick Williams: Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, c.1920 Photo © Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and North East Somerset Council / The Bridgeman Art Library Recording: 2–4 December 2010, Church of St Agostino & Auditorium – Centro Culturale ‘F. Scarfiotti’, Potenza Picena (MC) Sound engineer, editing and mastering: Luigi Faggi Grigioni, Riccardo Marongiu Musical supervision: Francesco Baroni, Luigi Faggi Grigioni, Giulio Fratini Special thanks to: Comune di Potenza Picena (MC) – Assessorato alla Cultura, Renza Baiocco, Michel Formentelli, Giulio Fratini and 훿 2011 Brilliant Classics
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