Eclipse and Rebirth
Vivaldi died in total solitude in Vienna in 1741. His contemporaries quickly forgot his name and even his memory, and his music, which had illuminated European musical life for almost four decades, quickly became nothing more than the distant tail of a comet in the Italian musical heavens. In 1739, President de Brosses foretold this collective amnesia in his Letters, stigmatizing Italy ‘where everything is fashion’ and ‘where last year’s music is no longer a success’. The shadow over Vivaldi was barely lifted in the 19th century by Forkel who mentioned the Italian while rehabilitating Bach, then, at the dawn of the 20th century, through the bold research of Arnold Schering. But, shortly before the First World War, Vivaldi was still the unknown composer to whom Fritz Kreisler could attribute a pastiche of his own composition without any fear of being unmasked. In this climate of forgetting, the destruction of the manuscript containing Pincherle’s thesis by German artillery in 1914 was yet another sad symbol.
The end of the Great War marked the end of Vivaldi’s purgatory. In 1922, as Wilhelm Altmann was publishing the first catalogue of Vivaldi’s works that were known at the time, an improbable situation was developing that would lead to the almost miraculous discovery of part of Vivaldi’s personal collection. Between 1926 and 1930, in three successive, surprising incidents, twenty-seven volumes of manuscripts that had belonged to Vivaldi, and containing totally unknown works, were discovered and brought together at the National University Library of Turin. The story of this rediscovery, with its share of both mystery and miracle, is well known.
It began in 1926, in a Salesian monastery in Montferato, whose Rector appraised and then put up for sale ninety-seven dusty volumes of manuscripts that had been abandoned in a library; he needed to pay for the restoration of his monastery’s buildings. Among these papers, Professor Alberto Gentili, of the Turin Library, identified fourteen volumes of Vivaldi’s manuscripts that had belonged to a larger collection. As rare book dealers and swindlers of all kinds started following the trail of the remainder of this collection, the directors of the Turin Library, guided by genealogists, moved ahead and managed to identify the owner of the precious missing manuscripts: he was a cantankerous old Genovese marquis, and he only agreed to give up his collection after his private confessor applied diplomatic pressure. The third step of this surprising resurrection was the National University Library of Turin’s acquisition of two collections, which occurred as the result of a poignant incident. Two men from Turin, Roberto Foà, a stockbroker, and Filippo Giordano, an industrialist, had each lost a young son in sad conditions, and decided to perpetuate their memories in 1927 and 1930 by funding the Library’s purchase of the twenty-seven volumes of Vivaldi’s manuscripts. Today, they are known by the names of the two children: the Mauro Foà collection and the Renzo Giordano collection.
This acquisition revealed to the musical world that Vivaldi, who had been contemptuously denigrated by Bachian hagiographers, was not merely the composer of a few models for Bach’s ingenious transcriptions. His work was found to contain a huge corpus of instrumental and vocal music, secular as well sacred. The Turin manuscripts helped enrich the sketchy inventories made by the pioneers of Vivaldian research; they added several hundred concertos, with a wide number of variants and instrumentation, but also twenty-two opera scores, some serenate, chamber cantatas, parts of Masses and Vespers, and dozens of psalms and motets. Unfortunately, the exploration of this collection was halted by a series of trials, the Fascist withdrawal and the Second World War. But, in 1939, a memorable Settimana Vivaldi organized by the Accademia Chigiana of Sienna, under the artistic direction of Alfredo Casella, feted Vivaldi’s rehabilitation. Many of his works were performed for the first time since his death, including the now-famous Stabat Mater and Gloria. Vivaldi’s rebirth had begun.
|
|
|
|