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These words were written by Ottavio Pitoni (1657-1743), who in 1686 assumed the post and responsibilities that Carissimi had fulfilled for more than forty years; citing the words of a direct witness seems the best way to introduce a figure of such importance.Unfortunately when compared to the time of Pitoni our knowledge of Carissimi’s music is irrevocably hampered by the loss of all his manuscripts. In a cruel twist of fate circumstances conspired to deprive posterity of this maestro’s works. Only a few days after his death the Jesuit superior of the college, conscious of the priceless nature of such a bequest, succeeded in obtaining a papal Brief from Clement X, in which upon pain of excommunication it was forbidden to move, transfer or in any way reduce in toto or in parte Carissimi’s opus, conserved in the school’s archives. And this, in a disastrous reversal of those original good intentions, was to prove catastrophic for Carissimi’s music, in that upon the suppression of the Jesuit Order in 1773 the entire college archive was completely dispersed. In the early nineteenth century the scholar Pietro Alfieri bitterly lamented this course of events: “Upon the suppression of the Society of Jesus during the course of the century the precious archives of the churches of Sant’Apollinare and Gesù were plundered and all the paper sold by weight. Canon Massaiuoli […] used to say that through a stroke of good luck he had been able to buy back from a delicatessen owner maybe as much as three thousand pounds in weight of paper belonging to the church of Sant’Apollinare. From which one can suppose that the magnificent Carissimi originals that we prize so highly today were probably at one time used to wrap butter or anchovies […].” The same fate befell the only portrait of the maestro cited in the Pitoni biography. The engraving popularly held to represent the composer’s face has now been established as a portrait of a little-known Dutch pastor, one Alexander Morus.
Try and imagine for a moment that all of Leonardo da Vinci’s works had been lost, and that in order to reconstruct the artistic identity, creative development and individual stylistic evolution of this great artist one only has access to copies painted by his students. What is more these copies are scattered throughout Europe, are impossible to place within a chronological framework and it is not even possible to be certain as to what they are in fact copies of. Of course this parallel with figurative art doesn’t hold completely, but the Carissimi scholar certainly finds himself in an analogous position, confounded by problems of attribution, forced to sail the high seas without the compass of chronological references, and confident of having finally identified the incontrovertible trait of the master in a certain work, only to see the attribution overturned a few years later. And this is not an isolated occurrence in the history of Carissimi research, which is why there is as yet no exhaustive monograph on the composer, and the rather sporadic musicological studies devoted to him all suffer from the same historiographical incompleteness.
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