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These discoveries could hardly come at a more opportune moment. They have occurred at exactly the time when Vivaldi’s œuvre –which has generally been considered in terms of a small number of seminal works– is being re-evaluated by a new generation of enthusiastic performers, publishers and musicologists, who of course will be delighted to take advantage of these new resources. The Dresden Nisi Dominus has already been recorded by Robert King. Rinaldi Alessandrini is preparing to conduct the La costanza trionfante, and a number of musicians have converged to study the Montezuma score.
In anticipation of hearing the works in concert or on recordings, Goldberg’s Frédéric Delaméa spoke with Vivaldi specialist Dr. Michael Talbot about the circumstances of the latest discoveries and the works themselves.
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2002 and 2003 were outstanding years in terms of the Vivaldi heritage, and several unknown works came to light. Let’s begin with the new Nisi Dominus, which you recently identified among the manuscripts in the Dresden State Library. How did this discovery come about?
Janice Stockigt, an Australian musicologist, was examining all the works attributed to Galuppi in the Dresden library. In an e-mail she sent in late April, 2003, she briefly mentioned a curious composition which included obligato parts for the viola d’amore, the salmo (chalumeau), and the tromba marina. She thought – and she was absolutely right – that these instruments dated from an earlier period than that of Galuppi, and wondered what my opinion was. I immediately knew that the score must have been by Vivaldi. Such unusual instruments could have only been used at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice: the word salmo come from the Venetian dialect, and violino in tromba marina means ‘a violin played in the manner of a trumpet marine’. Only Vivaldi could have included all these instruments at once! One of the five psalms Vivaldi had sold to the Ospedale della Pietà in 1739 was missing, and furthermore, another of the psalms, the Beatus vir, RV 795, had been found in the same library - and attributed to Galuppi. All the signs pointed to Vivaldi. A few days later Ines Burde, a German musicologist, sent the incipits of the eight movements of the psalm, and they seemed very Vivaldi-like to me. When the microfilm arrived, I immediately recognised the writing of the Venetian copyist Iseppo Baldan, who also copied the RV795 score and who for a long time made it difficult for musicologists to definitively attribute scores to Vivaldi.
What criteria did you use to refute Galuppi’s authorship and definitively establish the work as Vivaldi’s?
I’ve already mentioned some of the more or less external characteristics. Then of course we also had to make a close examination of the score itself to discern the stylistic elements that distinguish a Vivaldi score from one by Galuppi. Actually, it would be difficult to confuse the two composers. When you compare the two Confitebor tibi Domine written in 1733 for three solo voices and strings, one by Galuppi and the other by Vivaldi, you can see from the first bar that Galuppi’s piece, despite all his efforts to write in a ‘modern’ style, is definitely a baroque work, while Vivaldi clearly prefigures the classical style.
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