ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) Sacred Music - 6 Excerpts from the sleeve notes

Before the 1920s, the suggestion that Vivaldi had composed a significant corpus of sacred vocal music would have seemed absurd. Almost no church music by him was known to have survived and, since he had never been maestro di cappella at any church, it was difficult to conceive of circumstances in which he would have been asked to provide such music in bulk. True he was a priest, and for that reason would have been familiar with the sacred repertoire and, one supposes, sympathetic to its aesthetic, but that in itself proves nothing. After all, several clerics among composers, Tartini being the most pertinent example, eschewed vocal music altogether. The situation changed only when Vivaldi's own huge working collection of manuscripts came to light and was acquired for the National Library in Turin. It then became evident that his production of church music was substantial - over fifty works have survived, and the existence of many more is recorded - and that this music was varied, ambitious in form and expression, and on an artistic level at least equal to that of his concertos.

Raised as a violinist, Vivaldi probably wrote little or no church music until the second decade of the eighteenth century. But his travels with his father as a 'jobbing' player often placed him in situations where commissions for sacred works might have occurred. Such was the probable origin of the earliest sacred work by him on which a date can be set, the Stabat Mater, RV621 ('RV' numbers refer to the standard modern catalogue of Vivaldi's works by Peter Ryom). Vivaldi had visited Brescia in 1711 to play in the patronal festival of the Philippine church, Santa Maria della Pace; among the compositions acquired by this church in the following year and listed in its account book we find the Stabat Mater for alto and strings, commissioned for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin, which in 1712 fell on 18 March.

In 1713 an event of the greatest importance for Vivaldi's career occurred. Francesco Gasparini, who was choirmaster at the Pietà, the Venetian charitable institution for foundlings where Vivaldi worked as a violin master and orchestral director, went on a leave from which he never returned. Until as late as 1719 the Pietà failed to replace him, which meant that Vivaldi (together with a colleague, the singing teacher Pietro Scarpari) found himself invited to take over the main task of the maestro di coro: to supply the singers of the institution with a steady stream of new compositions which would attract a well-heeled congregation to the chapel services and so encourage donations and bequests. For reasons of decorum, mixed church choirs were not acceptable in Catholic Europe at this time, and since the Pietà's male wards left the institution during adolescence to take up apprenticeships, it had no option but to train and use exclusively female residents as musicians. Remarkably, the choir was laid out exactly as a normal male choir, with tenors and basses in addition to the expected sopranos and altos. The tenor parts, which have rather high compasses, were certainly sung as written; the bass parts were probably also sung much of the time at notated pitch by a handful of women with exceptionally deep voices. In case of difficulty, the bass parts could be transposed up an octave without damage to the harmony, since they were nearly always doubled by instruments. Solo parts, however, were overwhelmingly for high voices: soprano or alto. More than the choir, the orchestra or even the composers of the music, these soloists were the 'star attraction' of music-making at the Pietà - their names recorded for posterity in the letters and memoirs of visitors to its chapel. The triumphant solismo of the contemporary opera houses could hardly fail to spill over into the sacred domain.

Little of Vivaldi's church music composed during this period (1713-1719) circulated in Italy outside the Pietà's walls, but some works reached the Habsburg domains in central Europe. A visitor from Bohemia, Balthasar Knapp, acquired a number before his return to Prague in 1717, and his collection appears to have been the nucleus of a modest Vivaldi cult which flourished in such centres as Prague, Osek (in north Bohemia), Brno (in Moravia) and even Breslau (in Silesia). Vivaldi's sacred works were also known in the capital of Saxony, Dresden, where the Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka took a few pieces into his extensive collection of church music.

The surviving works from this 'first' period account for just under half of the total. A similar number date from a 'middle' period stretching from the mid-1720s to the early 1730s. These include nearly all the compositions laid out for two ensembles (in due cori, as Vivaldi describes this form of setting). Whereas the earlier works are restrained in expression and generally quite simple in texture, this second group is characterized by flamboyance and contrapuntal ostentation. Many of these works appear to have a connection with the Feast of St Lawrence Martyr on 10 August; Vivaldi may have written them for the convent church of San Lorenzo in Venice (which every year celebrated its patronal festival with great pomp, commissioning music for Mass and Vespers from external composers), or perhaps for the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, whose protector was his Roman patron, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. What is certain is that these works were composed for male voices - the energetic writing for the bass voices in such works as the Dixit Dominus, RV594, would be unthinkable for a female singer.

Near the end of his career, in 1739, Vivaldi once again supplied sacred vocal compositions to the Pietà during an interregnum between choirmasters - this time for payment, since he was no longer its employee. Only three of the works, apparently written for Easter Sunday, are extant today. They exemplify very clearly Vivaldi's turn, in his last years, to the fashionable galant style cultivated by younger Neapolitan composers, among them Vinci, Leo and Porpora.

A clear majority of the surviving works are for solo voice or voices. These include all the motets, introduzioni (an introduzione is a special kind of motet designed to precede the setting of a Psalm or a section of the Mass), hymns and votive antiphons, besides a few of the Psalms themselves. The remaining works are either - in the language of the time - pieno (for choir only) or concertato (for choir with one or more soloists). The supporting orchestra is most often made up merely of strings and continuo, but several of the compositions include wind instruments or obbligato parts. The vitality and idiomatic quality of the instrumental writing in these works is unrivalled in Italian sacred vocal music of the period.

A clear distinction must be made between the works on liturgical texts - texts which are unalterable and have their appointed place in the church calendar - and those on freely invented poetic texts (motets and introduzioni). The former mostly employ forms either peculiar to church music (for example, the so-called 'church aria' resembling the outer section of a da capo aria) or freely derived from instrumental music, while the latter follow secular models in their adoption of recitative and the da capo aria. A very few movements in the 'liturgical' works observe the stile antico based (at some remove, and not without modification) on the polyphonic language of sixteenth-century vocal music. Vivaldi seems to have had great difficulty in reproducing this style, since the specimens contained in his works include several instances of plagiarism.

The greatness of Vivaldi's sacred vocal music resides not in its historical influence, for it seems not to have circulated very widely in his day and (unlike his concertos) not to have initiated any practice copied by other composers, but rather in its consummate artistry and high level of inspiration. If Vivaldi does not quite have the musical gifts of a Bach, a Handel or even a Pergolesi, he has a manner of expression which is entirely individual and unmistakable, even in his least substantial works. In his best movements one discerns an almost shocking radicalism: a willingness to strip music down to its core and reconstitute it from these simplest elements. There is also a powerful instinct for thematic integration at work; time and again, analysis reveals how the same simple ideas inform each movement of a composite work and impart unity to it. The often unexpectedly subtle word-painting testifies to the thoughtfulness which Vivaldi brought to these compositions. They can accurately be described as the bridge between his imagination as a musician and his conviction as a priest: the point on which all facets of his complex personality converged.

This setting, closely related to the well-known setting of the same psalm for double choir, RV597 (the 'reversed' RV number is wholly fortuitous), was recognised as a composition of Vivaldi less than twenty years ago, when fragments of it were discovered in the library of the Conservatorio di Musica 'Benedetto Marcello' in Venice. Its position in the part-books containing it established clearly that it belonged to the group of psalms bought from Vivaldi by the Pietà shortly before Easter 1739 and probably performed on that occasion. Remarkably, the surviving parts matched perfectly those of a work surviving in a non-autograph score in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden. There was one complication: in Dresden the work was attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi (1706-1785), the leading Venetian composer of the first generation after Vivaldi.

The concordances in Venice and Turin, as well as the totally Vivaldian style of the work, would probably have sufficed by themselves to confirm the Dresden score of RV795 as authentic in all respects. However, added support comes from the fact that the manuscript was prepared by the Venetian music-copying firm of Iseppo Baldan, notorious among musicologists (especially Haydn scholars) for the exceptionally large number of deliberately misattributed works among its products. Baldan's copying shop supplied the Dresden court, in the decades immediately following Vivaldi's death in 1741, with large quantities of sacred vocal works by Galuppi; one can easily imagine that this Beatus vir, whose autograph manuscript it had perhaps acquired from the composer's estate via Vivaldi's nephews (who were themselves professional copyists with links to Baldan), was 'slipped in' under the younger composer's name to make up the numbers.

Close examination shows that RV597 and RV795 go back to a common archetype, a setting of the Beatus vir for single choir and orchestra that Vivaldi probably wrote during the 1710s. RV597, prepared in the 1720s, is an adaptation for male voices in which the ensemble is expanded to include a second choir and orchestra. RV795 retains the single ensemble, replaces selected movements by others written in a galant style, and casts aside the solo bass in favour of a 'pseudo bass' singing in the alto register. The last-mentioned change is most evident in the terzet 'In memoria aeterna', where the second contralto doubles the instrumental bass an octave above, producing a novel style of part-writing. The tenor required in the same terzet and in the 'Peccator videbit' movement was presumably Ambrosina (born c1710), famous for her deep voice.

The differences between RV597 and RV795 mirror those between the middle (RV610) and late (RV611) versions of the Magnificat. Baldan's copyist probably worked directly from the composer's autograph manuscript, in which the second movement (similar to the one found in RV597 but not including the repetitions of phrases assigned to the second coro) had evidently not been deleted or removed when its intended replacement was inserted. Consequently, the Dresden source innocently transmits two separate versions of the 'Gloriae et divitiae' movement: one going back to the lost archetype and the other dating from the late 1730s.

Because of the stylistic gap between old and new elements, RV795 offers a fascinating glimpse of evolving musical practice at the Pietà and of its ageing composer's attempts to keep his style up-to-date.

Vivaldi left three surviving settings of this Marian antiphon. Two are for solo alto and instruments laid out in two cori dating from the 1720s at earliest. Unexpectedly, the third setting, a much earlier work for soprano and strings in F major, survives only in a non-autograph manuscript preserved in the Moravian Museum in Brno, Czech Republic. It may have travelled to Bohemia in 1717 together with a group of manuscripts of sacred works by Vivaldi collected by Balthasar Knapp, secretary to Count Kinsky.

A highly unusual feature of the work in Brno is the scoring of its opening movement, in which the accompaniment consists of solo violin and continuo alone. There is a universal convention in Baroque music that the outer movements of a multi-movement work should be fully scored: it is in the inner movements that the texture can be lightened or varied. Only in RV617 does one find Vivaldi departing from this principle in a sacred vocal work. If there is a hermeneutic reason underlying his choice, it may be a desire to make the solo violin stand for Mary herself, to whom the soprano addresses his or her prayer. In the second movement, 'Ad te clamamus', the string tutti enters. The third movement, 'Eia ergo', brings soloist and tutti together in a rich, concerto-like texture. The final movement, 'Et Jesum', is a rocking siciliana in which the tutti and the solo violin accompany by turns. Without question, this is one of Vivaldi's most original sacred vocal compositions, and one in which his experience as a composer of concertos is most apparent.

Vivaldi wrote this concise but powerful single-movement setting of Psalm 116 (117 in Protestant bibles) for choir and strings in his 'first' period at the Pietà. Having only two verses, plus the mandatory Lesser Doxology, the psalm could hardly have been treated otherwise (it is the psalms with around ten verses that make the best candidates for multi-movement treatment). Vivaldi concentrates melodic and rhythmic interest in the part for unison violins, treating the choir as a kind of 'texted continuo'. This violin part is based on a short, arching motive that in some shape or form reappears once or twice in literally every bar. Half-way through, the composer produces a masterstroke, illustrating the word 'misericordia' (mercy) with a surging progression in sustained notes that takes the music momentarily into the distant region of B flat minor (the home key is D minor).

With its twenty-seven verses (not including the two comprising the Lesser Doxology), Psalm 113 (Psalms 114 and 115 combined in Protestant bibles) has always proved a handful for composers. In opting to set it for choir alone in a single, continuously running movement, Vivaldi took a very rational decision, even if, in his haste to complete the movement, he managed to confuse verse 4 with verse 6, thereby accidentally skipping a couple of verses.

RV604 belongs to the group of psalms Vivaldi wrote for Easter Sunday at the Pietà in 1739. It survives not only in Turin but also in the fragments of the Pietà's repertory today preserved at the Conservatorio di Musica 'Benedetto Marcello' in Venice. It is amusing to see, from the parts copied out for their own use by the Pietà's musicians, that they had just as much difficulty as we sometimes have today in deciphering Vivaldi's intentions.

The composer does his best to keep the musical interest alive in this 97-bar movement. He varies the accompanimental patterns on the violins, changes key in effective and sometimes surprising ways, and utilises different kinds of vocal texture (albeit without ever foregoing a pervasive homophony). Imitating the structure of the psalm's verses, he sometimes adopts a responsorial style in which the solo sopranos alone are answered by the full choir. Word-painting is rarely encountered. Because of its deliberate simplicity, this setting shows few differences from the comparable pieno settings from the 'first' period, RV606 and 607, which were composed over twenty years earlier.

RV608 is Vivaldi's most extended and artistically ambitious psalm setting for solo voice to have survived. It certainly dates from his 'first' period, but no one has yet established whether or not it was written for the Pietà. It survives in Turin not as an autograph score but as a set of parts copied out by the composer himself, his father and other hands. This suggests that its original, or perhaps its eventual, destination lay outside the Pietà's walls. It was Vivaldi's father who copied out the obbligato viola d'amore part for the 'Gloria'. In its notated form, this part treats three of the four upper strings as transposing 'instruments' - the open strings of the viola d'amore are tuned to D, F and D instead of the E, D and G familiar to a violinist - a procedure that leads to bizarre visual effects. Fingered as they would be on the violin, however, the notes make perfect harmonic and melodic sense.

It has long been known that the Pietà produced excellent players of the six-stringed viola d'amore. Among them were the celebrated Anna Maria (1696-1782), for whom Vivaldi composed two viola d'amore concertos, and her successor as principal violinist, Chiaretta (1718-1796). Only recently did the first testimony to Vivaldi himself as a virtuoso of that instrument turn up: in 1717, en route from Bologna to Venice, he celebrated a stopover in the small city of Cento with an impromptu performance on the viola d'amore in a local church, which was packed so full that the overspilling listeners had to jostle for space outside in the road. So the intended soloist in the Nisi Dominus could well have been the composer himself.

The nine movements are as varied in style and scoring as one could imagine. Two ('Vanum est vobis' and 'Beatus vir') are simple continuo arias, while one ('Sicut sagittae') has a string accompaniment in unison with the voice, and two others ('Nisi Dominus', with its abridged and retexted reprise 'Sicut erat in principio') are church arias in a lively concerto style. 'Cum dederit' conveys drowsiness by being set in a slow siciliana style and employing a distinctive motive with chromatically ascending lines that the composer often introduces in association with the idea of sleep (as in the second solo episode in the first movement of his 'Spring' Concerto, RV269); for this movement leaden mutes (piombi) are prescribed.

The most original movement is the third ('Surgite'), which is cast as an accompanied recitative, counterposing rapid ascending figures expressing the act of standing up to slow, reflective passages for the 'bread of sorrows'. The final 'Amen' imitates the style of an 'Alleluia' in a motet. But the spiritual fulcrum of the Nisi Dominus lies in the 'Gloria', which instead of being the usual expression of simple joy, is a brooding, dark-hued movement full of solitude.

Michael Talbot ©2000