ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) Sacred Music - 7 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.

A companion piece to the Laudate Dominum, RV606 (recorded in volume 6), Laetatus sum is set by Vivaldi almost after the strophic fashion of a hymn. Verses 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9 are given, respectively, exactly the same musical material. The Doxology (verses 10/11) becomes a modified and extended fourth strophe. Otherwise, RV607 is a typically unpretentious pieno setting dominated by its instrumental 'riff' on violins. Such concise settings should not be likened to pieces belonging to 'short' services in the Anglican rite. They were performed at Vespers alongside more elaborate settings of other psalms, the brevity of the first compensating for the length of the second so as to keep the duration of the service within reasonable bounds. In other words, they were the necessary complement of settings in several movements.

Vivaldi produced three known settings of Psalm 112 (113 in Protestant bibles), of which this is the last, dating from around 1730. It appears to have been composed for a member of a group of seven Italian singers at the Saxon-Polish court in Dresden who had trained in Venice and Bologna between 1724 and 1730. As well as the composer's autograph score, today preserved in Turin, a fair copy in the hand of his father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, survives in Dresden.RV601, in G major, is a true virtuoso piece for a soprano (originally a castrato) able to reach D in alto. The galant inflections of its melodic lines remind one of the Neapolitan opera that had conquered Venice only a few years earlier. It contains some vivid word-painting, examples of which are the sustained trilled note on the first syllable of 'saeculum' (eternity) in movement 2; the long ascent representing sunrise in movement 3; the registral contrast of 'caelo' (heaven) and 'terra' (earth) in movement 4; the fierce urgency with which the poor are raised up from the dust in movement 5; the mechanically repetitive crotchets illustrating the word 'collocet' (set) in movement 6. The most memorable movement is unquestionably the seventh, 'Gloria Patri', in which the composer calls for an obbligato flute, which for Venice was still a relatively new instrument. Vivaldi certainly encountered the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz, a member of the Dresden orchestra, on the latter's visit to Venice in 1726, and this movement can be seen as a retrospective homage to, and renewal of musical contact with, the eminent German.

This solo motet, whose text paraphrases part of Psalm 23 (24 in Protestant bibles) and quotes part of the rite of the Paschal Vigil (the praise of Easter at the blessing of the Paschal Candle expressed in the words 'O felix culpa quae talem meruit habere Redemptorem'), must have been composed for the conclusion of Holy Week. Bibliographical factors suggest a date around 1715.

Unusually, the autograph manuscript leaves out the composer's name. It likewise fails to identify the singer for whom it was composed, although that is less unexpected. In fact, the character of the contralto part and its accompaniment make it very likely that the singer was Geltruda (1684-1752), one of the Pietà's leading musicians in the 1710s. Typically for a figlia di coro, Geltruda was active in more than a single capacity, being also a theorboist and a viola player. As a singer, she had a very narrow compass (the vocal part in RV633 stretches from Middle C only as far as the D a ninth above it) and a rather weak voice; a composer had to take care, as Vivaldi does, not to allow it to be drowned by the instruments. It is for this reason that when the contralto sings she is either accompanied by continuo alone or her part is doubled by violins.

Vivaldi enthusiasts tend to become annoyed when RV589 is referred to as 'the' Vivaldi Gloria, because there survive two settings from the master's pen: the well-known setting and this almost equally fine but much less frequently performed setting in the same key (D major), scored for almost the same forces (RV588 requires an extra oboe and a tenor soloist). The similarities go much deeper, since both works come from Vivaldi's early period around 1715, divide up the movements in an almost identical way, and employ as their final movement an arrangement (different in each case) of the same movement in a setting of the Gloria for two choirs by a slightly older composer active in Venice, Giovanni Maria Ruggieri. This setting, dated 1708, is among the manuscripts of sacred music by other composers that once belonged to the composer's own collection, many items in which must have passed to him via his father.

The chronology of the two settings is disputed by scholars. Both manuscripts show clear evidence of reworking, probably over a period of several years. One thing is certain, however: whichever of the two was written first served as the model for the second. The two versions may have coexisted in the repertory of the Pietà for several years.

RV588 possesses a very unusual feature that may provide a reason for the slowness of its revival. Not only does it have a designated introductory motet (introduzione) for solo contralto, but this motet is actually dovetailed into it in an ingenious and radical way. The second and final aria of Jubilate, o amoeni chori is united in a single movement with the opening chorus of the Gloria. The celebratory text of the introduzione, paraphrasing Psalm 150, is non-specific enough to be suitable for any feast. The second aria invokes the sound of plucked (citharae) and bowed (lirae) stringed instruments, wind instruments (fistulae) and the organ (organa). Ostensibly praising God, it reminds the congregation of the virtuosity of the Pietà's instrumentalists. Obligingly, the orchestra provides little touches of illustrative colour, the most conspicuous of which is a five-bar solo for obbligato organ.

Vivaldi reckoned with occasions on which the introduzione would be omitted. Crosses in his autograph score in Turin tell the copyist of the separate parts which passages of the third movement to leave out if the Gloria is to be performed 'neat'. Leaving out the solo portions makes the movement too short, however, and this brutal solution is rarely adopted. Later in the decade Vivaldi wrote out a slightly modified vocal part for the introduzione, notating it in the soprano instead of the alto clef, even though the compass hardly changed. His purpose in preparing this new version (RV639a) seems merely to have been to make the part accessible to a singer more accustomed to read from the other clef.

The most impressive choral movement of RV588 is its second, 'Et in terra pax', an unhurried, chromatically-inflected chorus in B minor very similar in mood to its counterpart in RV589. Also worthy of mention are the short 'Gratias agimus tibi', with a startling enharmonic change in its second bar, the severe 'Domine Fili unigenite', which is possibly a borrowing from an older composer, the 'Domine Deus, agnus Dei', with its oboe obbligato, and the 'Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris', an aria for contralto in which a pair of solo violas accompanies a pair of solo violins in a chamber texture reminiscent of Mozart's string quintets.

Michael Talbot ©2001