ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) Sacred Music - 9 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.

LAUDATE PUERI RV602
Carolyn Sampson, Joanne Lunn sopranos
This radiant setting of one of the more commonly set Vesper psalms – it is absent from only a small proportion of services – is unique among Vivaldi’s sacred vocal compositions from the first period in requiring two cori for its performance. Each coro contains a solo soprano and strings, but only the first coro has a four-part choir. If, as appears almost certain, the work was composed for the Pietà c1716, one may infer from the asymmetry of the layout that one choir loft had less capacity than the other. This supposition makes good sense, for in 1723 the governors voted to have two small choir lofts erected on either side of the main one, since the coro was finding itself cramped in its existing accommodation.

The relationship between the two solo sopranos, in the movements where both sing, resembles that of the two solo violins in a ‘double’ concerto by Vivaldi. Much of the time, they respond to each other in dialogue fashion, but they occasionally come together to perform chains of thirds reminiscent of a love duet and even engage, at climactic moments, in brief snatches of imitative counterpoint. Vivaldi is scrupulously even-handed in his allocation of material to the two sopranos, and this equality reflects the (for the time) remarkably democratic régime at the Pietà, where the governors went to great lengths to foster an egalitarian spirit among the foundlings and, especially, the members of the coro.

This is a setting on a grand scale, in which the norm is that each verse of the psalm becomes a separate movement. To unify the work, Vivaldi resorts to the old device (used also in his setting of the Beatus vir, RV597, and in its later variant RV795) of treating a verse taken from the opening part of the psalm as a refrain. In the case of RV602, this is the second verse, the one that blesses the name of the Lord for evermore. The reason why Vivaldi did not choose the equally suitable first verse for this purpose is probably that he wanted the refrain to be choral. In the extended first movement, which includes the text of the first two verses, verse 1 is reserved for the solo sopranos, leaving the choir to enter with the music for verse 2, the first statement of the refrain, towards the end. This movement sets the tone for the whole work in its brightness and diatonic innocence.

Verse 3, with its reference to the rising and going down of the sun, provides the composer with a perfect opportunity to show his powers of word-painting, using a rising figure to denote ascent (the rhetorical figure called anabasis) and a falling one for the balancing descent (katabasis). Vivaldi does this in a more extravagant and leisurely way than most of his contemporaries attempted. The whole movement becomes, in fact, a fascinating game of ups and downs. The third movement, ‘Excelsus super omnes’, is the emotional heart of the work. In the uncommon key of F sharp minor, Vivaldi adopts the tempo and rhythm of a siciliana. But this is no rustic idyll: the music exudes deep melancholy, and the upward thrusts that punctuate the violin lines express desperation rather than vigour. The movement contains both the fourth and the fifth psalm verses, which Vivaldi treats strophically. In other words, the setting of the fifth verse is a paraphrase of that of the fourth. But the two ‘stanzas’ are far from identical (for a start, they modulate to different keys at their mid-point, and the movement is split between the two sopranos and their respective orchestras), and the composer shows great imagination in avoiding plain repetition.

Following the refrain, we arrive at the liveliest and most dramatic of the movements. Vivaldi depicts the raising up of the poor and the lifting up of the needy in vivid, forceful gestures expressing the Lord’s power, the two solo sopranos competing among themselves to describe the scene. Next comes a movement in the faux-naïf style that Vivaldi, stimulated by his experience in opera, made his own in the 1710s. In this movement, ‘Ut collocet eum’, the violins unite, thinning out the texture. Whenever the first soprano sings, the bass instruments drop out, leaving the viola as the lowest part. The effect created is that of a simple, rustic dance. This movement, which sets verses 7 and 8, concludes the setting of the psalm proper.

Following another statement of the refrain, we hear the first verse of the Lesser Doxology. This is traditionally a point at which solo display is introduced. Vivaldi makes the movement a ‘solo’ in a double respect, since the second solo soprano has as her partner a solo oboe, previously silent. The two alternate and intertwine in the manner of a chamber duet, but Vivaldi gives the wind instrument an opportunity to come out ‘on top’ by entrusting to it a short but showy written-out cadenza near the end of the final ritornello. The final movement, in time-honoured fashion, takes the statement ‘Sicut erat in principio’ (‘As it was in the beginning’) at face value and reintroduces the music of the opening movement. The restatement is not exact, and in the closing bars Vivaldi intercuts effectively between the text and music of the second verse of the Doxology and those of the second verse of the psalm (the refrain).

SALVE REGINA RV618
Nathalie Stutzmann contralto
Votive antiphons to the Virgin, like motets, were considered appropriate for singing by a single voice in Italian music of the late Baroque. This is logical enough, since the four ‘great’ antiphons, each allotted liturgically to its own season (that for the Salve Regina runs from the First Vespers of Trinity Sunday to the Saturday preceding the first Sunday of Advent), are all styled as prayers. The Salve Regina has six verses, which Vivaldi sets here as separate, moderately contrasted movements.

Like RV616, but unlike RV617 (the setting preserved in Brno), RV618 is an extended work for solo contralto and strings divided into two cori. A pair of oboes makes an appearance in the fourth movement but is otherwise silent. RV616 and RV618 belong to the large group of sacred vocal works in due cori that Vivaldi composed from the middle of the 1720s into the early 1730s. Most of these do not seem to have any connection with the Pietà and were probably conceived by the composer as ‘repertory’ pieces: a group of mutually compatible works from which selected items could be supplied on request to a church for its celebration of a major festival.

For the first movement, Vivaldi borrowed a fugal ritornello from one of his violin concertos (RV319). There is no justification in the psalm text for this unexpected feature, but it certainly lends energy and musical interest. In this movement the second orchestra acts merely as a reinforcement for the first. The relationship changes in the second movement, where the two cori are treated antiphonally, bouncing phrases off each other. Sighs (‘suspiramus’) groans (‘gementes’), pleas (‘flentes’) and tears (‘lacrimarum’) are all captured expressively in the slower third movement.

The arrival of the oboes in the fourth movement injects a touch of élan, although the mood remains serious, and a dolefully chromatic bass line accompanies the word ‘misericordes’ (‘merciful’). The first mention of Jesus, in the fifth verse, prompts Vivaldi to give the movement the lilt of a lullaby; the infant is gently tossed from one ensemble, as it were, to the other. It remains for a final movement to give voice to the supplicant’s pleas in music of fervent warmth.

ASCENDE LAETA RV635
Joyce DiDonato mezzo soprano
In his first period of sacred vocal music composition at the Pietà Vivaldi pioneered the practice of inserting short solo motets (introduzioni) before major choral items such as the Gloria in the Mass or the Dixit Dominus at Vespers. Ascende laeta is an introduzione for soprano and strings designed to precede the Dixit Dominus. It is congruent in key (A major), style and even thematic design with Vivaldi’s earlier surviving setting of the psalm, RV595. This and other factors enable Ascende laeta to be dated around 1715.

Its text, written in the highly Italianate Latin of the time, associates it with the celebration of the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August. The opening aria describes how Mary joyfully ascends mountains and hills, this ascent being an Arcadian metaphor for her translation to Heaven. In a central recitative the anonymous poet heaps encomiums on Mary, and the final aria exhorts the angels of Paradise, the flowers of the field and the shepherds of the Nativity to join in her praise. This final aria mentions the rustic instruments fistula and tibia (pipe and flute), and Vivaldi accordingly places bagpipe-like drones in the bass and chains of parallel thirds in the treble. The exuberance of this simple but by no means facile work makes the perfect hors d’oeuvre to the opening psalm of Vespers.

GAUDE MATER ECCLESIA RV613
Susan Gritton soprano
Vivaldi’s hymns, leaving aside the special case of his Stabat Mater, are his simplest, most functional sacred vocal compositions. Following tradition, they are set in strophic fashion, the music for one stanza being used for all the remainder. Where hymns have a great number of stanzas, it is the custom to set them selectively. In a liturgical context, any stanzas not included can be supplied as plainsong or intoned silently by the celebrant.

The hymn Gaude mater Ecclesia belongs liturgically to the feast of St Dominic on 4 August. This feast was not celebrated with any degree of pomp at the Pietà, so, although the hymn appears to date from the period of Ascende laeta, it was probably written to fulfil a commission from a Dominican house in Venice or elsewhere. The verses set are nos 1, 2 and 5 (specifically including the two that mention the name of the order’s founder). Vivaldi reproduces the symmetry of the quatrains by casting each stanza in binary form (with one couplet per section); an instrumental ritornello introduces each stanza.

VOS AURAE PER MONTES RV634
Carolyn Sampson soprano
This motet was written for the feast of St Antony of Padua in the second part of Vivaldi’s career. Although its autograph manuscript survives today in the library of the basilica of St Francis in Assisi, the work was probably first heard on the saint’s feast-day (13 June) in the basilica of St Antony in Padua itself. The manuscript’s present location in Assisi is probably due to the common practice of loaning or exchanging musical manuscripts practised by churches or convents belonging to the same monastic order.

Padua was the Republic of Venice’s ‘second city’ and the seat of its university. When the Venetian nobility went, for their summer vacation, to their country seats on the mainland, they often travelled via Padua, attending the basilica’s patronal festival on the way. Vivaldi was very familiar with this ceremony, since both he, and before him his father, were on several occasions recruited to the orchestra that participated in it. Indeed, in 1712 he wrote a violin concerto for the feast (RV212) in which he himself took the solo part. The opening aria depicts the gentle wafting of the breezes in terms familiar to those who remember the first movement of Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ Concerto from The Four Seasons, testing the vocal soloist’s virtuosity. The recitative focuses on the miraculous tongue of the saint, uncorrupted even after his death. A second aria calls on the whole of nature to recount Antony’s deeds, and an exuberant, concerto-like ‘Alleluia’ rounds off the work.

LAUDATE PUERI RV602a: ‘Gloria Patri’
Carolyn Sampson soprano
On two separate occasions, Vivaldi returned to his A major setting of the Laudate pueri (RV602), adapting and updating it for new purposes. RV602a is the earlier adaptation, probably dating from the late 1720s. Since he no longer cultivated the faux-naïf style of the previous decade, Vivaldi replaced the sixth movement (‘Ut collocet eum’), by a rather conventional aria in G major for second (in place of first) soprano and strings. He restored equality between the soloists by reassigning the seventh movement (‘Gloria Patri’) to the first soprano, at the same time replacing the oboe by the newly fashionable flute. The two versions are not very different, but the obbligato part is tailored very sensitively to the new instrument, which results in a number of interesting changes. This second version makes a delightful stocking-filler.