Worthy of Rescue

Thanks to their happy discovery that Bach had found Vivaldi worthy of imitation, musicologists found the Prete Rosso worthy of rescue from oblivion. The once interna­tionally famous Vivaldi had already become an obscure figure by the time of his pauper's death in Vienna in 1741. Today, his instrumental music is allowed to form the backdrop for clever conversation at culturally pretentious cocktail parties, much as it did for the urbane chatter of eighteenth century Venetian visitors to the fashionable concerts of the orphan girls of the Pieta. A French traveler, relating in amazement his exper­ience at a concert in this remarkable Venetian institution, describes a scene not unlike a modern cocktail party: "The orchestra, recruited from four hundred of the finest virtuose, was conducted by the famous Saxon, Hasse. (One of Vivaldi's successors). The unprofessed sisters, all refined ladies, came and went behind two grilles, making conversation and distributing refreshments to the cavaliers and abbes gathered in a circle around one or another grille, fans in their hands.'' Guardi and Longhi delighted in painting just such scenes.

The Pieta was but one of four Venetian conservatories or ospedal renowned for their music. They were actually shelters for the orphaned, illegitimate, handicapped, or otherwise unwanted female offspring of the city. With these conservatories, the Venetians had hit upon a brilliant solution to a tragic social problem. Venice was even then a playground for tourists, and for sailors on shore leave. Needless to say, Venice was plagued with a prodigious number of illegitimate births, and rather than have the innocent byproducts of what was, after all, an important factor in the Venetian economy, cast into the canals, the Pieta was founded to provide a haven for these unfortunates, who numbered as many as six thousand at one point in its history. The Pieta was no Dickensian institution, however. Though its charges wore habit-like uniforms and were kept in cloistered seclusion, they did not take religious vows and austerity was not a conspicuous quality in their lives. Music played an enormous part in the education of the girls at the Pieta. The best masters were engaged to instruct them in vocal and instrumental performance, in solfege and theory. The most gifted musicians formed a kind of aristocracy in the school (much as do the members of the football team in the modern high school or college); they received a yearly stipend of about one hundred lire from the state, while the elite among these received minor privileges, adulation, gifts, even proposals of marriage. They gave regular weekly concerts for which admission was charged, and the popularity of these concerts swelled the coffers of the Pieta. In addition, they sang at the funerals of distinguished Venetians, and were often invited to perform at the palaces of the nobility on special occasions, even traveling considerable distances from Venice.

In September 1703, only a few months after his ordination as a priest, the twenty-six year old Vivaldi assumed the post of "maestro di violino" at the Pieta. His industry as pedagogue and composer was rewarded by increases in salary and promotions, and he rapidly acquired an international reputation. When in 1713, Francesco Gasparini, as "maestro di coro" -- Vivaldi's superior-- took a leave of absence from the Pieta because of illness, Vivaldi assumed his responsibilities as house-com­poser, chiefly of sacred music. Around the same time Vivaldi also turned to opera, not only as a composer but as an impresario as well, an activity in those days not considered incompatible with his role as a priest. Vivaldi had long since given up saying Mass for reasons of ill-health; he seems to have had asthma and a heart condition which interfered with his religious obligations, although they did not seem to hamper his activities as a violinst, conductor, composer or business manager. Henceforth, Vivaldi would distinguish himself as much as a vocal composer as he had as a violinist and instrumental composer.

Gasparini's absence from the Pieta, which in due course became permanent, made it possible for Vivaldi to turn to a genre he had previously neglected, the oratorio. Two of Vivaldi's oratorios were performed in the concerts of the Ospedale della Pieta, Moyses Deus Pharaonis in 1714 and Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernes barbaris in 1716 (on MHS 835L/36H). The first of these has been lost, but the second is among the six volumes of Vivaldi's sacred music preserved today in Turin. (The discovery in the 1930s of a vast amount of Vivaldi's music, including a considerable number of operas and sacred works hitherto unknown, is in itself a fascinating scholarly detective story, full of intrigue and suspense.) Judith's providential discovery was fortunate, indeed, for the work is a masterpiece with its abundance of fresh musical ideas and variegated, appropriately-chosen instrumen­tal colors. The Judith story was a Baroque favorite, not only in art but in music: Charpentier had set it; Alessandro Scarlatti had composed two versions; five years before Vivaldi his compatriot Benedetto Marcello had written both libretto and music for a Giuditta dedicated to a Borghese princess; Metastasio's libretto of the Judith story, Betulia liberata, would be set by a long chain of composers, including the fifteen-year old Mozart. Vivaldi and his librettist Jacopo Cassetti saw in Judith, with her heroic and erotic qualities, a figure of Venice. The oratorio is not only a retelling of the Biblical story, but a veiled political allegory symbolizing the triumph of Venice (Judith and Betulia) over the Turks (the Assyrians), another episode in the "myth of Venice." In inverse proportion to the waning of Venetian mercantile dominance and political prestige, the Republic strove to bolster its image through art and music. The state-supported musical activities of the Pieta were part of this public relations scheme to glorify Venice; thus the Pieta was the ideal locale for the performance of an oratorio intended to enhance the prestige of Venice. In it, Vivaldi utilized all the musical resources of the Ospedale, players of all kinds of instruments as well as singers. The five solos were assigned to ospaliere, as the orphan girls were called; all the roles, even the male ones, are for soprano or alto. The chorus calls for full SATB; while the tenor parts could be sung by the low altos of the Pieta, the bass parts must have been taken by instructors at the Ospedale, perhaps filled out by members from various church choirs. Vivaldi makes use of a variety of unusual obbligato instruments in the arias--viola d'amore, a family of "viole all'inglese," theorbo, salmoe (a shawm), clareni (clarinets), even a mandoline--exploiting the wide-ranging abil­ities of the virtuose of the Pieta. Vivaldi was later to draw on material from Juditha for the concerto La Primavera.