Intorno a Locatelli: Studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764)

Abstract

Intorno a Locatelli: Studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764). Edited by Albert Dunning. (Speculum musicae, I. 1.) Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995. [2 vols. (xiv, 1250 p.) ISBN 88-7096-143-5. L250.000.00.] This massive two-volume collection of twenty substantial essays on subjects concerned directly or obliquely with Pietro Antonio Locatelli constitutes the proceedings of a congress held in 1995, presumably at Cremona, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth. Most of the contributors were young Italian scholars. Many were students of the volume's editor, Albert Dunning, at the University of Pavia. Three of the essays by non-Italians have been translated into Italian in order to create a unified work. The boxed set has been lavishly produced under the sponsorship of the Fondazione Pietro Antonio Locatelli of Amsterdam and Cremona, which is also underwriting the Locatelli complete works edition beaded by Dunning, the leading Locatelli specialist of our time. Among the essays tangential to Locatelli is the very long one (128 pages) that opens the collection, on musical patronage in Venice during the early eighteenth century, by Alessandra Bernardi, essentially a revision of her 1990 dissertation at the University of Pavia completed under Dunning's direction. It includes a comprehensive overview of musical activity in that city, set within the context of its political, social, cultural, religious, and economic institutions. It draws upon unpublished diaries, travelers' accounts, administrative records, archives of public bodies, and literary and musical sources. Much of it is organized according to category of patron, and contains new information relating to the careers of Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, Francesco and Michele Gasparini, Giovanni De Porta, Giuseppe Boniventi, Carlo Tessarini, Giorgio Gentili, and Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello. Similar to this essay in originality and scope is Franco Piperno's account of musical events, patronage, and institutions during the first half of the eighteenth century. Piperno, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Florence, concludes with a precise chronological table listing known performances of operas, oratorios, cantatas, serenades, and other items of musical spectacle in Rome from 1710 to 1725, with citations of primary and secondary sources. Likewise tangential to Locatelli but of undoubted value are Margherita Canale Degrassi's essay on the purposes and performance practices of Giuseppe Tartini's violin concertos, Galliano Ciliberti's study of the Christmas concerto in the eighteenth century, Stefano La Via's exposition of new documents relating to the musical patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome (1700-1740), Paola Pozzi's catalogue of Italian concertos from the first half of the eighteenth century preserved in the elector's library in Dresden, and Giovanni Sgaria's life and works of the estimable Roman composer Giovanni Mossi (ca. 1680-1742), this one, too, a Pavia dissertation supervised by Dunning. Giacomo Fornari's discussion of the decline of instrumental music in Italy during the eighteenth century confronts a very large and fascinating problem, probably beyond the reach of such a young scholar. His essay relies heavily on quotations from travel accounts, treatises, and music journals of the eighteenth century to establish, basically, that opera overwhelmed Italian musical culture of that period and that, given the abysmal condition of the Italian economy under foreign domination, many aspiring musicians migrated to Northern Europe, where there was a market for instrumental music that did not exist in their homeland. Consequently. Italian instrumental music, although extremely influential during the first half of the century, was essentially an aspect of emigrant culture. as Carl Dablhaus called it. Left unexplored is exactly why economic hardship in Italy favored opera production over instrumental music and why, in some parts of the peninsula, instrumental music flourished nonetheless. …