The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a period when the efforts to draw parishioners back into churches and solidify their faith had taken a decidedly theatrical turn, with church decorations, including marbles, paintings and sculptures, becoming evermore colorful, ostentatious and theatrical. Vesper music for solo voice with virtuoso embellishments, the use of a variety of instruments, and the colorful, sometimes highly embellished concertato psalm and Magnificat settings of Monteverdi reveal the efforts of composers to match the theatrical attractiveness of the ecclesiastical physical surroundings with an attractiveness of theatrically oriented music.

Impressive display, whether of the virtuoso solo voice or of vocal sonorities and instrumental color, become an important aesthetic goal in publications of the first decade of the new century. Not only does such music begin to match the physical surroundings in ostentation, but its attraction for listeners draws worshippers into church for what were essentially concerts of sacred music. From an economic standpoint, the process was self-feeding and circular: impressive music attracted more worshippers, who in turn gave more alms and other donations that financed the elaborate and expensive music-making. On the other hand, most music for Vespers during this first decade of the century still followed the traditional models and formats of the Cinquecento, though often a basso continuo part was added, especially toward the end of the decade.

Psalms by such composers as Giovanni Gastoldi, Giovanni Croce, Giulio Belli, and Lodovico Viadana not only reflected sixteenth-century styles, but were reprinted in multiple editions for many years to come, preserving the older traditions well into the new century. It is likely that the continuation and proliferation of traditional settings served feasts of lesser significance than the most important celebrations that featured the most elaborate music (often referred to in documents as “solemn Vespers”). Nevertheless, there were certain churches where more conservative styles, especially eight-voice, double choir psalmody were required for the most important feasts.

Magnificat will perform Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers on the weekend of April 23-25 and will also participate, along with Artek, AVE, The Marion Verbruggen Trio, Music’s Recreation, Sacabuche!, and Archetti, in a concert celebrating a century of Venetian vespers music from Monteverdi to Vivaldi as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Exhibition on June 13.

Forty years ago, virtually nothing was known about polyphonic music for the Office except for the 1610 Vespers of Claudio Monteverdi, which had been receiving significant scholarly attention since shortly after World War II. Today, not only have a number of critical editions of Vesper publications from Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries been issued in various series, but a variety of scholars, including notably, Robert Kendrick, have researched the relationship between published and manuscript liturgical music and the monastic institutions and their friars and nuns that produced and performed this music. My own research has focused on bringing the entire Italian published repertoire of Office music to light through the collection of bibliographical information on over 1500 prints of Office music published between 1542 and 1725. This information will be made available online through a database being assembled at the Fondazione Cini in Venice and an online catalogue to be published by the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music.

Dufay and Binchois

Polyphonic music for Vespers is a latecomer to the repertoire of polyphonic sacred music in Europe. This is especially true of the principal texts of the Vesper service, the four or five psalms that constitute the core of every Vesper ceremony (the monastic rite typically required only four psalms; however monastic composers almost invariably published psalms in groups of five or more). Hymns for Vespers had already been the subject of polyphonic composition in the late fourteenth century, and Dufay placed significant emphasis on hymns in his compositional output. Like hymns, polyphonic Magnificats also originated in the fourteenth century and achieved popularity in the next century with settings by Dufay, Binchois and others. The papal chapel in Rome in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a major center of Magnificat composition.

Vesper psalms, however, only began to be circulated with some frequency in the late fifteenth century, appearing in an increasing quantity of manuscripts in the first half of the sixteenth century. After the middle of the century, growing quantities of psalms appeared in print, although much psalmody, especially in Rome, remained in manuscript and was never published.

By the time we reach the threshold of the seventeenth century, a number of trends in polyphonic Vesper settings had already been established:

1. Four-, five-, and six-voice falsobordone settings
2. Four-, five-, and six-voice polyphonic settings
3. Eight-voice, double-choir settings
4. Twelve-voice, three-choir settings
5. Multi-choir settings

Many of these settings were alternatim, alternating either odd or even polyphonic verses with plainchant verses, although through-composed polyphonic settings assumed increasing importance with the decade of the 1580s. Multi-choir settings were especially prominent in Rome beginning in the 1580s, where the quantity of choirs could reach four and five. We also know that by the middle of the century, instruments were used to enhance the impressiveness of multi-choir psalm and Magnificat settings in the North and by the 1570s in Rome. Rodobaldo Tibaldi cites as the first publication to call explicitly for instruments in a psalm or Magnificat a collection of motets by Joseph Gallo, published in 1598, although the title page of Ippolito Camatero’s Salmi corista a otto voci of 1573 had already declared the contents as “comodi alle voci, accompagnate anco con ogni sorte di instrumenti,” and the same composer’s Magnificats for eight, nine and twelve voices of 1575 were described in the print’s dedication as “concertata con ogni sorte di stromenti musicali.”

While publications of Vesper psalms had increased steadily throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, spurred on especially by the publications of Giambattista Asola in the 1580s and 1590s, Vesper music increases dramatically in significance during the first decade of the Seicento. By 1610 Vesper publications considerably outpaced publications of masses and motets. It is in this decade that a number of new stylistic possibilities for the setting of Vesper psalms emerges alongside those inherited from the previous century. What is apparent is that polyphonic Vesper services, whether in secular or monastic churches and chapels, had become of greater musical significance than the mass, for composers focused more of their efforts and their imagination on Vesper psalms (including Magnificats, which were often subsumed under the rubric of psalms) than on masses. This new emphasis is obvious in Monteverdi’s 1610 publication with its single polyphonic mass in the contrapuntal style of the mid–16th century and fourteen items for Vespers of the Blessed Virgin exhibiting a myriad of different, elaborate compositional techniques representing virtually every new musical style developing in the first decade of the century.

The reasons for the exponential growth in music for Vespers are not entirely clear, though probably multiple. A few publications of Vesper music in the latter part of the Cinquecento carried mottos such as conformi al decreto del Sacro Concilio di Trento, even though psalms and Magnificats themselves had not been mentioned in the final dictates of the Council. Indeed, the predominantly chordal settings of psalm texts in this period meant that psalm settings by their very nature conformed to the Council’s decree for clarity of text in polyphonic masses. However, the fact that the Council had not addressed psalmody in its declarations on music eventually meant that psalms were not considered subject to the same constraints as the mass in the eyes of composers and church officials. Certainly the psalms for major feasts, which were more in number than the mass ordinary movements normally set in polyphony, offered a greater variety of texts for seventeenth-century composers who continued and even augmented the interest in musical interpretation of textual concepts inherited from the Cinquecento. Another factor may have been the tradition of granting indulgences for attending Vesper services—there are hints of this in the documents of the Servite congregation in Milan. This is a subject requiring further investigation, but may indeed be a principal explanation of the rapid expansion of Vesper polyphony in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Arcangelo Corelli

Few musicians of the seventeenth century enjoyed the exalted status bestowed on Arcangelo Corelli (February 17, 1653- January 19, 1713). He was called the ‘new Orpheus of Our Times’ and the ‘divine Arc Angelo’, a clever pun on his Christian name and the Italian word for a bow (arco). The Englishman musician and writer Roger North described Corelli’s music as ‘transcendant’, ‘immortal’ and ‘the bread of life’ to musicians. Renowned as a virtuoso performer, an influential composer, and sought-after teacher, Corelli commanded respect and praise throughout Europe at the turn of the 18th century.

The fifth child born to a prosperous family of landowners in Fusignano; Corelli’s first musical study was probably with the local clergy, then in nearby Lugo and Faenza, and finally in Bologna, where he went in 1666. In Bologna he studied with Giovanni Benvenuti and Leonardo Brugnoli, the former representing the disciplined style of the Accademia filarmonica (to which Corelli was admitted in 1670), the latter a virtuoso violinist.

By 1675 Corelli was in Rome where he may have studied composition under Matteo Simonelli, from whom he would have absorbed the styles of Roman polyphony inherited from Palestrina. He may have traveled to France and Spain, though neither journey has been securely documented. In 1675 he is listed as a violinists in Roman payment documents and by the end of the decade he was active as a performer and leader of small and large instrumental ensembles in Roman homes and churches and at public celebrations.

Corelli had entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden by 1679 and thanks to his musical achievements and growing international reputation he found no trouble in obtaining the support of a succession of influential patrons. In addition to Queen Christina, his Roman patrons included Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, both wealthy and influential leaders of Roman society.

In 1684, Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti became members of the Congregazione dei Virtuosi di S. Cecilia and in 1706, along with Pasquini and Scarlatti, he was inducted into the Arcadian Academy round the time that he met Handel in engagements at the Pamphili and Ruspoli palaces. He would direct the orchestra for performances of Handel’s La resurrezione shortly before retiring from public life in 1708.

Wealthy since birth, Corelli had the luxury of cultivating a personal mystique, acting more like a gentleman than a common musician. His wealthy patrons treating him almost as their equal, he was not burdened by the pressure of writing music on demand and composed selectively and at a his own pace, meticulously revising his music before publishing them late in life. This careful polishing made Corelli’s published pieces into models of economy and elegance. Their concision and urbanity contrasted sharply with the unbridled passion and unpredictability of music earlier in the seventeenth century.

Corelli’s reputation as a performer and teacher was at least equal to the reputation he achieved as a composer. Among his many students were Geminiani, Vivaldi, Gasparini, and Somis. His sonatas were widely performed and often reprinted, both as ideal practice material for students and as models for composers. For the solo sonatas (op. 5) there are several extant sets of ornaments, some attributed to the composer himself (Walsh, 1710); his works remained especially popular in England, where Ravenscroft imitated the trio sonatas and Geminiani transformed several solo and trio sonatas into concertos.

Corelli died a wealthy man on January 19, 1713, at Rome in the 59th year of his life. But long before his death, he had taken a place among the immortal musicians of all time, and he maintains that exalted position today.

Title page of Monteverdi's 1610 publication

Claudio Monteverdi’s very earliest, youthful publications were sacred, devotional music: a set of Sacrae Cantiunculae published in 1582 when he was only fifteen, and a collection of Madrigali spirituali, issued in 1583. But once he became employed at the ducal court of Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, probably in late 1590 or early 1591, his published works until 1610 consisted entirely of secular music: madrigals, scherzi musicali, and the opera Orfeo.  On September 1, 1610, however, he published a very large and elaborate collection of sacred music comprising a six-voice Missa in illo tempore in a conservative contrapuntal style and the brilliant and variegated Vespro della Beata Vergine employing every modern compositional technique imaginable in the early 17th century.

The Mantuan secular works, including the unpublished but famous opera Arianna, were all connected to particular events and entertainments at court. However, we know from letters and other documents that the Missa in illo tempore was not composed for any specific occasion in Mantua, nor do we have any evidence that the Vespro della Beata Vergine was either. We do know that at least from 1603, Monteverdi was responsible for a great deal of sacred music associated with the court, but until 1610 none of it was published nor does any survive in manuscript. Why would he publish such a large sacred collection in 1610?

From Monteverdi’s letters and a letter of his father, we know that the composer was sick and exhausted by the summer of 1608 from a very strenuous period of work in Mantua. In less than a decade his reputation as one of the most prominent composers in Italy had been established through the publication of his Fourth and Fifth books of madrigals (1603 and 1605), his first book of Scherzi musicali (1607), the opera Orfeo (1607, first published in 1609), several reprints of his First, Second and Third books of madrigals in 1600, 1604 and 1607, and reprints of his Fourth and Fifth books in 1605-1608. Moreover, the opera Arianna (1608) was such a success that word about it quickly spread far and wide. But Monteverdi had also been publicly attacked for his modern style of composition. In 1600 the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, a champion of 16th-century counterpoint, had published a treatise on the imperfections of modern music in which he singled out several madrigals by Monteverdi, chastising their violations of the rules of traditional counterpoint and modal coherence. A public polemic between Artusi and Monteverdi ensued lasting eight years, and the composer’s pride was clearly hurt by this assault.  He even promised a treatise explaining the rationale of modern music, though it never materialized.

In addition to responding to this attack, Monteverdi was under constant pressure to compose in Mantua. This pressure reached its apex in 1608 with preparations for the marriage of the duke’s son Francesco, which was celebrated in late May and early June of that year with the opera Arianna and much other music, some of it also composed by Monteverdi. It had been a bad year—his wife Claudia, herself a court singer, had died in September 1607, causing the widowed composer to lose her income. Most of Arianna was feverishly written in the last two months of that year.  In early March 1608, Caterina Martinelli, a young singer trained by Monteverdi and living in his household who was rehearsing the demanding lead in Arianna, suddenly died from smallpox, causing postponement of the production and a hasty search for another performer who could quickly learn the role. Added to these travails were the strains of preparing the score of Orfeo for publication, Monteverdi’s continual difficulties in collecting his salary from the court treasurer and the humid, unhealthful Mantuan climate resulting from its location in the midst of swampy marshes surrounding the Mincio river. After the wedding festivities, Monteverdi retired to his father’s house in Cremona, distraught and ill. That fall he sought dismissal from the duke’s service, or at least to have his work confined to sacred music only. However, the duke refused, and by January 1609 he was back in Mantua, desperate to find a new job, especially as maestro di cappella in a major church where the duties were fixed and predictable according to the liturgical calendar. The problem was that he had not published any sacred music for 27 years and no liturgical music at all.

These circumstances seem the obvious impetus for his composing in the first half of 1610 the Missa in illo tempore, a contrapuntal tour-de-force that answered the criticisms of Artusi about his ability to write in the old style. At the same time he gathered together a number of psalms, motets, a hymn and two Magnificats, some of which had probably been written several years earlier, and some of which may have been newly composed, into a liturgically coherent collection fulfilling the needs for a Vesper service for any feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is into these pieces that he poured his immense creativity in the new styles of music emerging in the late 16th and early 17th centuries to produce what to that time had been the most colorful and vocally splendid music ever written for a liturgical service. But despite their modernity, the majority of these compositions are based on the traditional Gregorian chants for the psalms, Magnificat, hymn and litany of the Virgin, generating a palpable tension between the traditional chant and the new styles of music in which it was embedded. With the Missa in illo tempore and the Vespro della Beata Vergine, Monteverdi at a stroke showed himself to be the pre-eminent Italian master of composition in all styles of sacred music, both old and new.

The 1610 publication was dedicated to Pope Paul V, and in the fall of that year Monteverdi went to Rome to present the newly minted edition personally to the Supreme Pontiff in hopes of obtaining admission for his son Francesco to the papal seminary, and probably to discreetly seek out job possibilities in Rome. He was unsuccessful on both counts and returned to Mantua by January 1611 empty-handed. In early 1612, duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, Monteverdi’s patron died and was succeeded by his own son Francesco, who had also been one of the composer’s patrons. But Francesco Gonzaga inherited a financial mess from his profligate father and in July 1612, angry at what he considered the arrogance of Claudio and his brother Giulio Cesare (also a court musician), fired both of them along with about half his musical establishment.

In July 1613, with the death of the maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s in Venice, the most important musical position in northern Italy became vacant and Monteverdi was recommended to the officials of the basilica as the most worthy candidate. They were aware of his recently published sacred music, and on August 15, 1613 he auditioned at St. Mark’s, celebrating Mass and Vespers on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, quite possibly including music from his 1610 print.  Four days later he was officially appointed maestro di cappella.  Monteverdi served the Republic for the remainder of his life, another thirty years, well-paid, revered and recognized as the finest composer of his age.

Though musicologists have speculated that Dario Castello probably worked at St. Mark’s and probably played violin and/or cornetto, in fact nothing is known about him beyond his music, which was all published in Venice. The numerous reprints of his sonatas and canzoni as late as 1650 attest to his popularity and influence. We will perform the first of his two part sonatas “in stil moderno” published in 1629.

More is known about Biagio Marini, a virtuoso violinist who composed both vocal and instrumental music. Marini traveled extensively and he held positions in Brussels, Neuburg an der Donau, Düsseldorf, Padua, Parma, Ferrara, Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia in addition to his work in Venice. We will perform two works by Marini: his Capriccio, subtitled “in which two violins play four parts” (a reference to the extensive double-stopping in the fiddle parts), and the sonata La Orlandina from Affetti musicali, published in 1617.

Two of the composers represented served in leadership roles in the St. Mark’s musical establishment. Giovanni Rovetta succeeded Grandi as vice maestro at St. Mark’s and assumed the post of maestro di cappella after Monteverdi’s death in 1641. Rovetta’s only published purely instrumental works are four canzonas included in a motet collection from 1626 and we will be performing the second of these canzani.

Francesco Cavalli was engaged as an organist at St. Mark’s while Grandi was in Venice. He went on to become maestro di cappella after Rovetta’s death. Best known for his many operas, Cavalli was also a prolific and respected composer
of sacred and instrumental music. In 1656, Cavalli published his magesterial collection of Vespers music Musiche Sacrae, which served as the basis for Magnificat’s Christmas concert on the San Francisco Early Music Sopciety series in 1996. The collection includes several instrumental canzon for 3 to 12 parts. We will be performing the first of these canzoni.

Hanneke van Proosdij will play a harpsichord Intavolature by Giovanni Picchi, who was hired as organist at the Venetian church of the Frari in 1607 and from 1623 to his death he was also organist at the confraternity Scuola di San Rocco.

Though he spent time in Venice, Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger is most closely associated with Rome. A prolific and highly original composer, Kapsberger is chiefly remembered today for his music for lute, theorbo and chitarrone, which was seminal in the development of these as solo instruments. David Tayler will perform Kapsberger’s Toccata Arpeggiata, a representative of a genre of lute music published during the first decade of the 17th century that exploits the instrument’s facility for appegiation in a way that reminds me of stile briseè of Gaulthier and Chambonieres.

Opening bars of "Amor, giustitia Amor" from Cantade et Arie…1626

The three works in Grandi’s Cantade et Arie a voce sola of 1620 that bear the designation of “cantata” are all constructed using the technique that musicologists now categorize as “strophic bass” cantatas.  In its classic form as represented in these pieces, the same bass line is used for each stanza of a strophic poem with varying melodies in the vocal part.

Ostinato bass lines were already common at the beginning of the century, but these new cantatas were distinguished by the greater length of their recurring bass line and their more definite structure. The strophic bass cantata is anticipated in, for example Monteverdi’s Orfeo in variations of the vocal line above a slightly modified bass line within a ritornello structure are found.

Grandi’s innovation can be seen as a logical extension of an improvised practice. It is likely that performers, in interpreting a strophic song would vary the melodic line for each stanza to emphasize certain words or communicate different sentiments. “Arias” setting strophic poetry are found in innumerable collections from the early years of the 17th Century, and in fact the bulk of Grandi’s 1620 collection is devoted to such strophic songs. One has to think only of Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento – a remarkably simple looking work on the page – and how it can be varied to exceptional effect in performance.

The cantatas in the 1620 collection formalize this practice, though they certainly do not preclude further embellishment and variation by the singer. There are numerous accounts of virtuosi, like Francesca Caccini, who could improvise a musical setting of poem and one can imagine that a strophic bass technique would lend itself to such extemporizing.

Grandi’s cantatas were immensely popular. The newly identified print from 1620, from which the cantatas on Magnificat’s program are drawn was in fact a reprint of an earlier publication and he went on to publish three more collections over the next decade, only one of which survives. Numerous composers imitated the cantatas, including Monteverdi himself.

Even in the 1620s we can observe the characteristic of the later Baroque cantata emerging, as composers begin to modify the bass line and alternating recitative and arioso styles in the vocal lines. Amor, giustitia amor, the one work designated “cantata” in Grandi’s third book of Cantade et Arie, published in 1626, which Magnificat will also be performing, already shows considerable variation in the bass line from stanza to stanza and clearly anticipates the more variegated form of the later cantata. The expansion of the stanzas into distinct sections is paralleled in the development of the trio sonata from a free flowing sectional form to a set of individual movements over the course of the 17th Century.

For anyone who cares about 17th-century music, 2010 is without question a Claudio Monteverdi year. The 400th anniversary of the composer’s ground-breaking and magisterial Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610 is a ripe occasion to program the sacred masterpiece of an artist deemed “the creator of modern music” by scholar Leo Schrade.

It’s an opportunity that Magnificat Baroque wasn’t about to miss. The Bay Area ensemble concludes its 18th season with an April 23-25 slate of Vespers concerts.

But before they get there, the troupe is embarked on an unusual and revealing side-trip through Monteverdi territory, with the composer’s lesser-known Venetian contemporary Alessandro Grandi as the destination. To make this journey even more enticing, Magnificat is offering a striking historical contrast to the well-known Vespers: The Feb. 12-14 Grandi programs feature what may well be modern premieres of some of the first self-identified cantatas ever written. The feat has generated considerable interest around the early-music world.

More important, these concerts figure to be an alluring discovery for audiences. In addition to the short solo cantatas on the program, performed by soprano Laura Heimes, Magnificat’s trio of Celeste fiori concerts will include assorted Grandi madrigals and motets, as well as instrumental music published at the time the composer lived in Venice.

Like other fine composers doomed to live in the long shadow of a game-changing genius (think Salieri), Grandi has remained a dim figure. “His main problem, ” said Magnificat Artistic Director Warren Stewart by phone, “is the understandable tendency of musical historians to look first at towering figures when they’re rediscovering a period. So the natural focus in early-17th-century Italian music was Monteverdi.” Stewart spoke from Washington, D.C., where he had just attended a Vespers performance at the National Gallery of Art — the second account of the work that week in the city. The towering figures do go on towering.

Grandi, 10 to 15 years younger than Monteverdi, “was talented and prolific before he got to Venice and on an upward career trajectory,” said Stewart. It was there that his and his more illustrious contemporary’s paths crossed, at San Marco Cathedral. In the city’s most important church, Grandi quickly ascended the ranks to become vice maestro to Monteverdi.

According to Steven Saunders, a professor of music at Maine’s Colby College, “evidence suggests that Grandi’s rise in stature under these conditions may have occasioned resistance and event resentment” by Monteverdi, who considered moving back to Mantua. Seen this way, it’s the older Monteverdi who’s cast as the Salieri figure, with Grandi as the fast-rising and threatening Mozart of his day. But fate, not to mention the fact of Monteverdi’s indisputable singularity, had a different hand to deal. After a decade in Venice, Grandi moved on to Bergamo in 1627 and died there in a devastating plague three years later. Monteverdi survived for another 13 years.

Doing Grandi in a Monteverdi year was “a very conscious decision,” said Stewart, who argues that the younger composer’s strophic bass cantatas “employ a variation technique that was immediately imitated by many other Venetian composers, including Monteverdi, in the 1620s.” Citing Grandi’s “very clear tonal sense,” “modern-sounding harmonies,” and a “buoyant and confident musical architecture,” Stewart made a case for even broader influence. “Clearly, [Heinrich] Schutz [German, 1585-1672] learned a lot from Grandi,” he said.

The cantatas on the Magnificat program vary in length from three to six minutes. Brief as they may be, their importance, according to Jeffrey Kurtzman, general editor of a forthcoming complete Grandi edition, “lies in the very first use of the word cantata in a music publication. The multi-sectional structure of these solo pieces lays the groundwork for sectional organization of the later solo cantata.” Over a repeated continuo bass figure, different vocal melodies, or strophic variations, yield different emphases, cadences, and emotional impact.

Apparently lost in the general neglect of the early Baroque, the pieces survived in manuscripts that had a perilous history of their own. First published in 1620, Grandi’s Cantade et arie a voce sola survived into the 20th century, as far as musicologists knew, only in a copy at Breslau’s University Library. In the Russian siege of that German city in 1945, the library was hit and some of the music collection set on fire. The Grandi collection was not among those works librarians managed to save by tossing them into an adjacent river. A largely impenetrable transcription of the manuscript, by the musicologist Alfred Einstein, remained at Smith College in Massachusetts.

That appeared to be the end of the trail until 2008, when a copy of Grandi’s published cantatas and other solo vocal works came to light from a huge private collection in Spain. Dinko Fabris, an Italian scholar and lute player, explained the discovery in a message to the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

“Some twenty years ago,” recalled Fabris, “I visited for the first time in Seville my good friend Señor Rodrigo de Zayas and I saw in his marvelous private library (30,000 volumes), among other treasures, the only surviving copy of the [Grandi] book.” Respecting his “obligations to the discretion” of the collector, Fabris kept silent. Many years later, after moving to Madrid, de Zayas decided to authorize publication of an edition by the Royaumont Foundation in France. A modern-day Grandi “premiere” concert was mounted in Royaumont in fall 2008.

The three cantatas and two other “new” Grandi vocal works on the February program here came to Magnificat from a transcription prepared by a Ph.D. student in Rome, Giulia Giovani, of yet another scholar, Agostino Ziino, who apparently knew of the Spanish collection’s Grandi treasure even before Fabris. Kurtzman, who is a Magnificat advisory board member as well the Grandi edition editor, served as the conduit.

One way or another, some four centuries later, Grandi was destined to find his way back into live performance. Pleased as he is to be a newsmaker, Stewart is just as excited — probably more so — to give the full range of Grandi’s music the attention it deserves. After a pretty thorough discussion of Grandi by phone, the Magnificat director kept thinking of more things he wanted to say about the composer.

In an effusive e-mail, Stewart limned Grandi’s originality and innovations. “He was among the first to include violins in solo vocal music, specifically in his motets. He integrated the violins (always a pair) in a variety of ways — with ritornelli as well as in more thorough-going dialogue with the voice.” The violin writing in the motets, Stewart added, “is fluid and idiomatic” and undoubtedly responsive to “the talented instrumentalists with whom he worked at San Marco.”

Being all but for forgotten for 400 years, it seems, has its own rewards. The pleasures of rediscovery are all that much keener.

In 1620 Alessandro Grandi, published a second edition of his ground-breaking Cantade et Arie a voce sola.  The first edition has long been lost. The importance of this collection of secular pieces lies in the very first use of the word “cantata” in a music publication.  The multi-sectional structure of these solo pieces lays the groundwork for the sectional organization of the later solo cantata.

The only known copy of the 1620 publication resided in the music division of the University Library in Breslau, Germany until the final months of World War II. As the Russians laid siege to Breslau, a bombardment that lasted three months in early 1945, the building housing the music division was hit and caught on fire.  Library personnel saved much of the music collection by throwing it into the surrounding river (the building with the music division lies on an island), but some very important items, including the Grandi Cantade et Arie of 1620 were lost. The only record of the music then lay in an old, difficult-to-read manuscript transcription by the musicologist Alfred Einstein, which is housed in the Music Library at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

What was unknown to musicologists with the exception of Agostino Ziino, and later, Dinko Fabris, was that another copy survived in the private collection of Rodrigo de Zayas in Seville. However, de Zayas has recently provided copies of his print to the Royaumont Foundation in France with permission to Aurelio Bianco of the Université de Tours in France to make an edition, and to Giulia Giovani, a student working on her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Rome under Professor Ziino.

Magnificat is grateful to the cooperation of all these musicologists in making our performances of this music possible. We will be performing from transciptions provided by Bianco and Giovani of the cantatas  Amor altri si duol, Vanne vattene Amor and Udito han pur i Dei as well as two madrigals O Bella Catatrice and Un Cerchietto d’oro. We will also perform one cantata in Grandi third book of Arie et Cantade from 1626, Amor, giustitia Amor. With the exception of the cantata Amor, altri si duol, these works will in all probability be receiving their first performances since the 17th century, and certainly their first North American performances, in Magnificat’s concerts.

Soprano Laura Heimes

At Magnificat’s concerts on February 12-14 Bay Area audiences will have the opportunity to hear the first performances since the 17th century of five vocal works by Alessandro Grandi, including the first three pieces identified by a composer as “cantatas”. Soprano Laura Heimes will join with David Tayler and Hanneke van Proosdij for what will most likely be the first performances of these works in modern times.¹

In his 1620 collection Cantade et Arie, Grandi used to the term “cantada” to distinguish three settings of strophic poetry for soprano and continuo. Each of the works – Amor altri si duol, Vanne vattene Amor and Udito han pur i Dei – employs a compositional strategy identified by musicologists as “strophic bass” cantatas, an example of strophic variation with which many composers were experimenting at the time.

Sadly, the only copy of Grandi’s historic 1620 collection thought to survive into the 20th century was destroyed in the Second World War. Prior to the war several scholars had written about the works, though it is unlikely that any were ever performed. However, Roman musicologist Giulia Giovani has recently transcribed another copy of the print found in a large collection of 16th and 17th century music from the music scholar Godfrey Arkwright that was purchased by a Spanish collector at an auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1939.

With the help of Magnificat Advisory Board member Jeffrey Kurtzman, we were able to contact Giovani, who has graciously offered to make her transcriptions of the three cantatas available for Magnificat’s performances, along with two arias from the same collection.

The distinguishing characteristic of these “cantatas” is the variation of the vocal line for each strophe of the poem over repeating bass lines. The norm in the early 17th century, and in song forms throughout the centuries, was to repeat the same music for each strophe, or verse, of a regularly repeating poetic form. In all ages performers have taken the opportunity presented by such a form to embellish and improvise the each verse. The strophic variation is merely a formalalization of that inherent implulse. Already in the strophic songs set by Caccini and in Monteverdi’s first opera Orfeo (c.f. Possente spirto), we see the principle of strophic variation at work.

Grandi’s association of the word cantata with this straight forward compositional strategy, likely in imitation of improvisatory performance practice, generated immediate imitation and proved to be very successful financially. His four collections of secular songs, as well as those of his solo motets, sold briskly and were reprinted numerous times in the 1620s and publications in the style by other Venetian composers began appearing within months of the release of Grandi’s Cantade et Arie.

We tend to see Monteverdi as the extraordinary genius he was, in whose shadow Grandi labored in obscurity. In reality, at least in the first years of the 1620s, it was the younger Grandi that was scoring on the bestseller lists. Following his arrival at San Marco from Ferrara in 1617, Grandi had risen swiftly through the ranks, quickly becoming capo of the Company of St. Mark’s and soon after gaining promotion to the role of vice maestro to Monteverdi. As Steven Saunders notes in his biographical essay on Grandi, “evidence suggests that Grandi’s rise in stature under these conditions may have occasioned resistance and even resentment” on the part of the elder Monteverdi, who was rumored to be considering a move back to Mantua around this time. The remarkable commercial success of Grandi’s publications and his association with the new and extremely popular genre of solo song must have intensified this resentment.

Within a few years of the first prints of Grandi’s first book of Cantade et Arie, strophic bass cantatas had been published by Giovanni Pietro Berti, Carlo Milanuzzi and Monteverdi himself. The term cantata soon expanded to include a wide range of compositional techniques and by the 1630s the focus of cantata composition had moved to Rome and began to take on the sectional, often narrative form featuring the alternation of recitative and aria associated with the cantata of the later Baroque.