Companion to Baroque Music

Companion to Baroque Music
Compiled and edited by JULIE ANNE SADIE
Foreword by CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1998
Italy
An Italian Overview
Prince Metternich's notorious dismissal of Italy as 'a geographical
expression' did not lack a grain of truth at the time of writing ( 1849).
As late as the 19th century it was still possible to argue that cultural
and linguistic unity, of which Italy had for centuries enjoyed a fuller
measure than many of her European neighbours, was irrelevant to political
allegiance, a factor more dependent on dynastic fortunes, diplomatic
adjustments and military successes. A complex history of foreign invasion,
inter-city rivalry and the ruthless pursuit of personal ambition -- all of
these complicated by the presence on Italian soil of the papacy -- lay
behind the periodically shifting political mosaic that the peninsula
presented at the beginning of the modern era.
Not too much should be made of the distinction between native-ruled and
foreignruled territories, since the latter drew most of their officialdom,
including their governors or viceroys, from the local élites and, until the
Age of Reform, interfered little with traditional laws and customs.
Nevertheless, the foreign dimension in Italian politics aided the spread of
Italian culture outwards, leading to a curious 'domination' in reverse
through which Italian, not German, became the language of polite
conversation and of letters at the imperial court in Vienna; between Spain
and Italy, however, the cultural exchange was less one-sided (though in
music Italy dominated).
During the period of the musical Baroque in Italy, roughly from 1600 to
1750, three large territories remained constantly under either imperial or
Spanish rule. The duchy of Milan (Lombardy) and the kingdoms of Naples and
Sicily all belonged to Spain until by the Peace of Utrecht ( 1713),
concluding the War of the Spanish Succession, Milan and Naples were
transferred to Austria ( Sicily followed in 1720, exchanged with Savoy for
Sardinia). The Treaty of Vienna ( 1735, ratified 1738), concluding the War
of the Polish Succession, returned Naples and Sicily, under a common crown,
to Spain, although not as a hereditary possession; its first king was the
Infant Don Carlos. Other territories came during our period under the sway
of the Habsburgs or the Spanish Bourbons through force of arms or a
dynastic void. The duchy of Mantua, ruled by the Gonzagas since 1328, paid
the price for supporting France against Austria despite being an imperial
fief and became attached to the empire in 1710; the duchy of Parma and
Piacenza, alienated from the papacy in 1545 by Pope Paul III, who donated
it to his natural son Pierluigi Farnese, passed, through the marriage of
Elisabetta Farnese into the Spanish Bourbons, to a cadet branch of the
Spanish royal house in 1731; the grand duchy of Tuscany came to the
Austrians (though, like Parma and Piacenza, not as a hereditary possession)
when Franz Stephan, Duke of Lorraine and later emperor, succeeded Gian
Gastone, last of the Medici, in 1737.
Cutting a broad swathe across central Italy, with considerable extensions
to the south-west ( Rome) and north-east ( Bologna, Ferrara), were the 13
provinces making
up the Papal States. These provinces, each administered by a high-ranking
churchman with a title such as legate, vice-legate or governor, enjoyed a
considerable degree of freedom from Rome in secular affairs, often
preserving elements of an earlier history as principalities or free
communes. Ferrara, indeed, reverted to the church only in 1598, after
Alfonso II d'Este, whose family had held the duchy as papal vicars since
1332, died without male issue; the duchy of Urbino, since 1508 held by the
Della Rovere family, devolved similarly in 1631. Whereas Lombardy, Sicily,
Naples and most of the other territories we shall discuss were highly
centralized -- reducible, ultimately, to a capital city and its hinterland
-- the Papal States resembled more an agglomeration of self-contained
statelets, each with its historic capital: Rome, Bologna, Ravenna, Ancona
and so on.
Of the independent territories other than those whose absorption by Spain
or Austria has already been mentioned the most important were the duchy of
Savoy (including Piedmont) in the north-west, the republic of Venice in the
north-east and the duchy of Modena north of Tuscany. Savoy, which
officially became part of the kingdom of Sardinia after 1720, bore strong
traces of its continuous involvement over the centuries with France. French
was the language of the court at Turin, and the extent of French influence
is illustrated by the fact that whereas the rest of the peninsula mostly
kept 'Italian' time, in which the 24-hour cycle began at nightfall (the
system goes back to medieval times and is related to the canonical hours),
Savoy kept 'French' time, beginning the cycle at midnight.
Venice, whose extensive administrative area on the Italian mainland -- the
socalled 'Terraferma veneta', or 'Veneto' -- stretched from Bergamo in the
west to Udine in the east and bordered the Po in the south (we will ignore
here her possessions along the western seaboard of modern Yugoslavia and
Greece and elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean), was in some respects,
geographical and cultural, only peripherally Italian; yet in political
terms she represented the concept of 'Italy', past and -- many believed --
future, better than any other state, having arisen from the debris of the
Western Roman Empire and against all odds preserved her independence ever
since. Venice's elaborate constitution, which reserved political power for
a patrician class comprising between 2.5 and 4% of the population of the
city of Venice, and many observances in her public life (such as the
wearing of the toga by her nobles and the long prohibition of wigs in the
Great Council) emphasized symbolically this historical or -- where history
failed -- mythical succession to republican and imperial Rome. Her
proximity to the Ottoman empire in the east and to Austria and Germany in
the north (via major Alpine passes, notably the Brenner), made Venice a
favoured entrepôt for cultural as well as material products. Even after her
manufacturing industry, like that of virtually all Italy, had gone into
decline in the 16th and 17th centuries, and her maritime activity was
curtailed by increasingly successful competition from English and French
fleets in the 18th century, Venice kept afloat through the development of
agriculture on the mainland and the growth of tourism -- the term is not
anachronistic -- in the capital; it has been estimated that in the years
around 1700 there were in Venice at Carnival time (January and February)
around 30,000 foreign visitors, as compared with only 140,000 permanent
residents.
Modena and Reggio, which were ruled, together with Ferrara, by the Este
family, remained in its possession after the cession of Ferrara to the
papacy. The consequent removal of the Este court from Ferrara to Modena
ushered in a period of intense
cultural activity belying Modena's slight political significance,
especially under Francesco II (reigned 1662-94).
For completeness, a group of small independent states adjoining Modena must
be mentioned: the republic of Lucca to the south; the duchy of Massa and
Carrara to the west; the republic of Genoa further west, curling round the
coastline. None of these distinguished itself in music between 1600 and
1750, and we shall hear no more of them.
If the political map of Italy seemed to bear out Metternich's words, two
factors tended to weld the fragments together; the Italian language and the
Roman Catholic church. Although the people spoke -- and still speak -- an
immense variety of dialects, a common literary language had been forged in
the 13th and 14th centuries through the examples of Dante ( 1265-1321),
Petrarch ( 1304-74) and Boccaccio ( 1313-75). Despite its label of Tuscan,
since it was associated historically with the region of Florence, this
literary Italian was soon cultivated by the educated throughout Italy, so
that no irony attaches to the fact that the first great codifier of Italian
linguistic and literary usage, Pietro Bembo ( 1470-1547), was a Venetian.
It is worth mentioning, however, that Venetian dialect aspired, like
lowland Scottish, to an independent literary status; writing in dialect --
with some relevance for comic opera -- also existed, notably in Bologna and
Naples.
At a time -- the 17th century -- when the literary cultures of some other
European nations had hardly begun to acquire their classic works, the
Italians could look back on a tradition of lyric and epic poetry, drama and
prose spanning four centuries. But it was a conservative tradition that
weighed down heavily on the writer, challenging him with precedents at
every turn. This tendency to conservatism was reinforced by the unique
relationship to Latin that Italian enjoyed. The visible reminders, natural
and man-made, of the Roman past; the lexical and grammatical similarities
of the two languages; the wide acquaintance with classical authors
stimulated by the Renaissance humanists and the development of printing:
all these made the work of the writers of Antiquity as relevant as that of
the post-Dante Italian school. When one reads the argomento before the
libretto of an Italian Baroque opera, where the source of the plot, in Ovid
or Livy perhaps, is dutifully identified, one realizes that the classical
author is as close to the experience of the opera-goer as an Ariosto or
Tasso.
The symbiosis of Italian and Latin is strikingly illustrated, albeit
unhappily from a literary standpoint, in the Latin texts of Baroque motets,
which, if we can believe Grosley, were often penned by sacristans, thus men
of only moderate education;1 here the accidence of Latin is wondrously
assimilated to the syntax and fashionable imagery of contemporary Italian
to produce a result too smooth and