The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (45 page)

Such a work could never have been written had he remained in Venice. The four concertos, each of which depicts a different season, relate closely to the countryside around Mantua. They are also each accompanied by a sonnet, presumed to have been written by Vivaldi himself, giving an indication of what the music is describing – along with a few more precise instructions in the score, such as ‘the dog barking’. This is programme music of the clearest and most evocative kind, yet it is also so much more than this in its expressive musicality – it can be enjoyed just as well without any knowledge of the ‘programme’. In the opening concerto, ‘Spring’, there is the sound of birdsong (with the calls of the different birds quite clearly distinguishable), the murmur of water in the flowing brook. A gentle breeze is followed by lightning and thunder; and later comes the sound of bagpipes, with nymphs and shepherds dancing. ‘Summer’ includes the unmistakable call of the cuckoo, the languor of heat and the buzz of swarms of insects. ‘Autumn’ depicts a bacchanal as the peasants celebrate the end of the harvest, and later a hunting scene; while ‘Winter’ portrays snow and
ice
and
freezing
wind, then a cosy scene inside before a warm fire.

The Four Seasons
would be published in 1723, and this, along with several similar virtuoso pieces, would gain Vivaldi a reputation throughout Europe. (Louis XV is said to have been particularly keen on ‘Spring’, and would insist upon it being played, regardless of inappropriate circumstances.) Despite such widespread renown, Vivaldi’s initial attempts to break into the lucrative opera market proved unsuccessful. Ironically, his first operatic success was
Nerone fatto Cesare
(Nero Made Caesar), a work to which he
only contributed some of the music. The plot involved a woman falling in love with a woman dressed as a man, hardly the kind of work one expects to be associated with a pious priest. Indeed,
Nerone
was initially banned by the Venetian censors, and was only allowed to be performed after certain cuts had been made. Despite this dubious beginning, Vivaldi would go on to establish himself in the operatic field, from now on producing a steady stream of operas – some successful, others less so. Towards the end of his life he would speak of himself as ‘having composed 94 operas’, which was seen as something of an exaggeration, since after his death only fifty operas were found. Even so, this was a prodigious output, especially in the light of all the other choral and instrumental work he produced.

In 1726 the sixteen-year-old mezzo-soprano Anna Girò sang the leading role in Vivaldi’s opera
Dorilla
. Although the range and strength of her voice were far from exceptional, her presence on stage was electric and her acting both passionate and controlled. From now on she became Vivaldi’s leading singer, travelling as part of his entourage when he took his work abroad
‘in moltissime città d’Europa’
(‘in cities throughout Europe’). Inevitably the forty-eight-year-old Vivaldi was suspected of becoming romantically involved with Anna, an accusation that he always denied – though in somewhat evasive fashion on occasion, especially when pressed on the matter by her middle-aged half-sister. Anna Girò would remain Vivaldi’s leading operatic singer for some eleven years – until, out of the blue, in 1737 the Archbishop of Verona issued a decree forbidding Vivaldi from visiting the city to stage his opera. Two reasons were given: Vivaldi was not performing his duties as a priest by performing mass, and he was embroiled in an
amicizia
(affair). Sometime after this Anna appears to have joined another operatic company performing in Graz in Austria.

Still Vivaldi continued to pour out his operas at an astounding rate, sometimes composing faster than the copyists could take down his dictation. In the margin of one of his operas there is even the inscription
‘fatta in 5 giorni’
(‘completed in five days’). Yet once again with quantity came quality: his works were increasingly progressive, constantly developing the form in style and content.

Yet Vivaldi’s ambitions seem to have remained somehow unfulfilled. He
felt that he was not fully appreciated in Venice. Perhaps it was the money. The indications are that he was given to capricious extravagance: being as prolific with his money as he was with his talent. A contemporary source, writing at the end of his life, would claim that he ‘earned at one time more than fifty thousand ducats’. This is a colossal sum – yet he seems to have saved nothing. Details of his extravagance are lost: they would appear to have been associated with generosity of spirit as well as love of display. They probably included disastrous business ventures in his role as an impresario, but they do not appear to have involved dissipated habits. He must certainly have run up bills, for he was short of money on numerous occasions. He became notorious for not publishing his works, finding that he could sell his original manuscripts for much more to wealthy tourists. According to the English visitor Edward Holdsworth, ‘he finds a good market because he expects a guinea for every piece’.

In 1730, writing from Venice, Vivaldi would claim, ‘I lack nothing here for perfect happiness’; yet by the end of the decade he appeared to want to abandon his native city. In the course of his travels through Europe, Vivaldi had encountered the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who had been highly impressed with his music and had taken a personal liking to ‘the red priest’. In 1728, when Charles VI had visited Trieste to oversee the enlargement of powerful Austria’s only port (a development viewed with some concern in Venice), Vivaldi had been included in a 200-strong delegation despatched to greet the emperor. Contemporary evidence suggests that Charles VI singled out his friend, ‘giving him a great deal of money and a gold chain … and knighted him’. The emperor then insisted that the newly created Cavaliere Vivaldi should stay with him, and it was said that ‘he talked more with [Vivaldi] in two weeks than he had with his ministers in two years’.

Some ten years later, following Vivaldi’s parting from Anna Girò and in the midst of his disillusionment with Venice, Charles VI sent word inviting Vivaldi to Vienna, giving him to understand that he would be able to stage his operas at the Kärntnertortheater. Sometime in mid-May 1740 Vivaldi took his leave of the Ospedale della Pietà and set off for Vienna. On the way he called in at Graz, where he seems to have met Anna Girò, perhaps promising her further work. Within months of Vivaldi arriving in
Vienna, Charles VI died, whereupon it appears that Vivaldi’s offered appointment fell into abeyance. Stranded in a foreign city, with little or no money, he took cheap lodgings in the dwelling of a saddle-maker’s widow. And here, in poverty and forgotten, he suffered from an ‘internal inflammation’. This proved fatal, and he died on 28 July 1741, his body being carried off to a common grave in the ‘poor sinners’ burial ground’ belonging to the nearby city hospital.

Vivaldi’s plunge into obscurity at the end of his life was echoed by the fate of his work, and even the details of his life itself. His cavalier disregard for his manuscripts meant that most of them were scattered and lost. Astonishingly, for well over a hundred years little was known of his work other than a few violin concertos, and even the earlier recognition of Vivaldi’s genius by the great Johann Sebastian Bach proved of no avail. As early as 1710 Bach had begun transcribing a series of Vivaldi’s concertos for performance on harpsichord or organ. However, when curious later scholars tried to track down the orginal concertos no trace could be found.

Then in i860 a large cache of Vivaldi’s original manuscripts was discovered ‘in a music cabinet of the Catholic Hofkirche in Dresden’. All the indications were that they had remained undisturbed here for more than a century. Even so, contemporary musicologists remained unimpressed: the German conductor Wilhelm von Wasielewski described Vivaldi’s concertos (including
The Four Seasons
) as ‘the Italian composer’s thin and lifeless skeleton. Vivaldi was dismissed as ‘a scribbler in the worst sense of the word … constantly producing works devoid of substance and meaning’. Since then, several further discoveries of Vivaldi manuscripts have been made, ranging from a trove of more than a hundred concertos and twelve operas in a remote monastery in Piedmont in 1926 to a few manuscripts that turned up in Manchester Central Library in the 1970s. It is now clear that Vivaldi was far from exaggerating when he claimed to have composed ninety-four operas, for we now know that he did in fact compose more than a hundred. In all, he is (to date) known to have also composed some 500 instrumental works, to say nothing of another 200 cantatas, choral works, and so forth.

The 1920s discovery in Italy resulted in a certain revival of interest in Vivaldi, but the true renaissance of his work did not occur until the years following the Second World War, when it was interpreted in all its
freshness and virtuosity by such chamber orchestras as La Scuola Veneziana. Vivaldi had at last returned to his native city, one of the most apt and characteristic of all the artistic ornaments of
La Serenissima
.

However, an opera still required one vital ingredient beyond music and singers, an opera house and an unruly audience. At the outset it needed a librettist, and eighteenth-century Venice teemed with good, bad and very bad writers of operatic drama, most of whom were highly unoriginal. Classical, mythical and fairytale adaptations abounded: the old stories pulled in the audiences, and the impresarios preferred it that way. This was as true of the best librettists as it was as of those who merely passed themselves off as experienced stage craftsmen (whose reputation was invariably of the highest, yet in some other city).

The leading writers were frequently dramatists in their own right, and this was certainly true of Venice’s leading librettist of the period, Carlo Goldoni, who collaborated with Vivaldi several times – despite his opinion that the red priest was ‘an excellent violinist and middling composer’. Goldoni has even left us a description of a meeting with his mediocre collaborator, though this is a largely stereotypical caricature. The entire episode consists of Goldoni astonishing a sceptical Vivaldi by rewriting an entire eight-verse aria in record time, so that Vivaldi ends up casting aside his breviary in amazement, crying out with joy and heaping lavish praise upon Goldoni’s superb skill: ‘Ah … here is an unusual man, here is an excellent poet. Read this aria. This gentleman has done it right here without hedging and in less than quarter of an hour.’

Unexpectedly there is more than a little truth in Vivaldi’s (alleged) words. Goldoni was almost as prodigious, and talented after his own fashion, as the composer himself. Carlo Goldoni had also been born in Venice, though almost thirty years after Vivaldi, in 1707. Like Vivaldi, he had childhood problems concerning his vocation. Goldoni’s father wished him to qualify as a lawyer, which was not what Goldoni had in mind at all. Instead of studying, he wrote poems and comic sketches, and participated in a number of comical escapades himself, to the extent that he was expelled from school and ran away a number of times. However, his father prevailed and he qualified in law at Padua in 1732, returning to Venice to practise. But
after two years he could bear it no longer, and ran off with a roaming troupe of
commedia dell’arte
players, for whom he wrote tragicomic sketches. A year later he was back in Venice, where he achieved his first success in November 1734 with
Belisario
. Such was the effect on the audience of this work that ‘The play was listened to with a silence which was extraordinary, indeed almost unheard of in Italian theatres.’ He would achieve his first success as a librettist the following year with
Aristide
, for which Vivaldi almost certainly provided the music – though for some reason both librettist and composer appeared under somewhat unconvincing pseudonyms (Goldoni as Calindo Grolo, and Vivaldi as Lotario Vandini). Vivaldi’s reason may well have been financial, while Goldoni may by then already have been under contract to a rival company. In 1734 he is known to have joined the prestigous Imer company, to which he would remained attached over the next ten years – the genial young actor enjoying the favours of several of the actresses. Amongst the female leads was an attractive young widow called Zanetta Casanova, mother of the celebrated lover, Giacomo. Not all of Goldoni’s affairs brought him happiness, and when he was eventually driven to extremes of jealousy by a particularly fickle leading lady named Elisabetta Passalacqua, he took his revenge by maliciously casting her in his original version of the old
commedia dell’arte
classic
Don Giovanni
. Passalacqua was said to have played the part with such superb contempt that the audience soon understood what had happened and the play became an immediate
succès de scandale
.

During these years the Imer company frequently went on tour, playing the cities of northern Italy, and not long after the
Don Giovanni
affair Carlo Goldoni would meet his future wife Nicoletta Conio, the daughter of a notary, in Genoa. Carlo and Nicoletta would be married within a matter of weeks, before the company left the city. According to the Italian historian Indro Montanelli, ‘Nicoletta Conio was not only pretty and in possession of a fair-sized dowry, but she also showed understanding, patience and devotion when it was necessary (and God knows it was necessary often enough) to put up with the infidelity of a lay-about like him.’ Despite this harsh judgement, Carlo and Nicoletta would remain together for fifty years of seemingly happy marriage, which according to Goldoni was not marred by either ‘domestic quarrels or inflamed temper’. At the end of his life he
would pay her the generous, if somewhat disingenuous compliment of claiming that ‘she was and always has been my only consolation’.

During Goldini’s ten years with the Imer company his talents would quickly develop, the ‘lay-about’ producing a constant stream of librettos and dramas. From penning farces and adapting hackneyed
commedia dell’arte
stories, he progressed to contriving his own delightful brand of comedy involving realistic characters. These were increasingly set in recognisable Venetian locales, portraying the foibles, sadnesses and passing joys of local family life amongst the growing middle classes. This may not have been great literature, but it made for excellent theatre – both entertaining and moving the audiences, who recognised themselves. This was the poetry of domestic life, maintaining the dignity of common people as they underwent life’s perennial upsets. The audiences loved seeing these dramas, which poked gentle fun at the idiosyncrasies of their everyday existence. There was no overblown farce, or hideous tragedy, or licentiousness: Venetian audiences did not appreciate such matters when they referred to themselves. Impresarios, writers and even actors understood this. A visitor describes how on one occasion, when it became evident that a husband onstage was about to kill his wife with a sword, the audience cried out with one voice for him to stop. At this point the actor playing the husband stepped to the front of the stage and addressed the audience, apologising and reassuring them that the scene would in fact have a happy ending.