Music in : A Historiographical overview

Jonathan Glixon

The great Italian musicologist Nino Pirrotta wrote that Ven- ice “was perhaps the most musical of cities in the most musical period of our history.” The way in which scholars have approached in Venice until the second half of the 20th century, however, has been quite limited, conditioned by the models established by the first two monumental works of research in the field: Carl von Winterfeld’s Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (Berlin, 1834) and Francesco Caffi’s Storia della Musica Sacra nella già cappella ducale di San Marco in Venezia dal 1318 al 1797 (Venice, 1854). In this long-lasting picture, music and musicians wor- thy of study first appear in Venice in the 16th century, particularly with the arrival of Adrian Willaert as maestro di cappella in 1527. The ducal chapel (in the sense of a musical establishment) of San Marco was the central (and almost exclusive) location for sacred music, and Renaissance Venice’s major contribution to European musical culture as a whole can be found in a particularly Venetian style of church music cultivated at San Marco at the end of the 16th century, most especially in the works of , organist at San Marco and prolific of both instrumental and vocal works for the Church.

Music at San Marco

The works by Caffi and von Winterfeld established two overlapping paths of scholarship: historical and biographical studies of the musical establish- ment of San Marco and its maestri and organists, on the one hand, and the development of the Venetian style of church music on the other. While von Winterfeld does present a brief history of the cappella and discusses the life and times of Giovanni Gabrieli, his attention is clearly on the rise of a musical style that he views as one of the principal foundations for the development of later (particularly German) styles. Gabrieli’s works, drawing from the models of Willaert and of such as Orlando di Lasso, break away, in this picture, from the prevailing contrapuntal style of Renaissance sacred music and employ, instead, a technique relying more on chordal harmony, with careful attention to the rhythm of the text, very 866 jonathan glixon often in two or more choirs, the technique known as cori spezzati. Caffi, in contrast, is concerned exclusively with demonstrating the lost musical glories of the doge’s chapel by presenting an accurate history of the devel- opment of the choir and instrumental ensemble and of the construction and use of the two organs in the church. With the exception of the organs, Caffi’s view is that the chapel was not fully constituted until the appoint- ment of the first maestro di cappella in 1490 (Piero de Fossis), and even then was in a primitive state until the appointment of the great Willaert in 1527. A large part of the book consists of biographies of the main maestri and organists. While most of those for the 16th century are very brief, four figures dominate, as they would continue to do for at least a century: the middle third of the century, 1527–62, is the age of Willaert, succeeded by the noted theorist (and disciple of his predecessor) . The end of the century is, for Caffi, the age of Giovanni Gabrieli (organist at San Marco from 1583 to his death in 1612) and his uncle Andrea (organist 1566–86). The focus is clearly on these “great men,” whose biographies are many times longer than those of all the other figures. The nationalistic aspects of the two early books (praising the lost glories of Venice, on the one hand, and seeking the origins of German styles, on the other), re-emerge in the two earliest 20th-century writings. Giacomo Benvenuti, in a book published in 1931 with the blessing of Mus- solini, strove to accomplish two goals: on the one hand, to correct and expand Caffi’s treatment of San Marco in the 16th century through thor- ough documentation, and, on the other, to demonstrate, through a multi- level approach, that the Venetian school of composition, of both sacred and instrumental music, owed little to the Flemish school embodied by Willaert but was, rather, a truly Italian accomplishment. Benvenuti pres- ents accurately cited transcriptions of many of the documents regarding the appointment of maestri di cappella, organists, and instrumentalists for this period, something not done by Caffi, and is able to straighten out some of the confusion created by inaccuracies in the earlier work. This was an important step forward. To achieve his second purpose, Benvenuti discussed not only archival documentation but also the writings of Vene- tian theorists, and the contemporary publications of instrumental music, presenting also the first modern editions of a significant portion of the repertoire. Despite the polemical aspect, there is much of value in this study. The other new work of the 1930s is much less polemical, although national pride was certainly an impetus for the research. The Belgian scholar René Lenaerts, in articles of 1935 and 1938, returned the focus to