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Vivaldi: Concert for the Prince of Poland 65:20
The Academy of Ancient Music
with
Andrew Manze, dir.
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![[harmonia mundi]](../../../images/icons/hm2.gif){kind=icon}
Album Notes
It is not often that the hapless writer can conjure up the sights, sounds and
feel of a remote place and time with just one name. Eighteenth century Venice
is thankfully an exception, the name heing Canaletto. Who has not peered into
those crammed canvasses and heen transported!
It is the evening of March 21st, 1740, and the air is heavy with the threat of
a storm out at sea. The Riva degli Schiavoni faces the lagoon and tonight shines
with a hundred torches, illuminating the Ospedale della Pieta, the
convent-cum-orphanage, to which Venice's high society is swarming. Inside, the
great hall is decked with the most beautiful, fringed damask, while cloth of
gold catches the light from crystal chandeliers, to honour the visit of Prince
Frederick Christian, son of the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. This
music-loving aristocrat had been in Venice since December, sightseeing in
traditional fashion: he had visited San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale, other
Renaissance churches and the famous Murano glassworks. March 21st saw the
first of three concerts he attended, one at each of the famous Venetian
convents which were in effect rival music schools. Only the Pieta however
could hoast the involvement of the internationally renowned director of
music, Antonio Vivaldi.
On the programme that evening was a serenata, II Coro delle Muse. The libretto
was by Carlo Goldoni (Venice's leading playwright) though the music's composer
and whereabouts are unknown. Happily, the four concertos which Vivaldi supplied
as entr'actes do survive, in a single manuscript copy (partly in Vivaldi's hand)
with an elegantly engraved title page. This copy, which was presented to the
Prince as a memento of the occasion and now resides in the Saesische
Landesbibliothek Dresden, is the only source for all four works. The convent's
accounts record that Vivaldi was paid just over fifteen ducats to compose them,
and they are quite possibly his last compositions. Just one month after the
Prince's concert, he was making ready to leave Venice for Vienna to cultivate
the patronage of the Emperor Charles VI. Again the Pietit's accounts are
revealing: to raise money for this journey Vivaldi sold twenty concertos to
his employers for a ducat each, a bargain figure when compared to the earlier
sum. He left Venice in the summer of 1740 but his hopes in the Emperor's
direction were dashed when Charles died in October. Vivaldi is next heard of
selling more concertos in Vienna the following summer. It would appear that his
oeuvre was both calling card and pension plan. A month later he died, penniless
and almost forgotten (a fate Mozart was to share exactly fifty years later).
The 1740 concertos provide a fitting opus supremum: they bear out the famous
observation made a year earlier by the visiting Frenchman, Charles de Brosses,
that, though a vecchio of sixty one, Vivaldi was still an obsessive, furious
composer. These pieces are structurally tight and bristle with innovative
instrumental sonorities. Timbre and texture were crucial at a concert where
(it must be remembered) the audience could barely see the performers. The girls
sat behind a grille, protected from the corrupting gaze of visiting men seeking
brides. Three of the concertos have unique scorings: RV 552 is for a violin and
orchestra 'on stage', with an echo soloist and echo orchestra (of just two
players) at some distance. (The Prince remarks in his diary that he particularly
enjoyed this joli piece.) RV 558 is a veritable Noah's Ark, with pairs of
mandolins, chalumeaux, theorbos, recorders, a single 'cello and two violins
imitating the tromba marina*. In RV 540 two of the most gentle instruments,
the lute and viola d'amore, are accompanied by muted strings, to magical,
intimate effect. Vivaldi is known to have had a special fondness for the
viola d'amore, perhaps for its erotic connotations as much as its sonority.
Sometimes his manuscripts bear the orthography d'AMore, identifting perhaps
his star pupil at the Pieta', Anna Maria, or more likely the singer Anna
Mantovana, who was for many years Vivaldi's intimate companion (despite his
vigorous protestations that, being a Catholic priest, he was only concerned
with her moral welfare!). Even the Concerto for strings in G, RV 149, although
it has no soloists, creates an interesting and unusual texture in its second
movement in which the violins are divided: half bow the melody while the others
pizzicato.
To symbolize the part of the 1740 evening which is lost, two concertos must
suffice to represent II Coro delle Muse. These are taken from Vivaldi's
Op 8, II cimento dell' armonia e dell' inventione, written some fifteen
years earlier but still the staple fare of Vivaldi's pupils and his many
foreign admirers. Il piacere is an abstract portrait of 'pleasure', the
exemplum classicum of a Venetian concerto, a Canaletto in sound. It is here
'updated' to the 1740s with ornamentation and the inclusion of a cadenza
of the kind which Vivaldi often improvised and occasionally notated, though
never published. (Part of this cadenza is borrowed from Giuseppe Tartini
on the slim pretext that the younger virtuoso is thought to have visited
Venice in 1740 and may even have been at the Pieta on March 21st.) La tempesta
di mare is unashamedly programmatic, a celebration of Nature's power: not so
much Canaletto as early Tiepolo perhaps. It follows the Four Seasons in Op 8
and is packed with orchestral effects __ wind, rain, thunder and lightning __
which toss the helpless violin like driftwood. Only in the eerie Largo is the
violin becalmed in the eye of the storm, far away beyond the lagoon.
- ANDREW MANZE
*This contrabass-sized instrument usually had just one string from which the
player coaxed notes of the harmonic series. To help the naturally soft harmonics
project, the string passed over a rattling bridge, producing a rather coarse
(trumpet!) sound, though where the epithet 'marine' came from is not known.
harmonia mundi usa
2037 Granvillc Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90025 (c)1997
Recorded: April 22-26, 1996, St. Jude-on-the-Hill, London
Producer: Robina G. Young
Recording Engineer: Brad Michel
Editor: Paul F. Witt
Booklet Designer: Caroline Cavella
Front cover: Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) (1697-1768), Carnival. Bowes Museum, Durham/Bridgeman Art Library, London. Photo: Gordon H. Roberton.
Back cover: Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), Gala concert in honor of Princess Maria Fedorowna in Venice, Italy. Alte Pinakothek, Munich/Art Resource, New York. Photo: Erich Lessing.
The performing editions used for this recording were prepared from existing sources.
All texts and translations (c) harmonia mundi usa
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