by Will Durant
V. QUEEN OF THE ADRIATIC
Between Milan and Venice some minor cities lolled in the sun. Bergamo had to be content, in this half century, with painters like Ghislandi, composers like Locatelli. Verona presented operas in her Roman theater, and had an outstanding man in Marchese Francesco Scipione di Maffei. His poetic drama Merope (1713) was imitated by Voltaire, who honorably dedicated his own Mérope to him as “the first who had courage and genius enough to hazard a tragedy without gallantry, a tragedy worthy of Athens in its glory, wherein maternal affection constitutes the whole intrigue, and the most tender interest arises from the purest virtue.”32 Even more distinguished was Maffei’s scholarly Verona illustrata (1731-32), which set a pace for archaeology. His city was so proud of him that it raised a statue to him in his lifetime.—Vicenza, with its buildings by Palladio, was a goal of pilgrimage for architects reviving the classic style.—Padua had a university then especially noted for its faculties of law and medicine, and it had Giuseppe Tartini, acknowledged by all (except Geminiani) to be at the head of Europe’s violinists; who has not heard Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill”?
All these cities were part of the Venetian Republic. So, in the north, were Treviso, Friuli, Feltre, Bassano, Udine, Belluno, Trento, Bolzano; so in the east was Istria; in the south the state of Venezia extended through Chioggia and Rovigo to the Po; across the Adriatic it held Cattaro, Preveza, and other parts of today’s Yugoslavia and Albania; and in the Adriatic it held the islands of Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante. Within this complex realm dwelt some three million souls, each the center of the world.
1. Venetian Life
Venice herself, as the capital, contained 137,000 inhabitants. She was now in political and economic decline, having lost her Aegean empire to the Turks, and much of her foreign commerce to Atlantic states. The failure of the Crusades; the unwillingness of the European governments, after the victory at Lepanto (1571), to help Venice defend the outposts of Christendom in the East; the eagerness of those governments to accept from Turkey commercial privileges denied to her bravest enemy33—these developments had left Venice too weak to maintain her Renaissance splendor. She decided to cultivate her own garden—to give to her Italian and Adriatic possessions a government severe in law, political censorship, and personal supervision, but competent in administration, tolerant in religion and morals, liberal in internal trade.
Like the other republics of eighteenth-century Europe, Venice was ruled by an oligarchy. In the flotsam of diverse stocks—Antonios, Shylocks, Othellos—with a populace poorly educated, slow to think and quick to act, and preferring pleasure to power, democracy would have been chaos enthroned. Eligibility to the Gran Consiglio was generally restricted to some six hundred families listed in the Libro d’oro; but to that native aristocracy some judicious additions were made from the ranks of merchants and financiers, even though of alien blood. The Great Council chose the Senate, which chose the powerful Council of Ten. A swarm of spies circulated silently among the citizens, reporting to the lnquisitori any suspicious action or speech of any Venetian—of the doge himself. The doges were now usually figureheads, serving to polarize patriotism and adorn diplomacy.
The economy was fighting a losing battle against foreign competition, import dues, and guild restraints. Venetian industry did not expand into free enterprise, free trade, and capitalistic management; it was content with the fame of its crafts. The wool industry, which had fifteen hundred employees in 1700, had only six hundred at the end of the century; the silk industry declined in the same period from twelve thousand to one thousand.34 The glass workers of Murano resisted any change in the methods that had once brought them European renown; their secrets escaped to Florence, France, Bohemia, England; their rivals responded to advances in chemistry, to experiments in manufacture; the Murano ascendancy passed. The lace industry similarly succumbed to competitors beyond the Alps; by 1750 the Venetians themselves were wearing French lace. Two industries flourished: fisheries, which employed thirty thousand men, and the importation and sale of slaves.
Religion was not allowed to interfere with the profits of trade or the pleasures of life. The state regulated all matters concerning ecclesiastical property and clerical crime. The Jesuits, expelled in 1606, had been recalled in 1657, but under conditions that checked their influence in education and politics. Despite a governmental ban on the importation of works by the French philosophers, the doctrines of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, and Diderot found their way, if only by visitors, into Venetian salons, and in Venice, as in France, the aristocracy toyed with the ideas that sapped its power.35 The people accepted religion as an almost unconscious habit of ritual and belief, but they played more often than they prayed. A Venetian proverb described Venetian morals with all the inadequacy of an epigram: “In the morning a little Mass, after dinner a little gamble, in the evening a little woman.”36 Young men went to church not to worship the Virgin but to examine the women, and these, despite ecclesiastical and governmental fulminations, dressed décolleté.37 The perennial war between religion and sex was giving sex the victory.
The government permitted a regulated prostitution as a measure of public safety. The courtesans of Venice were famous for their beauty, good manners, rich raiment, and sumptuous apartments on the Grand Canal. The supply of cortigiane was considerable, but still fell short of the demand. Thrifty Venetians, and aliens like Rousseau, clubbed together, two or three, to maintain one concubine.38 Despite these facilities, and not content with cavalieri serventi, married women indulged in liaisons dangereuses. Some of them frequented the casinos, in which every convenience was provided for assignations. Several noble ladies were publicly reproved by the government for loose conduct; some were ordered confined to their homes; some were exiled. The middle classes showed more sobriety; a succession of offspring kept the wife busy, and filled her need for receiving and giving love. Nowhere did mothers lavish more ardent endearments upon their children—“Il mio leon di San Marco! La mia allegrezza! Il mio fior di primavera!” (My lion of St. Mark! My joy! My flower of spring!)
Crime was less frequent in Venice than elsewhere in Italy; the arm ready to strike was held back by the abundance and watchfulness of constables and gendarmes. But gambling was accepted as a natural occupation of mankind. The government organized a lottery in 1715. The first ridotto, or gambling casino, was opened in 1638; soon there were many, public or private, and all classes hastened to them. Clever sharpers like Casanova could live on their gambling gains; others could lose the savings of a year in a night. The players, some masked, bent over the table in a silent devotion more intense than love. The government looked on amiably (till 1774), for it taxed the ridotti, and received some 300,000 lire from them in annual revenue.39
Moneyed idlers came from a dozen states to spend their savings, or their declining years, in the relaxed morals and plein-air gaiety of the piazzas and the canals. The abandonment of empire lowered the fever of politics. No one here talked of revolution, for every class, besides its pleasures, had its stabilizing customs, its absorption in accepted tasks. Servants were pliant and faithful, but they brooked no insult or contumely. The gondoliers were poor, but they were the lords of the lagoons, standing on their gilded barks in the confident pride of their ancient skill, or rounding a turn with lusty esoteric cries, or murmuring a song to the sway of their bodies and the rhythm of their oars.
Many different nationalities mingled in the piazzas, each keeping its distinctive garb, language, and profanity. The upper classes still dressed as in the heyday of the Renaissance, with shirts of finest linen, velvet breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes; but it was the Venetians who in this century introduced to Western Europe the Turkish custom of long trousers—pantaloons. Wigs had come in from France about 1665. Young fops took such care of their dress, hair, and smell that their sex was imperceptible. Women of fashion raised upon their heads fantastic towers of false or natural hair. Men as well as women felt undressed without jewelry. Fans were wo
rks of art, elegantly painted, often encrusted with gems or enclosing a monocle.
Every class had its clubs, every street its caffè; “in Italy,” said Goldoni, “we take ten cups of coffee every day.”40 All kinds of amusement flourished, from prize fights (pugni) to masked balls. One game, pallone— tossing an inflated ball about with the palm of the hand—gave us our word balloon. Water sports were perennial. Ever since 1315 a regatta had been held on January 25 on the Grand Canal—a race between galleys rowed by fifty oars and decorated like our “floats”; and the festival was climaxed by a water polo game in which hundreds of Venetians divided into shouting and competing groups. On Ascension Day the doge sailed in glory from San Marco to the Lido on the richly decorated ship of state, the Bucintoro (Bucentaur), amid a thousand other craft, to remarry Venice to the sea.
Saints and historical anniversaries lent their names and memories to frequent holidays, for the Senate found that bread and circuses were an acceptable substitute for elections. On such occasions picturesque processions passed from church to church, from square to square; colorful carpets, garlands and silks were hung from windows or balconies on the route; there was intelligible music, pious or amorous song, and graceful dancing in the streets. Patricians chosen for high office celebrated their victories with parades, arches, trophies, festivities, and philanthropies costing sometimes thirty thousand ducats. Every wedding was a festival, and the funeral of a dignitary was the grandest event in his career.
And there was Carnival—the Christian legacy from the Saturnalia of pagan Rome. Church and state hoped that by allowing a moral holiday they could reduce, for the remainder of the year, the tension between the flesh and the Sixth Commandment. Usually, in Italy, Carnevale extended only through the last week before Lent; in eighteenth-century Venice, from December 26 or January 7 to Martedi Grasso (“Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras); perhaps from that final day of permissible meat-eating the festival took its name—carne-vale, farewell to flesh food. Almost every night in those winter weeks the Venetians—and visitors converging from all Europe—poured into the piazzas, dressed in gay colors, and hiding age, rank, and identity behind a mask. In that disguise many men and women laughed at laws, and harlots thrived. Confetti flew about, and artifical eggs were cast around to spread their scented waters when they broke. Pantalone, Arlechino, Columbine, and other beloved characters from the comic theater pranced and prattled to amuse the crowd; puppets danced, rope walkers stopped a thousand breaths. Strange beasts were brought in for the occasion, like the rhinoceros, which was first seen in Venice in the festivities of 1751. Then, at midnight before Ash Wednesday (Mercoledi della Ceneri), the great bells of San Marco tolled the end of Carnival; the exhausted reveler returned to his legal bed, and prepared to hear his priest tell him on the morrow, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem redieris” (Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return).
2. Vivaldi
Venice and Naples were the rival foci of music in Italy. In its theaters Venice heard twelve hundred different operas in the eighteenth century. There the most renowned divas of the age, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, fought their melodious battles for supremacy; and each from one foot of board moved the world. Cuzzoni sang opposite Farinelli in one theater, Bordoni sang opposite Bernacchi in another, and all Venice was divided between their worshipers. If all four had sung together the Queen of the Adriatic would have melted into her lagoons.
At antipodes to these citadels of opera and joy were the four ospedali, or asylums, in which Venice cared for some of her orphan or illegitimate girls. To give function and meaning to the lives of these homeless children they were trained in vocal and instrumental music, to sing in choirs, and to give public concerts from behind their semi-monastic grills. Rousseau said he had never heard anything so touching as these girlish voices singing in disciplined harmony;41 Goethe thought he had never heard so exquisite a soprano, or music “of such ineffable beauty.”42 Some of the greatest of Italy’s composers taught in these institutions, wrote music for them, and conducted their concerts: Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lotti, Galuppi, Porpora, Vivaldi ...
To supply her theaters with operas, to furnish her ospedali, orchestras, and virtuosi with vocal and instrumental music, Venice called upon the cities of Italy, sometimes of Austria and Germany. She herself was the mother or nurse of Antonio Lotti, organist and then maestro di capella at St. Mark’s, author of indifferent operas but of a Mass that brought tears to Protestant Burney’s eyes; of Baldassare Galuppi, famous for his opera buffe, and for the splendor and tenderness of his operatic airs; of Alessandro Marcello, whose concertos rank high in the compositions of his time; of his younger brother Benedetto, whose musical setting of fifty psalms “constitute one of the finest productions of musical literature”;43 and of Antonio Vivaldi.
To some of us the first hearing of a Vivaldi concerto was a humiliating revelation. Why had we been ignorant of him so long? Here was a stately flow of harmony, laughing ripples of melody, a unity of structure and a cohesion of parts, which should have won this man an earlier entry into our ken, and a higher place in our musical histories.*
He was born about 1675, son of a violinist in the orchestra of the Doges’ Chapel in St. Mark’s. His father taught him the violin, and obtained a place for him in the orchestra. At fifteen he took minor orders; at twenty-five he became a priest; he was called II Prete Rosso because his hair was red. His passion for music may have conflicted with his sacerdotal ministrations. Enemies said that “one day, when Vivaldi was saying Mass, a subject for a fugue came to his mind; he at once left the altar, … and repaired to the sacristy to write out the theme; then he came back to finish Mass.”44 A papal nuncio charged him with keeping several women, and finally (it was said) the Inquisition forbade him to say Mass. Antonio in later years gave quite a different account:
It was twenty-five years ago that I said Mass for … the last time, not due to interdiction, … but by my own decision, because of an ailment that has burdened me since birth. After being ordained a priest I said Mass for a year or a little more; then I ceased to say it, having on three occasions been compelled by this ailment to leave the altar without completing it.
For this same reason I nearly always live at home, and I only go out in a gondola or coach, because I can no longer walk on account of this chest condition, or rather this tightness in the chest [strettezza di petto, probably asthma]. No nobleman invites me to his house, not even our prince, because all are informed of my ailment. My travels have always been very costly because I have always had to make them with four or five women to help me.
These women, he added, were of spotless repute. “Their modesty was admitted everywhere. … Every day of the week they made their devotions.”45
He could not have been much of a rake, for the Seminario Musicale dell’ Ospedale della Pietà kept him through thirty-seven years as violinist, teacher, composer, or maestro di coro— rector of the choir. For his girl students he composed most of his nonoperatic works. The demands were great; hence he wrote in haste and corrected at what leisure he could find; he told de Brosses that he could “compose a concerto faster than a copyist could copy it.”46 His operas were equally hurried; one of them bore on the title page the boast (or excuse) “Fatto in cinque giorni”— Done in five days. Like Handel, he saved time by borrowing from himself, adapting past performances to meet present needs.
In the interstices of his work at the Ospedale he composed forty operas. Many contemporaries agreed with Tartini that they were mediocre; Benedetto Marcello made fun of them in his Teatro alla moda; but audiences in Venice, Vicenza, Vienna, Mantua, Florence, Milan, and Vienna welcomed him, and Vivaldi often deserted his girls to travel with his women through northern Italy, even to Vienna and Amsterdam, to perform as a violinist, or to conduct one of his operas, or to supervise its staging and décor. His operas are now dead, but so are nearly all those composed before Gluck. Styles, manners, heroes, voices, sexes have changed.
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History knows of 554 compositions by Vivaldi; of these 454 are concertos. A clever satirist said that Vivaldi had not written six hundred concertos, but had written the same concerto six hundred times;47 and sometimes it seems so. There is in these pieces much sawing of strings, much hurdy-gurdy continuo, an almost metronomic beating of time; even in the famous series called The Seasons (1725) there are some deserts of monotony. But there are also peaks of passionate vitality and wintry blasts, oases of dramatic conflict between soloists and orchestra, and grateful streams of melody. In such pieces48 Vivaldi brought the concerto grosso to an unprecedented excellence, which only Bach and Handel would surpass.
Like most artists, Vivaldi suffered from the sensitivity that fed his genius. The power of his music reflected his fiery temper, the tenderness of his strains reflected his piety. As he aged he became absorbed in religious devotions, so that one fanciful record described him as leaving his rosary only to compose.49 In 1740 he lost or resigned his post at the Ospedale della Pietà. For reasons now unknown he left Venice and went to Vienna. We know nothing further of him except that there, a year later, he died, and received a pauper’s funeral.
His death passed unnoticed in the Italian press, for Venice had ceased to care for his music, and no one ranked him near the top of his art in his land and time. His compositions found a welcome in Germany. Quantz, flutist and composer for Frederick the Great, imported Vivaldi’s concertos, and frankly accepted them as models. Bach so admired them as to transpose at least nine for the harpsichord, four for the organ, and one for four harpsichords and a string ensemble.50 Apparently it was from Vivaldi and Corelli that Bach derived the tripartite structure of his concertos.
