Venice: Pure City

by Peter Ackroyd

  Vivaldi had a congenitally weak constitution, having been close to death as a premature baby, and he always needed assistants to help him travel. As he explained in a letter, written towards the end of his life:

  When I had just been ordained a priest, I still said mass for rather more than a year and then gave it up, because three times I was forced to leave the altar without finishing mass on account of my illness. For this reason I spend my life almost entirely at home, leaving my house only in a gondola or carriage, because with my chest complaint, known as heart seizure, I cannot walk. No nobleman invites me to his house, not even our doge, because they all know of my ailment. I can usually leave the house immediately after breakfast but never on foot.

  Yet this was the man who plunged himself into a relentless round of composition, administration and direction. He was quixotic and impulsive, by all accounts surrendering himself to the moods of the moment. Like his music he seems to have acquired some extraordinary internal energy from an unknown source of power. He was said by one English musician of the time, William Hayes, to have “too much mercury in his disposition”—which meant that he was impulsive and quixotic. He was, perhaps, a little eccentric. In 1704, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed to the music school of the orphanage, the Ospedale della Pietà, and was music master there for most of his life. When he joined that institution he became a thorough master of all its music. He became teacher, director, and player. Nine years later he was appointed as the official composer of the ospedale. During those years his fame as a composer had increased, and spread throughout Europe. The king of Denmark, Frederick IV, made an especial visit to the ospedale to hear one of Vivaldi’s oratorios.

  Yet already his energy and determination were driving him in another direction. In the same year that he was appointed official composer, his first opera was staged in the city of Vicenza on the mainland of the Veneto. This was a prelude to the performance of his operas in Venice itself, where he quickly earned both popularity and income. For the rest of his life he divided his compositions between operatic and sacred work. The pursuit of profit was part of his purpose. He was in the habit of offering his works to foreign musicians, demanding very high prices. He marketed Venetian music in the same way that his contemporary, Canaletto, marketed Venetian views on commission to visiting tourists. He haggled over prices and costs. He decided not to publish his works, on the supposition that he could earn more money by selling the manuscripts. He discussed his finances with an English traveller, Edward Holdsworth, who reported that “he finds a good market because he expects a guinea for every piece.”

  In his operatic works he was an entrepreneur as well as a musician. He rented the theatre. He engaged the singers and the musicians. He chose the libretti. He conducted the orchestra and provided solo accompaniments on the violin. He had to respond to the demands of the public. If an opera were unsuccessful he found a replacement within a matter of days. Yet this supreme impresario was also a man of the cloth. The Venetian dramatist, Goldoni, recorded a visit to Vivaldi. “I found him surrounded by scores,” he wrote, “his breviary in his hand. He rose, made the sign of the cross with broad gestures, put his breviary down …” This conflation of piety and business, of the sacred and the secular, seems so thoroughly Venetian as to need no further comment.

  Yet all things in Venice were dependent upon fashion. A close friend of Vivaldi, Charles de Brosses, wrote in 1740 that “to my great surprise I found that he is not so highly regarded as he deserves to be in this country, where everything follows the trend of the moment.” It was for this, and other reasons, that Vivaldi looked for patrons abroad. He journeyed to Vienna, and was about to travel on to Dresden when in 1741, at the age of sixty-three, he died. It was reported that after a life of excessive prodigality he died a pauper. Yet this may be the usual pious epilogue for a career of extravagant genius.

  In his rapidity of execution, Vivaldi is thoroughly Venetian. He wrote more than five hundred instrumental works, and almost one hundred operas. He boasted that he could compose a concerto with all its parts “faster than a copyist could copy it.” His playing, too, had the fire and energy of lightning. The German scholar, Zacharias von Uffenbach, attending one of Vivaldi’s concerts, noted that he “quite confounded me, for such playing has not been heard before and can never be equalled. He placed his finger but a hair’s breadth from the bridge so that there was hardly room for the bow. He played thus on all four strings, with imitations, and at an unbelievable speed.” Von Uffenbach then commissioned Vivaldi to write for him some concerti grossi. Three days later, Vivaldi delivered ten of them. On the manuscript score of his opera, Tito Manlio, there is the inscription “Musica del Vivaldi fatta in 5 giorni”—music by Vivaldi, completed in five days.

  In his manuscripts there is evidence of a tremendous force of conception and execution outstripping the ability of the hand to register it. There is such animation and rhythmic drive that the momentum is irresistible. The coloristic effects, the vivid impressionism, the shimmering harmonies, the fantastic ingenuity of Venetian music find their acme in Vivaldi. Any imitated pattern creates excitement. Agitation creates excitement. Vivaldi is vivacity. Speed, of composition and of execution, is the key. The words used by his contemporaries were “fierezza,” fiery energy, and “prestezza” or rapidity. The melodic force is overwhelming. The impression is one of inexhaustibility.

  He was also a man of the theatre, creating an environment of insistent and unrelenting sound for the expression of extravagant and violent feeling. His most famous work, The Four Seasons, is intensely expressive. It was a way of translating a pictorial and operatic genre into music. There is in fact in his art a thoroughly Venetian tendency to combine display with melody, so that he introduces operatic effects within his instrumental music and sustains his operas with the techniques of his concerti. The first page of the solo violin part of the “Spring” concerto resembles a composition by Mondrian; the notes seem to dance together. They arch and leap and soar in serried ranks. On his scores Vivaldi will scrawl down hurriedly “spiritoso” or “allegro.”

  Sometimes he will continue the notation for three or four pages; then pause; then cross it all out; then with the same vigour and rapidity begin all over again from the first notes. On occasions he would write out two movements for the same place, and then leave it to the interpreter or musicians to make their preference. He worked sometimes so quickly that he forgot his original key. His writing became more abrupt and elliptical in the course of composition.

  The same rush of genius, the same facility and prolixity, are evident through the history of Venetian culture. Tintoretto was well known for the ferocious energy of his artistic practice. He could paint the walls of a church, or the hall of a guild, within a week. In a later century Tiepolo was known for being able to finish a large canvas in ten hours. So in the music of Vivaldi there is a tremendous quickness and pressure, guided by a driving force and rhythmic impulse that astonished his contemporaries. It is as inexorable as fate. It rushes forward like the tides of the lagoon. What is the secret of this exuberance in the artists of Venice? It is joy. Joy in creation. It has to do with the fact of living in an harmonious city. Yet it is also the joy of living in unity with the culture and society that surrounded them. They were at home. The ground of their being was Venice itself.

  Is it then possible to interpret the nature of Venetian music as an organic whole? It is marked by exuberance and spontaneity, a ferocious gaiety that is manifest in other forms of Venetian art. The most used and favoured word is brilliance. It has associations with the glitter of Venetian glass, and the glittering light upon the water. Yet Venetian music also has associations with the richness of colour and texture in Venetian art. We read of the brilliant “tone colours” and “chromatic phrases” associated with the musicians of Venice, as opposed to those of Naples or of Florence. The Venetian manuals of music written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rely largely upon expounding the arts o
f improvisation and ornamentation. Venetian music, therefore, is predominantly expressive. The temperamental affinities, to put it perhaps too crudely, are with show over substance. One German musicologist of the eighteenth century, contrasting Venetian melodies with Roman harmonies, remarked that “the Venetian makes its way to the ear more quickly, but its spell continues for a shorter time.” The art of echo, already noticed in sacred polychoral music, was also an aspect of secular music. The Venetian sonata, for example, has been noticed for its marked contrapuntal effects.

  The music of Venice has a certain sweetness. It was often light and clear. In that sense it could be suggested that it contains little interior life. There could be no Beethoven in Venice. It has an irresistible flow. It has the rhythm of the sea, not of the wheel. It provokes astonishment and admiration rather than contemplation. Yet it could also be unruly and abrupt, with sudden and unexpected turns both in melody and in harmony. It is often eccentric or extravagant. It sometimes relishes strangeness, or what were known as bizzarria. It has an eastern flavour. It can even be claimed that, through the agency of Venice, the music of the East entered the classical European tradition. Venetian music is sustained by constant and subtle variation. It favours contrast and intricacy; it can be fast, and florid. It perfectly suits the genius of the virtuoso. It has been suggested that the solo concerto was first heard in Venice. It may be possible, then, to define the nature of this music as an expression of the Venetian temperament; Stendhal remarked that “the glittering reflection of the Venetian character falls across the texture of Venetian music.” The process of transmission and inheritance has never properly been understood, except in the evident relish of a language that describes art and character in identical terms. And so we have the words—vivacity, gaiety, radiance, extravagance, energy, buoyancy, spontaneity, urgency, facility, exuberance, impetuosity. Oh! Venezia!

  A Venetian Chronology

  FOURTH, FIFTH AND SIXTH CENTURIES AD

  The Veneti tribe leave the Italian mainland for the islands to escape successive waves of barbarian invaders. The islands form part of the Byzantine Empire.

  421: The legendary founding of Venice. The real date of the city’s foundation is probably over a century later.

  446: The Veneti meet at Grado and establish the rule of a tribune.

  568: Torcello founded.

  SEVENTH CENTURY

  Early: The basilica of S. Maria Assunta is built at Torcello.

  697: The first doge of Venice, Paoluccio Anafesto, is elected by the people.

  EIGHTH CENTURY

  Byzantine domination of northern Italy is ended by barbarian invasions.

  NINTH CENTURY

  Beginning: The original palace of the doge is constructed in the area now known as Saint Mark’s Square.

  810: Pepin unsuccessfully attempts to claim the islands for the Frankish empire.

  825: The area of Saint Mark’s Square is completed.

  828: The body of Saint Mark is brought from Alexandria to Venice. Saint Mark replaces Saint Theodore as patron of the city.

  TENTH CENTURY

  900: The lagoons are fortified.

  928: The first mention of a Venetian glass-maker.

  ELEVENTH CENTURY

  End: Venice establishes itself as an autonomous state and a maritime republic. It develops into a strong naval power and builds an empire in the East, seizing the eastern shores of the Adriatic before 1200, and capturing many of the islands in the Aegean, including Cyprus and Crete.

  The Venetian Carnival is instituted.

  TWELFTH CENTURY

  1100: Venice participates in the First Crusade.

  Early: The Arsenal is constructed.

  1167: The first public loans are issued in Venice.

  1171: Two great columns, one surmounted by Saint Theodore and the other by a lion, are erected in Saint Mark’s Square.

  1178: Venice takes control of the Brenner Pass from Verona, and establishes an extensive empire on the Italian mainland or terra firma over the next four centuries.

  Late: The earliest surviving mention of a gondola.

  The great council, comprised exclusively of aristocratic families, is established. It elects the doge and the senate.

  THIRTEENTH CENTURY

  1203–4: Venice plays a major role in the assault and sacking of Constantinople. It brings home the four horses of the triumphal Quadriga. Venice dominates trade throughout the Byzantine Empire.

  1229: Venetian laws are codified.

  1242: The first jousts are recorded in Saint Mark’s Square.

  1270: The earliest reference to private banks.

  1284–5: The first gold ducat is issued; the Mint is founded.

  1298: The imprisoned Marco Polo narrates his voyages in foreign lands to an amanuensis.

  FOURTEENTH CENTURY

  1310: The judicial committee known as the council of ten is created. It is elected by the senate, and made permanent in 1335.

  1348: Plague in the city.

  1380: The long war between Venice and Genoa, which had continued intermittently for a century, ends with a Venetian victory.

  FOURTEENTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

  Venice is at the height of its military and naval power.

  FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  1421: The construction of the Ca d’Oro begins.

  1422: The old palace of the doge is replaced by a Renaissance palace in Saint Mark’s Square.

  1462: War breaks out between the Venetian and Turkish empires; it ends in 1479 when the Venetians sue for peace. This signals the beginning of the end of Venetian power in the East. Gradually Venice ceases to dominate trade in the area.

  1495: The publisher Aldus Manutius establishes a workshop in Venice for the production of texts in Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

  SIXTEENTH CENTURY

  1516: The Jewish ghetto is established in Canareggio.

  1519: The birth of Tintoretto.

  1527: After the sack of Rome by barbarian invaders, Venice offers a haven to countless Roman artists and intellectuals.

  1527: Jacopo Sansovino, a refugee from Rome, is appointed public architect. He designs the Mint, the Library, the loggia of the campanile, and part of the Rialto market. He also transforms Saint Mark’s Square into a classical piazza.

  1565: The first European theatre, built specifically for the production of plays, is constructed in Venice.

  1570: Venice loses Cyprus to the Turks.

  1585: Beginning of the construction of the Rialto bridge.

  SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

  1618: The failure of the “Spanish Plot” to destroy many important political buildings in the city.

  1637: The world’s first public opera house is created in Venice.

  1669: Venice loses Crete to the Turks.

  1678: Vivaldi is born.

  1696: Tiepolo is born.

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  Venice becomes the city of art and pleasure.

  1725: Casanova is born.

  1774: The greatest Venetian gambling house is closed by public order.

  1797: Venice falls to Napoleon, who hands the city over to the Austrians. The doge is deposed and the Venetian republic ceases to exist.

  NINETEENTH CENTURY

  1805: Napoleon defeats the Austrians and reclaims the city.

  1814: The Austrians reclaim Venice.

  1848: The Venetians oust the Austrians from the city and re-establish the republic of Venice.

  1849: The Austrians reoccupy the city and the republic falls.

  1854: The Accademia Bridge is constructed.

  1866: The Austrians withdraw from Venice and the city becomes part of the newly established kingdom of Italy.

  End: The Lido becomes a popular beach resort.

  1895: The first international exhibition is organised. It soon becomes known as the “Biennale.”

  TWENTIETH CENTURY

  1902: The campanile of Saint Mark’s Square falls.

  1917: Venice, as p
art of the Italian alliance with Britain and Russia in the

  First World War, is once again menaced by Austrian forces.

  1943: German forces take over the city.

  1966: The year of the great flood.

  1996: Venice’s most famous opera house, La Fenice, burns down.

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