NOTE:
This is a draft of the article that was later cited and published in
Choral Journal. To read the published version go to:
MilesFish.com
This is a draft of the article that was later cited and published in
Choral Journal. To read the published version go to:
MilesFish.com
DISCOVERING the RE-DISCOVERING of Antonio Vivaldi
Article and Photographs by Miles Dayton Fish
Article and Photographs by Miles Dayton Fish
Manuscripts from the Monastery arrived in Turin in the fall of 1926 .
So did Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government.
I. Turin 1926—Arrival
Early in 1926, as the collapse of the Italian government under King Victor Emmanuel III continued, Dr. Alberto Gentili, music history professor at the University of Turin, was contacted by Luigi Torri, director of Turin’s National Library, concerning old volumes of music manuscripts that had been newly discovered at the San Carlo Salesian Monastery in Monferrato near Turin. The monastery was interested in selling the manuscripts to antique dealers and the rector, Monsignore Emmanuel, solicited the Turin Library to assist in establishing an estimate of their worth. Crates of the Monastery manuscripts were shipped to Professor Gentili for his evaluation.
In the fall of 1926 the crates arrived and upon opening, Professor Gentili discovered volumes of manuscripts by Antonio Vivaldi, whose compositions up until that time appeared to have mostly disappeared after his death in 1741.
The monks at the Salesian Monastery had sent Gentili hundreds of Vivaldi manuscripts, fourteen folios filled with concertos, operas, sonatas, secular and sacred vocal works. Many of them were autographs. In addition to the Vivaldi cache, there were works by Tuscan composer Alessandro Stradella plus assorted manuscripts, printed music, and autographs from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
In the fall of 1926, Professor Alberto Gentili discovered that the Monks at the Monastery had discovered one of the great musicological finds of all times.
II. Berlin 1824—Mendelssohn’s Grandmother
In 1824 Bella “Babette” Itzig Salomon gave her grandson Felix Mendelssohn a gift that would be a contributing factor in changing the course of music history: she gave him a copyist’s manuscript score of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Felix Mendelssohn was 14 years old when he received his grandmother’s gift. Several years later in 1829 when Felix was 20, he organized, rehearsed and conducted Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion at Berlin’s Singakademie. The historic performance was the catalyst that helped re-establish the genius of the nearly forgotten J.S. Bach and helped usher in the Bach Revival and the Early Music (Old Music) Revival.
After Mendelssohn’s 1829 Bach performance, more and more Bach compositions came to see the light of day and so did the name “Antonio Vivaldi.” Bach, early in his career, transcribed several Vivaldi concertos for solo organ, solo harpsichord, and one for four harpsichords and strings. The interest that fueled the search for more Bach compositions no doubt widened to include interest in finding the Antonio Vivaldi compositions that Bach had transcribed as well as discovering other Vivaldi compositions.
Around 1860 a large number of Vivaldi manuscripts were discovered in a forgotten cabinet at the Hofkirche Cathedral in Dresden, Germany. Also, a handfull of private collectors and musicologists possessed copies of some Vivaldi works, including the Four Seasons, that had been published during Vivaldi’s lifetime by Giuseppe Sala of Venice, Estienne Roger of Amsterdam, and London music publisher John Walsh. In addition, by 1922 Wilhelm Altmann had published a catalogue of works printed during Vivaldi’s life. Nevertheless, despite the known existence of some Vivaldi works and despite an ever increasing interest in early music, Antonio Vivaldi remained obscure and unknown to the concert going public for more than a century after the Bach Revival began in 1829. It was possible that during the revolutions of the old music revivals, Vivaldi might be the "composer left behind."
III. Turin 1926—Some Things are Missing
After the 1926 monastery discovery, it would appear that Vivaldi’s centuries of obscurity would soon end. Not so. In 1926 the journey toward re-discovery was just beginning.
Library Director Torri and Universityh Professor Gentili wanted the manuscripts to remain in Turin, but library finances would not support such a purchase and alternate options to secure the manuscripts were limited. Gentili was skeptical to involve the Italian government that a year ago had dissolved parliament and made Benitto Mussilini dictator; the government could impound Vivaldi’s manuscripts and relocate them to another Italian city.
Gentili and Torri were also concerned about the antique dealers who might have initially been interested in purchasing the manuscripts from the Salesian Monks; a dealer could divide the collection into parcels and sell them to the highest private collector bidders and the manuscripts could disappear as quickly as they had appeared. It was decided that evaluations of the monastery manuscripts would be kept secret until the Turin Library could explore a way to secure funds to purchase the manuscripts.
The Professor immediately began searching for a benefactor and he found Roberto Foà, a Turinese banker who agreed to purchase the manuscripts from the monastery. In 1927 Foà purchased and donated the manuscripts to the Turin Library in memory of his deceased infant son and the collection was named “Mauro Foà” in the boy’s memory. However, examination of the Foà Collection brought an alarming discovery: there was a substantial number of missing pages throughout the collection. Many of the manuscripts were bound and numbered in pairs and Gentili found that often a pair lacked an even-numbered or an odd-numbered volume. Occasionally, the last portion of a manuscript or a complete act of an opera was missing.
It was apparent that at one time the collection had been haphazardly divided. It was also apparent that the library’s Foà Collection was possibly part of a much larger collection. Gentili began the nearly impossible task of securing the missing portions. Once again, he worked in secrecy, this time for fear that the government and/or wealthy private collectors might compete against him in the search for the missing manuscripts.
IV. Venice 1730s—last days of Vivaldi
Venice by the mid-1400s was one of the world’s richest and most powerful cities. Later that same century, however, Venice began a long, slow decline. As Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Venice lost territory along the Adriatic Coast. The discovery of America launched escalating westward expansion and the discovery of new routes to the Far East via South Africa were some of the contributing factors in Venice’s economic decline. By the 1600s as “The Grand Tour” evolved, Venice became increasingly dependent on her role as one of the world’s first destination cities. Wealthy, well educated travelers from the world over began to flood into Venice; some European countries set up embassies to accommodate their citizens who were visiting Venice. For a while, this influx would work to Vivaldi’s advantage.
Antonio Vivaldi at the height of his career was the archetype of success. Born in a low station, he had become a priest and in so doing advanced his and his family’s standing in Venice. He remained a priest all of his life, although a non-practicing one. He also carried all of his life his priestly "red" nickname “Il Prete Rosso.” It is believed that his father was red haired musician nicknamed “Rosso”; since Vivaldi and his father were close, the shared nickname seems endearing. He was an astute musician, composer, teacher, opera impresario and, for a while at least, he appeared to have also been an astute businessman.
In the 1730s economic conditions in Venice continued to deteriorate and Venetian musical tastes continued to change. As 1730s Venice changed, so did Vivaldi’s life. His operas were no longer performed in Venice, his music was no longer in style and therefore no longer in demand so concerto sales to rich visitors were no longer a prime source of income it had once been. He was no longer affiliated with Teatro Sant’Angelo, the opera house on the Grand Canal, and in 1740 his contract with Venice’s prestigious Ospedale della Pietà where he had taught and composed on and off for almost 40 years was not renewed.
Although the decade was filled with circumstances of financial and professional devastation these circumstances did not compare to the circumstances of personal devastation that occurred mid 1700s: the death of his father. Vivaldi, once one of the highest paid musician/composer/teacher/impresarios in Europe, was now out of fashion, out of money, and out of a job. Although he was one of history’s first composers to achieve international financial success, by 1740 he was out of work in his own home town. To make matters worse Vivaldi’s father who was his first music teacher, his sometime copyist, his often time opera co-impresario and traveling companion, his lifelong mentor, supporter and sharer the “Rosso” nickname, was no longer there.
Vivaldi’s prospects were bleak in Venice so he moved to Vienna in 1740 possibly to regain Emperor Charles VI’s patronage; the Austrian Emperor had supported Vivaldi in the past. However, it is more likely he moved to Vienna to establish his career in opera there. It has been suggested that an added motive for leaving Venice was flight from local creditors. There are also indications that old, unsavory rumors and gossip concerning Vivaldi and Anna Giro and her sister Paolina continued to circulate and perhaps even escalated during this time. Anna had been Vivaldi’s caregiver, his longtime companion, opera protégée, his prima donna and probably often his muse since 1724.
Anna and probably Paolina plus one of Vivaldi’s unmarried sisters accompanied him to Vienna. Vivaldi rented an apartment close to the Kärntnertor Theater no doubt to be near the venue where his operas might be performed. His Argippo was reportedly performed at the Kärntnertor years earlier.
After Vivaldi moved to Vienna, Charles VI died an untimely death possibly from eating poisonous mushrooms and Vivaldi’s chances for royal patronage died with him. More devastating than Charles’ death was the observance of mourning for Charles: opera was banned for a year of mourning. Vivaldi’s hopes for a jumpstart to his opera career in Vienna also died.
Vivaldi had gambled on a new beginning in Vienna and he had lost.
After Charles died, Antonio Vivaldi at the age of 63 died in 1741. He received a modest funeral at St. Stephens Cathedral, probably paid for by Anna, and he was buried in the hospital burial ground in Vienna near where, exactly fifty years later, Mozart would be buried.
V. Genoa 1930—missing manuscripts
For Professor Gentili the search to secure the missing manuscripts began soon after the Foà Collection evaluation began. Early on in the new search, Marchese Dr. Faustino Curlo, expert archivist and genealogist whose family was well connected with Genoa’s aristocracy, was brought on board to assist in investigating a lead involving Count Giacomo Durazzo of Genoa. Giacomo Durazzo had been an ambassador to Vienna from 1749-64 and later the Viennese ambassador to Venice 1764-84.
After Vivaldi’s 1741 death in Vienna, it is probable that a Vivaldi family member (or members: possibly a brother and his two unmarried sisters) sold Vivaldi’s personal cache of manuscripts to Venetian senator and collector Jacopo Soranzo, who had them in his possession by 1745. Spronzo died without an heir and his surviving family divided his collections. Retired Jesuit and Venetian collector Matteo Luigi Canonici acquired the collection from the Spronzo family, reassembled it and later sold it to Count Giacomo Durazzo of Genoa, the Viennese ambassador living in Venice. After the Count’s death, the manuscripts were moved from Venice to the Durazzo villa in Genoa and remained there for the next hundred years. (Here’s a quick change-of-hands recap on the manuscripts 1741-1893, Venice to Genoa: Vivaldi to Spronzo to Canonici to Durazzo.)
By 1893 the volumes of manuscripts had been divided between two remaining Durazzo brothers. One brother, Marcello (sometimes called Marcellino), died in 1922 and left his part of the collection to the San Carlo Salesian Monastery in Monferrato near Turin; this was the collection the National Library in Turin purchased and named the Foà Collection. Through his connections with the Genoa aristocracy, his knowledge of the area’s ecclesiastical hierarchy, and friends in the local police, archivist Faustino Curlo tracked down the last living Durazzo heir—an heir that possibly possed the missing portion of the Turin manuscripts.
That heir was Giuseppe Maria Durazzo of Genoa, elderly nephew of Marcello Durazzo who donated his collection of manuscripts to the monastery in 1922 (this was the collection that became known as Foà). Giuseppe reportedly had a private music manuscript collection that he guarded with such pathologically obsessive zeal that not even his domestic servants were allowed near the collection.
Finding Giuseppe Maria Durazzo turned out to be far less difficult than dealing with him.
Communications and negotiations revealed that the last Durazzo was arrogant, irrational and extraordinarily erratic. Also, Durazzo was aware of the Foà Collection purchase and he was furious that a portion of his family’s manuscripts was now in the possession of the Turin National Library. According to Durazzo the monks at the monastery had no legal right to sell his family’s property.
After three years of tedious negotiations, Giuseppe Maria Durazzo gave his written permission to sell the manuscripts and, not surprisingly, included several eccentric stipulations. Most notable was a stipulation that prohibited publication or performance of the manuscripts. Due to the haphazard way the manuscripts had been divided, this stipulation affected both collections. In addition, Durazzo demanded an excessively high price of 100,000 lire for his manuscripts.
Gentili once again was compelled to locate a benefactor for Vivaldi manuscripts. The family of Filippo Giordano, an Italian textile manufacturer, had experienced a personal tragedy similar to the Roberto Foà family; their young son had died. Filippo Giordano provided funds to purchased the manuscripts from Durazzo and they were presented to the National Library in Turin in honor and memory of his infant son Renzo Giordano.
The Foà Collection and the Giordano Collection, both given in honor and memory of deceased young sons, are known as the Turin Manuscripts and still remain at the National Library. Professor Gentili and the library staff against near impossible odds persevered. The Vivaldi Manuscripts became once again complete on October 30, 1930.
But for Professor Gentili obstacles for the Vivaldi Turin Manuscripts remained.
The Durazzo stipulation was the most immediate and most obvious obstacle. After years of legal maneuvering and civil litigation the “no publication / no performance” stipulation was laid aside. (Giuseppe Maria Durazzo, however, fought to have the “no performance/no publication” clause upheld until the day he died.) An obstacle that was not as immediate and obvious as Durazzo’s stipulations was Italy’s movement toward alignment with Nazi Germany. Six years after the Vivaldi collection was complete, Italy and Germany signed a treaty of friendship and announced the Rome-Berlin Axis. In another two years the Fascist Party passed anti-Jewish legislation that prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans, prohibited Jews from serving in the army, allowed for the confiscation of Jewish property, prohibited Jews from employing Aryan servants, and prohibited Jews from working in the government, municipal service, or any other public institution.
Professor Alberto Gentili was a Jew.
VI. Dresden 1700s—Pisendel/Vivaldi connection
By the mid 1700s after years of building and expansion under Friedrich August I (August the Strong), Dresden, Germany, become known as “Florence on the Elbe” and a golden age of high art was ushered in. August I’s love of art, architecture, literature and music guided the Dresden expansion and also guided the education of his son who would one day become Friedrich August II.
As part of his education, the young Prince-elector took several European Grand Tours including two trips to Venice plus, when he was twenty years old, an extended stay in Venice from February 1716 until July 1717. Members of the Kammermusik, the prince’s chamber ensemble, accompanied him on the extended trip to Venice. Included in this traveling ensemble was Dresden Court violinist and future Court Concertmaster Johann Georg Pisendel.
It was on this extended Venice trip that Pisendel met Antonio Vivaldi and started a musical alliance that would last more than a decade. Some have surmised that it was a teacher/student relationship that began early on. While in Venice, Pisendel took violin and composition lessons from Vivaldi. Some Pinsendel manuscript pages show markings in Vivaldi’s hand.
When Pisendel returned to Dresden in 1717 he brought with him more than forty Vivaldi instrumental works including several dedicated to Pisendel. In 1728 Pisendel became concertmaster of the Dresden Court Orchestra, which was regarded as one of one of Europe’s finest. He continued to champion Vivaldi’s instrumental works and Vivaldi, between 1720 and 1730, continued to send orchestral works to Pisendel. Vivaldi’s music remained part of the court repertory long after 1730.
Pisendel remained concertmaster until he died in 1755. Maria Josephy, daughter of Joseph I, purchased Pisendel’s private music library that included Vivaldi instrumental music, and transferred it to the holding of the court orchestra. Pisendel’s private library, along with other private libraries, was stored in a large cabinet marked ”II” and placed behind the organ at Dresden’s Catholic Hofkirche where it remained unnoticed for almost a century.
In 1860 “II” cabinet was unlocked for the first time in almost a century and revealed a vast collection of Vivaldi compositions. Many of the manuscripts were in Vivaldi’s hand including the ones inscribed “fatto per Ma Pisendel Del Viualdi (to Maestro Pisendel from Vivaldi”). The collections were later moved to the Royal Public Library now the SaxonState and University Library Sächsische Landesbibliothek, better know as SLUB Dresden.
VII. Siena 1932—Chigiana Founded
The Palazzo Saracini in Siena, Italy, originally built in the 12th century, was inherited by the Chigi family in 1877. In 1932, after a decade of Chigi sponsored winter orchestral concerts in Siena, Count Guido Chigi Saracini established at his Palazzo a conservatory for advanced musical studies and named it Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
The Accademia Chigiana soon enjoyed international success thanks in part to leadership and support of Alfredo Casella. Casella, the offspring of a respected music-oriented family was born in Turin in 1883 and studied composition at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1896 to 1914. He was a student of Gabriel Fauré; Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and De Falla were among his contemporaries during his Paris years. He fostered an international reputation as composer, conductor, pianist. He made his U.S. debut in 1921 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and later served as conductor of the Boston Pops from 1927-1929 just prior to Arthur Fiedler’s half century tenure there. He remained connected with Accedemia Chigiana in Siena throughout his remaining lifetime and played an important role in the school’s continued international success.
VIII. Rapallo 1930s—Ezra and Olga
In 1925 novelist Earnest Hemingway, friend and former Left-Bank roommate of distinguished American poet Ezra Pound, encouraged Ezra and his wife Dorothy to consider moving to Rapallo, an Italian coastal retreat southeast of Genoa that was favored by artists and writers. The Pounds were unhappy living in Paris and currently touring Sicily with W.B. Yeats and his wife Georgie. (Yeats and Dorothy Pound’s mother Olivia had an intense love affair in the mid-1890s and she was the subject of his “The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love.”) After touring Sicily, the Yeats went on to Capri then Rome while the Pounds took Hemingway’s advise and settled in Rapallo. There they rented an apartment overlooking the sea.
Olga Rudge, concert violinist born in Youngstown, Ohio, raised in London and Paris, was 26 when she met 36 year old Ezra in Paris in 1922. Shortly after meeting they began a love affair that would last fifty years. When Ezra and his wife Dorothy moved to Rapallo, Olga, who was pregnant with Pound’s child, followed.
Olga eventually left Rapallo and relocated to Bressanone north of Venice near the Austrian border for the delivery of the baby in 1925. She named her child Mary and left Mary with a paid German speaking caregiver in Gais, a small village near Bressanone. Her daughter Mary would remain in Gais with her caregiver for the next ten years.
Olga then moved to Venice to live in the house given to her by her father, the house Pound later named “Hidden Nest.” In 1930 Olga also rented an apartment about a half hour hike from the Rapallo beach. During this time Ezra’s wife Dorothy, tired of his infidelity, left him. Then she, Dorothy, became pregnant from an unknown lover while traveling in Egypt. Dorothy, while pregnant, returned to Paris with Ezra who soon left Dorothy in Paris and joined Olga in Italy. It was Hemingway who carried Dorothy to the hospital in Paris when it was her time to deliver. Pound remained in Rapallo and, with Pound’s permission, Dorothy gave her son Ezra’s last name. Omar Shakespeare Pound was raised in London by Dorothy’s mother, Olivia, until he was old enough for boarding school. Ezra and Omar met for the first time after Olivia died in 1938; Omar was twelve years old.
IX. Siena 1939—Vivaldi Week
It would appear that the Turin Manuscripts collection discovery that was reunited in 1930 would be the event that would launch Antonio Vivaldi’s music back into the concert halls. But again it was not to be. Not in 1930 anyway.
The discovery of Vivaldi’s manuscripts may have been one of music history’s most spectacular finds but the years that immediately followed the discovery were anything but spectacular. Little progress was made by the Turin Library to promote Vivaldi’s music. There was a local Vivaldi recital after the Foà collection was purchased but during the years following the addition of the Giodarno collection, only a trickle of transcriptions made their way out of the Turin Library. By 1938, Italy’s anti-Jewish laws forced Professor Alberto Gentili out of public life and he was no longer overseer of the under-promoted Vivaldi Turin Manuscripts. Any agreements made with Foà or Giodarno, who were also both Jews, was no longer valid.
Enter Olga Rudge with Ezra Pound and then, later, enter Olga Rudge with Alfredo Casella and Siena’s Accademia Chigiana.
In 1933 Olga began working full time as Guido Chigi Saracini’s secretary at Siena’s Accademia Musicale Chigiana. She was apparently a significant part of the Accademia’s international success as she was admired for her talents as both a musician and a musicologist. When Ezra was not with her in Siena she lived inside the Chigiana Palace/Conservatory walls to be near her work.
In 1935 Olga traveled to Turin to examine the Vivaldi manuscripts. A year later, in 1936, she laid out a catalogue of the Vivaldi Turin works making a preliminary survey possible. With the help of Sebastiano Arturo Luciani and Antonio Bruers, she founded the Centro Studi Vivaldiani at Siena’s Accademia Chigiana in 1938 and she served as the first director. In the meantime Pound, in 1937, had requested from Gerhart Münch in Dresden copies of microfilms of Vivaldi manuscripts in the Dresden SLUB Library. Münch complied with Ezra’s request but soon afterwards Münch lost interest in Vivaldi all together. Ezra transcribed some of the microfilmed Dresden Vivaldi works, used some for his Rapallo discussion group and passed some of the microfilmed Vivaldi manuscripts on to Count Guido Chigi Saracini at the Chigiana in 1938.
German pianist/composer/arranger Gerhart Münch had earlier been involved with Ezra and Olga in Rapallo concerts held at Teatro Reale, a movie house rented for the occasions. Ezra’s transcriptions via Münch from the Dresden Vivaldi microfilm were performed in Rapallo in February of 1938 with the help of Olga and Pound’s wife Dorothy who was once again living in Rapallo. Ezra also requested that the library in Turin microfilm the Vivaldi manuscripts as Dresden had done. When the library refused to cooperate he phoned Giuseppe Bottai, Mussolini’s Minister of Education, who then phoned the Turin library and reportedly commanded them to “…dig out Vivaldi..” for Ezra Pound.
Pound’s role in the ongoing Vivaldi revival shifted, by necessity most likely, to the less active role of supporting and encouraging Olga’s Vivaldi research and her involvement with the Accademia Chigiana. However, he remained active in organizing Rapallo concerts up until 1940.
Alfredo Casella, internationally known composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, and scholar, was also an Italian cultural nationalist who was known for embracing and promoting both new and old music. He promoted Monteverdi and he promoted Schoenberg; he was instrumental in bringing Bartók and Hindemith to Italy. As a Fascist sympathizer, although his wife was a French Jew, he remained in good standing with Mussolini’s government.
He had been affiliated with Siena’s Accademia Chigiana since Count Guido Chigi Saracini founded it 1932. Casella was instrumental in developing the idea of a weeklong Chigiana music festival devoted to rediscovering Antonio Vivaldi. Both he and the Count believed Vivaldi to be one of Italy’s greatest and least known composers. No doubt Casella realized the international impact the event could have for Italy and for himself. He became chief organizer and artistic director of the first Settimana Musical Senese, and the date for the Vivaldi Festival Week was set for September 16-21, 1939. Olga assisted, possibly even led Casella in planning and organizing the week and Ezra, no doubt a little jealous of both Olga and Casella, took consolation in the fact that he had transcribed and presented Vivaldi’s music in Rapallo a year and a half before Settimana Musical Senese.
The week long festival programs included Vivaldi instrumental selections and a Bach transcription. More importantly, Casella chose to also feature Vivaldi’s unpunished vocal music. In addition to instrumental manuscripts, the Turin Manuscripts contained a wealth of secular and religious vocal works that had not been sung or heard since Vivaldi’s day. Casella’s Vivaldi Festival Week program included the Credo (RV 591), Gloria (RV 589), Stabat Mater (RV 621), and the complete opera, L’Olimpiade, which was performed on two separate occasions during the week.
During August and the first half of September there was an extraordinary amount of pre-event press on both sides of the Atlantic for the Settimana Musical Senese celebrating the newly re-discovered Antonio Vivaldi. It might appear that Settimana Musical Senese would finally launch Antonio Vivaldi’s music back into the concert halls. But once again it was not to be. Not in 1939 anyway. Just as the Turin Manuscripts discovery of 1926-30 failed to ignite and sustain worldwide interest in Vivaldi, a similar fate was met by Chigiana’s Vivaldi Festival Week of 1939. Hitler invaded Poland and on September 27, 1939, one week after Settimana Musical Senese ended, Warsaw surrendered to Germany.
World War Two had begun and Antonio Vivaldi was no longer news.
X. Italy 1939—The War Years
Mussolini, who had sided with Germany in 1936, declared allegiance to the Axis Powers and entered World War II in 1940.
Because of its industrial importance with factories like Fiat which manufactured autos, tanks and aircraft for the Axis, Turin was the first and the most often bombed cities in Italy. The Allies (mostly RAF) first raided Turin in June of 1940 and continued until April of 1945; the Turin Library was one of the first structures damaged and about 150,000 volumes, including rare ones, were lost. The Vivaldi Turin Collection was not among the destroyed treasures. After the bombings began, the famous Shroud of Turin was removed from the city for safekeeping and it is believed that many of the remaining treasures from the Turin Library were also relocated at that time. As the war waged on, the Italian people became increasingly disenchanted with Benito Mussolini and in 1943 Italy switched sides from the Axis to the Allied Powers although northern Italy remained occupied by Germany.
In 1943 in Milan the Ricordi music publishing company that had published some pre-Settimana Musicale Senese Vivaldi music was destroyed by Allied bombs. Casa Ricordi was founded by Giovanni Ricordi in 1808 and was music publisher for the works of Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, as well as some early Vivaldi. Although priceless manuscripts, documents and Ricordi’s world famous opera posters had been moved prior to bombing, the war brought complete devastation and restoration of the publishing company would continue on through the mid 1950s.
In 1945, during the very last months of the War, the Allies fire bombed Dresden, Germany. The city that up until that time was still known as “Florence of the Elbe,” was leveled in three days. The SLUB Dresden library had placed important documents in the library vault but the incendiary bombings were so intense that some documents were damaged including some Vivaldi manuscripts.
Both Alfredo Casella and Ezra Pound officially supported the Fascist government of the Axis Powers and remained in Italy for the war’s duration. From 1941 until 1943 the profoundly anti-Semitic Pound wrote and often delivered Pro-Fascist anti-Semitic, anti-American military speeches via radio broadcasts, about 125 of them. He was paid by Mussolini a modest average sum of about $18 per broadcast and delivered the speeches up until the day Mussolini was imprisoned. At the war’s beginning, Ezra had invested wife Dorothy’s inheritance, their only substantial source of income, in Mussolini’s government and soon that was all lost. During thee war years the broadcast payments were his only source of income as book royalties transfers from the U.S. were forbidden. From 1944 to 1945 Ezra and Dorothy lived with Olga in her Rapallo apartment without modern conveniences such as electricity. After Settimana Musicale Senese and after the war, Olga became less active in promoting Vivaldi.
Casella was diagnosed with cancer in 1942 but continued to compose and conduct through the war years. He remained associated with the Accedemia Chigiana in Siena where Settimana Musicale Senese future events would promote little known (at the time) Italian composers such as Scarlatti, Pergolesi and Salieri as well as promote lesser known works by Rossiini, Donizetti, Cherubini. Casella also continued to promote the new music of composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew who had fled Berlin in 1933 for Paris then the U.S., even though Hitler banned Schoenberg’s music in German territories.
Benito Mussolini was arrested and removed from office in July of 1943. American troops landed on the Italian mainland in September of that year. The Allies took Rome in June of 1944. German forces in Italy surrendered May 2, 1945. Cities in Tuscany and northern Italy sustained most of Germany’s combat damage.
X. Italy / U.S. 1947—Vivaldi after the War
After the ravages of World War II, Europe began a long journey of recovery and reconstruction. The re-discovering of Antonio Vivaldi became part of that journey.
Two years after the war’s end Antonio Fanna, born in Venice in 1926, founded the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi in Venice to publish and promote Vivaldi’s music and under the editorship and collaboration of Venetian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, undertook publishing a comprehensive edition of Vivaldi’s music. By the end of the War Vivaldi’s future was passed from Siena’s Accademia Chigiana to Venice’s Istitute Italiano Antonio Vivaldi.
On the other side of the Post WWII Atlantic, American violist Louis Kaufman, like Cassella and the Count in Siena, champion of under-performed and undiscovered music; Kaufman was among the first to perform works by Robert Russell Bennett, William Grant Still, plus he was friends with and premiered works by Barber, Copland, Milhaud, and Poulenc. He was also one of the first to perform works by Antonio Vivaldi in the Twentieth Century.
Kaufman was a concertizing classical violinist who was also a Hollywood movie soundtrack musician veteran. He was also the artist who “debuted” on December 31,1947, a portion of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in a recorded-live performance at Carnegie Hall with members of the New York Philharmonic strings just hours before a musicians’ strike would silence recorded music performance in NYC for a year. (The performance was scheduled for later in the year but upon learning of the strike for midnight January 1, they rescheduled Carnegie Hall for December 31, just hours before the strike.) Only a portion of Seasons was performed because the whereabouts of a complete Vivaldi Four Seasons score was unknown at that post WWII time.
After the 1947 Seasons recording at Carnegie hall, Kaufman and his wife traveled to Europe and met at the Italian home of Gian Francesco Malipiero of Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, in search of clues about a complete Vivaldi Seasons score. Upon Malipiero’s advice, Kaufman journeyed north to Brussels to the Royal Music Conservatory library where he did indeed locate a complete copy of Seasons. He departed Brussels with a microfilm of the work and in 1950 in Zurich, Switzerland, Kaufman completed the first recording of the entire Vivaldi Four Seasons. That same year, Kauffman’s Concert Hall Society Label recording of the Vivaldi Seasons won the Grand Prix du Disque, the award for outstanding recording established in France in 1938.
Antonio Vivaldi was still an obscure Italian composer at that time. But finally that was about to change.
While in Paris, Kaufman and his wife told a friend, who was a newspaper correspondent, their story of the search for the “complete” Four Seasons. Their friend/correspondent ran the story in the Continental Daily Mail, an English language newspaper in Paris, and then other newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic picked up the story as did America’s Time Magazine. After the Vivaldi press notoriety from Paris and the Grand Prix du Disque award for the Seasons recording, Kaufman became one of the first, if not the first, performers to launch a series of all-Vivaldi concerts that included performances in New York, London and Paris.
Kaufman played on more than 400 Hollywood movie soundtracks including “The Best Years of our Lives,” “Laura,” “Casablanca,” “Diary of Anne Frank,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Spartacus”; he was concertmaster for more than 100 movies including “Gone with the Wind,” “Showboat,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Intermezzo,” “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” Kaufman was responsible for the final launch that would bring Antonio Vivaldi back into the concert halls and then was introduced to the recording studios. Vivaldi was thrust to the forefront of classical music and then, via recordings, was thrust to the forefront of popular culture worldwide.
Kaufman, defender and promoter of under performed classical music, championed an unknown Antonio Vivaldi who, in the mid Twentieth Century, took on a life of his own and became in fifty short years one of the most performed composers in history. During that same time Vivaldi also became one of the most recorded classical composers in history; there are over 200 (and counting) recordings that are available today.
It’s ironic that movie soundtrack veteran musician Kaufman launched a Vivaldi mid-century career that would involve, in addition to concerts and recordings, inclusion in no fewer than 174 (and counting) movie/TV soundtracks.
XI. Gloria 1957—The ‘real’ Gloria arrives
As mentioned at the beginning, the Vivaldi Gloria (RV 589) that was composed around 1713 and probably first performed at the Venice Pietà in 1715, was lost for over 200 years. Alfredo Casella gave the Gloria its re-discovery debut in 1939 Siena at the Vivaldi Festival Week Settimana Musical Senese. It would be decades before RV 589 would be available in an original edition. Casella edited, arranged, and elaborated the Gloria for the 1939 Siena performance. An “authentic” Gloria was first performed in the U.S. at the First Festival of Baroque Choral Music at New York’s Brooklyn College in 1957. Vivaldi’s Gloria made up for a couple of centuries of silence by swiftly becoming one of the foundations of the worldwide choral repertory.
XII. Rapallo 1945—Ezra Arrested
On the 24th of May, 1945, at the war’s end, U.S. poet Ezra Pound living in Rapallo, was arrested. He was incarcerated at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Center north of Pisa, on suspicion of committing criminal offenses against the Allies. He was the only non-military prisoner incarcerated at the Center. He was detained in one of the camp’s “death cells” a six foot square cage open to the elements on all four sides. In three weeks, after experiencing what was believed to be a nervous breakdown, he was moved to a tent with other prisoners. In mid-November he was flown to Washington to stand trial for treason but was found to be of unsound mind and was transferred to a hospital for the insane where he remained for more than a decade. His eventual release was due in part to the hard work of Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and, once again, his old friend and former Left Bank roommate Ernest Hemingway.
At a hearing before his impending trial it was reported that Ezra Pound stated “I saved Vivaldi….I saved Vivaldi.”
Although Olga would probably top him on the list for “saving Vivaldi” it turns out that Ezra did, singlehandedly, save a portion of Vivaldi. In the 1930s he requested microfilms of selected Vivaldi works from the Dresden SLUB library and he passed some of these on to the Accademia Chigiana in late 1930s. The Dresden library vault was damaged during the WWII bombings and some manuscripts, including Vivaldi’s, were also damaged. So, it turns out that the best copies we have of some of Vivaldi’s Dresden works are not in Dresden. They are in Siena’s Accademia Chigiana Library thanks to Ezra Pound.
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So did Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government.
I. Turin 1926—Arrival
Early in 1926, as the collapse of the Italian government under King Victor Emmanuel III continued, Dr. Alberto Gentili, music history professor at the University of Turin, was contacted by Luigi Torri, director of Turin’s National Library, concerning old volumes of music manuscripts that had been newly discovered at the San Carlo Salesian Monastery in Monferrato near Turin. The monastery was interested in selling the manuscripts to antique dealers and the rector, Monsignore Emmanuel, solicited the Turin Library to assist in establishing an estimate of their worth. Crates of the Monastery manuscripts were shipped to Professor Gentili for his evaluation.
In the fall of 1926 the crates arrived and upon opening, Professor Gentili discovered volumes of manuscripts by Antonio Vivaldi, whose compositions up until that time appeared to have mostly disappeared after his death in 1741.
The monks at the Salesian Monastery had sent Gentili hundreds of Vivaldi manuscripts, fourteen folios filled with concertos, operas, sonatas, secular and sacred vocal works. Many of them were autographs. In addition to the Vivaldi cache, there were works by Tuscan composer Alessandro Stradella plus assorted manuscripts, printed music, and autographs from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
In the fall of 1926, Professor Alberto Gentili discovered that the Monks at the Monastery had discovered one of the great musicological finds of all times.
II. Berlin 1824—Mendelssohn’s Grandmother
In 1824 Bella “Babette” Itzig Salomon gave her grandson Felix Mendelssohn a gift that would be a contributing factor in changing the course of music history: she gave him a copyist’s manuscript score of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Felix Mendelssohn was 14 years old when he received his grandmother’s gift. Several years later in 1829 when Felix was 20, he organized, rehearsed and conducted Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion at Berlin’s Singakademie. The historic performance was the catalyst that helped re-establish the genius of the nearly forgotten J.S. Bach and helped usher in the Bach Revival and the Early Music (Old Music) Revival.
After Mendelssohn’s 1829 Bach performance, more and more Bach compositions came to see the light of day and so did the name “Antonio Vivaldi.” Bach, early in his career, transcribed several Vivaldi concertos for solo organ, solo harpsichord, and one for four harpsichords and strings. The interest that fueled the search for more Bach compositions no doubt widened to include interest in finding the Antonio Vivaldi compositions that Bach had transcribed as well as discovering other Vivaldi compositions.
Around 1860 a large number of Vivaldi manuscripts were discovered in a forgotten cabinet at the Hofkirche Cathedral in Dresden, Germany. Also, a handfull of private collectors and musicologists possessed copies of some Vivaldi works, including the Four Seasons, that had been published during Vivaldi’s lifetime by Giuseppe Sala of Venice, Estienne Roger of Amsterdam, and London music publisher John Walsh. In addition, by 1922 Wilhelm Altmann had published a catalogue of works printed during Vivaldi’s life. Nevertheless, despite the known existence of some Vivaldi works and despite an ever increasing interest in early music, Antonio Vivaldi remained obscure and unknown to the concert going public for more than a century after the Bach Revival began in 1829. It was possible that during the revolutions of the old music revivals, Vivaldi might be the "composer left behind."
III. Turin 1926—Some Things are Missing
After the 1926 monastery discovery, it would appear that Vivaldi’s centuries of obscurity would soon end. Not so. In 1926 the journey toward re-discovery was just beginning.
Library Director Torri and Universityh Professor Gentili wanted the manuscripts to remain in Turin, but library finances would not support such a purchase and alternate options to secure the manuscripts were limited. Gentili was skeptical to involve the Italian government that a year ago had dissolved parliament and made Benitto Mussilini dictator; the government could impound Vivaldi’s manuscripts and relocate them to another Italian city.
Gentili and Torri were also concerned about the antique dealers who might have initially been interested in purchasing the manuscripts from the Salesian Monks; a dealer could divide the collection into parcels and sell them to the highest private collector bidders and the manuscripts could disappear as quickly as they had appeared. It was decided that evaluations of the monastery manuscripts would be kept secret until the Turin Library could explore a way to secure funds to purchase the manuscripts.
The Professor immediately began searching for a benefactor and he found Roberto Foà, a Turinese banker who agreed to purchase the manuscripts from the monastery. In 1927 Foà purchased and donated the manuscripts to the Turin Library in memory of his deceased infant son and the collection was named “Mauro Foà” in the boy’s memory. However, examination of the Foà Collection brought an alarming discovery: there was a substantial number of missing pages throughout the collection. Many of the manuscripts were bound and numbered in pairs and Gentili found that often a pair lacked an even-numbered or an odd-numbered volume. Occasionally, the last portion of a manuscript or a complete act of an opera was missing.
It was apparent that at one time the collection had been haphazardly divided. It was also apparent that the library’s Foà Collection was possibly part of a much larger collection. Gentili began the nearly impossible task of securing the missing portions. Once again, he worked in secrecy, this time for fear that the government and/or wealthy private collectors might compete against him in the search for the missing manuscripts.
IV. Venice 1730s—last days of Vivaldi
Venice by the mid-1400s was one of the world’s richest and most powerful cities. Later that same century, however, Venice began a long, slow decline. As Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Venice lost territory along the Adriatic Coast. The discovery of America launched escalating westward expansion and the discovery of new routes to the Far East via South Africa were some of the contributing factors in Venice’s economic decline. By the 1600s as “The Grand Tour” evolved, Venice became increasingly dependent on her role as one of the world’s first destination cities. Wealthy, well educated travelers from the world over began to flood into Venice; some European countries set up embassies to accommodate their citizens who were visiting Venice. For a while, this influx would work to Vivaldi’s advantage.
Antonio Vivaldi at the height of his career was the archetype of success. Born in a low station, he had become a priest and in so doing advanced his and his family’s standing in Venice. He remained a priest all of his life, although a non-practicing one. He also carried all of his life his priestly "red" nickname “Il Prete Rosso.” It is believed that his father was red haired musician nicknamed “Rosso”; since Vivaldi and his father were close, the shared nickname seems endearing. He was an astute musician, composer, teacher, opera impresario and, for a while at least, he appeared to have also been an astute businessman.
In the 1730s economic conditions in Venice continued to deteriorate and Venetian musical tastes continued to change. As 1730s Venice changed, so did Vivaldi’s life. His operas were no longer performed in Venice, his music was no longer in style and therefore no longer in demand so concerto sales to rich visitors were no longer a prime source of income it had once been. He was no longer affiliated with Teatro Sant’Angelo, the opera house on the Grand Canal, and in 1740 his contract with Venice’s prestigious Ospedale della Pietà where he had taught and composed on and off for almost 40 years was not renewed.
Although the decade was filled with circumstances of financial and professional devastation these circumstances did not compare to the circumstances of personal devastation that occurred mid 1700s: the death of his father. Vivaldi, once one of the highest paid musician/composer/teacher/impresarios in Europe, was now out of fashion, out of money, and out of a job. Although he was one of history’s first composers to achieve international financial success, by 1740 he was out of work in his own home town. To make matters worse Vivaldi’s father who was his first music teacher, his sometime copyist, his often time opera co-impresario and traveling companion, his lifelong mentor, supporter and sharer the “Rosso” nickname, was no longer there.
Vivaldi’s prospects were bleak in Venice so he moved to Vienna in 1740 possibly to regain Emperor Charles VI’s patronage; the Austrian Emperor had supported Vivaldi in the past. However, it is more likely he moved to Vienna to establish his career in opera there. It has been suggested that an added motive for leaving Venice was flight from local creditors. There are also indications that old, unsavory rumors and gossip concerning Vivaldi and Anna Giro and her sister Paolina continued to circulate and perhaps even escalated during this time. Anna had been Vivaldi’s caregiver, his longtime companion, opera protégée, his prima donna and probably often his muse since 1724.
Anna and probably Paolina plus one of Vivaldi’s unmarried sisters accompanied him to Vienna. Vivaldi rented an apartment close to the Kärntnertor Theater no doubt to be near the venue where his operas might be performed. His Argippo was reportedly performed at the Kärntnertor years earlier.
After Vivaldi moved to Vienna, Charles VI died an untimely death possibly from eating poisonous mushrooms and Vivaldi’s chances for royal patronage died with him. More devastating than Charles’ death was the observance of mourning for Charles: opera was banned for a year of mourning. Vivaldi’s hopes for a jumpstart to his opera career in Vienna also died.
Vivaldi had gambled on a new beginning in Vienna and he had lost.
After Charles died, Antonio Vivaldi at the age of 63 died in 1741. He received a modest funeral at St. Stephens Cathedral, probably paid for by Anna, and he was buried in the hospital burial ground in Vienna near where, exactly fifty years later, Mozart would be buried.
V. Genoa 1930—missing manuscripts
For Professor Gentili the search to secure the missing manuscripts began soon after the Foà Collection evaluation began. Early on in the new search, Marchese Dr. Faustino Curlo, expert archivist and genealogist whose family was well connected with Genoa’s aristocracy, was brought on board to assist in investigating a lead involving Count Giacomo Durazzo of Genoa. Giacomo Durazzo had been an ambassador to Vienna from 1749-64 and later the Viennese ambassador to Venice 1764-84.
After Vivaldi’s 1741 death in Vienna, it is probable that a Vivaldi family member (or members: possibly a brother and his two unmarried sisters) sold Vivaldi’s personal cache of manuscripts to Venetian senator and collector Jacopo Soranzo, who had them in his possession by 1745. Spronzo died without an heir and his surviving family divided his collections. Retired Jesuit and Venetian collector Matteo Luigi Canonici acquired the collection from the Spronzo family, reassembled it and later sold it to Count Giacomo Durazzo of Genoa, the Viennese ambassador living in Venice. After the Count’s death, the manuscripts were moved from Venice to the Durazzo villa in Genoa and remained there for the next hundred years. (Here’s a quick change-of-hands recap on the manuscripts 1741-1893, Venice to Genoa: Vivaldi to Spronzo to Canonici to Durazzo.)
By 1893 the volumes of manuscripts had been divided between two remaining Durazzo brothers. One brother, Marcello (sometimes called Marcellino), died in 1922 and left his part of the collection to the San Carlo Salesian Monastery in Monferrato near Turin; this was the collection the National Library in Turin purchased and named the Foà Collection. Through his connections with the Genoa aristocracy, his knowledge of the area’s ecclesiastical hierarchy, and friends in the local police, archivist Faustino Curlo tracked down the last living Durazzo heir—an heir that possibly possed the missing portion of the Turin manuscripts.
That heir was Giuseppe Maria Durazzo of Genoa, elderly nephew of Marcello Durazzo who donated his collection of manuscripts to the monastery in 1922 (this was the collection that became known as Foà). Giuseppe reportedly had a private music manuscript collection that he guarded with such pathologically obsessive zeal that not even his domestic servants were allowed near the collection.
Finding Giuseppe Maria Durazzo turned out to be far less difficult than dealing with him.
Communications and negotiations revealed that the last Durazzo was arrogant, irrational and extraordinarily erratic. Also, Durazzo was aware of the Foà Collection purchase and he was furious that a portion of his family’s manuscripts was now in the possession of the Turin National Library. According to Durazzo the monks at the monastery had no legal right to sell his family’s property.
After three years of tedious negotiations, Giuseppe Maria Durazzo gave his written permission to sell the manuscripts and, not surprisingly, included several eccentric stipulations. Most notable was a stipulation that prohibited publication or performance of the manuscripts. Due to the haphazard way the manuscripts had been divided, this stipulation affected both collections. In addition, Durazzo demanded an excessively high price of 100,000 lire for his manuscripts.
Gentili once again was compelled to locate a benefactor for Vivaldi manuscripts. The family of Filippo Giordano, an Italian textile manufacturer, had experienced a personal tragedy similar to the Roberto Foà family; their young son had died. Filippo Giordano provided funds to purchased the manuscripts from Durazzo and they were presented to the National Library in Turin in honor and memory of his infant son Renzo Giordano.
The Foà Collection and the Giordano Collection, both given in honor and memory of deceased young sons, are known as the Turin Manuscripts and still remain at the National Library. Professor Gentili and the library staff against near impossible odds persevered. The Vivaldi Manuscripts became once again complete on October 30, 1930.
But for Professor Gentili obstacles for the Vivaldi Turin Manuscripts remained.
The Durazzo stipulation was the most immediate and most obvious obstacle. After years of legal maneuvering and civil litigation the “no publication / no performance” stipulation was laid aside. (Giuseppe Maria Durazzo, however, fought to have the “no performance/no publication” clause upheld until the day he died.) An obstacle that was not as immediate and obvious as Durazzo’s stipulations was Italy’s movement toward alignment with Nazi Germany. Six years after the Vivaldi collection was complete, Italy and Germany signed a treaty of friendship and announced the Rome-Berlin Axis. In another two years the Fascist Party passed anti-Jewish legislation that prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans, prohibited Jews from serving in the army, allowed for the confiscation of Jewish property, prohibited Jews from employing Aryan servants, and prohibited Jews from working in the government, municipal service, or any other public institution.
Professor Alberto Gentili was a Jew.
VI. Dresden 1700s—Pisendel/Vivaldi connection
By the mid 1700s after years of building and expansion under Friedrich August I (August the Strong), Dresden, Germany, become known as “Florence on the Elbe” and a golden age of high art was ushered in. August I’s love of art, architecture, literature and music guided the Dresden expansion and also guided the education of his son who would one day become Friedrich August II.
As part of his education, the young Prince-elector took several European Grand Tours including two trips to Venice plus, when he was twenty years old, an extended stay in Venice from February 1716 until July 1717. Members of the Kammermusik, the prince’s chamber ensemble, accompanied him on the extended trip to Venice. Included in this traveling ensemble was Dresden Court violinist and future Court Concertmaster Johann Georg Pisendel.
It was on this extended Venice trip that Pisendel met Antonio Vivaldi and started a musical alliance that would last more than a decade. Some have surmised that it was a teacher/student relationship that began early on. While in Venice, Pisendel took violin and composition lessons from Vivaldi. Some Pinsendel manuscript pages show markings in Vivaldi’s hand.
When Pisendel returned to Dresden in 1717 he brought with him more than forty Vivaldi instrumental works including several dedicated to Pisendel. In 1728 Pisendel became concertmaster of the Dresden Court Orchestra, which was regarded as one of one of Europe’s finest. He continued to champion Vivaldi’s instrumental works and Vivaldi, between 1720 and 1730, continued to send orchestral works to Pisendel. Vivaldi’s music remained part of the court repertory long after 1730.
Pisendel remained concertmaster until he died in 1755. Maria Josephy, daughter of Joseph I, purchased Pisendel’s private music library that included Vivaldi instrumental music, and transferred it to the holding of the court orchestra. Pisendel’s private library, along with other private libraries, was stored in a large cabinet marked ”II” and placed behind the organ at Dresden’s Catholic Hofkirche where it remained unnoticed for almost a century.
In 1860 “II” cabinet was unlocked for the first time in almost a century and revealed a vast collection of Vivaldi compositions. Many of the manuscripts were in Vivaldi’s hand including the ones inscribed “fatto per Ma Pisendel Del Viualdi (to Maestro Pisendel from Vivaldi”). The collections were later moved to the Royal Public Library now the SaxonState and University Library Sächsische Landesbibliothek, better know as SLUB Dresden.
VII. Siena 1932—Chigiana Founded
The Palazzo Saracini in Siena, Italy, originally built in the 12th century, was inherited by the Chigi family in 1877. In 1932, after a decade of Chigi sponsored winter orchestral concerts in Siena, Count Guido Chigi Saracini established at his Palazzo a conservatory for advanced musical studies and named it Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
The Accademia Chigiana soon enjoyed international success thanks in part to leadership and support of Alfredo Casella. Casella, the offspring of a respected music-oriented family was born in Turin in 1883 and studied composition at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1896 to 1914. He was a student of Gabriel Fauré; Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and De Falla were among his contemporaries during his Paris years. He fostered an international reputation as composer, conductor, pianist. He made his U.S. debut in 1921 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and later served as conductor of the Boston Pops from 1927-1929 just prior to Arthur Fiedler’s half century tenure there. He remained connected with Accedemia Chigiana in Siena throughout his remaining lifetime and played an important role in the school’s continued international success.
VIII. Rapallo 1930s—Ezra and Olga
In 1925 novelist Earnest Hemingway, friend and former Left-Bank roommate of distinguished American poet Ezra Pound, encouraged Ezra and his wife Dorothy to consider moving to Rapallo, an Italian coastal retreat southeast of Genoa that was favored by artists and writers. The Pounds were unhappy living in Paris and currently touring Sicily with W.B. Yeats and his wife Georgie. (Yeats and Dorothy Pound’s mother Olivia had an intense love affair in the mid-1890s and she was the subject of his “The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love.”) After touring Sicily, the Yeats went on to Capri then Rome while the Pounds took Hemingway’s advise and settled in Rapallo. There they rented an apartment overlooking the sea.
Olga Rudge, concert violinist born in Youngstown, Ohio, raised in London and Paris, was 26 when she met 36 year old Ezra in Paris in 1922. Shortly after meeting they began a love affair that would last fifty years. When Ezra and his wife Dorothy moved to Rapallo, Olga, who was pregnant with Pound’s child, followed.
Olga eventually left Rapallo and relocated to Bressanone north of Venice near the Austrian border for the delivery of the baby in 1925. She named her child Mary and left Mary with a paid German speaking caregiver in Gais, a small village near Bressanone. Her daughter Mary would remain in Gais with her caregiver for the next ten years.
Olga then moved to Venice to live in the house given to her by her father, the house Pound later named “Hidden Nest.” In 1930 Olga also rented an apartment about a half hour hike from the Rapallo beach. During this time Ezra’s wife Dorothy, tired of his infidelity, left him. Then she, Dorothy, became pregnant from an unknown lover while traveling in Egypt. Dorothy, while pregnant, returned to Paris with Ezra who soon left Dorothy in Paris and joined Olga in Italy. It was Hemingway who carried Dorothy to the hospital in Paris when it was her time to deliver. Pound remained in Rapallo and, with Pound’s permission, Dorothy gave her son Ezra’s last name. Omar Shakespeare Pound was raised in London by Dorothy’s mother, Olivia, until he was old enough for boarding school. Ezra and Omar met for the first time after Olivia died in 1938; Omar was twelve years old.
IX. Siena 1939—Vivaldi Week
It would appear that the Turin Manuscripts collection discovery that was reunited in 1930 would be the event that would launch Antonio Vivaldi’s music back into the concert halls. But again it was not to be. Not in 1930 anyway.
The discovery of Vivaldi’s manuscripts may have been one of music history’s most spectacular finds but the years that immediately followed the discovery were anything but spectacular. Little progress was made by the Turin Library to promote Vivaldi’s music. There was a local Vivaldi recital after the Foà collection was purchased but during the years following the addition of the Giodarno collection, only a trickle of transcriptions made their way out of the Turin Library. By 1938, Italy’s anti-Jewish laws forced Professor Alberto Gentili out of public life and he was no longer overseer of the under-promoted Vivaldi Turin Manuscripts. Any agreements made with Foà or Giodarno, who were also both Jews, was no longer valid.
Enter Olga Rudge with Ezra Pound and then, later, enter Olga Rudge with Alfredo Casella and Siena’s Accademia Chigiana.
In 1933 Olga began working full time as Guido Chigi Saracini’s secretary at Siena’s Accademia Musicale Chigiana. She was apparently a significant part of the Accademia’s international success as she was admired for her talents as both a musician and a musicologist. When Ezra was not with her in Siena she lived inside the Chigiana Palace/Conservatory walls to be near her work.
In 1935 Olga traveled to Turin to examine the Vivaldi manuscripts. A year later, in 1936, she laid out a catalogue of the Vivaldi Turin works making a preliminary survey possible. With the help of Sebastiano Arturo Luciani and Antonio Bruers, she founded the Centro Studi Vivaldiani at Siena’s Accademia Chigiana in 1938 and she served as the first director. In the meantime Pound, in 1937, had requested from Gerhart Münch in Dresden copies of microfilms of Vivaldi manuscripts in the Dresden SLUB Library. Münch complied with Ezra’s request but soon afterwards Münch lost interest in Vivaldi all together. Ezra transcribed some of the microfilmed Dresden Vivaldi works, used some for his Rapallo discussion group and passed some of the microfilmed Vivaldi manuscripts on to Count Guido Chigi Saracini at the Chigiana in 1938.
German pianist/composer/arranger Gerhart Münch had earlier been involved with Ezra and Olga in Rapallo concerts held at Teatro Reale, a movie house rented for the occasions. Ezra’s transcriptions via Münch from the Dresden Vivaldi microfilm were performed in Rapallo in February of 1938 with the help of Olga and Pound’s wife Dorothy who was once again living in Rapallo. Ezra also requested that the library in Turin microfilm the Vivaldi manuscripts as Dresden had done. When the library refused to cooperate he phoned Giuseppe Bottai, Mussolini’s Minister of Education, who then phoned the Turin library and reportedly commanded them to “…dig out Vivaldi..” for Ezra Pound.
Pound’s role in the ongoing Vivaldi revival shifted, by necessity most likely, to the less active role of supporting and encouraging Olga’s Vivaldi research and her involvement with the Accademia Chigiana. However, he remained active in organizing Rapallo concerts up until 1940.
Alfredo Casella, internationally known composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, and scholar, was also an Italian cultural nationalist who was known for embracing and promoting both new and old music. He promoted Monteverdi and he promoted Schoenberg; he was instrumental in bringing Bartók and Hindemith to Italy. As a Fascist sympathizer, although his wife was a French Jew, he remained in good standing with Mussolini’s government.
He had been affiliated with Siena’s Accademia Chigiana since Count Guido Chigi Saracini founded it 1932. Casella was instrumental in developing the idea of a weeklong Chigiana music festival devoted to rediscovering Antonio Vivaldi. Both he and the Count believed Vivaldi to be one of Italy’s greatest and least known composers. No doubt Casella realized the international impact the event could have for Italy and for himself. He became chief organizer and artistic director of the first Settimana Musical Senese, and the date for the Vivaldi Festival Week was set for September 16-21, 1939. Olga assisted, possibly even led Casella in planning and organizing the week and Ezra, no doubt a little jealous of both Olga and Casella, took consolation in the fact that he had transcribed and presented Vivaldi’s music in Rapallo a year and a half before Settimana Musical Senese.
The week long festival programs included Vivaldi instrumental selections and a Bach transcription. More importantly, Casella chose to also feature Vivaldi’s unpunished vocal music. In addition to instrumental manuscripts, the Turin Manuscripts contained a wealth of secular and religious vocal works that had not been sung or heard since Vivaldi’s day. Casella’s Vivaldi Festival Week program included the Credo (RV 591), Gloria (RV 589), Stabat Mater (RV 621), and the complete opera, L’Olimpiade, which was performed on two separate occasions during the week.
During August and the first half of September there was an extraordinary amount of pre-event press on both sides of the Atlantic for the Settimana Musical Senese celebrating the newly re-discovered Antonio Vivaldi. It might appear that Settimana Musical Senese would finally launch Antonio Vivaldi’s music back into the concert halls. But once again it was not to be. Not in 1939 anyway. Just as the Turin Manuscripts discovery of 1926-30 failed to ignite and sustain worldwide interest in Vivaldi, a similar fate was met by Chigiana’s Vivaldi Festival Week of 1939. Hitler invaded Poland and on September 27, 1939, one week after Settimana Musical Senese ended, Warsaw surrendered to Germany.
World War Two had begun and Antonio Vivaldi was no longer news.
X. Italy 1939—The War Years
Mussolini, who had sided with Germany in 1936, declared allegiance to the Axis Powers and entered World War II in 1940.
Because of its industrial importance with factories like Fiat which manufactured autos, tanks and aircraft for the Axis, Turin was the first and the most often bombed cities in Italy. The Allies (mostly RAF) first raided Turin in June of 1940 and continued until April of 1945; the Turin Library was one of the first structures damaged and about 150,000 volumes, including rare ones, were lost. The Vivaldi Turin Collection was not among the destroyed treasures. After the bombings began, the famous Shroud of Turin was removed from the city for safekeeping and it is believed that many of the remaining treasures from the Turin Library were also relocated at that time. As the war waged on, the Italian people became increasingly disenchanted with Benito Mussolini and in 1943 Italy switched sides from the Axis to the Allied Powers although northern Italy remained occupied by Germany.
In 1943 in Milan the Ricordi music publishing company that had published some pre-Settimana Musicale Senese Vivaldi music was destroyed by Allied bombs. Casa Ricordi was founded by Giovanni Ricordi in 1808 and was music publisher for the works of Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, as well as some early Vivaldi. Although priceless manuscripts, documents and Ricordi’s world famous opera posters had been moved prior to bombing, the war brought complete devastation and restoration of the publishing company would continue on through the mid 1950s.
In 1945, during the very last months of the War, the Allies fire bombed Dresden, Germany. The city that up until that time was still known as “Florence of the Elbe,” was leveled in three days. The SLUB Dresden library had placed important documents in the library vault but the incendiary bombings were so intense that some documents were damaged including some Vivaldi manuscripts.
Both Alfredo Casella and Ezra Pound officially supported the Fascist government of the Axis Powers and remained in Italy for the war’s duration. From 1941 until 1943 the profoundly anti-Semitic Pound wrote and often delivered Pro-Fascist anti-Semitic, anti-American military speeches via radio broadcasts, about 125 of them. He was paid by Mussolini a modest average sum of about $18 per broadcast and delivered the speeches up until the day Mussolini was imprisoned. At the war’s beginning, Ezra had invested wife Dorothy’s inheritance, their only substantial source of income, in Mussolini’s government and soon that was all lost. During thee war years the broadcast payments were his only source of income as book royalties transfers from the U.S. were forbidden. From 1944 to 1945 Ezra and Dorothy lived with Olga in her Rapallo apartment without modern conveniences such as electricity. After Settimana Musicale Senese and after the war, Olga became less active in promoting Vivaldi.
Casella was diagnosed with cancer in 1942 but continued to compose and conduct through the war years. He remained associated with the Accedemia Chigiana in Siena where Settimana Musicale Senese future events would promote little known (at the time) Italian composers such as Scarlatti, Pergolesi and Salieri as well as promote lesser known works by Rossiini, Donizetti, Cherubini. Casella also continued to promote the new music of composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew who had fled Berlin in 1933 for Paris then the U.S., even though Hitler banned Schoenberg’s music in German territories.
Benito Mussolini was arrested and removed from office in July of 1943. American troops landed on the Italian mainland in September of that year. The Allies took Rome in June of 1944. German forces in Italy surrendered May 2, 1945. Cities in Tuscany and northern Italy sustained most of Germany’s combat damage.
X. Italy / U.S. 1947—Vivaldi after the War
After the ravages of World War II, Europe began a long journey of recovery and reconstruction. The re-discovering of Antonio Vivaldi became part of that journey.
Two years after the war’s end Antonio Fanna, born in Venice in 1926, founded the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi in Venice to publish and promote Vivaldi’s music and under the editorship and collaboration of Venetian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, undertook publishing a comprehensive edition of Vivaldi’s music. By the end of the War Vivaldi’s future was passed from Siena’s Accademia Chigiana to Venice’s Istitute Italiano Antonio Vivaldi.
On the other side of the Post WWII Atlantic, American violist Louis Kaufman, like Cassella and the Count in Siena, champion of under-performed and undiscovered music; Kaufman was among the first to perform works by Robert Russell Bennett, William Grant Still, plus he was friends with and premiered works by Barber, Copland, Milhaud, and Poulenc. He was also one of the first to perform works by Antonio Vivaldi in the Twentieth Century.
Kaufman was a concertizing classical violinist who was also a Hollywood movie soundtrack musician veteran. He was also the artist who “debuted” on December 31,1947, a portion of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in a recorded-live performance at Carnegie Hall with members of the New York Philharmonic strings just hours before a musicians’ strike would silence recorded music performance in NYC for a year. (The performance was scheduled for later in the year but upon learning of the strike for midnight January 1, they rescheduled Carnegie Hall for December 31, just hours before the strike.) Only a portion of Seasons was performed because the whereabouts of a complete Vivaldi Four Seasons score was unknown at that post WWII time.
After the 1947 Seasons recording at Carnegie hall, Kaufman and his wife traveled to Europe and met at the Italian home of Gian Francesco Malipiero of Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, in search of clues about a complete Vivaldi Seasons score. Upon Malipiero’s advice, Kaufman journeyed north to Brussels to the Royal Music Conservatory library where he did indeed locate a complete copy of Seasons. He departed Brussels with a microfilm of the work and in 1950 in Zurich, Switzerland, Kaufman completed the first recording of the entire Vivaldi Four Seasons. That same year, Kauffman’s Concert Hall Society Label recording of the Vivaldi Seasons won the Grand Prix du Disque, the award for outstanding recording established in France in 1938.
Antonio Vivaldi was still an obscure Italian composer at that time. But finally that was about to change.
While in Paris, Kaufman and his wife told a friend, who was a newspaper correspondent, their story of the search for the “complete” Four Seasons. Their friend/correspondent ran the story in the Continental Daily Mail, an English language newspaper in Paris, and then other newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic picked up the story as did America’s Time Magazine. After the Vivaldi press notoriety from Paris and the Grand Prix du Disque award for the Seasons recording, Kaufman became one of the first, if not the first, performers to launch a series of all-Vivaldi concerts that included performances in New York, London and Paris.
Kaufman played on more than 400 Hollywood movie soundtracks including “The Best Years of our Lives,” “Laura,” “Casablanca,” “Diary of Anne Frank,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Spartacus”; he was concertmaster for more than 100 movies including “Gone with the Wind,” “Showboat,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Intermezzo,” “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” Kaufman was responsible for the final launch that would bring Antonio Vivaldi back into the concert halls and then was introduced to the recording studios. Vivaldi was thrust to the forefront of classical music and then, via recordings, was thrust to the forefront of popular culture worldwide.
Kaufman, defender and promoter of under performed classical music, championed an unknown Antonio Vivaldi who, in the mid Twentieth Century, took on a life of his own and became in fifty short years one of the most performed composers in history. During that same time Vivaldi also became one of the most recorded classical composers in history; there are over 200 (and counting) recordings that are available today.
It’s ironic that movie soundtrack veteran musician Kaufman launched a Vivaldi mid-century career that would involve, in addition to concerts and recordings, inclusion in no fewer than 174 (and counting) movie/TV soundtracks.
XI. Gloria 1957—The ‘real’ Gloria arrives
As mentioned at the beginning, the Vivaldi Gloria (RV 589) that was composed around 1713 and probably first performed at the Venice Pietà in 1715, was lost for over 200 years. Alfredo Casella gave the Gloria its re-discovery debut in 1939 Siena at the Vivaldi Festival Week Settimana Musical Senese. It would be decades before RV 589 would be available in an original edition. Casella edited, arranged, and elaborated the Gloria for the 1939 Siena performance. An “authentic” Gloria was first performed in the U.S. at the First Festival of Baroque Choral Music at New York’s Brooklyn College in 1957. Vivaldi’s Gloria made up for a couple of centuries of silence by swiftly becoming one of the foundations of the worldwide choral repertory.
XII. Rapallo 1945—Ezra Arrested
On the 24th of May, 1945, at the war’s end, U.S. poet Ezra Pound living in Rapallo, was arrested. He was incarcerated at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Center north of Pisa, on suspicion of committing criminal offenses against the Allies. He was the only non-military prisoner incarcerated at the Center. He was detained in one of the camp’s “death cells” a six foot square cage open to the elements on all four sides. In three weeks, after experiencing what was believed to be a nervous breakdown, he was moved to a tent with other prisoners. In mid-November he was flown to Washington to stand trial for treason but was found to be of unsound mind and was transferred to a hospital for the insane where he remained for more than a decade. His eventual release was due in part to the hard work of Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and, once again, his old friend and former Left Bank roommate Ernest Hemingway.
At a hearing before his impending trial it was reported that Ezra Pound stated “I saved Vivaldi….I saved Vivaldi.”
Although Olga would probably top him on the list for “saving Vivaldi” it turns out that Ezra did, singlehandedly, save a portion of Vivaldi. In the 1930s he requested microfilms of selected Vivaldi works from the Dresden SLUB library and he passed some of these on to the Accademia Chigiana in late 1930s. The Dresden library vault was damaged during the WWII bombings and some manuscripts, including Vivaldi’s, were also damaged. So, it turns out that the best copies we have of some of Vivaldi’s Dresden works are not in Dresden. They are in Siena’s Accademia Chigiana Library thanks to Ezra Pound.
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Miles Dayton Fish
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Miles Dayton Fish
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MilesFish.com (click to go to HOME page)
479.366.3331 (cell) 479.619.2237 (office)
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Vivaldi's Venice. Sunrise: Saint Mark's Basin. PHOTO:MilesFish.com
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