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  • Leonardo Vinci e il suo tempo: Atti dei Convegni internazionali di studi (Reggio Calabria, 10-12 giugno 2002; 4-5 giugno 2004)
  • Reinhard Strohm
Leonardo Vinci e il suo tempo: Atti dei Convegni internazionali di studi (Reggio Calabria, 10-12 giugno 2002; 4-5 giugno 2004). Ed. by Gatetano Pitarresi. pp. xii + 627. Documenti e studi musicologici, Sopplimenti musicali I, 8. (liriti editore, Reggio Calabria, 2005. ISBN 88-87935-98-X.)

Gaetano Pitarresi and his colleagues have brought together a good range of scholarly expertise in two conferences dedicated to Leonardo Vinci (b. Strongoli, 1696; d. Naples, 1730), held at Reggio Calabria in 2002 and 2004. Now they have derived a substantial volume of proceedings from these contributions. The conferences were convened at the local Conservatorio 'Francesco Cilea', where Pitarresi teaches; they also featured sessions on the critical editing and performance of Baroque music. The proceedings volume in fact incorporates five papers on editing Vivaldi, Hasse, Pergolesi, Jommelli, and the Well-Tempered Clavier.

A show of the strength of central and south Italian musicology and music education, the volume is lightly garnished with international contributions (from Wolfgang Hochstein, Michael Talbot, Diana Blichmann, and Kurt Markstrom). Its main tale, however, is a regional one. The subtitle of the Vinci section, 'Architetture musicali nella Napoli del Viceregno austriaco', insinuates both a musical (perhaps analytical) and a socio-political metaphor. The contributions focus on style analysis on the one hand, biography and cultural history on the other. The background for this combination is surely to be sought in the transalpine origins of musical research on Vinci and his Neapolitan environment. The composer's eighteenth-century fame had most emphatically been acknowledged by Charles Burney, and it is this early acknowledgement of Vinci and his generation (see Kurt Markstrom, 'Burney's Assessment of Leonardo Vinci', Acta musicologica, 67 (1995), 142-63), rather than Francesco Florimo's additional tale of a 'Neapolitan School' (1880-2), that Edward J. Dent, Helmut Hucke, Michael F. Robinson, and Daniel Heartz developed in their statements on Neapolitan pre-classical innovations. These scholars had also inherited the style-analytical methods of Hermann Kretzschmar, Guido Adler, Hugo Riemann, and Wilhelm Fischer, which were particularly useful for an assessment of how close the music in question had come to Viennese classicism. In the 1970s, the Calabrese composer was a central figure in my own bibliographical and analytical research on opera seria arias; Kurt Markstrom followed with the first comprehensive biography and a work-by-work interpretation of Vinci's operas, now at last available in book form (Kurt Markstrom, The Operas of Leonardo Vinci, Napoletano (Hillsdale, NY, 2007). It is a joy to see that the present volume documents, for the first time ever, a strong Italian interest in Vinci research, and that it does it so convincingly.

Markstrom opens the parade with new, fascinating detail on Vinci's Roman season of 1728, the misfortunes of his Catone in Utica, and the amorous entanglement that apparently led to the composer's sudden death by poisoning two years later. Similar archival research also char [End Page 604] acterizes the four-handed contribution of Ausilia Magaudda and Danilo Costantini: ostensibly focused on a performance of a Vinci commedia per musica at Vasto (Molise), this essay spreads out documents of diverse kinds on musical patronage, aristocratic country life, singers, and the musical transfers between capital and provinces in the ancient 'Regno di Napoli'. Gaetano Pitarresi achieves more unity of purpose in his excellent reconstruction of the oratorio tradition in Naples, exemplifying with Vinci's passion oratorio Maria dolorata, a major work. Pitarresi now correctly dates it (1722), assesses its style, and assigns it to the correct performing institution: the 'Arciconfraternita' dei Sette Dolori costituita presso il Chiostro della Chiesa di San Francesco di Paola del Convento di San Luigi di Palazzo'. The paper by Paolo Maione on the Neapolitan commedia per musica, despite some heavy bibliographic referencing, is really a brief essai on the contemporary intellectual environment of the genre. Francesco Cotticelli, with signifiant publications on the Neapolitan theatre to his credit, contributes a more poignant reading: the contract concerning the training and recruitment of a young singer (Gaetano Bottinelli) for a role...

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