An Oratorio by Giovanni Paolo Colonna

Bolognese composer, organist, organ builder, and maestro di cappella Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1637–1695) is undoubtedly one of those major musicians of the late seventeenth century whose music could benefit from more attention than it has received so far. Known until the 1970s primarily to local historians, musicologists, and musicians in Bologna, Colonna first came to the attention of Anglo-American musicology through the dissertation, two important articles, and the 1974 publication of his Messa concertata a 9 voci by Anne Schnoebelen. (Anne Schnoebelen, “The Concerted Mass at S. Petronio in Bologna ca.1660–1730: A Documentary and Liturgical Study” [Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois, 1966]; Schnoebelen, “Performance Practices at San Petronio in the Baroque,” Acta Musicologica 41, fasc. 1–2 [January–June 1969]: 37–55; Schnoebelen, “Cazzati vs. Bologna: 1657–1671,” Musical Quarterly 57, no. 1 [January 1971]: 26–39; Giovanni Paolo Colonna, Messa a nove voci concertata con stromenti, ed. Anne Schnoebelen, Recent Researches on the Music of the Baroque Era, 17 [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1974].) Only in the late 1980s and early 1990s did conductor Sergio Vartolo record several compact discs of large-scale polychoral vesper psalms by Colonna with soloists, choirs, and instrumentalists gathered under the name of the Cappella Musicale di San Petronio for the Bolognese label Tactus. Recordings later followed of small-scale psalms, motets, and a couple of oratorios (by performers including Vartolo, Francesco Cera, and Maria Luisa Baldassari), and still almost exclusively for Tactus, but the interest in Colonna unfortunately faded again for a decade or so.

Reasons for this fading interest are manifold: as I have explored Colonna’s work in my own research, it has become clear that for us today most of Colonna’s most appealing compositions are extant in manuscript, and were meant almost exclusively for performance during the particularly festive liturgy for the feast day of Bologna’s patron, Saint Petronius, on 3 and 4 October in the city’s vast basilica of San Petronio. The acoustic peculiarities of that immense space not only have repercussions on the compositional techniques and the nature of the counterpoint Colonna and his colleagues used, but also on the massive performing forces needed to fill such a space. (See Marc Vanscheeuwijck, The Cappella Musicale of San Petronio in Bologna under Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1674–95): History, Organization, Repertoire, Etudes d’histoire de l’art, 8 [Brussels; Rome: Institut historique belge de Rome; Turnhout: Brepols, 2003]; Vanscheeuwijck, “Giovanni Paolo Colonna and Petronio Franceschini: Building Acoustics and Compositional Style in Late Seventeenth-Century Bologna,” in Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory, ed. Peter Dejans, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute, 6 [Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007]: 171–201.) Typically these compositions in concertato style called for one or two trumpets, eight or nine soloists, two choirs (one four-part and one five-part choir), and a large group of strings and continuo instruments that included the two historical organs (the oldest one from 1475, the “new” one from 1596). Although Colonna published twelve collections of sacred compositions between 1674 and 1695, most are either double-choir psalms and mass settings in old-style counterpoint with basso continuo, or small-scale motets with one or two voices and continuo, sometimes with two solo violin parts. Only his opera 10 and 12 contain short masses and vesper psalms with larger forces—three to five soloists, one five-part choir, strings, and continuo. Although Pyrros Bamichas recently published Colonna’s psalms opus 12 in full score online (Psalmi ad Vesperas, Opus Duodecimum (1694), ed. Pyrros Bamichas, in WLSCM: Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music, http://www.sscm-wlscm.org/index.php...