Vivaldi, Gasparini, Mary Magdalene, and the Women of the Pietà

Part 1

Vivaldi dominates our view of the musical activities at the Pietà in Venice, but he was not the first composer of significance to be employed there. That honor belongs to Francesco Gasparini (1661–1727), who was engaged as maestro di coro in 1701. He expanded the scope of the ospedale’s musical activities and hired musicians of distinction, including the virtuoso Vivaldi as maestro di violino in September 1703, to instruct its female wards.¹

In 1701 Gasparini was already an established figure. Born near Lucca, by 1682 he was an organist in Rome, and in 1686 his first opera premiered in Livorno, followed by others for Rome, Genoa, Naples, and Palermo. His first oratorio for the Pietà was Triumphus misericordiae of 1701, and his first Venetian opera was staged in 1702. By the time he left the city in 1713, he was Venice’s leading composer for the theater, having written twenty-three operas and fifteen oratorios, almost all for the Pietà. In the remaining years of his life, only one more original oratorio, Anima rediviva of 1717, and one new opera, Gli equivoci d’amore e d’innocenza of 1723, were premiered at Venice.

Gasparini took leave from the Pietà on 23 April 1713, having already determined to go permanently. He resettled in Rome, where he died in 1727. His fame was widely recognized and finds mention in both John Hawkins (General History of the Science and Practice of Music [London, 1776]) and Charles Burney, if only in general terms. (The latter, for example, describes some of Gasparini’s cantatas as “graceful, elegant, natural, and often pathetic; less learned and uncommon than those of Ales. Scarlatti; but for that reason, more generally pleasing and open to the imitation and pillage of composers gifted with little invention.”)² His total of about sixty-three operas exceeds Vivaldi’s approximate tally of fifty, if not by much by contemporary standards, but his twenty-nine oratorios far surpass in number Vivaldi’s own four known works of this type.

Among Gasparini’s distinctions while in Venice was the consolidation of the tradition of oratorio at the Pietà (which was immediately continued by Vivaldi in his two known oratorios for the ospedale, Moyses Deus Pharaonis, rv 643, and Juditha triumphans, rv 644, of 1714 and 1716) as its first bona fide maestro di coro. His oratorios run the gamut from the Old and New Testaments, including the canonical, the apocryphal, and the hagiographical-historical. They are his most numerous large-scale works after the operas, and he obviously devoted much time and energy to them. Unfortunately, however, as Denis and Elsie Arnold point out regarding the Venetian oratorio in general and his oratorios in particular:

We know pitifully little of oratorio music from this time. The scores have perished and the librettos are not very informative. . . .

Gasparini’s oratorios are an especially sad loss since he was no mean composer, and one surviving oratorio [S. Maria egittiaca of 1717] . . . shows him to have been a post–Alessandro Scarlatti figure with a talent for agreeable melody.³

Nonetheless, knowledge of the oratorio tradition in Venice did not completely disappear with the end of the Republic in 1797: the Venetian historian Francesco Caffi (1778–1874), for example, wrote about his personal recollections of stories concerning individual figlie del coro (i.e., the female musicians), the rivalry of the ospedali, and the importance and popularity of the oratorio productions in his unpublished Notizie per una Storia teatrale of ca. 1850:

Oratorii deliziossimi che scritti in lingua latina metricamente, posti in musica dai più renovati musurgi ed accompagnati da pienissima orchestra, esse nel dopo pranzo d’ogni giornata festiva dall’alto de’ chiusi lor cori eseguivano a gara nelle stesse lor Chiese dale quali . . . zeppe d’uditori che v’accorean da ogni lato. . . .

Nei tre Ospitali, Incurabili, Mendicanti e Spedaletto, fiorì contemporaneamente la musica; e nella continua lor gara or l’uno or l’altro avea su tre rivali: Trionfò il Pio Luogo La Pietà; sebben vi sedessero musurgi [sic] eccellentissimi: Gasparini, Porta...