Il fondo musicale del Duomo di Pavia by Mariateresa Dellaborra and Maria Cecilia Farina (review)

This volume is a good lesson about how a catalogue of music manuscripts in a cathedral archive should—or must—be written. The first section is not only a historical survey about the archive but also a musical history of the Cathedral, the chapel masters, the customs, etc., even if the collection is now held by the local Seminary. The second section contains the complete list of bibliographic entries, with the surprise of an edition not listed in RISM A/I (Orazio Polaroli, Salmi per tutto l'anno a' quattro voci con il basso per l'organo e violini se piace [Brescia, Marco Vendramino, 1738]).

The first part is written by Mariateresa Dellaborra, expert and passionate scholar who devoted many contributions to Pavia's history: the Duomo musical chapel as institution began in 1564: at this time an organ already existed, made by Giovanni Battista Facchetti di Brescia post 1547, the year of a document concerning the construction of the gallery ("ponte") for the cantoria. Later, in 1811 the organ builder Luigi Amati, requested for a new project, said: "vi erano in precedenza ben quattro organi: due di 12', uno di 8' e uno di 4'" ("there were earlier four organs"). Long is the list of the chapel masters, among which Nicola Parma (years of service 1580–1596), a certain Landino (first half of seventeenth century), Giovanni Paolo Martinengo (1645–1655), Gerolamo Robolino (1659–1664), Antonio Francesco Martinenghi, (1681–1706), Giovanni Antonio Costa (see below), Giovanni Sampietro (1757–1778), Raimondo Mei (1778–1796), Angelo Cugi and Giovanni Moro, Luigi Tosi (1810–1857), and Alessandro Buzio 1857–1885. In the list of organists Agostino Gilberti (1566–1577), Landino again, Giovanni Battista Magone (1584–1613?), Martinengo, and Robolino again. From the accounts of the feasts, we imagine bombastic occasions of baroque music: from eighteenth-century manuscripts by Mei one can argue an example of ritual and liturgical practice; from other items of the eighteenth century the practice of alternatim was alive. One of the most interesting figures in Dellaborra's reconstruction is Giovanni Antonio Costa who hailed from Pavia: his vicissitudes brought him, from an early age, to Asti (Piedmont) in 1691–1692. Then he was charged in Pavia from 1706 onwards, but in 1713 he litigated with the Seminary because he stopped teaching polyphony and carried on teaching chant only: in a defense (transcribed in the Appendix), Costa explained it saying that his fee was suspended by the bishop, who brought up a strange norm, according to which the bishop could not be compelled to remunerate the master, without nevertheless giving the leave [!]. In 1713, the Perroni brothers from Milan, whom Costa addressed, were requested by Turin Cathedral to supply the name of a music master: they would mention Costa, if only he was free. Costa left Pavia only in 1727 and then found a job in Vercelli (in Piedmont) and stayed there until 1735.

The most consistent part of the archive—as often in Northern Italy—is represented by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music: obviously the music composed by musicians active in the Cathedral, such as Gerolamo Gazzaniga (in service as master and organist between 1727 and 1734), and especially Giovanni Maria Bianchi, Giovanni Sampietro, Raimondo Mei, but also the evidence of the use of polychoral Masses copied from the printing of the Bolognese school (i.e., Maurizio Cazzati, Giovanni Paolo Colonna, Angelo Antonio Caroli), that witness performing practices like the doppio coro—somewhat confirmed by the presence of the manuscript masses for eight voices by Ambrogio Bissone, a composer from Vercelli.

A composer like Raimondo Mei, in full baroque style, within his more extended choral settings and "con sinfonia", inserts modern taste into ancient style, which maybe on the contrary he does not master so well. Instead, a more interesting personality is Domenico Scagni, a composer who flourished in the second half of...