Messa, e salmi concertati, op. 4 (1639) (review)

Giovanni Rovetta. Messa, e salmi concertati, op. 4 (1639). Edited by Linda Maria Koldau. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 109-10.) Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, Inc., c2001. [Part 1. Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii-xvi; texts and trans., p. xvii-xx; 4 plates; score, 127 p.; crit. report, p. 129-31. ISBN 0-89579-478-0. $58. Part 2. Acknowledgments, p. vi; texts and trans., p. vii-xi; score, 169 p.; crit. report, p. 171-74. ISBN 0-89579-479-9. $69.]

A new, two-volume modern edition of a major Mass and Vespers collection by a seventeenth-century Venetian composer would be a welcome addition to the corpus of early baroque music under almost any circumstances, but it is especially so when the composer is Giovanni Rovetta (ca. 1596-1668), who, with Alessandro Grandi (for a time) and Francesco Cavalli, was one of the primary figures surrounding Claudio Monteverdi at St. Mark's. Surprisingly, in spite of the importance accorded to these composers in both contemporaneous and modern scholarly accounts of North Italian music during this crucial period, little of the repertory has been made available in critical editions. Thus, these two recent volumes in A-R Editions' series Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era are a handsome down payment toward filling this gap.

Rovetta's Messa, e salmi concertati, op. 4, was published in Venice in 1639 by Alessandro Vincenti, shortly after the music was performed in November 1638 to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin (later Louis XIV). To honor the future Sun King, the French ambassador to Venice, Hamelot de la Hussaye, organized a lavish four-day festival, commissioning Rovetta, who since 1627 had been vice-maestro at St. Mark's, to compose the music for the religious celebrations held at Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the island across from the ducal palace. In keeping with the Venetian love of spectacular public pomp, the Mass was preceded by a procession from the doge's palace to the church —the dignitaries and their following crossed the wide stretch of lagoon that separates the two islands on a bridge of boats rafted together.

Drawing on the contemporaneous account by Fausto Ciro published in the same year to commemorate the event—Venetia festiva . . . , a source already known to James H. Moore in 1979 ("Vespers at St. Mark's, 1625-1675: Music of Alessandro Grandi, Giovanni Rovetta, and Francesco Cavalli" [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles]; published in Studies in Musicology, 30 [Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981]) but not generally discussed by scholars—Linda Koldau documents in the edition's introduction not only the commission and the events that made up the festival, but also the music-making itself, including the size and components of the ensemble that the French ambassador put at Rovetta's disposal. Many of the details, including not only instruments within the church but also outside of it (Ciro mentions pifari, tamburi, trombe, et violini), as well as the procession and the firing of cannons at the elevation of the Host, agree with iconographic evidence as well as with the particulars already known for the celebrations of 1631 at the end of the plague that had ravaged the city in 1630-31. As Koldau notes, Rovetta's collection is one of the first substantial publications of the post-plague period after a long hiatus, and his first of sacred music in over a decade.

The music itself is quite varied. The Mass, which following the more veneto includes only the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, is arranged to call for increasingly larger vocal ensembles (from five voices in the Kyrie to seven in the Gloria), which are augmented throughout by a pair of violins and continuo, as well as occasionally by trombones. The writing is a mix of choral polyphony and soloistic passages for various vocal combinations, with the violins participating independently throughout and...