- Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco Provenzale (1624-1704)
Naples looms large in histories of music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, larger still in those of the eighteenth, but not so in the seventeenth century, at least in the seventy years between the death of Carlo Gesualdo in 1613 and the appointment of Alessandro Scarlatti as maestro of the Real Cappella. Epilogue to one golden age or prologue to another, Seicento Naples lacks the musical reputation of Venice and Rome, despite the best efforts of such giants of the past century as Salvatore di Giacomo, Benedetto Croce, and Ulisse Prota-Giurleo. A similar fate dogs its leading composer, Francesco Provenzale, relegated to histories of opera as precursor to Scarlatti and the eighteenth-century masters that followed.
Since the 1980s, Dinko Fabris has sought to right these and other historiographical wrongs. The book under review, a revision of his 2002 doctoral dissertation at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London, is a summa of his efforts. It begins by sketching the musical life of Naples itself. Chapter 1, "La città della festa," reviews the principal civic and religious celebrations that filled the year, and in which music figured prominently. Fabris then describes the leading musical institutions of the city, among them chapels, theaters, pedagogues, and publishers. He closes by narrating the disasters that struck the city during the 1630s, '40s, and '50s: disasters that either stimulated or impeded musical production. (This being Naples, the usual suspects — pestilence, war, famine — were supplemented by a spectacular eruption of Vesuvius in 1631.)
In chapter 2, "The Age of Provenzale," Fabris focuses on both city and composer. He begins by discussing Provenzale's most important predecessors and colleagues, and the roles they played in Neapolitan musical life. A biographical sketch of the composer follows, based on the few surviving documents that record his baptism, marriage, birth of children, and the like. Chapter 3, "The Four Conservatoires," similarly joins biography and institutional history. Provenzale served as maestro di cappella for two of these immensely important establishments, S. Maria di Loreto and S. Maria della Pietà dei Turchini, and it was there that he trained whole generations of Neapolitan musicians.
Fabris devotes the next three chapters to the composer's music, of which precious little survives: these are supplemented by a "Catalogue of Provenzale's Works," the most detailed such list in print. Chapter 4, "A Composer for the Church," is the longest in the book, and as such provides much-needed balance to [End Page 1394] the usual emphasis on Provenzale as opera composer. Fabris closely examines the composer's liturgical music, a Requiem mass, and a vespers service, as well as such quasi-dramatic creations as his oratory music and melodrammi sacri. In covering more familiar ground, the next chapter, "Provenzale and Opera in Naples," reminds us of another obstacle to the composer's reputation. Of six such works he is known to have written, scores survive for just two, Lo schiavo di sua moglie and Stellidaura vendicante. Chapter 6, "Chamber and Instrumental Music," underscores another problem that hampers the study of Provenzale, that of dubious attributions. As Fabris notes, seven cantatas and five organ works fall in this category, further diminishing an already slender catalogue.
Fabris returns to biography and social history in his final chapters. Chapter 7, "Hope and Disillusion," traces Provenzale's activities at other leading Neapolitan institutions as maestro to the city itself and to the Tesoro di S. Gennaro. "Disillusion" refers among other things to Provenzale's experiences with the Real Cappella, to which he was not admitted until the death of a rival in 1680, and of which he never became maestro. Chapter 8, "Conclusion," charts Provenzale's posthumous legacy: his nine-voice setting of the hymn Pange lingua enjoyed wide diffusion throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long after his operas were forgotten. Fabris also provides details on the final years of the composer's life. As in the preceding...