Venetians

by Paul Strathern

  Galileo quickly wrote up his findings, and in 1610 published them in a short work called Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). Later that same year he received word from Florence, from his former pupil Cosimo de’ Medici, who had recently succeeded as Grand Duke of Tuscany. Grand Duke Cosimo II formally invited Galileo to accept the well-paid post of ‘first philosopher and mathematician at his court. Galileo was elated by this opportunity, and late in 1610 left Venice for his native Tuscany. He is known to have taken his two daughters with him and to have placed them in the San Matteo convent at Arcetri in the hills a mile south of Florence. By means of letters he would remain in constant contact with his favourite eldest daughter Virginia, who certainly inherited at least some of her father’s intellect. Their mother, Marina Gamba, and his four-year-old son were left behind in Venice; it was long thought that Galileo had provided her with sufficient money for a dowry, which she used to get married, but it now appears that she was probably in ill health and too debilitated to travel such a distance, for she died two years later.

  Galileo would live to regret leaving the protection of Venice. In 1615 a decree was issued in Rome declaring that the Copernican theory was heretical, and banning his work, as well as several other works, including one by Kepler. No work by Galileo was banned, but he received a private warning from Cardinal Bellarmine, who just fifteen years previously had condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake. Galileo would rashly ignore this warning and, despite the efforts of Grand Duke Cosimo II to protect him, in 1633 the sixty-nine-year-old Galileo was summoned to Rome to face the Inquisition. Fearing Bruno’s fate, Galileo publicly retracted his view that the Earth moved around the sun, though at the same time he is said to have been unable to refrain from muttering to himself, ‘And yet it does move.’ He was now banned from disseminating any of his scientific views and condemned to house arrest. He chose to stay in a villa in Arcetri, in order to be near his daughter in her convent, but was heart-broken when she died of dysentery in 1634, within a year of his return. The ageing Galileo lived on in Arcetri, surreptitiously continuing with his work even as his sight began to fail, until he died blind at the age of seventy-seven in 1642.

  News of Galileo’s trial, his confinement and his eventual demise would all have been followed closely in Venice. A direct consequence of the liberal climate maintained by the Republic was that the people of Venice were becoming increasingly informed on all manner of matters. Sir Henry Wotton stigmatised the dissemination of ‘news’ as ‘the very disease of this city’. When reports of events reached Venice, they would be publicly read out before an assembled crowd of citizens, each of whom was expected to pay a coin called a gazzetta for the privilege. And news reported by these means was not only confined to such matters as war, disasters and Galileo’s appearance before the Roman Inquisition. People were equally interested in, and willing to pay for, all manner of the latest information: Galileo’s discoveries of the wonders of an entirely new universe were also reported in this fashion. When the world’s first newspaper was produced in Venice sometime around 1630 it was known as the Gazzetta.* Although there are other claims to this ‘first’, the Gazzetta was perhaps the earliest publication to appear regularly, usually on a weekly basis; it was printed on a large sheet, which could be folded so as to produce four pages of news.

  Ironically, this liberalising and insatiable thirst for news of all kinds also had its repressive underside. Gossip flourished in the narrow streets of the city, secrets from overheard conversations quickly circulated, and within this comparatively close-knit community everyone kept an eye on everyone else. Inevitably this fuelled a collective paranoia about spying, which was put to effective use by the Council of Ten in the interests of public order, detecting plots against the government and any suspicious activities by agents acting for foreign powers. As had been seen in the ‘Spanish Plot’ of 1610, fears of spying were certainly justified, and throughout the following century the city would continue to attract foreign spies, even in the most unlikely of guises. Thus in 1625 the French philosopher Rene Descartes would spend a month or so in the city, acting as a spy for the Jesuits. And three-quarters of a century later the German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz would make two visits to Venice of a similar length, covertly soliciting sensitive intelligence on various political and theological matters, while at the same time more openly gathering information for his own omnivorous intellectual purposes, which included a pioneering interest in China. (It was in Italy that he was given a first-hand description of the wonders of Hangzhou, the very city described by Marco Polo.)

  Under such circumstances there is no denying that the Council of Ten faced a considerable challenge. However, the coexistence of its intrusive attitude towards the behaviour of its own citizens and the city’s traditionally liberal attitude towards ideas appears to have formed a tension in which creative ideas were still able to flourish, though how long such a delicate balance could be maintained was open to question.

  * This annual event was already nearly 150 years old, having started soon after Johannes Gutenberg set up his first printing press at nearby Mainz. Apart from periodic breaks during times of war and plague, it has continued for more than half a millennium since then.

  * According to White, Bruno’s silence was ensured by more vicious means: ‘A long metal spike was thrust through Bruno’s left cheek pinning his tongue … Then another spike was rammed vertically through his lips.’

  * From the Greek tele meaning ‘distant’ and skopos ‘to see’.

  * Despite the fact that Aretino is called ‘the first journalist’, he did not write for a newspaper. Instead, his libellous rumours, scurrilous poems and satires were distributed in the form of printed handbills and pamphlets.

  18

  ‘The Seat of Music’

  IT COMES AS no surprise that a city of such fluidity and limpid reflection should also be a city of music. The gondoliers were not the only ones known for their spontaneous singing as they worked. In the market places the vendors sang out praises (and prices) of their fresh vegetables, fish and meat. Many early visitors from northern Europe commented on how the sound of musical instruments and singing flowed from open windows into the streets and alleyways, while groups of musicians roamed the streets playing for money. Even a public reading of the news was liable to be preceded by a song, intended to draw the attention of the gazzetta-paying onlookers. Meanwhile the skill and commercial acumen of the city’s many publishers ensured that printed music was readily available, and during the sixteenth century the city’s skilled instrument-makers played their role in ensuring that the violin, the lute and other stringed instruments evolved into the classical shapes we know today. Indeed, some Venetians even came to regard their violin-makers on a par with those from Cremona, the Lombardy city that was home to the Stradivari family. It is no wonder that the first 1581 guidebook to Venice even went so far as to call it la sede de musica (the seat of music).

  Yet there can be no doubt as to Venice’s major musical accomplishment – namely in the pioneering and development of opera, though curiously this musical form so associated with Venice was in fact invented in Florence – and coincidentally it was Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, who would play a leading role in this. He and a circle of friends who played music together found themselves becoming increasingly frustrated by the medieval restrictions imposed by polyphony, which required voices to sing in counterpoint against each other. They wished to see music too undergo a renaissance, breaking free of church polyphony and returning to its classical roots. They attempted to revive Greek tragedy, which was known to have been accompanied by music that has since been lost. It was the writing of music to accompany Greek tragedy that gave birth to opera – with a single-voice recitative, in part invented by Vincenzo Galilei, being used to draw together the narrative between aria and chorus. The earliest extant opera is Euridice, composed by Galilei’s friend Jacopo Peri, which was performed in Florence in 1600.

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p; Opera quickly became all the rage, but nowhere more so than in Venice. It is no anachronism to claim, as many have, that this was the first ‘pop’ music, the great leveller of its day. Opera had something for the entire audience: instrumental expertise, virtuoso singing, catchy melodies, passion and high drama, star performers and scandalous costumes – it was all there and at prices to suit all. As such, it appealed to all classes, and its rapturous reception in republican Venice is not surprising. As early as 1637 the city built its first public opera house – the Teatro Tron, near the Rialto. By the end of the century Venice had become the undisputed capital of opera in Europe, with more than ten full-sized opera houses, and perhaps another half-dozen more intimate venues, as well as no fewer than four conservatoires where young musicians and singers trained. But it was not only the performers themselves who contributed to this pre-eminence. As evidenced in the production lines of the Arsenale, this was a city of highly skilled engineers, and when they turned their attentions to the mechanics of stage management they were soon producing awe-inspiring scenery as well as sensational effects – a succession of which could speedily be manoeuvred into place behind the curtains between scenes. This produced a thrilling spectacle to delight the eye as well as the ear.

  Despite Venice’s triumph in this field, its audiences were not always as appreciative as their city’s reputation had led many visitors to expect. The many boxes that ringed the upper tiers of the opera houses were the preserve of noble families, who purchased them outright and thus came to regard them as their personal property. Thus many came to use their family box as another living room, an extension of their palazzi, often attending the theatre many nights a week regardless of the opera being performed. Guests were entertained to food and drink, and conversation would continue throughout the performance, while noble friends often made the rounds of other boxes. Meanwhile, below in the stalls, the lesser strata of Venetian society would continue to gossip, giggle and even play cards throughout the performance on stage. According to the writer Peter Ackroyd, ‘The noise of their chatter was compared to a bush filled with birds.’ The lower orders were permitted to wear hats in the theatre to protect them from the rain of refuse from above, as the nobles spat out their fishbones and fruit pips, and tossed their gnawed chicken bones over the balconies of their boxes.

  As gondoliers had transported their charges to the opera, and were expected to wait until the performance was over to take them back, they were granted free entry to the opera house, providing a welcome service for the management by filling up unoccupied seats at less popular performances, or simply cramming along the walls and crouching in the aisles at more popular shows. At the end of the opera they would be particularly vociferous towards the singers, with competing groups stamping and shouting ‘Bravo!’ for their favourites, or setting up a deafening chorus of catcalls, whistles and jeers to greet their opponents’ favourite, an inept performer or one who for some reason attracted their opprobrium. Different groups were frequently bribed by interested parties to jeer or boo, sometimes even being encouraged to interrupt the performance to express their feelings at the entrance of a particular singer.

  Venetian opera came into its own during this period and would produce a succession of operatic composers. The finest of the earlier wave was undoubtedly Claudio Monteverdi, whose operas and madrigals carried over from the early Renaissance polyphony to elaborately ornamental flourishes of the baroque period.* This is epitomised by his opera L’Orfeo, which he wrote in 1617 at the age of forty. One of the earliest operas, it was based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who descends into the Underworld and after charming the gods with his music, is allowed to lead his dead bride Eurydice back to the upper world, but fatally disobeys them by turning back to look at her. This of course echoes the story of Peri’s earliest opera Euridice, but in Monteverdi’s version both the musical and narrative line are more fully developed, making this in many ways the first completely realised example of operatic form – to such an extent, and with such success, that L’Orfeo remains in the repertoire to this day.

  In 1613 Monteverdi moved to Venice, where he became conductor of the orchestra at the basilica of San Marco. Although he had married in earlier life, by this time his wife had died and his children had grown up and married, so in 1632 he joined the priesthood. This may well have been prompted by his survival of the 1630 plague, which is known to have killed almost one-third of the population. Despite Monteverdi taking up holy orders, 1642 would see the staging of what many experts regard as his most technically accomplished opera L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), which is based upon the most unholy subject of the Roman emperor Nero and his mistress. Indeed, it was famously decribed by the music critic Bernard Holland as ‘the story of virtue punished and greed rewarded’. Such inversion of morality is transcended by Monteverdi’s skill in incorporating elements of tragedy, romance and even comedy, as well as by a portrayal of realistic character in some psychological depth.

  Amazingly, Monteverdi accomplished all this when he was in his seventies, a decade that marked some of his most creative years, as well as the peak of his widespread fame. Possibly through the sheer effort of producing such work during his late years, his earlier abrasiveness is said to have developed into the full-blown crotchetiness of old age. The following year he revisited his birthplace in Cremona and then travelled on to Mantua, the scene of his earliest triumphs, before returning (in the words of Tasso), ‘Like a swan, feeling the fatal hour is near, approaches … Venice, the Queen of all waters’. He would die in Venice in November 1643 at the age of seventy-seven.

  Less than half a century later would see the birth of the greatest of all Venetian composers, Antonio Vivaldi, on 4 March 1678. It was said that on the day of his birth Venice was shaken by an earthquake, and that in response his mother promised God that her son would be dedicated to the priesthood. His father, on the other hand, had been a barber who abandoned his trade to become a musician. His first appointment as a professional violinist was with the orchestra that played in the basilica of San Marco at a salary of fifteen ducats a year. However, this soon rose to twenty-five ducats when it became clear that he had sufficient talent to perform solos. It appears that the young Vivaldi was expertly taught the violin by his father from an early age, and soon began showing such exceptional talent and originality that his father even began instructing him in the art of composition. Despite the prospect of a promising career in music, his mother seems to have insisted upon the fulfilment of her promise to God, and Antonio trained for the priesthood, eventually being ordained at the age of twenty-five in 1703.

  Even so, it soon became clear that he was unable (or unwilling) to fulfil all his priestly duties. He had to give up performing mass because he was so often unable to finish administering the service as he suffered from strettezza di petto (literally ‘tightness of the chest’). Several interpretations have been put upon this complaint. Some assert that since his youth Vivaldi had suffered from bronchial asthma, with its suggestion of psychological stress induced by a suppressed unwillingness to enter the priesthood. Others see this ailment as angina pectoris. Another suggestion, in keeping with the more individualistic view of all artists that was beginning to emerge during this period, has him suspended from saying mass because he was in the habit of becoming preoccupied and wandering off into the sacristy to jot down a snatch of music that had occurred to him.

  In the same year as he was ordained Vivaldi was appointed to the post of violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà, the large orphanage on the Riva degli Schiavoni overlooking the open water close to the house where Petrarch had lived. This institution took in abandoned children: here young boys were taught a trade before being despatched into the outside world, while girls received a more standard female education before taking up their duties as skivvies or servants. Girls who showed talent were permitted to stay on as members of the Ospedale’s choir or orchestra. In time, Vivaldi would become director of thi
s choir, as well as the composer of its music and a virtuoso musician in its orchestra. Even in a city where musical competition was fierce indeed, the public performances of this choir achieved a high reputation under the direction of ‘il prete rosso’ (‘the red priest’), as he came to be known on account of his red hair. The girls performed in rising galleries behind wrought-iron grilles, their voices emerging as if from the building itself or the upper air, achieving a sublime beauty. During performances the canal outside the building would be clogged with gondolas as their passengers listened to the sheer beauty of the girls’ voices floating out over the water. Vivaldi was soon expected to produce a new piece of work for each feast day, but as his output increased, so did its quality. Besides sacred vocal music, he now also produced cantatas and concertos. He well understood the brilliance of his music, and was ambitious to have it appreciated. However, his early forays into the outside world of music made little impression: Venice had a jealously guarded hierarchy of composers, and no mere orphanage priest was going find a place here without difficulty. At the same time, relations with the board of the Ospedale became strained, partly owing to jealousies, and partly it would seem because of certain eccentricities in Vivaldi’s character. It is difficult to pin down the precise nature of these eccentricities; his portraits suggest a slight capriciousness, and he may well have exhibited some oddities of manner. His persistent asthma, the possible effects of an autistic nature, a weakened physique overstrained by excessive work – all these have been suggested. Even the reports of his behaviour seem contradictory: there are some reports of him being solitary, spending hours lost in the isolation of his room amidst scattered sheets of music, constantly composing. He may have been in poor health, yet others speak of his boundless energy, endlessly coaching the girls’ choir in their new pieces, and of the strain caused by the amazing dexterity of his virtuoso violin-playing. Many remarked on his piety; others on his ambitious nature.