jwilzewske: venice

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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Subterranean Venetian Epidemiology and 16th Century Compositional Creativity

On 07-DEC-1562, Adriaen Willaert passed away. The musical father to the composers of Venice thus ended his tenure of thirty-five years as maestro di cappella of San Marco, during which he was the chief musical force in the Republic. His artistic legacy had been immense, but his death marked a watershed in Venetian musical history. A fresh generation of musicians was taking command, and their creations can be seen in Antonio Gardano’s publications of the 1560s.

During the last decade of his life, Antonio Gardano continued to publish music of fine quality whose contents reflected not only favorite music of the past but also the work of younger composers whom Gardano befriended. In fact, the 1560s were especially productive, as Gardano’s firm saw at least 187 editions through the press in that decade, as compared with 108 in the 1550s and 93 in the 1540s. Gardano’s repertory was truly cosmopolitan, but any account of the last decade of his printing career must begin in Venice, for it was republican Venice and its flourishing trade, intellectual aspirations, and religious freedom that fed the music printing industry that had been the city’s glory for a century.

Gardano was an active participant in the musical life of the city—not as a performer, but as a friend and supporter of its musicians. After Willaert’s death, the position of maestro di cappella at the ducal church of San Marco was taken up by Cipriano de Rore, who spent a miserable year there before fleeing back to the court at Parma where he had worked earlier. Rore died there on 27-SEP-1565, and thus another giant among Gardano’s composer friends passed on.

Rore was succeeded by Gioseffo Zurlini, a pupil of Willaert, who held the post until he died on 12-MAY-1569.

Other composers published by Gardano who were active at San Marco in the 1560s were Baldassare Donato, Annibale Padovano, Vincenzo Bell’Haver, Gioseffo Guami, Perissone Cambio, Claudo Merulo, and Giovanni Scrofulascio. Madrigals and motets by Donato, Cambio, Londariti, and Rore were assembled into volumes that Gardano printed. Naturally, in the course of their business with Gardano each of the composers visited Gardano’s rooms in Venice, exchanged manuscript pages with him, shook his hand, descended his dark stairways, drank glasses of wine in his company, breathed his air. Mysteriously, each in turn contracted a progressive illness. One by one, the life of each was snuffed out.

Two doges also succumbed. Girolamo Priuli was elected in 1559. He was succeeded in 1567 by Pietro Loredan, who survived until 1570.

The houses of the wealthy were likewise decimated. A description of music at social gatherings in Venice can be found in Gardano’s dedicatory letter to Marco Trevisan in Willaert’s book of six-voice motets, published in 1542. In this letter Garano asks that Willaert’s motets be performed at Trevisano’s “most honored salon, where the finest performers play and sing the best music with the most noble of personages in attendance.” The contaminated music that Gardano printed and the printer himself were undoubtedly present at these gatherings.

Even the artist Titian may have met his end as a result of his business dealings with Gardano. Titian was completing a magnificent painting of the Annunciation for Gardano’s parish church, the sanctuary beneath whose pavement Gardano himself was to be laid to rest in 1569. In late 1568, Titian was taken ill with a strange inflammation that began in his fingers, ascended to his elbows by 1570, reached his throat by 1573, and finished him off in 1576. Immediately after Titian’s own death, his son and pictorial assistant, Orazio, died of the bubonic plague then raging in Venice.

Attributing the father’s death to the same cause as the son's is an unfounded inferential leap, post hoc ergo propter hoc—an error of careless historians who did not bother to examine Titian’s correspondence (in which he complained for years of his progressive affliction).

In light of recent evidence, the culprit is likely to have been a peculiarly virulent and insidious strain of mycobacterium marinum, known to inhabit the canals of Venice. Gardano’s quarters, located in a disused crypt below the ground level of San Marco, provided an ideal lair from which the mycobacteria could mount their attacks.

Gardano's Moist Lodgings, San Marco, Venice

M. marinum granuloma, 40X light microscopy

How Gardano himself remained impervious to the organism for so long is an astonishing thing—perhaps a fluke of inheritance that only modern genomics could elucidate.

But hold, if you will, your Enlightenment notions of human mastery of Nature and Art in abeyance, and consider Gardano’s eclectic tastes in the music he preferred to print; consider his affinities for the composers he chose to finance; consider his propensity to entertain musicians in his rooms, down in his moist converted crypt in San Marco…

Consider that these inadvertent factors and the communicable illness that was propelled by them may have exerted an effect on the future of Venetian music more profound than any other. Kissing Gardano’s cheeks may have conferred a composerly fate more immutably, more relentlessly than any popular or ducal criticism could ever do. Counting Gardano as an intimate was tantamount to choosing a fate, every bit as much as choosing exposure to HIV might be in present times.

History, of course, is written by the victors. Those Venetian composers who were disliked by Gardano are the ones who survived, who continued to compose until a hoary old age, and whose work is best known to us today. Gardano’s close friends, not so much.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Fontijn’s ‘Desperate Measures’: Confabulating a Plausible Bembo

It may come as something of a surprise to learn that at least four of the Venetian students of Francesco Cavalli were women: the singer-composer Barbara Strozzi; Betta Mocenigo; Fiorenza Grimani; and the young singer Antonia Padoani.”

— Claire Fontijn

CMT: It’s a popular thing in publishing and in movies these days: fan fiction, speculative extension of what’s known. Star Trek’s James T. Kirk when he was at the Academy, in a way that Roddenberry would never have conceived. Taking liberties with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The wildly speculative Da Vinci Code. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, extended ad infinitum; episodes addressed to a seemingly endless demand.

DSM: The sequel-prequel approach is natural, I suppose—for authors and for publishers and marketers. You have a ‘brand’ or ‘franchise’—a ready-made, existing market; people already familiar with the subjects and themes; who find them appealing; who identify with them, and who buy them—and you just continue it.

CMT: The last ten years has seen an explosion of this because of the Web. Anybody who wants to write fan fiction can now do it, with almost zero investment other than their time. And, increasingly, some originators of the intellectual property are relinquishing certain rights to their characters or works—at least in idioms that they themselves do not intend to pursue. That was the subject of one of the pieces on the NPR Morning Edition program this morning . . .

DSM: It’s surprising, though, to see instances of this when the phenomenon touches some of the more arcane dimensions of classical music and early music. We are not astonished to see a film like Amadeus appear, but would we be astonished to see Claire Fontijn’s biography of Antonia Padoani Bembo made into a feature film?

CMT: Well, it would be exotic, I admit. But Fontijn’s book and the accompanying CD are juicy. Bembo was a larger-than-life figure. She was blocked by the church from divorcing her abusive husband and fled from Venice to Paris, where she worked as a composer at the court of Louis XIV. There are a number of aspects that would resonate with feminists in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. ‘Desperate Measures’ is bona fide biography—fastidiously respecting historical details and the preserved correspondence of Antonia Padoani Bembo; all the extant details—as befits Fontijn’s role as Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Music at Wellesley College in Boston. But the book is a page-turner! It reads like an A.S. Byatt book. I can see that ‘Desperate Measures’ could readily be turned into a successful screenplay. This book is not the mere publication of Fontijn’s 1994 doctoral thesis!

DSM: Antonia Padoani Bembo fled the abusive situation and had to leave her children in Venice, is that right? Her rapport with Louis XIV, according to Fontijn, caused Louis XIV to change his views of women generally—not just women as composers, but women as equals of men in all respects?

CMT: She lived with Louis XIV’s sponsorship in a flat near the church of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle. But her situation was still precarious and highly dependent upon Louis XIV—both financially and socially. So don’t get carried away with your notions of ‘equal’ or Louis XIV’s progressiveness. Bembo continued to worry about people revealing where she lived. The scanty correspondence that Bembo left gives us few factual clues as to why this concern persisted, years after her departure from Venice.

DSM: But there is no evidence of paranoia or other psychiatric issues. ‘Desperate Measures’ is perfect—very Byatt-like in its portraying the backstory of Fontijn’s own sleuthing to deduce the motives and causes behind Bembo’s life!

CMT: So Fontijn takes her thesis and wants to write a story, wants to make it accessible to a large audience. Perhaps more to the point, she gets further and further into researching Antonia and discovers a story so rich and multi-faceted that it’s just begging for her to write it. It’s been nibbling at her ankles for ten years now, keeping her up at night with promises of great literature yet to be, and distracting her when she has all sorts of other commitments at Wellesley and with La Donna Musicale and other groups she performs with. She already knows the characters—Louis XIV and many others of them are canon. She embellishes with a few of her own, given that they’ve probably been talking in her head since she began her doctoral program. And she’s got a Creativity Demon. Good for her! The story has legs! It practically writes itself!

DSM: So she writes it down. Fontijn writes what she knows about Bembo’s story, and she writes the way that works for her. She writes best when she does each scene in order, rather than skipping ahead and back and forth—although the Byattish historian in Fontijn does do some chapters that provide character background and context. Some of my writing friends work well when they write the dialogue first, then go back and add descriptions. Some people write the last paragraph or last page, then go to the beginning and see if they get to that point. Some people—my friend Teresa, for example, writes an outline and religiously works from that.

CMT: Plots are very important to this process, and that is something that Fontijn does very well. It must amaze her editor at Oxford University Press! While you can write an academic monograph without a plot (PWP = Plot? What Plot?), if you’re addressing a broad audience and you aspire to selling a screenplay, then you probably want to start with a good plot! In fact, that’s probably the nature of Fontijn’s Creativity Demon: a plot that just won’t go away.

DSM: Or maybe she just had a scenario. What’s the difference? A scenario is “Bembo, displaced from her kids, composes her heart out.” A plot is, “Bembo goes to Paris where she is transformed into a prominent social and political figure, threatening in many ways to elements of the Ancien Regime, and has to adjust to her new lifestyle in the middle of negotiating a trade agreement.” Maybe ten years ago she couldn't tell someone else what the rising and falling action is, or what the goal is that the character Antonia Bembo is seeking. But incubate it awhile! Maybe Fontijn needed to take ten years before she could figure it out for herself.

CMT: No, I think that, given Fontijn’s careful scholarly publications and journal articles, she clearly knew what she had from the start. But what did it mean to her, in 2001, when her story was already over 1 megabyte of juicy story and still wasn’t anywhere near finished? Well, she clearly wasn’t spending too much time going over the same ground. And she wasn’t struggling to stitch fragments together. She realized that this wasn’t just a static ‘plight of baroque woman’ scenario! She had an honest-to-god Plot! She had Antonia and Louis. Are they spending a lot of time thinking long paragraphs about their feelings for each other? She breaks away from the lead characters for a bit and works on a subplot. No, not just one! A second, a third, a fourth plot, related to the main plot. All of these plots may come together at the end (in many good stories, they do, and in many, they remain separate like in real life).

DSM: And in fact this helps to focus her main plot once she’s distanced herself, even if just for a scene or two. Claire Fontijn teaches courses on Early Music, Opera, Women Composers, and German Lieder. She has appeared as a singer and baroque flutist with La Donna Musicale of Boston, the Washington DC Bach Consort, and Le Concert Spirituel of Paris, among other ensembles. Her students must count themselves very lucky!

D esperate Measures stands midway between scholarly work and novel—with the rigor of the former and the readability of the latter.”

— Giovanni Zanovello, Padua, Italy