Venetian Music During the Renaissance
When the current St Mark’s was built at the end of the eleventh century (it was consecrated in 1073), the Republic of Venice, a city built on 118 small islands, under the authority of the chief magistrate, or Doge, had a unique electoral system for public offices. This system precluded any one noble family or person from acquiring a disproportionate amount of wealth or political prominence. This resulted in a notable lack of artistic patronage, as far as Venetian musicians were concerned, and ensured that St Mark’s would become the musical centre of Venetian life for at least the next five centuries. The city of Venice, its great wealth built as a result of its prominent position as a trading post at the top of the Adriatic Sea, and its centuries of trade in grain, spices and silk between Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world, had built St Mark’s to house the holy remains of the Alexandrian Apostle and Evangelist after which it is named. (The current Byzantine building, with its separate campanile, is the third on the site.) St Mark’s, the private chapel of the Doge, and not a cathedral at the time (it didn’t become a cathedral until 1807), appointed its first musical director, or Maestro di Cappella, ‘Master’ Zuccheto, in the late fourteenth century, and in 1408 the choir school was founded. In the 1420s there were signs of increasing musical activity, and by 1425 the installation of the first organ had been completed. By 1490 St Mark’s had singers and instrumentalists on the payroll in a small, but significant, way, and in the late 1490s Petrucci’s publishing house opened in Venice. The advent of this new technology was a crucial development for European music, and the publication of early anthologies of motets and frottolas (early secular madrigals) was to become the foundation of the emerging Venetian School, which culminated one hundred and fifty years later in the musical style of this evening’s concert. By 1520 the Basilica San Marco had a musical establishment with a Maestro di Cappella and two organists, responsible for the teaching of Latin, plainsong and counterpoint to the boys of the choir school and to young priests in training. The appointment in 1527 of the eminent Netherlander Adrian de Willaert (1490-1562) to the post of Maestro di Cappella (by now one of the most influential musical positions in Europe) further diversified the city’s growing international reputation. Willaert’s influence was to be huge, since most of the musicians who were to follow him were taught either by him or by one of his pupils. More publishing houses were opened, and by 1550 Venice was established as the most prolific and important city for music publication in Europe. Many eminent composers travelled to the city to oversee the publication of their work, and in doing so added, albeit temporarily, to the cultural fabric and diversity of the city, enhancing and promulgating its reputation. Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli were appointed to the post of Maestro di Cappella in 1566 and 1586 respectively, and music continued to flourish.
The Venetian Liturgy
The liturgical calendar and sacred practice in Venice during the advent and evolution of the Venetian School had significant differences from the Roman Catholic liturgy which was prevalent across the rest of Italy, and indeed Spain, France and the Netherlands. Whilst Protestant reformation had made its influence felt in England and Germany, its musical practices necessarily adapting to the new liturgical requirements of Anglicanism and Lutheranism, the rest of Europe remained largely Catholic and therefore under the papal influence. Not so, however, in the north east corner of Italy. The coastal city of Aquileia, about 100km north east of Venice, was an early centre of Christianity and an early Catholic see. Ancient tradition asserts that the see (or diocese) was founded by St Mark, who had been sent there by St Peter. Through the third and fourth centuries the city was the religious centre for north-east Italy, and in the fifth and sixth centuries cities such as Venice, Verona, Vicenza and Triviso were amongst its suffragans. During the fifth General Council at Constantinople in 553, under the papacy of Pope Vigilius, the archbishops of Aquileia broke from Rome. The resulting schism provided the Archbishop of Aquileia with the opportunity to assume the title of Patriarch, and this title was used from about 560. The efforts of various popes over the next six centuries to end this schism met with refusal and resistance, and by the early twelfth century Aquileia and the region was a flourishing centre of commerce, industry and religion, served by an excellent road network and a busy seaport. However, by the end of the fourteenth century, as a result of several devastating earthquakes and the bubonic plague, the population of the city was reduced to a few hundred inhabitants. It was also facing the rising wealth and prosperity of Venice, which had become the major seaport in the region. In 1411 there began a war which was to bring about the end of the Patriarchate. In July 1419 the Venetians captured the neighbouring cities of Treviso and Udine, and, after a long siege, the city of Aquileia fell on June 7th 1420. Since the sixth-century split from Rome, the Aquileians had been evolving their own liturgical calendar. This had been implemented in the neighbouring regional cities, including Venice. It was called the Ritus Patriarchinus (Patriarchal Rite) and it contained some significant differences from the Roman liturgy. Advent, for example, began earlier and had five Sundays. Various major feast days, including Trinity Sunday, were celebrated at different times from Rome. Septuagesima did not exist and there were only two Sundays to prepare for Lent: Sexagesima and Quinquagesima (the sixth and fifth Sundays before Easter respectively). There was a mid-Pentecostal feast (as is the case in many eastern rites), and the overall construction of the calendar suggests a fusion between eastern and western traditions. This could perhaps be explained by the geographical location of Aquileia and its prominence as an early sea port trading between the east and the west.
