The Liturgy in Venice
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, he having 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). 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.
The Ritus Patriarchinus was used in Venice from 1250. Throughout the middle ages various popes issued edicts that the Roman Rite was to be restored, but the Venetians simply ignored them and carried on. After the Council of Trent in 1570, under the papacy of Pope Pius V, various cities in north-east Italy, one after the other, did restore the Roman Rite (Trieste 1586, Udine 1596, Como 1597). Saint Mark’s, however, the old chapel of the Doge, resisted this until the republic fell in 1807 and the building acquired cathedral status. So, for over five centuries the Procurators of St Mark’s held out against the pope, enabling the composers of the Venetian School to create a new type of music, the mixing of voices and instruments in church, a feature which was to define the approaching Baroque period.
