In the mid 17th century,as more and more European nations were striving for imperial glory by conquering new and distant lands, Venice had become something of a “political curiosity.” Though still a proud force,, it had now become a captive of the narrow limits imposed by the Mediterranean.And yet,on the verge of extinction,the Serenissima ound the strength to influence European culture by assuming the role of a dazzling symbol and disseminating the innovations of its most brilliant artists far and wide. Perhaps it was due to its golden isolation that Venice succeeded in single-mindedly cultivating its own characteristics, its own colors, its intrinsic, nearly evanescent lightness, its taste for intimacy and private dimensions, for freedom and the pleasures of life. Thriving in open contrast to the grandeur, missionary zeal and weightiness of the 17th century in the rest of Europe, Venice ’s magnificent uniqueness ultimately engendered a style of its own that set out to conquer its fellow nations in the early 18th century, as new aesthetic imperatives were pervading the European fabric.

“Although this Republic is in much greater decline than it ever was before, be it through the grav losses suffered in the wars against the Turks, or be it through the important decrease in commerce, there is still an incredible wealth and abundance of all kinds of things in this place.”
Some letters ...1687 Gilbert Burnet,Anglican bishop
 
The impression gained by a traveler visiting the city during that period had to have been one of wonder.The celebrated 16th-century map of Venice drawn by Jacopo de ’ Barbari had to be updated: around 1650 the commission was awarded to the German artist Joseph Heintz the Younger.The task was to create a new panorama of Venice from a bird ’s eye view, enveloping the city in the characteristic colors of its lagoon and reaching towards the waning shores of the terra ferma in an expostulatory gesture of warning ...

“Imagine the city of Venice rising from the water with its thirty or forty great bell towers, distant by at least one league and a half from the mainland.What a surprise to see this large city without walls, without bastions, incessantly battered by the waves, yet sitting .rmly upon its wooden piles, as if on a rock.”
Nouveau voyage d ’Italie ...1688 Maximilien Misson

There was no lack of new things to see, and some of them, truly exceptional, added to the universally recognized fame of this fantastic city. The principal draftsman of this aesthetic renewal was the architect Baldassare Longhena (1598 –1682). It is to him that we owe the Ca ’ Rezzonico of 1660,, the funerary monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Chiesa dei Frari, erected in 1669, the façade of the Ospedaletto ai Santi Giovanni e Paolo of 1674, the Ca ’ Pesaro begun in 1676,, and that masterpiece of the Venetian Baroque, the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, completed in 1681. Among the new visual glories were, moreover, Giuseppe Sardi ’s façade of the Scalzi of 1680, and the extravagant façade of the Chiesa di San Moisè by Alessandro Tremignon of 1668, as well as the Dogana di Mare and the lions guarding the entrance of the Arsenale, brought from Athens in 1682. Begun in 1681 was the façade of Santa Maria Zobenigo, or del Giglio ,another project by Sardi, an absurdly self-congratulatory commission from the patrician Antonio Barbaro. These were also the years in which the military pride of the glorious marine republic was rekindled through the exploits of Commander Francesco Morosini,who was elected Doge in 1689. However, the naval and military activity proved to be very costly – also in terms of human lives. It was more advisable to turn inward, towards the mainland, and to heed the call of tourism, which was enjoying an ever-growing popularity at a time when the grand tour was a fashionable cultural staple. “Venice has an abundance of everything, not only of the things necessary for life, but also of those one needs to enjoy life.” Journal d ’un voyage ...1667 Grangier de Liverdys New theaters were opened:in 1671 the Teatro di Sant Angelo, the only one facing the Canal Grande; in 1677 the Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo (today ’s Malibran); finally, the Teatro di San Moisè was reconstructed and augmented in 1684. To make up for the closure of the theaters during the Lenten season, and thus to of er the city ’s passionate music lovers the chance to enjoy music during Lent, The Oratorio della Fava was begun in 1661; it became the seat and creative center of the Venetian oratorio.

The Composers and Their Music

Decried as the “calamity of Europe ” and as a symbol of freedom and the pleasures of life, Venice both attracted and confounded music as well as musicians. In the wake of the Parisian experiences – often less than exhilarating – of Venice ’s opera composers, French practices began to insinuate themselves into the rigid Venetian tradition. In 1688 Giovanni Legrenzi conducted a Requiem with music by Lully, and another chronicle of that year mentions a concert in the home of the same Legrenzi, maestro di cappella of San Marco, at which he accompanied on the harpsichord three young female siblings in duets and trios by the French composer. Composers from beyond the Alps such as Johann Rosenmüller, Johann Philipp Krieger and Johann Wolfgang Franck came to Venice to learn its exclusive musical idiom, while Venetian musicians began writing “alla tedesca ,” perhaps in an ef ort to please their patrons. For as far as instrumental music was concerned, these patrons were now almost exclusively foreign. The economic situation was deplorable: the illustrious music publishers were disappearing (Rosenmüller ’s Sonatas of 1667 were the last to be published by Vincenti, while Legrenzi ’s “La cetra ” collection was the only work printed in Venice in 1673!), and the dwindling commissions and reduced honorariums, together with the lack of local patrons, were encouraging the immigration of musicians, particularly to Vienna and the court of the highly musical Emperor Leopold I.
The biography of Francesco Caletti-Bruno , called Cavalli (1602 –1676), reflects the prototypical career of a musician in the service of San Marco: from boy singer to maestro di cappella . It is also emblematic of the transition from the glorious tradition of the early 17th century to the new European style.The dramma per musica “Eliogabalo ” of 1668 was never per ormed, since it was criticized as being “too much in the old style.” Modal instability alternates with echoes of Monteverdi in the first two sections of the sinfonia,which closes with a boisterous tarantella.
Johann Rosenmüller (c .1619 –1684) found refuge in the free city in 1658; he had fled Leipzig, where he had been suspected of homosexual practices and arrested. He rose from the ranks of a simple trombone player in the ensemble of San Marco to become the “maestro de ’ strumenti ” at the Ospedale della Pietà in 1678 – the same year in which Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born to Giovanni Battista “sonador ” and Camilla Colicchio in Venice. Rosenmüller ’s attachment to the city that welcomed him found its expression in his style, which makes him “the most Venetian ” of Germanic composers.The Sonate da camera of 1667 all begin with a theatrically inspired sinfonia that is followed by a series of dances that occasionally betray a more northern idiom, even if correnti and balletti were familiar in Venice. A curious trait of these sonatas is the act that they each end with a melancholy sarabande. Perhaps it is this fashionable dance which a French traveler staying at the Palazzo Grimani in 1670 described as “a slow and solemn progression from one room to the next.” By contrast, the Sonate of 1682 are in the church style and reflect the inroads made by the “stil moderno ” of Dario Castello and the elaborate counterpoint of Massimiliano Neri, distinguished exponents of the preceding era of instrumental music. The foremost personality of that musical era in Venice was no doubt Giovanni Legrenzi (1626 –1690). Having arrived in Venice in his later years, in the 1670s, he did not become maestro di cappella at San Marco until 1685.Yet he still had time to modernize the instrumental ensemble of the cappella, increasing the force of the string section,in particular.
His compositional style sets the use of motivic technique against strict fugal practice, and thanks to his exceptional gift for melodic invention, he was still acclaimed a hundred years later by Charles Burney, who in 1789 attributed “some of the best melodies of the time ” to him.. The sense of freedom and lightness derived from his music is one of the characteristic traits of Venetian composition in the 18th century. Dedicated to the city of the violin par excellence, the Sonata a cinque “La Cremona ”was often recycled by the composer in his Venetian operas (Eteocle Polinice ,Germanico sul Reno ,Totila ) in a process of stylistic derivation more intent on refinement than evolution. Ranking alongside his most representative collection of sonatas La cetra are the other Sonata a quattro violini and the Sonata a “quattro viole da gamba o come piace,” in which the open setting and austere style point to the fact that they were commissioned in Vienna;the work was dedicated to the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I. The Corrente IX , in its turn,was published posthumously by Legrenzi ’s nephew and pupil Giovanni Varischino and testifies to the surprising survival of an old bass line from a 16th-century dance,the “Aria di Fiorenza o del Gran Duca.” Although it had long since fallen into oblivion everywhere else, we find it once again in Venice at the end of the century in Antonio Caldara ’s Opera II, now designated as Ciaccona.

Pietro Andrea Ziani (c .1620 –1684) belonged to the group of wandering musicians:he made his way from Venice to Bergamo, and then to Innsbruck, Vienna,Kromeritz,Dresden and back to Venice again. 
He finished his peregrinations in Naples as maestro della Cappella Reale The Sonate or strings from the Opera VII, first printed in Freiberg towards 1667, reveal his robust formation as an organist:counterpoint, chromaticism and fugal writing stamp his tripartite works for four or five instruments. This style, perhaps in conjunction with the cultivated and slightly antiquated taste of his northern patrons, is in notable contrast with the other, “lighter ” side of his personality,,which he – a master of the opera buffa – indulged in more visibly in his stage works.Perhaps his dual personality emerges more strongly in the Sonata VIII when a whirling and spirited ritornello in triple time bursts upon us without warning and seems to depict the entrance on stage of a commedia dell’ arte character.
Completing the anthology is a piece by Carlo Antonio Fedeli , called “Saggion ”(c .1622 –1685) who, like Cavalli, learned his profession under the cupola of the Basilica of San Marco – from violone player to “maestro de ’ concerti .” Fedeli was the patriarch of a wealthy and important family of Venetian musicians; his son Giuseppe is said to have been the first to introduce the double bass to the Paris Opéra in the early 1700s.
In his music one finds the typical style of melodious writing idiomatic to the instrument, in which cantabilità and transparent textures are its main features. In the Sonata a 4 there is a nostalgic tribute to the Venetian tradition of antiphonal,or “echo ” playing,which was later taken up again by Antonio Vivaldi in his concerto with violins “per eco in lontano .” Fedeli ’s dedicatory words to Prince Carl of Brunswick, the patron of his Opera I, contains between the lines an interesting observation about  performance practice. Although couched in the obsequious style of the genre, Fedeli confirms the improvisatory character and the importance of a certain interpretative freedom in the music of his time:

“...although I am honored to offer you the services of outstanding virtuosi who,with their elegant playing, will discriminatingly endow them [the sonatas ] with embellishments which they could never have received from my weak talents, this might lead one to believe that through the vividly scintillating colors of their suave and incomparable playing, my pale imitations are genuine, priceless diamonds ...”

Giorgio Fava
Translation:Roger Clement