Vivaldi and a Search Engine

Michael Talbot

Friday, August 23, 2013

Guest post by Michael Talbot (Liverpool, UK):

Anyone my age (seventy) has, as it were, “grown up” in parallel with RISM in the various phases of its, and our, evolution. Especially since the transfer of the manuscripts database to an OPAC on the internet, the potentiality to make discoveries, either through serendipity or through targeted trawling, has increased by leaps and bounds. The recent addition of a musical incipits search engine, to add to that already existing for textual incipits, is the latest leap forward, and one from which I have already profited greatly. Only a few months ago, I used this search engine to uncover new sources of two concertos by Vivaldi. A full description and evaluation of both discoveries is contained in my Miscellany column (a kind of annual round-up) in the yearbook Studi vivaldiani for 2012 (vol. 12).

The process was that I keyed in the incipits of Vivaldi concertos of special interest to me just in order to find out whether, perchance, there were any concordances unknown to the Vivaldi community. This keying in is an extremely rapid process, made even more rapid by the ingeniously simple mechanism whereby accidentals are ignored, “B” and “H” are treated as equivalents, and transpositions can, if wished, be automatically included. The search engine is therefore ideal for completely speculative searching. To my delight, I scored a “hit” for Vivaldi’s violin concerto in D major, RV 206, of which the only previously known source was a manuscript in the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Schwerin (RISM no.240005255), which, since this is a peripheral repertory, inevitably places a slight question mark over the authorship, even though the composer is clearly named. The new source was in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB; RISM no.212001661), which, fortunately, has digitized the source, allowing an immediate and close scrutiny. The Dresden source, interestingly, is attributed to a younger composer, Alberto Gallo, who seems to have been in Vivaldi’s orbit in the 1710s and whose style, although less refined than Vivaldi’s, is certainly modelled on his. On this occasion, I believe that the existing attribution to Vivaldi, in Schwerin, should be upheld (largely on stylistic grounds), but the new source raises interesting questions, and of course will be a valuable adjunct if and when a new, critical edition of this concerto is made.

The other find was less expected. The Dresden collection of Vivaldi concertos and sonatas, which largely goes back to the collection assembled by the future court Konzertmeister Johann Georg Pisendel in 1717 and subsequent years, contains the score of a fine D minor concerto by Vivaldi, RV 241, which was similarly thought to be a unique source (RISM no.212000154). Imagine my surprise to find listed on the database an anonymous, incomplete set of parts for the same concerto (lacking the principal violin part) in the remote library of Durham Cathedral, England (RISM no.806927569). The provenance of this new source is at present unclear (some leads are given in my discussion in Miscellany), but once again the new musical text itself is of immediate use. Since it coincides practically perfectly with the musical text of the source in Dresden, it establishes that there are no interventions by Pisendel in the latter. (It should be explained that Pisendel was an inveterate tacit arranger of music that he acquired, copied out or instructed others to copy, so the integrity of no Vivaldi manuscript in the Dresden collection can be assumed a priori.)

Finally, on behalf of the Vivaldi community worldwide I would like to thank RISM for the introduction of this new refinement, through which unattributed works can be identified or alternative attributions and their sources disclosed. Its benefit to Vivaldi studies will be replicated, I’m sure, for countless other composers.

Image credit: Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Mus.2727-O-1, digital.slub-dresden.de/ppn319351513

Category: Rediscovered