Gloria! Gloria!

In 2009 Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano recorded both extant settings by Vivaldi of the Gloria, RV 588 and 589. Although both were written around the same time, the two works are very different. Here is the promotional video from Naive, in which Alessandrini indicates some of these differences:-



The performance sequences are taken from a film made by Philippe Beziat of the recording sessions, which mixes excerpts from both settings. Unfortunately it also contains some annoying "video theatre", but is still well worth watching, not least because it shows Alessandrini's unique method of working with his musicians and singers. The location is the church of San Bernardino in Crema.

















Here are Alessandrini's liner notes for the CD booklet:-

Perhaps one of the most stimulating exercises for a musicologist or a musician is to write about Italian sacred music of the eighteenth century. Unlike opera, where the works obey an ever more rigidly structured code (beginning with the division into recitatives and arias), in which the composer increasingly adheres to preconceived models that conform to his audience’s expectations, sacred music takes care to avoid submitting to ideology of any kind. While in theory at least it accepts a set of precepts (which will be discussed further on), sacred music does not (will not, cannot) free itself from operatic influence. The composer is well aware of the public’s mood when it enters the church, looking forward to hearing the fashionable castrato who is in town at the moment, perhaps under contract with the local opera house: he will show off his talents in motets that will have little in common with a vague concept of spirituality or mysticism (which we have in reality derived from what is nowadays a Romantically tinged subculture). He will, quite simply, be singing operatic music set to a Latin text. The presence of the choir and of certain unignorable rules of musical ethics (chiefly the use of counterpoint) will help create unpredictable, surprising structures.

The great aesthetic revolution accomplished in the early seventeenth century had far-reaching consequences for sacred music. Hitherto characterised by an inescapable contrapuntal style and assigned to exclusively vocal forces (at most doubled by the organ), church music was obliged to change course as the new expressive tendencies stemming from the seconda pratica took shape. Now came the introduction of instruments and the concertato style; the slow disintegration of forms (above all in the Office of Vespers), with figural music increasingly replacing plainchant; and the emergence of the messa bassa, where the liturgical text, now murmured in an undertone by the celebrant, left the congregation’s ears free to delight in a continuous and uninterrupted succession of motets and various other types of music for the entire duration of the service. The sole remaining bulwark of tradition was the contrapuntal style, which assumed the rhetorical value of music intended for purposes of worship, and was employed from time to time to remind the faithful that they were nevertheless still in church. But its original function was lost, since the fugues and points of imitation once assigned to the purity of a few voices were now decked out in the brilliant, ringing sonorities of instruments, or in the sensual, sinful strains of singers whose vocal technique grew ever more refined. Various parameters now came into play: the noisiness of the orchestral forces, growing in size according to the importance of the feast-day; the participation of singers and instrumentalists of greater artistic prestige for the most solemn festivals; the rhythm of performance, which would be slower if the majesty of the ceremony required this to attain a supposed state of contemplation of the Divine. But all this offers food for discussion: one of the aims of performance was to involve the congregation, who as they listened would recognise in the Church Militant on earth a reflection of the Church Triumphant in heaven.

Venice seems to have been a magical place for sacred music: the far-sightedness of the ecclesiastical authorities and the city’s democratic customs, far removed from the sometimes repressive cultural strategies to be found elsewhere (in Rome, for example), made it an ideal setting for this kind of spectacle. The tourist guides of the time speak with astonishment of the Vespers performed on the square in front of S. Maria della Salute, while the cappella of S. Marco was graced by the finest instrumentalists and singers of the day.
In the case of more highly structured compositions like the two settings of the Gloria recorded here, the rhetorical values called into question by the composer will certainly be more numerous, but most of them will still refer to easily recognisable rhetorical and theatrical situations. The word ‘Gloria’, for example, unequivocally suggests ringing sonorities that may be assimilated with musical evocations of war. Thus the utilisation of oboes and trumpets becomes inevitable. The text ‘Gratias agimus tibi’ suggests an act of thanksgiving interpreted in the theatrical sense with an almost pagan hieraticism and solemnity.
Vivaldi’s two settings of the Gloria present an enormous variety of musical solutions: some agree on their approach to the same text, while others diverge. The opening movements are cheerful, radiant: here the glory of the Lord is revealed on the earth with joy, far from any feeling of agitation, yet sometimes astounding us with unexpected modulations. The complexities of the writing in the two settings of ‘Et in terra pax’ help to give the movement greater substance, even if the contrapuntal voice-leading is toned down by melodic lines which have nothing classical about them. But whereas RV 588 is full of polyphonic indiscretions recalling older styles (‘Domine Fili Unigenite’, ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi’), RV 589 is distinguished by an intensive recourse to theatrical models, attaining a moment of sheer pathos in the alto aria ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’, in which Vivaldi seeks to create a dramatic space by placing the soloist at a distance from the chorus, which comments on human fragility (‘Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis’). There is even a nod to current fashion with the dotted quaver rhythms à la française in ‘Domine Fili Unigenite’), a concession to the urbane style popular on the other side of the Alps.
In general, it should be borne in mind that the emotional charge that sixteenth-century polyphony sought to achieve, even if it was perhaps at one remove from the congregation, lost its force in the High Baroque period, although the aim was still to control the emotions of the assembly of the faithful, who were expected to recognise in music a sign of the divine. But the people were now given what they wanted, while maintaining the illusion that a reflection of the divine could be found even in the pastoral sensuality of the siciliana ‘Domine Deus Rex coelestis’ (RV 589).

It is worth saying something about the closing fugues of the two settings, which are two different reworkings of a fugue from a Gloria for two choirs and orchestra by Ruggieri. I have no idea why Vivaldi did not want to venture on an original composition at this point. Contrary to popular opinion, he was a competent contrapuntist. The various fugues he essayed in his concertos, especially the concerti ripieni (without soloists), do not find him unprepared or ill at ease. Quite the reverse, in fact. Both elaborations of the material (that of RV 589 is later than RV 588) show a marked feeling for form exemplified in their subtle modifications of phrase length and instrumentation, which lighten the rhetoric and make the piece more effective in its concision.
Finally, a word on the introductions which open the two Glorias. That of RV 588 belongs to the main work without a shadow of a doubt, while the connection of the motet Ostro picta with RV 589 can be deduced only from the fact that they share the same key. One may see in these introductions another contemporary device for padding out the musical event to excess by enriching and decorating it with music that is liturgically superfluous, though certainly effective and impressive.

Rinaldo Alessandrini

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