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Musica diversa di Compietà: Compline and its Music in Seventeenth-Century Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1982

Jerome Roche
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Extract

At the end of the seventeenth century a Venetian chronicler by the name of Pietro Antonio Pacifico drew attention to the music in two of the Venetian ospedali with the words ‘… these young ladies make a great study of music, with singular success, and to the amazement of foreigners, who wonder at their art in the singing of the divine Office’; and again ‘instructed by the best salaried teachers, they sing with various instruments on all the great feasts of the year Mass, Vespers and Compline — especially in Lent, when many people come to hear’. If Mass and Vespers were principal liturgical functions, this particular mention of Compline — the final Office of the day which almost certainly took place at the same sort of time as today's secular concert and was thus convenient for people of culture and devotion to turn out to — gives a guide to its relative importance as a liturgical act. This is confirmed by a glance at the catalogues of music in stock which the Venetian publisher Vincenti issued in 1621 and 1649, both of which list a considerable number of musical settings of Compline in both old and new styles, with and without continuo — an indication of steady demand. Yet by comparison with Mass and Vespers Compline and its music have been little studied, whether in Italy in the Baroque or elsewhere in other periods, and there is scarcely any substantial information about it in the major musical or religious reference works. It may be less because the repertory consists largely of music by relatively little-known figures (though Legrenzi, Cazzati and Colonna hardly belong in that category) dian because the musical requirements of the liturgy are on the whole straight-forward, not offering musicological conundrums that call into being polemical tracts of the Monteverdi Vespers variety; in essence the Office of Compline is a religious act on an intimate scale, not a potentially grand liturgical occasion with showy ritual. Indeed, the virtual absence of ritual in this final act of tie day probably encouraged its development in seventeenth-century Italy into the spiritual concert of which our Venetian chronicler speaks. Such a development was facilitated, too, by the simplicity of its liturgy — unlike Mass and Vespers, nothing basic changes from day to day, be it Sunday or weekday, feast or ferial day; there is no Proper, nor are there any complex stipulations about psalm groupings, antiphons, and Gregorian tones. Only the concluding Marian antiphon (which did not belong specifically to Compline but was in practice often attached to it) changed four times a year according to the liturgical season. From the outset, therefore, a composer could devise a complete, self-contained ‘package’, either allowing the intrinsic variety of the liturgy to give balance and contrast to bis setting or, as with the more adventurous, to build upon the liturgical foundations a colourful construction that could succeed as a spiritual concert on its own terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 109 , 1982 , pp. 60 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Pietro Antonio Pacifico, Cronica Veneta (Venice, 1697), 468, 214.Google Scholar

2 Reprinted in Monatshefte für Musikgeschichte, xiv-xv (1882–3), suppls.Google Scholar

3 This table, and all the Compline settings in this survey, conform to the Roman Rite. Certain local rites within Italy differed substantially in the form of the Compline liturgy, though in most cases polyphonic settings of these do not survive. There is, however, Compline music for the Ambrosian Rite that was current at Milan in two very large anthologies in choirbook format, RISM 16193 and 16194, by various Milanese composers. In this rite the hymn comes first, there are six psalms (4, 30, 90 and then 132, 133 and 116 under one doxology), the ‘preparatory section’ beginning with the Short Lesson comes next, and after the Canticle the Office concludes with one of five Marian antiphons, the familiar four plus ‘Inviolata, integra’, assigned to quite different liturgical divisions of the calendar.Google Scholar

4 Psalm 30 was dropped from the psalms of Compline in the revision of the Roman Breviary carried out by Pope Pius X in 1911; it was then that a set of different Compline psalms for each weekday (included in post-1930 editions of the Liber Usualis) was introduced.Google Scholar

5 Just under half the Compline publications in Table II include a Litany setting, but it should be remembered that Litanies were even more frequently found in Mass, Vesper psalm, and motet collections, and were sometimes issued in sets on their own or with antifone.Google Scholar

6 The Marian antiphons are assigned to liturgical seasons as follows:

Alma redemptoris mater — Advent to the Purification (2 February)

Ave regina caelorum — Purification to Wednesday in Holy Week

Regina caeli — Easter to Saturday after Pentecost

Salve regina — Trinity Sunday to Saturday before Advent

7 This assertion is based on an examination of the large and representative sample of seventeenth-century publications listed in Gaetano Gaspari, Catalogo della biblioteca del Liceo musicale di Bologna (Bologna, 1890–1905, repr. 1961), ii. The use of Marian antiphons to conclude other Office Hours is confirmed by rubrics in post-Tridentine Breviaries and by phrases such as ‘quae in fine horarum per totum Annum recitari solent’ on the title page of Trabaci's Compline of 1608.Google Scholar

8 Roland Jackson, ‘Trabaci, Giovanni Maria’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xix, 106–7.Google Scholar

9 James H. Moore, Vespers at St Mark's: Music of Alessandro Grandi, Giovanni Rovetta and Francesco Cavalli (Ann Arbor, 1981), i, 212–3, 287–92.Google Scholar

10 Moore, op. cit., i, 86.Google Scholar

11 As in the dedication of Olivi's Compline of 1674.Google Scholar

12 Pelicelli, N., ‘Musiosti in Parma’, Note d'Archivio, viii (1931), 218.Google Scholar

13 Bergamo, Biblioteca pubblica, Terminationes, Mia LXIII-38, f. 35.Google Scholar

14 This inventory is printed in Jerome Roche, ‘An Inventory of Choirbooks at S Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, January 1628’, R. M. A. Research Chronicle, v (1965), 47–50.Google Scholar

15 Graham Dixon, ‘Lenten Devotions: Some memoriae of Baroque Rome’, Musical Times, cxxiv (1983), 159–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Vale, G., ‘La cappella musicale del Duomo di Udine’, Note d'Archivio, vii (1930), 134–5.Google Scholar

17 Vale, op. cit., 150—1; Bergamo, Biblioteca pubblica, Scritture, Mia LXIV-4, document dated 18 May 1654.Google Scholar

18 Facsimile repr. in Biblioteca musics bononiensis, xl (Bologna, 1969).Google Scholar

19 Dixon, op. cit., 160. Another Roman composer, G. F. Anerio, included settings of the three antiphons required at Compline throughout the year (‘Miserere’ or ‘Alleluia’ for the psalms, ‘Sarva nos’ for the Canticle) in his Antiphonae of 1613. See Armstrong, James, ‘The Antiphonae, seu sacrae cantiones (1613) of Francesco Anerio’, Analecta Musicologica, xiv (1974), 89–150.Google Scholar

20 Gaspari, op. cit., 179, refers to this, but unfortunately concludes (wrongly) that the Complines cannot be intended to dovetail merely on the evidence that the two respective ‘Jube domne’ settings at the opening are obviously different. This is shown in Table II by the indication ‘separate’.Google Scholar

21 Jerome Roche, North Italian Church Music in the Age of Monteverdi (forthcoming), chapter VI.Google Scholar

22 It seems more than coincidence that Ferrari worked at the small town of Noventa di Piave, near Venice, where the composer Milanuzzi had worked, for the latter was particularly important in the development of ground bass and ostinato techniques in psalm settings (it is his Vesper psalm collections rather than his Compline of 1647 that illustrates this).Google Scholar

23 It is notable that the basso continuo partbook of this print actually presents the piece in score, including the four string parts as well as the solo voice — a rare example of such a practice.Google Scholar

24 Roche, ‘Giovanni Antonio Rigatti and the Development of Venetian Church Music in the 1640s’, Music & Letters, lvii (1976), 259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Not one as previously thought. His activity at the Incurabili is known about, but before taking up his post there he had in 1639–42 taught organ and singing at the Mendicanti. See Istituzioni di Ricovero e di Educazione Venezia, Arte e Musica all'Ospedaletto (Venice, 1978), 161.Google Scholar

26 See ex. 3 of Roche, ‘Rigatti’, 265.Google Scholar

27 It is perhaps worth observing (as evidence of musical priorities characteristic of this epoch) that the setting of ‘Amen’ occupies one third of this work.Google Scholar

28 Haselbach, R., Giovanni Battista Bassani (Kassel, 1955), 32–4, lists the items of this Compline and their scorings, but unaccountably states that there is no setting of psalm 30.Google Scholar

29 In the relevant places in his Compline of 1606.Google Scholar

30 E.g. Borsaro's 1605 setting of this psalm.Google Scholar