Antonio Vivaldi's autographs in Turin: story of a discovery

One might be surprised to learn where the most important collection of Antonio Vivaldi ’s (Venice, 1678 - Vienna, 1741) autograph compositions is to be found: not in his native Venice, the city where the great composer spent most of his career, nor even in the Vienna that welcomed him in the extreme phase of his artistic parabola. In fact, they are to be found in Turin, housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria in the Piedmontese capital: a collection of four hundred and fifty scores in the hand of the Venetian master, including fourteen complete operas (Turin is home to the world’s only witnesses to these works), about three hundred concertos, about forty pages of sacred music, and some secular vocal music, all collected in twenty-seven tomes. Vivaldi certainly had some contact with Turin, where he went in 1701 to study with Lorenzo Francesco Somis, founder of the Scuola Violinistica Piemontese, but beyond this episode the author of the Four Seasons is not known to have had any other links with the city. The arrival of this material in Turin is the result of some fortunate and adventurous events.

The story was reconstructed in detail on the occasion of the exhibition Vivaldimania. A Turin Story, which was held in 2008 at the Bricherasio Palace in Turin, and it begins on the night of July 27-28, 1741, when Antonio Vivaldi died in Vienna, in poor economic conditions: even the funeral would be that typical of the poor. His “greedy heirs” (so scholar Franca Porticelli, who traced the whole affair) were not slow to put his entire estate up for sale, probably as early as the late summer of 1741. The autograph manuscripts had remained in the Venetian house, and the beneficiary of the sale was the bibliophile and senator Jacopo Soranzo (Venice, 1686 - 1761): he acquired them as loose sheets and it was he who bound them into the twenty-seven volumes that are now in the National University Library in Turin, as we learn from the Soranzo Library catalog compiled in 1745. When Soranzo passed away in 1761, his books took different paths, since the senator died leaving no direct heirs: part of his library went to the Marin Zorzi family, another to the Corners. However, a few years later, an important collector of the time, Abbot Matteo Luigi Canonici (Venice, 1727 - Treviso, 1805), an educated Jesuit and book enthusiast, managed to reunite the bulk of the Soranzo Library: probably between 1773 and 1780 thousands of volumes that were once in the bibliophile’s library passed to Canonici, who also came into possession of the twenty-seven Vivaldi tomes.

The vicissitudes of the great composer’s manuscripts were far from over, however. A new sale brought the tomes into the collection of another great bibliophile, Count Giacomo Durazzo (Genoa, 1717 - Venice, 1794), a diplomat with an intense career: he was first ambassador of the Republic of Genoa in Vienna, then decided to become assistant to the director of the court theater in Vienna and then took on the role of impresario of the same theater, and finally returned to his diplomatic trade by accepting the post of ambassador of the Austrian Empire in Venice, where Durazzo arrived in 1764 and where he remained until his death. It was in Venice that Durazzo was able to devote himself to his collection: he was especially attracted to prints and music collections, and it was not long before Vivaldi manuscripts ended up in his collection. Giacomo’s collection then passed to his nephew Girolamo (Genoa, 1739 - 1809), who between 1802 and 1805 was also the sole doge of the Ligurian Republic, the state created in Napoleonic times over the territories of the former Republic of Genoa. However, Girolamo, like his uncle Giacomo, also died without leaving direct heirs: the library, which had probably left Venice in the meantime to reach Genoa, had passed to his nephew Marcello, and from him to his son Giuseppe Maria IV. In 1893, when the latter passed away, the estate was divided between his sons Marcello and Flavio Ignazio. The eldest son, in 1873, after his marriage to the Piedmontese-born noblewoman Francesca da Passano, moved to her family’s castle in Occimiano, near Casale Monferrato, and in 1922, the year of Marcello’s death, the nobleman’s library, which had inherited the Vivaldi tomes, was handed over to the San Carlo Salesian College in Borgo San Martino, Alessandria.

“The transfer of Marcello Durazzo’s library to the Collegio San Carlo,” Porticelli recalls, “took place, unfortunately, with not too orthodox methods that aroused the indignation of both the librarian of the Collegio and the Countess da Passano, who saw the work of sorting and cataloging done by her husband thwarted. The rector of the College, in fact, had a tombarello, a two-wheeled wagon then customarily used in Piedmont for transporting stones and sand, used to move the volumes. Numerous trips were necessary to move the entire library to Borgo San Martino, and at the end of each trip the precious cargo was rolled to the ground from the rear flap of the tombarello, so that it took several days to bring to the breakdown the volumes that had accumulated in the College courtyard. In addition, the shelves of the precious book collection made available proved insufficient, and so the surplus volumes were crammed into crates and unworthily placed in the attic.” The beginning of the denouement of the affair dates back to 1926.

That year, the rector of the Salesian College, Federico Manuel, had to have some urgent work done on the College’s premises, and to raise the necessary funds he decided to put the books from the Durazzo donation up for sale. In charge of the appraisal were Luigi Torri, then director of the National Library of Turin, and Alberto Gentili, professor of History and Aesthetics of Music at the University of Turin. Gentili sensed the value of the collection and convinced his friend Torri to have all the holdings transferred to the institute he directed so that it could be more easily appraised. The two of them had all the material packed up and delivered to Turin: they noticed with amazement that, among the various books, there were also manuscripts of well-known composers, and Torri therefore decided to have the works placed under lien. A problem arose, however: in fact, the Library did not have sufficient funds to purchase the material. Gentili and Torri thus ran in search of a patron, and they found him in the figure of Roberto Foà, a stockbroker by profession, who purchased the entire collection in memory of his son Mauro, who had died prematurely.

Examination, however, revealed another surprise: it was realized, in fact, from the numbers with which the works had been inventoried, that only half of Giacomo Durazzo’s collection had reached Marcello, while all the rest of the collection was probably still in the possession of another heir of the family, and so the search for the missing part began (the Vivaldi codices were, however, already in the possession of the National Library of Turin). Taking on the task was the librarian Faustino Curlo, of Ligurian origin, who, thanks to his skill and knowledge, finished his work in 1930, bringing to Turin the rest of the collection, which was owned by Marquis Giuseppe Maria Durazzo and located in his palace in Genoa: Curlo ascertained a hitherto unknown fact, namely the division of the library between Marcello and Flavio Ignazio at the time of the death of Giuseppe Maria IV. The fund, despite the initial opposition of Giuseppe Maria Durazzo, was sold to another patron found by Torri and Gentili, the textile industrialist Filippo Giordano, who again in 1930 provided 100,000 lire (about ninety thousand euros today) for the purchase of the books (curiously enough even in his case to remember his son Renzo, who died at the age of twelve), which thus reached the other half of the library that belonged to Giacomo Durazzo and before that to Jacopo Soranzo. And which today, however, survives in two separate funds, called the Mauro Foà Collection and the Renzo Giordano Collection. Only after World War II, however, could the holdings be adequately studied: Gentili was in fact Jewish, and because of the racial laws of 1938 he was expelled from the University of Turin, thus remaining unable to continue the analysis of the material.

The Turin collection is estimated to collect approximately 90 percent of Antonio Vivaldi’s autograph manuscripts. These are works on which Vivaldi worked and produced and, in addition to enabling the study of a vast amount of otherwise unknown material, they have made it possible to delve more deeply into the figure of Antonio Vivaldi and his creative process, thanks to the way he composed (the sheets show numerous erasures and corrections, made, moreover, in economy of paper, a very expensive material for the time: often, when the author erased something, he intervened with paper patches glued with wax seals, or sewn on with string), and also thanks to the numerous annotations and indications he left in the margins of his scores.

Out of the more than 450 compositions, the largest portion is the concertos, which total 296: among them, 97 are for violin, 39 for bassoon, 19 for cello, 12 for flute, 11 for oboe, and the remainder for two or more instruments of various kinds: “it is a testimony, this,” scholar Alberto Basso has written, "to the incredible ability Vivaldi had in producing music for the most diverse instrumental ensembles, aiming to emphasize not only the virtuosic qualities of the performers, but also the possibilities offered by the combination of timbres and the use of unusual instruments (English viola, chalumeau, violin scordato, i.e. tuned differently than normal, trombone and hunting horn, viola d’amore, theorbo, lute, mandolin, flute), often applying descriptive or invented titles, such as La notte, La tempesta di mare, Il Proteo ossia mondo al rovescio, L’amoroso, L’inquietudine, Il sospetto, Il piacere, Il riposo, Il favorito, Il gardellino, La pastorella, Il ritiro, Grosso Mogul, L’ottavina, Concerto funebre, madrigalesco, alla rustica". The twenty-seven tomes were exhibited in their entirety for the first time to the public in 2017, on the occasion of the exhibition L’approdo inaspettato, curated by Annarita Colturato and Franca Porticelli, whose title was intended to indicate precisely the rocambolic nature of the affair that brought the Vivaldi autographs to the Piedmontese city. The importance of these manuscripts is enormous: thanks to this fund, in fact, the figure of Vivaldi, who until then was a semi-unknown composer known to few enthusiasts or scholars, was able to rise to a worldwide dimension. The availability of the autograph compositions (until the time of the discovery of the autographs today in Turin, only the Seasons were known of Vivaldi), has in fact made possible a widespread study of his production: his entire figure has been valorized, countless concerts have been performed, and the music publishing and recording market have begun to publish most of his works. The most substantial undertaking is the Vivaldi Edition, the recording of all of Vivaldi’s compositions preserved in Turin, promoted by the aforementioned Alberto Basso, which plans to produce 120 CDs and is still in progress. It is therefore also thanks to the treasure trove kept by the Turin National University Library that Antonio Vivaldi is today one of the most performed and most famous musicians in the world.

The National University Library of Turin

The National University Library of Turin originated around 1723 when, at the behest of King Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, the municipal library, the library of the Royal University and the library of the Dukes of Savoy were combined in one building, owned by the Royal University, to compose a new library institute, the Library of the Royal University, which immediately saw its holdings increased in the following years thanks to the privilege of printing rights, various donations, the acquisition of various holdings, and acquisitions from suppressed convents. After the Unification of Italy, the Library of the Royal University obtained the title of national library in 1876. In 1904 a fire destroyed five rooms of the institute, devastating manuscripts, incunabula, and aldine, but the library management did not lose heart and continued to acquire funds. A further ominous event was the bombing of Turin on December 8, 1942, during World War II, when more than 15,000 volumes and excerpts of the general catalog were destroyed. In 1957 construction began on the current site, in Piazza Carlo Alberto, which was completed in 1973: the new library was inaugurated on October 15 of that year. In 1975 management finally passed to the newly formed Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

Among the manuscripts in the possession of the National University Library (4.500 before the 1904 fire) include a hundred Hebrew codices dating from the 12th to the 16th century (before the fire it was one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind in Europe), the Greek collection, a manuscript from the mid-9th century containing the treatise De laudibus Sanctae Crucis by Rabanus Maurus, the Commentary on theApocalypse of Beatus of Liebana, a Catalan copy (11th-12th century) of the Visigothic Beatus of Gerona Cathedral, datable to 975; the Codex k of the Gospels, which contains a translation of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew predating the Vulgate, probably written in Africa in the 4th-5th century; theHistoria Naturalis by Pliny, made between the 15th and 16th centuries for the Gonzaga family, with miniatures attributed to the school of Mantegna, The Created World by Torquato Tasso datable between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a group of illuminated French manuscripts from the Library of the Dukes of Burgundy. Among the codices acquired after 1904, particularly significant are the statutes of Chieri and Ronco Canavese, the autographs of Foscolo, Gioberti, Pellico, and Tommaseo, the collection of manuscript and printed works of Clarice Tartufari, the archives of Giovanni Flechia, Alberto Nota, Felice Romani, and the Peyron family. The collection of incunabula, filled with more than 1,600 editions, offers a broad overview of the early years of print in Europe and, more specifically, in Italy. There are some of the very first works printed in Mainz by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, numerous volumes published in Rome by the Italian prototypographers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, early printings, including some in Greek characters and the celebrated Hypnerotomachia Polyphili by Francesco Colonna of 1499, by Aldo Manuzio, and several illuminated specimens. Also of special interest are the Hebrew incunabula mostly coming out of the workshop of Joshua Solomon Soncino’s family. Among the cinquecentine (more than 6,000 editions) are a deluxe edition of the Polyglot Bible, in Hebrew, Chaldean, Greek and Latin, printed in Antwerp by Christophe Plantin in 1569 in 8 volumes, 6 of which are on parchment, and numerous editions by Giovanni Battista Bodoni.

Also important are the music collections (in addition to Vivaldi’s autographs there are those of Aleessandro Stradella, and then manuscript and printed scores by Gluck, Haydn, Traetta, Rameau, Favart, Philidor, the Staffarda Codex from the abbey of the same name, probably dating to the end of the 15th century, the so-called Cancionero de Turín containing Spanish compositions, the Ballet comique de la Royne by Baldassarre Baltazarini di Belgioioso (Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx), the first example of a ballet de cour and the only existing copy in Italy, and Il Ballarino by Marco Fabrizio Caroso, the first treatise on the art of dance, printed in Venice in 1581. The Library can also boast the presence of ten codices that contain, in addition to the text, scenes and costumes made for court festivities organized at the Savoy court in the 17th century. Also noteworthy is the collection of opera librettos and oratorios, within which are the collections of operas performed in the theaters of Turin in the years 1702-1856, in the theaters of Milan in the period 1801-1824, from various other Italian and foreign theaters, as well as publications of Turin music publishers from the 17th and 18th centuries. The Turin National University Library also has the collection of drawings and prints by Filippo Juvarra and his pupils, especially Ignazio Agliaudi Baroni di Tavigliano and Giambattista Sacchetti. In addition to these are other architectural drawings by Ascanio Vittozzi, Ercole Negro di Sanfront and the Valperga family. Also of note are drawings by Renaissance artists such as Luca Cambiaso and Bernardino Lanino, and Baroque artists such as Vanvitelli and Fabrizio Galliari. The collection of engravings (more than 15.000), whose origins date back to the ducal library and the confluence of Jesuit funds, preserves works by the most celebrated engravers including Albrecht Dürer, Juvenal Boetto, Brugel the Elder, Jacques Callot, Carracci, Luca Cranach, Stefano della Bella, Luca di Leida, Andrea Mantegna, Claude Mellan, the Parmigianino, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Marcantonio Raimondi, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, and Agostino Veneziano.

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