Pergolesi Marian Vespers
As a recording producer (writes Malcolm Bruno) I am always developing new ideas. Early in 2000 I began to reflect on the perennial delight of two choral masterpieces of the Italian baroque tradition: Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. Although I knew of much else in the Monteverdi canon, I could think of no other sacred works by Pergolesi except his equally esteemed Salve Regina. Surely, I reasoned, these two late works must have had predecessors.
A brief look at Grove revealed three vesper psalms and an introit as authentic (as well as an earlier Salve): but why, I wondered, had no one from the early music world set out to re-construct a liturgical sequence with this music, as has been done with so many other baroque (and earlier) composers’ With the prospect of a major recording in mind, I set out on an archaeological dig. As most of us know Pergolesi’s music through his last work (the Stabat Mater), looking backward from this perspective, the earliest and intermediate stages of his talent might come into focus. Indeed, they do reveal music eternally young and energetic and, assembled in a sequence offer, for the first time, a survey of the whole the composer’s talent at a single glance.
Pergolesi was born in 1710 in Iesi in the Italian Marches. Some ten years later he arrived at the Conservatorio dei Poveri in Naples, to study with Gaetano Greco, Leonardo Vinci and Francesco Durante, where he proved himself to be an exceptional singer, violinist and composer. By the time he left the conservatory (at least by 1731), he had received his first operatic commission, which was significant, given the central position opera had attained in Italian musical life by the early 18th century. And in the few brief years ahead Pergolesi would turn all his considerable abilities to mastering the form: in both buffa and seria guises.
Like Monteverdi before him, who had launched the seconda prattica in 1607 with his Orfeo, and whose magnificent 1610 Vespers exuded these new operatic tendencies, Pergolesi’s sacred music parallels the development of his operatic enterprise. It can be seen, for example, throughout his vesper Psalms how polyphonic and fugal techniques — in which he would have been well versed from his conservatory training — are used only for colour and texture. Even more than Monteverdi’s a century before, Pergolesi’s musical instincts always move back to the aria, to ‘the words that are mistress of the music’. The short movements of the three psalms he has left posterity exemplify such a perfect alignment of text to music.
My reconstruction takes as its starting point an event in 1732, which itself has a sense of the dramatic about it. Following a number of earthquakes in late 1732, St Emidius had been proclaimed — as protector against earthquakes — the special patron saint of Naples. A vow was taken to celebrate his feast day each year, falling on 31 December, with a solemn mass and double vespers. Pergolesi’s first biographer, the Marchese di Villarosa, reporting a century later from sources who may have had direct contact with the composer, states that Pergolesi was commissioned to write music for the first celebration of this festival, for which he wrote a mass for double chorus and a vespers, including the vespers introit Domine in adjuvandum and three vesper Psalms: a Dixit Dominus, Laudate and Confitebor.
Further information about this event so far remains very sketchy: presumably time didn’t allow a busy operatic composer to set a Magnificat as well as the other missing vesper psalms? Or perhaps the composer deemed more than an hour’s worth of three psalms sufficient length for his commission (leaving the others and Magnificat to be performed as chant)? To these and many other questions there are few, if any, answers. Of the three psalms in question, only the Dixit and Laudate have been discovered in autograph, along with a fragment of the Introit. The dating of these works also raises questions. The Laudate is certainly a work composed later than 1732, while the Confitebor must be significantly earlier (almost Vivaldian in character); and the Domine in adjuvandum even earlier, its origins perhaps lying in the composer’s student days before 1730, it being perhaps adapted and filled out for New Year’s Eve 1732.
Unlike a reconstruction of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, therefore, for which there is clear evidence of the major elements of the vespers service, my goal in this reconstruction has been principally to create a panorama of Pergolesi’s genius, given that we now have a much clearer idea of the works actually composed by him. The 1732 New Year Vespers thus become a convenient centre-point to visit his three authentic vesper Psalms and Introit. And to extend the context I have added a vespers Hymn and Magnificat, drawing on an autograph of an obscure and incomplete secular cantata (and not the falsely attributed and much less appealing Magnificat by Durante in B flat published as Pergolesi 40 years ago).
These contrafacta not only round off the Vespers sequence but bring to light otherwise unknown Pergolesian pieces of considerable quality. To complete the chronological tour is the late Salve Regina from 1736, bringing us, at last, into the familiar world of the Stabat Mater. The Vespers conclude with chant versicles and an Amen, reworked from the final movement of the Introit, the purpose for this final contrafactum being musical more than historical: allowing the listener to recall the stylistically very early material of the opening. Between these mileposts of Introit and Salve Regina lies the whole of the composer’s compositional development.
The genius of Pergolesi is not to be found in compositional complexity. Unlike Bach, but in common with practically all Italian music from the 18th century, his musical interest was not in contrapuntal and harmonic technique as ends in themselves. When he employs such techniques, they are as remnants of the early polyphonic, stilo antico period. The brilliance of Pergolesi’s pen is in its melodic invention, line after line, perfectly crafted in gesture and length. His music is conceived visually, dramatically, where pacing — rhetoric — is everything. As in jazz, phrases grow organically, with little ornaments and decorations, accentuation and other effects happening without apparent calculation. (Characteristic little snaps, mini-syncopations, as well as larger syncopations, occur, for example, in abundance.) Yet, however enticing the local flourishes, the length and sense of each episode remains perfectly balanced, one to the next.
Pergolesi would not have known the kind of choral performance to which we are today accustomed. In keeping with the practice of his day, and throughout Italy, Spain, France and Germany, a ‘choir’ meant a consort of singers, one to a part, with additional consorts of ripieni to replenish these favoriti. Viewing the aristocratically compact size of the splendid Santa Maria della Stella in Naples, the location of the 1732 New Year’s Eve Vespers, it was immediately clear to me that it would only have allowed for a small string constitution for the first orchestra in the Dixit Dominus (the psalm requiring the greatest forces), with the second perhaps being single strings. More importantly, the vocal forces would most certainly have been single voices (ten singers (SSATB) for the double-choired Dixit, with its second choir offering a ripieno for the other psalms).
Stylish sopranos, borrowed straight from the nearby opera house, would have sung the top parts of the consorts of soloists. In planning the sequence I have, therefore, taken the view that the omnipresent soprano role could well be shared by two ‘divas’ and, indeed, extended this principle to the Salve Regina, where an alternation of voice movement-by-movement (in the style of the Stabat Mater) becomes phrase-by-phrase at the close.
But despite these seemingly elitest conventions, Pergolesi’s straight-forward writing easily admits to performance by a modern choir whose repertory includes the masses of Mozart and Haydn. More problematic than the forces for modern performers may well be the pitch standard of southern Italy of the early 18th century: in common with Handel’s vesper psalms, Pergolesi’s need to be performed at low pitch: frequent top B-flats, for example, being closer to A-flats at 440.
Any overall sense of Pergolesi’s genius, however, has been shrouded from us for more than two-and- a-half centuries, not only by performance convention, but mostly by a scandalous series of forgeries that began immediately after his death. His teachers and colleagues and other unsuccessful if ambitious composers, envious of the instant success of the Stabat Mater, started a train of forgery that continued into the 20th century. And such was the number of misattributions that by the time the first ‘complete’ edition was published in the 1940s, some 70 per cent of its content was music not composed by Pergolesi! Over the past 30 years careful, scientific study into the authenticity of all Pergolesi’s attributed works (using computerised and other techniques), with a search for others not previously known, has revealed an entirely new picture of a composer whose name till now has been so often tainted by lesser talent.
My reconstruction and recording seek in some way to redress this unhappy reward for popularity before publication.
Pergolesi was a mere 25 in 1735, when he abandoned an ambitious operatic career for the restorative care of monks at a Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli, just north of Naples. It was there in a weakened, consumptive state that he gave the early 18th century two works of unparalleled beauty: his Stabat Mater and second Salve Regina. They exhibit the tragic spirit of a devout, very young man at the peak of his ability, with his own death only weeks away. But in them many shadows of the youthful innocence from the Vespers remain, though, brought to a new fruition. Indeed, in a working life spanning little more than five years, this young composer had attained for himself a key position in the history of Italian music, midway, as it were, between Monteverdi and Verdi.
Reproduced from the January/February 2003 issue of Choir & Organ by permission of the Editor. Copyright © Orpheus Publications Ltd 2002. www.choirandorgan.com