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The
Nobel
laureate
for literature in 1915, French writer Romain
Rolland, supposedly rescued Provenzale from
obscurity in a 1905 work entitled A History of
Opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti, in which he called Provenzale “the real
founder of the glorious Neapolitan school” and
compared him to J.S. Bach.
(A few years later, a German musicologist, Hugo
Goldschmidt, compared Provenzale to Mozart. See
“sources,” below.) Well, those rescue attempts
didn’t work very well because Provenzale is still so
obscure that he is not even listed(!)
in the 3,000-page 1956 Garzanti Il
Mondo della Musica (The World of
Music). (There is no one between baritone Aldo Protti and Giacomo
Puccini.) Provenzale is not even mentioned in
the encyclopedia’s section on “The Neapolitan
school.” And the only street named for Provenzale in
Naples is about four feet long and so far out of
town that it might as well be in
the 1600s. Tracing
the
history of opera, in general, one tends to jump from
Monteverdi to A. Scarlatti (if one is in a hurry).
Monteverdi, of course, was from the north. He wrote
his first opera—the first opera— Orpheus, in 1607, and his last, The Coronation of Poppea, in 1647.
The first was an experiment with a new musical form;
the last, with the music fully at the service of the
psychology of the drama, was a full-blown model
for later grand opera. Scarlatti
was born in Palermo (Sicily) in 1660 and moved to
Naples in his twenties. He wrote opera, sacred
music, comic opera and symphonies until his death
65 years later. His influence was enormous. Provenzale
was
unfortunate
enough
to
exist in time between those two giants, but he was
not a lightweight. He was born just three years
after the first opera theater, San
Bartolomeo, opened in Naples. At the time, of
course, the music was imported from the north.
Provenzale wound up as one of the early contributors
to a home-grown repertoire of opera and other
musical forms before Scarlatti and held some
extremely important positions in the world of music
in Naples. He was the maestro of
the Real Cappella (Royal Choir); he
was the head of two of the four music
conservatories (Santa Maria di
Loreto and Santa Maria della
Pietà dei Turchini); and he was the
official composer to the vice-royal court of Naples. Between 1652 and
1678, Provenzale composed six operas, only two of
which survive: Il schiavo di sua moglie
(His wife’s slave) (1671) and La Stellidaura vendicata (The
Revenge of Stellidaura) (1674). Interestingly,
they are somewhere between the concepts of “serious
opera” (based on classical Greek mythology) and
“comic opera”: that is, the first one features
Hercules against the Amazons (and you don’t get much
more classical than that!) but also has a Neapolitan
character in the cast; and the second one is written
partially in Calabrian dialect. (Some critics say
that this “anticpated” the dialect opera
buffa, the comic opera
of Scarlatti and his generation.) Provenzale wrote
significant sacred music and employed dialect even
there—for example, in La Colomba Ferita
(The wounded Dove), a work dealing with the life of
the patron saint of Palermo, Saint Rosalia. As
composer to the vice-royal court for many years, he
wrote much of the “official” music required of the
day. This included sacred music still highly
regarded, such as his Missa defunctorum (Requiem mass) composed probably at the death of
Phillip IV of Spain in 1666 and used, as well, on
other occasions for the rest of the century. It must
have seemed archaic even in 1666, sounding
hauntingly like the great Flemish polyphonies of the
early Renaissance. Perhaps for a requiem, that was
appropriate. It may also serve as an indicator of
why Provenzale is not regarded as the beginning of
anything new in music in Naples (that honor belongs
to Scarlatti). Even his “anticipation” of dialect
was not revolutionary. It might even be said to have
been retrograde or at least parochial since most
theater of the day was in dialect and not “Tuscan”
(one day to be known as “Italian.”) The real
revolution would be to write Neapolitan comic opera
in Italian (which is what Scarlatti did in 1718 with
Il trionfo dell’onore). So why is
Provenzale obscure? Perhaps because, as a culture,
we equate greatness with innovation, with moving
forward. Provenzale was merely a solid link to the
past. Maybe that’s not good enough. Provenzale was
born in Naples and died there. Sources: —Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco Provenzale, (1624-1704) by Dinko Fabris. Publisher: Ashgate (2007). —“Francesco Provenzale als Dramatiker” by Hugo Goldschmidt, in Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 7. Jahrg., H. 4. (1906), pp. 608-634. —“The Centro di Musica Antica 'Pietà dei Turchini', Naples” by Irene Calagna; (transl.) James Chater, in Early Music, Vol. 27, No. 1, (Feb., 1999), pp. 158-159. —CD Eloquentia EL 0710. Francesco Provenzale. Missa defunctorum, performed by the Cappella de’ Turchini of Naples. (2006). to main index to music portal |
Even to those
interested in the history of music it may come as a
surprise to learn that there was music in Naples
before