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On the Trail of the
Missing Music Conservatories The last part first. Many years ago, I saw the name of the church named Pietà dei Turchini on via Medina in Naples. I let fall but a single powerful drop of my intellectual alkahest onto the problem of the origin of the name and —shazaam!— knew, just knew (!) the answer: —fact: in the 1500s, Turkish pirates were raiding along the Campanian coast; —fact: there is in Neapolitan dialect a cry for help, "Mamma, li turchi!" (roughly: "Help! Here come the Turks!"). It is still used humorously to express mock terror. —factoid: "Turchini" is a plural diminutive of "turco"—a Turk, thus "little Turks";
I then
found out that turchino
is a color, a few angstroms away from "turquoise"
and that the church is named for the color of the
robes that the little altar boys wore. The kids
were the "turchini". The church is named for altar
boys. There. And if you prefer the true story to
mine, I don't like you. (Having said all that, I
have no explanation for the presence of a Turkish
flag on the balcony adjacent to the church, above.
Someone has a strange sense of humor.)
That church is connected to what was once a very large monastery (long since converted to secular, municipal use) and was the site of one of the four historical music conservatories in Naples. As noted elsewhere in these pages, these institutions were consolidated into a single conservatory in the early 1800s. That is shakily accurate, but is a drab gloss of what went on behind the scenes, so I set out to find the actual old buildings, themselves, and see what I could dig up. (In Naples, "dig up" is not necessarily a metaphor.) Thus: 1. That
Conservatorio della Pietà
dei Turchini was
built in 1583 and is the only one of the
original four sites that is still easy to find.
Indeed, the church is still prominent and open
to the faithful. It stands on via Medina not far
from the city hall. The church has a historical
marker posted in front that explains its role as
one of the original four. The name
"conservatory" originally indicated a place that
"conserved" orphans and young women. All of the
institutions instructed their wards in music;
thus was born the modern meaning of "music
school."
All monasteries and convents in Naples were closed by the French in the early 1800s (under the reign of Murat), and many were then re-closed at the unification of Italy later in the century. The Poveri di Gesù Cristo has a slightly different history. It was closed in 1743. According to some sources, the students staged a "revolt" against the rector, and the conservatory was simply shut down and the unruly students dispersed to the other three music schools. Thus, the Poveri di Gesù Cristo is not in the group of Neapolitan monasteries later consolidated. The church stayed open, but fell into ruin over the years. (The facade of the church is from 1715 and is by Antonio Giudetti. The church was last restored in 1896.) The original entrance is now closed; the metal gate across the entrance is rusted and bent, the wooden doors are rotted, the facade is dingy, the inscription above the entrance is barely legible. To the eye, it is just one more broken-down small old church in the city. Yet, if you walk around the corner and through a side entrance—behind the original church—you are in the courtyard of the old monastery, itself—again a working religious institution. And I mean working. Members of the order of the Sisters of Calcutta (Mother Teresa) scurry and hustle about, heeding the injunction to feed the hungry. They even have a homeless shelter with room for about 20 residents at any given time. [Also see the
entry on Croce &
Pergolesi)
The
original monastery was turned into a hospital in
the 19th century; that hospital was
destroyed by an Allied
air raid on December 15, 1942.
(The hospital was virtually next-door to the major
Axis port facility in Naples; that entire area was
subject to over 100 air raids in the war.)
If the
city fathers, in their current, welcome frenzy of
tagging buildings with historical markers in four
languages decide to save the enormous chunk of
Spanish masonry I referred to (above) they can say
that once upon a time it was part of a music
conservatory renowned as the training grounds for
many of the famous Italian castrati
singers of the day, including Farinelli.
"This morning
I went with young Oliver to his
Conservatorio of St. Onofrio, and visited
all the rooms where the boys practise,
sleep, and eat. On the first flight of
stairs was a trumpeter, screaming upon his
instrument till he was ready to burst; on
the second was a french-horn, bellowing in
the same manner. In the common practising
room there was a Dutch concert, consisting
of seven or eight harpsichords, more than
as many violins, and several voices, all
performing different things, and in
different keys: other boys were writing in
the same room..."
Sant' Onofrio counts as its alumni Niccoló Jommelli, Giovanni Paisiello and Niccoló Piccinni, three of the great names in 18th century Neapolitan music. The original building still stands, just across the street on the north side of the old Vicaria, the tribunale, the Naples Hall of Justice (until quite recently). That area of Naples was not greatly affected by the risanamento or by the air raids of WW2. The building is under restoration; a plaque says that it is an administrative office building for the province of Naples (which function it will perhaps take up again when the builders leave); also, another plaque identifies the one open office as the premises of the Confraternity [lay brotherhood] of Sant' Onofrio a Portacapuana. The adjacent entrance to the church, itself, looks as decayed and closed as it does in the old photographs from the 1920s. (The photos are to be found in the definitive book on the old conservatories: I quattro antichi conservatori di musica a Napoli (The Four Ancient Music Conservatories of Naples—pub. Sandron. Milano, 1924) by the Neapolitan journalist and poet, Salvatore di Giacomo. The square near the old school was originally named Piazzetta Sant' Onofrio; it is now Piazza Enrico de Nicola, named for the first president of the Italian Republic. [bibliographic
note: Di Giacomo's book cites extensively from
an earlier, now difficult-to-find work, La
scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi
conservatori, con uno sguardo sulla storia
della musica in Italia, by Francesco
Florimo, 4 volumes. Morano, Napoli,
1882.]
5. San
Sebastiano. The consolidation of the
conservatories took place in piecemeal fashion,
but quickly. With the closure of
the Poveri di
Gesù Cristo in the 1740s,
there remained but three institutions. First, the
music teaching function of the Loreto was
ceded to Sant' Onofrio in 1797 so the
Bourbon army could use part of the Loreto premises
as a barracks. The combined facility took on the
combined name of Loreto
a Capuana. Then, under French rule in 1807,
all of that was merged with the conservatory at
the Pietà dei Turchini (mentioned
above), which then officially became the Reale
Collegio della Musica. And that
institution was then moved—still under the French
in the early 1800s—to the premises of the
ex-monastery of San Sebastiano. At that point, the
musical life of the original conservatories may be
said to have ceased.
As
noted above, under the French in 1807 the entire
musical establishment that had settled into Pietà
dei Turchini was moved into San Sebastiano.
A few years later, in 1828,
the centuries-old game of musical chairs came to
an end when the Bourbons moved the Royal College
of Music one block east into the premises of San Pietro a Maiella in
1828, where it remains today. At the unification
of Italy, the San Sebastiano complex was turned
into a high school, the Convitto Vittorio
Emanuele. The high school still exists under that
name.
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Conclusion
(the chain of deduction takes my breath away):
Today, if you
turn in from the port road on Corso Garibaldi just
past the Mercato, you find after a short distance
an enormous chunk of an old Spanish building on
the right that they simply haven't bothered to
tear down (photo, right). That is part of the
original conservatory—and then hospital—of Santa
Maria di Loreto.
One such newer building is the
modern hospital (photo, left),Santa Maria di
Loreto a mare, named for the old hospital
and standing approximately on the original
premises.
The
church/monastery complex of San Sebastiano is
ancient and huge; it sits in the middle of Naples
on the eastern side of