Requiem ''cantato secondo l'usanza Venetiana''
(Requiem 'in the Venetian Manner') SF. B660

Benedetto Marcello’s place in the history of Venetian music is not easily defined. Born into an old patrician family, he described himself in his youth as an ‘amateur contrapuntist’. Throughout his life he held a variety of important posts in judicial and administrative departments of the Venetian Republic, becoming a member of the Council of Forty, then Provveditore of Pola and finally Camerlengo at Brescia, where he died in 1739.

Today, when we think of Venetian music in the first half of the eighteenth century, we think immediately of Vivaldi, a priest but primarily a professional musician. The rediscovery, and ever-expanding popularity of Vivaldi, which has been a phenomenon of the twentieth century, has all but eclipsed the reputation of Marcello; yet the latter enjoyed the esteem of Bach, Telemann, Locatelli, Avison and Goethe, and later that of Cherubini, Rossini and Verdi. Once, the ‘Nobile Veneto’, the ‘Venetian Aristocrat’, was considered one of the musical glories of Italy on a par with Palestrina and Pergolesi. He was admired for his skilful counterpoint, his masterly attention to the words of the texts he set, the noble simplicity of his melodies.

For the past few decades, however, all these considerations seem to have faded into the background so completely that Marcello’s place in the history of music appears to rest primarily upon his famous satirical pamphlet, Il teatro alla moda, about the evils of the contemporary theatre. Even his great work, Estro poetico-armonico (1724–6), comprising settings of the first fifty Psalms paraphrased in Italian, has been somewhat neglected.

The current marginalisation of Marcello by writers on music history, compilers of concert programmes and by record companies, is possibly the result of his unusual relationship with the major Venetian musical institutions. His music was never played in St Mark’s, in the hospitals or the theatres of his native city, but only in the great houses and the salons of the aristocracy.

An interesting exception to this is his setting of sacred Latin texts. From its specifically liturgical nature, it is obvious that this music was intended for use in church, and certainly not in domestic situations nor in the private societies known as accademie. Unfortunately we do not know when, where, nor for what specific occasion Marcello composed his fine Requiem for soloists, two choirs, strings and continuo. A biography of Marcello written in the lateeighteenth century by a great admirer of the composer, Giovenale Sacchi, only tells us that Marcello also set other sacred Latin texts:… the Miserere Psalm… and three Masses, one accompanied by violins, the other two only by basses and organ.

We cannot exclude the possibility that this Mass ‘accompanied by violins’ was in reality the Requiem in G minor. Sacchi implies that these settings belong to Marcello’s final creative period, when the composer was obsessed with ‘self-canonisation’. The most plausible dating places it between 1728 and 1733, years in which the composer, having achieved a high degree of technical competence and an intense religious awareness, was devoting himself to his final musical utterances. Similarities between parts of the Requiem and the final chorus of his oratorio Joaz (1727) would appear to support this theory also from a stylistic point of view. These were the last years Marcello spent in his native city.

We also know that the composer was in contact with the organist of the Santi Apostoli and the parish church of Santa Sofia, two Venetian churches only a stone’s throw from Palazzo Marcello. Sacchi tells us that The composer donated these last works to the Church of Santa Sofia,… where they were performed many times; but then the manuscripts fell into the hands of someone who, placing a higher value upon money than upon good music, sold them to an Englishman who knew their worth, and thus they are no longer to be found in Venice.

This explains why the manuscript of the Requiem is now in the archives of the British Library in London. It is greatly to be hoped that this work, one of those that best reveal the originality and artistic strength of Marcello, may spark off a modern renaissance for Benedetto Marcello.

© 1999 Marco Bizzarini