Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts

Authors

  • Paul Everett

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35561/JSMI08123

Keywords:

Vivaldi, Prague, Bohemia, concertos, manuscripts, lute, rastrology,

Abstract

The present article was originally published in Czech translation by Michaela Freemanová: ‘Vivaldiho bohemikální rukopisy’, Opus musicum, 44/3 (2012), 14-25. It concerns the several manuscripts - mostly autographs - of Antonio Vivaldi that appear to originate from Bohemia and the time of the composer’s visit, accompanied by his father Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, to ‘Germania’ in 1729-30. Besides three manuscripts of compositions with lute (RV 83, 85 and 93), whose association with Count Johann Joseph von Wrtby (Jan Josef z Vrtba, 1669-1734) had been recognized in the 1970s, there are eleven further manuscripts (of RV 155, 163, 186, 278, 282, 288, 330, 380, 473, 500 and 768) discovered to be of similar, putatively Bohemian provenance that survive in Vivaldi’s personal archive of music, now preserved in Turin. Through the examination of their paper-types and rastrographies (utterly distinct from those of the music papers Vivaldi typically used in Italy), a clear picture emerges of the near-contemporaneity and common origin of these fourteen manuscripts.

Author Biography

Paul Everett

Paul Everett, formerly Head of the Department of Music, University College Cork, is well known as an editor of music and for his studies of early eighteenth-century manuscripts, notably Vivaldi sources and their chronology. Since the 1980s he has been one of the editors for the New Critical Edition of Vivaldi’s works, and is perhaps most noted as the author of Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He was instrumental in founding Ireland’s first peer-reviewed musicological journal, the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and served as its first Executive Editor (2005-9).

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Published

14-06-2013

How to Cite

Everett, P. (2013). Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts. Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 8, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.35561/JSMI08123

Issue

Vol 8 (2012-13)

Section

Articles

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