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Lost Arias from Ifigenia in Tauri (1713) in Thomas Gray's Music Collection: ‘E posto in Musica dal Sig. Domenico Scarlatti’?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2023
Abstract
This article shares the exciting discovery of previously unidentified arias within the music amassed by the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray. His ten-volume collection, now held at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, contains some of the only surviving copies of important arias dating back as far as 1690 and bears many annotations by Gray listing performance venues, composers, opera roles and singers. One volume of the collection contains many unattributed works, among which I identify a number of arias. Five of them match the libretto to La caduta del regno dell'Amazzoni (1690) and another corresponds to Il Colombo overo l'India scoperta (1691), both operas originally set by Bernardo Pasquini. The texts of the two ensuing arias align with Carlo Sigismondo Capeci's libretto for Ifigenia in Tauri (1713), the opera he wrote with Domenico Scarlatti for their patroness, Maria Kazimiera Sobieska. In addition, in the first pages of the assemblage, instructions in Gray's hand on how to execute a basso-continuo accompaniment continue from another volume, where he entitled these ‘Regole per l'Accompagnamento’ and interwove them with a ‘Toccata per il Cembalo’. This article seeks to describe the newfound works and stimulate study into the full contents of Gray's music collection, but its main focus is on the two excerpts from Ifigenia in Tauri and their possible attribution to Domenico Scarlatti. Salient characteristics of these scores are presented, as is an evaluation of their concordance with Capeci's libretto. Further, I underline features that these numbers share with other Ifigenia in Tauri arias known to be by Domenico Scarlatti and provide comprehensive tables detailing equivalent structural proportions.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
I wish to thank the editorial team of Eighteenth-Century Music and the reviewers for making this article stronger. I extend my gratitude to the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and its wonderful staff for making this research possible. I also wish to acknowledge the support of family and friends. My heartfelt thanks in particular to the late Ronald Désormeaux, the late Marie-Claire Dupuis, and my brother Marc Dupuis-Désormeaux and his family for their encouragement and for partially funding this research. I would also like to thank Sandra Bender for her keen editing skills and many years of unwavering support. I am also grateful to Cristina S. Martinez for believing in me, for encouraging me to pursue this project and for the countless hours spent discussing it.
References
1 ‘Di più dolce, o lieta sorte’ (Act 3 Scene 4) from Carlo Sigismondo Capeci and Domenico Scarlatti, Ifigenia in Tauri. Dramma per musica Da rappresentarsi nel Teatro Domestico della Maestà di Maria Casimira Regina Vedova di Pollonia, composto, e dedicato alla Maestà Sua da Carlo Sigismondo Capeci Suo Segretario Fra gli Arcadi Metisto Olbiano, E posto in Musica dal Sig. Domenico Scarlatti Mastro [sic] di Cappella di Sua Maestà. In Roma, per Antonio de’ Rossi, 1713. A copy of the libretto is held at the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (I-Bu), A.V.Tab.I.F.III.07.7, and is available digitally at http://corago.unibo.it/esemplare/BUB0000767/DRT0023101 (25 January 2021). My translation.
2 For information on ownership of Gray's volumes see Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (US-FAy), Quarto 532 MS, Object File: receipt dated 5 July 1937. See also Krehbiel, Henry Edward, Music and Manners in the Classical Period (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898), 7–8Google Scholar.
3 For more information on Thomas Gray's collection see Dupuis-Désormeaux, Nathalie, ‘Thomas Gray as Music Collector’, in Thomas Gray among the Disciplines, ed. Abbott, Ruth and Levinson, Ephraim (London: Routledge, 2023)Google Scholar.
4 For a list of members see Vichi, Anna Maria Giorgetti, Gli arcadi dal 1690 al 1800: onomasticon (Rome: Arcadia-Accademia Letteraria Italiana, 1977)Google Scholar, available at www.accademiadellarcadia.it/strumenti/ (10 February 2021).
5 These arias are grouped together under ‘Anonymous, Opera (unidentified fragment)’ with the general catalogue number Quarto 532 MS 10:14; as such, they do not yet have individual labels.
6 Marcello's Estro poetico-armonico contained settings of poetic paraphrases of biblical psalms by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani. For the original score see Benedetto Marcello, Estro poetico-armonico: parafrasi sopra li primi venticinque salmi, eight volumes, volume 3 (Venice: Domenico Lovisa, 1724), i–xiv. A digital copy is available from the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (D-Dl), Dresden (shelfmark Mus.2416.D.3-3), at https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/162548/37.
7 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was a pupil of Francesco Durante (known in Arcadia as Milcandro) and Hasse was a student of Alessandro Scarlatti (Terpandro Politeo). In addition, Handel frequently attended the salons of the Accademia dell'Arcadia, where he is said to have met Domenico Scarlatti; see Kirkpatrick, Ralph, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 32Google Scholar. Domenico Natale Sarri da Terni, identified in Arcadia as Daspio, was one of the first to set to music the stanzas of Metastasio (Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi), known as Artino Corasio, with Didone abbandonata in Naples (1724); see Strohm, Reinhard, Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 21Google Scholar. The inclusion in the tenth volume of Giovanni Antonio Giaÿ seems justified on the grounds of the libretto being by Apostolo Zeno (Arcadia's Emaro Simbolio), but more so given the observable fact that the music follows directly after that of Hasse in a grouping of pieces written on the same leaf.
8 See Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces, two volumes (London: Becket, Robson and Robinson, 1773), volume 1, 155, 312Google Scholar. See also Dent, Edward J., Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Work (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1905; reprinted London: Edward Arnold, 1962Google Scholar, with a preface and additional notes by Frank Walker), 192. On the rivalry with Handel see Strohm, Dramma per Musica, 22; see also Burney, Charles, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, three volumes (London: author, 1776–1789; revised edition in two volumes by Frank Mercer, New York: Dover, 1935, reprint 1957), volume 2, 788Google Scholar.
9 See Burney, A General History of Music, volume 2, 918. More on Gray's interests in comparative analyses can be read in Dupuis-Désormeaux, ‘Thomas Gray as Music Collector’.
10 Cox, Virginia, The Prodigious Muse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 88–89Google Scholar.
11 The significance for musicology and performance practice of such rules is summarized by Giulia Nuti: ‘Precisely because so much Italian music is not figured, or is only partially figured, a knowledge of these rules is vital and their application in performance is essential. . . . that within the regole is explained both the placing of chords within the bar and the harmonies expected to be heard when only an unfigured bass is given makes the regole one of the most important sources of stylistic information available.’ Nuti, Giulia, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2007), 62Google Scholar.
12 This evaluation was aided by Susan Odell Walker and Kristen McDonald of the Lewis Walpole Library, to whom I extend my gratitude for locating the watermarks and taking the measurements.
13 Gray's entire collection was eventually amassed in the United Kingdom by the American collector Charles W. Frederickson, who returned with it to the United States. In 1886 Frederickson offered some items from his personal library for sale, including Gray's music collection. It was purchased by the auctioneer Francis Bangs, but he only procured nine of the ten volumes, since he thought the tenth volume was not part of the original collection, for the reasons given above. See US-FAy Quarto 532 MS, Object File: Letter from E. J. Brazier to W. S. Lewis, 22 October 1937, 4–6; see also US-FAy Quarto 532 MS, Object File: Letter from Bernard Quaritch to W. S. Lewis, 5 July 1937, 2.
14 Benedetto Marcello claims the acciaccatura is different from the appoggiatura because it is not part of the counterpoint, noting that it is discussed in Francesco Gasparini's Armonico Pratico al Cimbalo. See Nuti, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo, 89.
15 Mason, William, ed., The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are added Memoirs of his Life and Writings (York: A. Ward, 1775), 342Google Scholar.
16 Mason, ed., The Poems of Mr. Gray, 342.
17 See Malcolm Boyd, Roberto Pagano, Edwin Hanley, Eva Badura-Skoda, Christopher Hair and Gordana Lazarevich, ‘Scarlatti Family’ and, more specifically, Lazarevich's contribution on Giuseppe Scarlatti in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (23 May 2020).
18 A libretto to Giuseppe Scarlatti's La Merope (1740) is available digitally from Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/meropedramapermu211zeno/mode/2up (1 September 2022).
19 This latter usage is chosen by Charles Burney when he reports, ‘With his [Joseph Kelway's] harpsichord playing I was not acquainted, but have often been assured, that he executed the most difficult lessons of Scarlatti, in a manner peculiarly neat and delicate.’ Burney, A General History of Music, volume 2, 1009. Prior to embarking on his travels to compile A General History of Music, Burney sent Mason the plan of his book in order to request his and Thomas Gray's opinion of it. See Mackerness, E. D., ‘The Progress of an Italophile: Thomas Gray and Music’, Italian Studies 12/1 (1957), 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is not surprising, therefore, that he attempted to secure a meeting with Giuseppe Scarlatti when reaching Vienna in September 1772; unfortunately, Giuseppe was away at the time. See Burney, The Present State of Music, volume 1, 324.
20 Decker, Todd, ‘“Scarlattino, the Wonder of his Time”: Domenico Scarlatti's Absent Presence in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Music 2/2 (2005), 274–276CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also XLII Suites de pièces pour le clavecin en deux Volumes Composées par Domenico Scarlatti, ed. Thomas Roseingrave (London: Benjamin Cooke, 1739). These are the initial thirty studies from Domenico's Essercizi per gravicembalo together with twelve other works (k1–42).
21 See William Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar: The True Tragedy of an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman. With Two Youthful Notebooks Now Published for the First Time from the Original Manuscripts in the Morgan Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937).
22 Edmund Gosse, English Men of Letters: Gray (London: Macmillan, 1882), 127.
23 See, for example, the Chrysander copy of Alessandro's ‘Regole per ben sonare il Cembalo’, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky, Musiksammlung, Hamburg (D-Hs), M A251, available at https://resolver.sub.uni-hamburg.de/kitodo/HANShm195. See specifically page 242 (3 February 2021).
24 See, for example, W. Dean Sutcliffe, The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 363–375.
25 The texts agree exactly except for two minor deviations in ‘Se un astro’ and one change of word at the end of the recitative ‘Doue, doue’ (Act 2 Scene 15).
26 La caduta del regno dell'amazzoni: festa teatrale fatta rappresentare in Roma dall'eccellentissimo signor marchese di Coccogliudo ambasciatore della maestà del re cattolico per le augustissime nozze dalla sacra real maestà di Carlo II. re delle Spagne e della principessa Marianna, contessa palatina del Reno: dedicata alla maestà della regina sposa. 1690. A copy of the libretto resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Italian Festivals +51, and is available digitally at https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2033976 (1 August 2021).
27 La caduta del regno dell’ Amazzoni (excerpts) in the library of the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini, Florence (I-Fc), B2379, fols 59v–60; 93r–93v. The arias are found in a manuscript solely attributed to Alessandro Scarlatti but which is known to contain works by other composers. I am grateful to Santa Tomasello of the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini for this information. The two arias in question are also listed in Alexandra Nigito's edited compendium Bernardo Pasquini: Le cantate, in Monumenta Musica Europea, section 3: Baroque Era, ed. Fulvia Morabito, two volumes, volume 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), clxxviii–clxxix.
28 La caduta del regno dell’ Amazzoni (excerpt) in Bernardo Pasquini, Alessandro Scarlatti, F. Gasparini, Giovanni Pietro Franchi and Flavio Carlo Lanciani, ‘Recueil d'arias italiennes’, Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn), département de la Musique, RES VMF MS-40.
29 See libretto, Il Colombo overo L'India scoperta: dramma per musica: dedicato all'Illustriss. ed'Eccellentiss. Sig. principessa D. Maria Otthoboni: da rappresentarsi nel Teatro di Tor di Nona l'anno M.DC.XCI (Rome: Gio: Francesco Buagni, 1690). A copy is available digitally from Library of Congress (US-Wc) Albert Schatz Collection; see http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/musschatz.19570 (12 August 2021).
30 For features of early eighteenth-century Roman scores see Paul Joseph Everett, ‘The Manchester Concerto Partbooks’ (PhD dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1984), 87–90. Rosalind Halton also suggests that the most common watermark for Roman paper of the late 1690s to early 1700s is the fleur-de-lis contained within a double circle. See Rosalind Halton, ed., ‘A voi che l'accendeste: Seven Settings, Seven Composers’, Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music WLCSM 31 (2016), Introduction, i.
31 Nigito, ed., Bernardo Pasquini: Le cantate, ccxii–ccxiii.
32 Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti, 23. Queen Kristina had died in April of 1689.
33 Gray's index to volume 1 (GRA/1/1) of his three-volume commonplace book shows (at fol. 4r, labelled ‘G’) ‘Relatn de la Rivière des Amazons, de Christ: d'Acunha, trad: par Gomberville, Par: 1682. 12mo’, which points to his interest in the subject. The three volumes of Gray's commonplace book are available through the University of Cambridge's Pembroke College Library at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00001/1, https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00002/1 and https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00003/1 (15 January 2022).
34 See Gray's commonplace book, volume 1 (GRA/1/1): on the death of Jan Sobieski, fol. 60r; on the death of Charles II, fol. 61r; and on other key events tied to the War of the Spanish Succession fols 33v–34r as well as fols 58v–61v.
35 Kazimierz Waliszewski, Marysieńka, Marie de la Grande d'Arquien, Queen of Poland, and Wife of Sobieski, 1641–1716, trans. Lady Mary Loyd (London: Heinemann, 1898), 271.
36 Waliszewski, trans. Loyd, Marysieńka, 273.
37 The 1713 libretto to Ifigenia in Tauri refers to Carlo Sigismondo Capeci as ‘Fra gli Arcadi Metisto Olbiano’. See also Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, 47. For biographical information see Cametti, Alberto, ‘Carlo Sigismondo Capeci (1652–1728), Alessandro e Domenico Scarlatti e la Regina di Polonia a Roma’, Musica d'oggi 13 (1931), 55–64Google Scholar.
38 Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, 46.
39 Waliszewski, trans. Loyd, Marysieńka, 282.
40 See Aneta Markuszewska, ‘Music in the Service of Politics: The Iphigenia Operas Written for Maria Casimira Sobieska as a Case Study’, Historični seminar 11 (2014), 12, 16–17, available at http://hs.zrc-sazu.si/Portals/0/sp/hs11/Markuszewska.pdf (18 December 2020).
41 Strohm remarks that, unlike in comic opera, the librettos for the drammi per musica of the time were produced ‘exclusively’ in the Tuscan dialect. See Strohm, Dramma per Musica, 6.
42 This fact is pointed out by Markuszewska in ‘Music in the Service of Politics’, 15; see also Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, 53.
43 See Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar, ‘Addenda: Text of Gray Notebooks in Pierpont Morgan Library’, 151, 161.
44 See Jones, William Powell, ‘Thomas Gray's Library’, Modern Philology 35/3 (1938), 265Google Scholar.
45 Incidentally, in England, the play Iphigenia (1700) by John Dennis had Thoas, the ruler of Tauris, embody a female person, ‘a passionate Amazon’, claims Heitner, Robert R. in ‘The Iphigenia in Tauris Theme in Drama of the Eighteenth Century’, Comparative Literature 16/4 (1964), 292Google Scholar.
46 Letter from Gray to Richard West, c1 April 1742, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, revised edition, ed. H. W. Starr, three volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), volume 1, 189 (letter 101).
47 Letter from Gray to West, 8 May 1742, in Correspondence, ed. Toynbee and Whibley, volume 1, 202 (letter 107).
48 Letter from Gray to John Chute, 24 May 1742, in Correspondence, ed. Toynbee and Whibley, volume 1, 208 (letter 109). With ‘Dab’ Gray simply refers to the small quantity of his holdings.
49 See details in Malcolm Boyd's Domenico Scarlatti: Master of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 44–67.
50 See Markuszewska, Aneta, ‘The Musical Form of Selected Arias in the Libretti of Carlo Sigismondo Capece (1710–1714)’, Musicology Today 6 (2009), 48Google Scholar.
51 See Francesco Gasparini's ‘La beltà, ch'io sospiro, è la mia pace’ and ‘Quanto sei penosa ò quanto’ copied by Pertica, available at Clori – Archivio della cantata italiana http://cantataitaliana.it/query_bid.php?id=1862 and http://cantataitaliana.it/query_bid.php?id=1860 (both 9 January 2021).
52 Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, illustration 22.
53 A similar watermark with countermark ‘I V’ can be seen in Harvey Cushing's manuscript of the printed anatomical drawings by Jacob van der Gracht (1593–1651) held at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. See https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical/blog/beneath-surface-watermarks-and-flayed-figures (4 March 2021).
54 Although Domenico Scarlatti's name appears in the libretto, Boyd wonders if Domenico himself modified the work or if the 1719 Ifigenia in Tauri was altered by another hand. See Boyd, Domenico Scarlatti, 60.
55 Ifigenia in Tauri dramma per musica da rappresentarsi nel teatro di S.A.S. il signor principe di Carignano nel carnevale del 1719. Dedicato all'altezza reale di Carlo Emanuel principe di Piemonte, &c In Torino Francesco Antonio Gattinara. Two copies of the 1719 libretto have materialized: one in the Bologna Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica (see www.bibliotecamusica.it/cmBM/viewschedatwbca.asp?path=/cmBM/images/ripro/libretti/05/Lo05137/ (12 December 2020)) and the other in the Santa Cecilia collection in Rome (see http://corago.unibo.it/libretto/DRT0023103 (14 December 2020)). Notably, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini's Ifigenia in Tauride on the libretto by Benedetto Pasqualigo (also derived from that of Martello) was shown in Venice that same year (1719). The Pasqualigo libretto does not contain the same two arias as Capeci's 1713 libretto; see http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/musschatz.19570 (10 January 2021).
56 Luciani's copy of Tolomeo’s first act bears the appellation ‘Dominicus Capece’ on its cover. See Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, 415. See also Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo, ‘Un opera inedita di Domenico Scarlatti’, Rivista Musicale Italiana 48 (1946), 433–445Google Scholar.
57 The libretto does not mention the cast; Boyd reports that ‘no list exists of the musicians in Queen Maria Casimira's permanent employment’. Boyd, Domenico Scarlatti, 23.
58 Nathalie Dupuis-Desormeaux, composer-pianist, concert ‘Thomas Gray as Music Collector’: ‘Toccata per il Cembalo’, excerpts (Quarto 532 MS 6:2, Anonymous); ‘D'un Tiranno che accarezzi’ (Quarto 532 MS 10:16) and ‘Di più dolce e lieta sorte’ (Quarto 532 MS 10:15) from Ifigenia in Tauri (1713); and ‘Sitting together in the Library’ (Tableau No. 4) from The Lewis Walpole Tableaux, Op. 127 by Nathalie Dupuis-Désormeaux, filmed by O2Films-XCZone TV (Ottawa, Canada) for the virtual concert that premiered at the conference Thomas Gray among the Disciplines, Cambridge, on 31 July 2021. I extend my gratitude to Dave McMahon and Lise Meloche of O2Films-XCZone for the cinematography that accompanied the computer rendition of ‘D'un Tiranno che accarezzi’ and for the production of this film, which they generously gifted. See https://youtu.be/MiCbtRBBr3M.
59 Waliszewski, trans. Loyd, Marysieńka, 279.