News

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This December’s Winter Baroque (two concerts this year, one in Newburyport and the other in Andover) will feature Italian composer Benedetto Marcello’s Cello ‍Sonata No. 4 performed by Eliana Razzino Yang.

To please his father, Marcello went into law and politics, becoming a member of the ruling Council of Forty (like being a city representative in the Venetian government), all while also working as a musician and composer.

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“Trolling” might seem like recent concept but they’ve been practicing it for centuries in Italy. Marcello was a virtuoso not just in music but with a pen as well.  Fed up with over-the-top opera productions and the ridiculous antics of singers, in 1720 he penned a pamphlet, Il Teatro Alla Moda (The Fashionable Theater”), lambasting the entire profession, specifically Teatro Sant'Angelo, the premiere opera house in Venice.  

His satiric  and biting “suggestions” included:

• "To the Composers – The modern Music Composer should possess no knowledge about the Rules of good composition…”
  
• "To the Singers – It is not necessary that the virtuoso can read or have good pronunciation or understand the sense of Words, but it is better if he mistakes Senses, Letters, Syllables, etc., in order to perform Ornaments and very long Cadenzas…”
  
• "To the Mothers of Female Singers – When the Girls have an audition with the Impresario, they (the mothers) will move their mouth with them, will prompt them the usual Ornaments and Trills and, asked about the age of the Virtuosa, will cut down at least ten years."

To print his pamphlet, he concocted a fake publisher, “Aldiviva” which, in the Italian tradition of deeply personal insults, was an anagram of the esteemed director of Teatro Sant'Angelo: a certain Antonio Vivaldi (“Aldaviva” = Vivaldi, get it?).

For health reasons, Marcello retired to the clean air of Brescia where he died a few years later of tuberculosis. Having secretly married his vocal student Rosanna Scalfi (who he first heard singing when she was rowing a gondola), upon his death the marriage was declared invalid because she was a commoner. She sued Marcello’s brother for support but lost. A talented composer herself, she died in poverty three years later.

David Yang, Artistic Director

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