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References

^[*] Marica S. Tacconi (mst4@psu.edu) is Professor of Musicology and Art History at the Pennsylvania State University. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on the music, art, and culture of late medieval and early modern Italy, especially Florence and Venice. Her scholarly work has been presented at conferences and symposia throughout North America and Europe, and has appeared in numerous journals, collections of essays, and exhibition catalogs. She is the author of I Libri del Duomo di Firenze (with Lorenzo Fabbri; Centro Di, 1997) and Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Her research has been supported by several institutions and grant agencies, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the American Musicological Society, and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

^[1] “The Weasel and the Mice,” in The Fables of Phaedrus, trans. P.F. Widdows (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), 82 (Book 4, Fable 2).

^[2] I use the designation “songbook” loosely. The three manuscripts include primarily operatic arias, but also monodies and cantatas.

^[4] Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Catalogo nazionale dei manoscritti musicali redatti fino al 1900, http://www.urfm.braidense.it/cataloghi/catalogomss.php (digitized card catalog, compiled 1965–). Warren Kirkendale cites MSS 740, 742, and 743 as sources for songs by Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri: Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici: With a Reconstruction of the Artistic Establishment (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 180, 243. He lists MS 740 as “mid-17th c.” (p. 180). Most recently, in a 2014 conference proceedings article, Anna Claut, former librarian at the Biblioteca Marciana, described the three books as “precious” music manuscripts, attributing MSS 742 and 743 to the late seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Anna Claut, “Gli italiani a Parigi nei manoscritti musicali marciani: I fondi Contarini e gli altri musicali presso la Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia (1640–1670),” in I musicisti veneziani e italiani a Parigi (1640–1670): Parigi, 28 marzo 2014, Atti della Giornata di Studio (PDF pub. by Venetian Centre for Baroque Music, 2014), 34–35, http://www.vcbm.it/public/research_attachments/I_musicisti_veneziani_e_italiani_a_Parigi_-_Atti_della_giornata_di_studio_1.pdf. Claut does not say anything about the dating of MS 740. Anna Claut and Elisabetta Sciarra also discussed the three songbooks in a 2016 conference presentation, listing them among the Marciana’s “musical treasures”: Anna Claut and Elisabetta Sciarra, “Marciana Musical Treasures” (paper presented at the International Association of Music Libraries Congress, Rome, 7 July 2016); the abstract is published online: https://www.iaml.info/sites/default/files/pdf/2016-06-30_iaml_rome_programme_with_abstracts.pdf, 38–39. MS 740 is listed as a concordance dated “1612–1649” in Wolfgang Witzenmann, Domenico Mazzocchi, 1592–1665: Dokumente und Interpretationen, Analecta musicologica 8 (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1970), 221. Alberto Zanotelli, Domenico Freschi, musicista vicentino del Seicento: Catalogo tematico (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 2001), lists MS 743 as a concordance for the two arias by Freschi, dating the manuscript to the second half of the seventeenth century (p. 16).

^[5] Throughout this study, I use the nouns “fake” and “forgery,” and the adjectives “fabricated,” “forged,” and “fraudulent” somewhat interchangeably. While there are differences in their definitions, there has been a tendency for these terms to be used in a more relaxed way in non-legal discourse. In general, I prefer the terms “fake,” “fabricated,” and “fraudulent” because they better convey the act of misrepresentation—authentic content but presented with the intent of deceiving.

^[6] The works run from Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima et di Corpo (1600) to Antonio Cesti’s Orontea (1656). The manuscript gives the wrong date for Orontea: 1649 instead of 1656; see Margaret Murata, “Four Airs for Orontea,” Recercare 10 (1998): 249; Lowell Lindgren and Margaret Murata, The Barberini Manuscripts of Music, Studi e testi 527 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2018), 392.

^[7] Tu mancavi a tormentarmi is attributed to Carlo Caproli in several sources; see Lindgren and Murata, Barberini Manuscripts, 392. Cesti’s Orontea premiered in 1656, not 1649.

^[8] The works run from Giulio Caccini’s “Odi, odi Euterpe” (from Le nuove musiche, 1602) to Jacopo Melani’s Il potestà di Colognole (1657).

^[9] The works run from Jacopo Peri’s Torna, o [recte deh] torna pargoletto (published in 1611 as part of P. Benedetti’s Musiche) to Antonio Sartorio’s Hercole sul Termodonte (1678).

^[10] Bianconi writes: “One more note, also marginal: the three Venetian manuscripts of the Marciana Library (It. IV. 740 and 742, and, similarly, the other, 743) are not, in any case, seventeenth-century sources…. In reality they appear to be copies in a nineteenth-century troubadour style … and, moreover, they include the most piratical repertoire of ‘arie antiche’ (maybe a first in the genre?).” The translation is my own. Lorenzo Bianconi, review of Wolfgang Witzenmann, Domenico Mazzocchi (1592–1665): Dokumente und Interpretationen, in Nuova rivista musicale italiana 6, no. 2 (1972): 277–78.

^[11] Consider, for example, a seventeenth-century manuscript preserved at the library of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, I-Vqs MS Cl.VIII.8 (=1434). It includes sixty-four arias all drawn from two operas by Domenico Freschi premiered at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in Venice: Olimpia vendicata from 1681 and Giulio Cesare trionfante from 1682. Similar manuscripts include I-Vqs MS Cl. VIII.4 (=1430); I-Vqs MS Cl. VIII.5 (=1431).

^[12] Alessandro Parisotti, ed., Arie antiche, vols. 1 and 2 (Milan: Ricordi, 1885–90); Hugo Goldschmidt, Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Oper im 17. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901); Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912); Hugo Riemann, Musikgeschichte in Beispielen: eine Auswahl von 150 Tonsätzen, geistliche und weltliche Gesänge und Instrumentalkompositionen zur Veranschaulichung der Entwicklung der Musik im 13.–18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912).

^[15] Carl Banck, Arien und Gesänge älterer Tonmeister (Leipzig: Kistner, n.d.); probably published around 1880.

^[16] Incidentally, the erroneous date (1649) inscribed in the manuscript comes from Parisotti’s description of the piece: “Intorno all’idol mio … fa parte dell’opera Orontèa eseguita nel 1649”; Parisotti, Arie antiche, 1:6. This is further evidence that the aria was copied from Parisotti’s edition, not from Banck’s.

^[17] Here too there are slips of the pen. For example, measure 7 (fol. 18r): the vocal line should read G instead of E, an error that once again resulted from copying from treble clef.

^[18] Riemann, Handbuch; Goldschmidt, Studien; Goldschmidt, Die italienische Gesangsmethode des XVII. Jahrhunderts und ihre Bedeutung für die Gegenwart (Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1890); Robert Eitner, Die oper von ihren ersten Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Berlin: T. Trautwein’sche Buch- und Musikalienhandlung, 1883).

^[19] Musiche di Piero Benedetti (Florence: Marescotti, 1611); Peri’s Torna, deh torna is on p. 29. Gagliano’s song Bel pastor dal cui bel guardo is also present in MS 742 (fols. 21v–25r) and in Benedetti’s print (pp. 26–28).

^[20] The Grove Music Online article on Jacopo Peri lists Benedetti’s Musiche (1611) and MS 742 as the only known sources for Torna, deh torna. William V. Porter and Tim Carter, in Grove Music Online, s.v. “Peri, Jacopo,” published 2001, “Works” section.

^[22] The metric shifts are related to Riemann’s theories on the metrical organization of music, which received their most extensive treatment in his System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1903).

^[23] Riemann, Handbuch, 38–40. On Grandi’s Cantade, see Giulia Giovani, “ ‘Old and Rare music and Books on music’: le Cantade ‘ritrovate’ di Alessandro Grandi,” Studi musicali, Nuova serie, 1 (2010): 147–85.

^[25] Maffeo Zanon, ed., Venti arie (1 voce in chiave di Sol) tratte dai drami [sic] musicali di Francesco Cavalli (Pier Francesco Caletti Bruni, 1599–1676) raccolte su manoscritti dell’epoca e trascritte con accompagnamento di pianoforte da Maffeo Zanon, Tesori musicali italiani (Trieste: C. Schmidl & Co., n.d. [1908]), 1–7. The three arias are Cavalli’s “A portar di bella il vanto” from Le nozze di Teti e Peleo (1639), “Quel bel fior di giovinezza” and “Su le rive d’Ipocrene” both from Gli amori di Apollo e Dafne (1640).

^[26] On Zanon’s editorial practices, see Margaret Murata, “ ‘Wo die Zitronen blühn’: Re-Versions of Arie antiche,” in Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, ed. Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 334. Murata describes Zanon’s Venti arie publication as “the most source-oriented or ‘text-centric’ Italian edition to date.” Small slips of the pen seem to confirm that the scribe of MS 743 copied from Zanon’s edition and not from the manuscripts of the two Cavalli operas preserved at the Marciana Library (I-Vnm Cod. It. IV. 365; I-Vnm Cod. It. IV. 404). For example, there are several wrong notes, the result of copying from the treble clef of Zanon’s edition and transcribing to C1 clef.

^[27] A reference to Taddeo Weil, I codici musicali contariniani del secolo XVII nella R. Biblioteca di San Marco in Venezia (Venice: F. Ongania, 1888).

^[28] Maffeo Zanon, Raccolta di 24 arie di vari autori del secolo XVII scelte ed armonizzate da Maffeo Zanon (Milan: Ricordi, 1914). The translation of the Preface is my own. Zanon specifically refers to Goldschmidt’s edition of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and to Parisotti’s Arie antiche: Hugo Goldschmidt, Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Oper im 17. Jahrhundert, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1904). Also see Murata, “Wo die Zitronen blühn,” 333–34.

^[29] Number 7, Giovanni Legrenzi’s “Quella Dea” from Totila, was copied from either I-Vnm Cod. It. IV.460, fols. 64r–65r or I-Vqs Ms. Cl. VIII.4 (1430), fols. 135v–136v. An examination of the two sources is inconclusive in determining the specific exemplar.

^[30] Zanotelli, in Domenico Freschi, lists MS 743 as a seventeenth-century source, erroneously attributing it to the Marciana’s Contarini collection. Incidentally, he draws attention to another manuscript, which shows the second verse, “Tu mi laceri quest’alma,” of “Gelosia non posso più.” Zanotelli references an illustration in Paolo Camerini’s extensive study on Piazzola sul Brenta, which shows “Tu mi laceri” as the incipit of an aria attributed to Domenico Freschi. The illustration’s caption identifies the manuscript as simply belonging to the “Contarini collection” in the Palazzo Contarini, Piazzola. The manuscript does not appear to have survived. Zanotelli, Domenico Freschi, 15, 20–21; Paolo Camerini, Piazzola nella sua storia e nell’arte musicale del secolo XVII (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1929), 347.

^[31] Legrenzi’s thematic catalog lists three sources for the D major version of “Lasciami in pace il cor”: MS 743, GB-Och Ms. 945 (fols. 22r–23v), and I-MOe Mus. F.628 (fols. 53r–55r). However, I have confirmed that the Modena manuscript includes the A major and not the D major version; Francesco Passadore and Franco Rossi, La sottigliezza dell’intendimento: Catalogo tematico di Giovanni Legrenzi (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 2002), 117, 176. Passadore and Rossi list MS 743 as a source from the second half of the seventeenth century (p. 105).

^[32] I am most grateful to Judith Curthoys and Alina Nachescu of the Christ Church Library staff for arranging to have digital images made and sent to me despite a partial lockdown of the library in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

^[34] The spelling of “inamorato” with only one N is present in both Riemann and Goldschmidt. The manuscript of the full opera has the correct spelling: “innamorato.”

^[36] As noted earlier, the manuscript includes seventeen ruled but blank pages at the end—a sign that the book may have been left unfinished.

^[37] Amphiareo’s calligraphy manuals were released in nineteen editions published between 1548 and 1620.

^[38] See Vespasiano Amphiareo, Opera di Frate Vespasiano … nella quale si insegna a scrivere varie sorti di lettere (Venice, 1565), digitized by F-Pn, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105430204/f51.item. The gothic letter L is on signature C4v, digital view 52.

^[39] See Weil, I codici musicali contariniani, vi–vii; and Thomas Walker, “ ‘Ubi Lucius’: Thoughts on Reading Medoro,” in Francesco Lucio, Il Medoro: Partitura dell’opera in facsimile, edizione del libretto, saggio introduttivo, ed. Giovanni Morelli and Thomas Walker (Milan: Ricordi, 1984), cxli.

^[40] These included Carlo Pallavicino’s Le Amazoni nell’isole fortunate (1679) and Domenico Freschi’s Berenice vendicativa (1680). See Paolo Camerini, Piazzola (Padua: Società Cooperativa Tipografica, 1902), 75–77.

^[43] Domenico’s crest is divided into quadrants—two with the traditional diagonal bands and two with a series of fleurs-de-lis. Alvise’s coat of arms is the single field with diagonal bands. Both are found in engravings in Giovanni Palazzi, Fasti ducales ab Anafesto I. ad Silvestrum Valerium Venetorum ducem cum eorum iconibus, insignibus, nummismatibus publicis, & privatis aere sculptis (Venice, 1696), 284, 290. Digitized copies are available through the Pitts Theology Library of Emory University: http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/image_details.cfm?ID=125405; and http://pitts.emory.edu/dia/image_details.cfm?ID=125407.

^[44] For example, Flavio Testi includes a color reproduction of the manuscript’s fol. 13r, the opening of Giovanni Legrenzi’s “Quella Dea” from Totila. The caption gives the manuscript’s shelf number and describes the book as a “Codice Contariniano”; Flavio Testi, La musica italiana nel Seicento: Il melodramma (Milan: Bramante Editrice, 1970), [plates p. 28]. Also, see n. 30 above.

^[45] A very similar, albeit not identical, ex libris is affixed to a book identified as belonging to Caterina Dolfin: Appiano Buonafede, Il bue pedagogo (n.p., 1765). The book is preserved in I-Pu BOT.5.143. For a reproduction of the ex libris, see the virtual exhibition Giovanni Marsili: The Library of the Prefect of Padova’s Botanical Garden, last modified 5 September 2019, https://mostre.cab.unipd.it/marsili/en/22/contemporaries.

^[46] Caterina Dolfin, Sonetti di Caterina Dolfino Tiepolo in morte di Gio. Antonio Dolfino (Venezia: Novelli, 1767).

^[49] The items Concina sold to the Marciana consist primarily of transcriptions of music by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian composers. See “Archivio dei possessori,” s.v. Concina, Giovanni.

^[51] “Manoscritto musicale contenente arie di maestri del sec. XVIIo, rilegato ex libri Dolfin. Lire 62.00.” I am grateful to Dr. Luciana Battagin, director of the music and theatre division of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, for retrieving the invoice. The invoice also bears the inventory number, no. 51223, which positions the manuscript as one acquired after Concina’s initial sale of 152 items.

^[52] I-Vnm Cod. It. IV. 739 (=10269). Tharald Borgir, The Performance of the Basso Continuo in Italian Baroque Music, Studies in Musicology 90 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987; reprint University of Rochester Press, 1991), 139–40. Borgir does not propose a date for the forgery. An editorial note by Wendy Heller and Rebecca Harris-Warrick in a posthumous article by Irene Alm acknowledges Lorenzo Bianconi for pointing out that the treatise is “an ingenious forgery by a late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century music historian who supplemented his considerable knowledge of sevententh-century practices with extensive borrowings from a 1775 keyboard treatise by Vincenzo Manfredini.” See Irene Alm, “Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15, no. 3 (2003): 220, n. 7. While the extensive borrowings from Manfredini’s Regole armoniche, o sieno precetti ragionati … (Venice: Zerletti, 1775) are certain, there is no evidence, to my knowledge, that the forgery was made in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. In a column that appeared in a 1989 issue of the Giornale della musica, Bianconi refers to the forged basso continuo treatise as a “fool-catching manuscript” (“un manoscritto acchiappacitrulli”), and warns that this and other fakes would warrant further investigation: Lorenzo Bianconi, “Un manoscritto acchiappacitrulli,” Giornale della musica 38, IV (1989); I’m grateful to Prof. Bianconi for providing me with a copy of this column. It is certainly possible that the forgery was executed in the early twentieth century, perhaps even by Giovanni Concina himself—an expert keyboardist. The manuscript has been digitized and can be viewed through the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana online catalog (where the catalog entry, accessed 1 March 2021, dates it “1890–1920”): https://polovea.sebina.it/SebinaOpac/resource/precetti-ragionati-per-apprendere-laccompagnamento-del-basso-sopra-gli-strumenti-da-tasto-come-il-gr/VEA0926823?locale=eng.

The invoice shows that Concina sold the manuscript to the Marciana on 12 January 1917 for the price of 100 Italian lire (ca. $252 in today’s currency).

^[53] Giovanni Concina, et al., Catalogo delle opere musicali – Città di Venezia: Biblioteca Querini Stampalia, Museo Correr, Pia Casa di Ricovero, R. Biblioteca di S. Marco (Parma: Fresching, 1914; reprint Bologna: Forni, 1983).

^[54] I draw the expression from Charles L. Cudworth, “Ye Olde Spuriosity Shoppe, Or, Put It in the Anhang,” Notes 12 (1954): 40.

^[55] Frederick Reece, “Composing Authority in Six Forged ‘Haydn’ Sonatas,” Journal of Musicology 35, no. 1 (2018): 137.

^[56] For some excellent overviews on music forgery, see Cudworth, “Ye Olde Spuriosity Shoppe,” 25–40; Reinhold Brinkmann, “The Art of Forging Music and Musicians,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 111–25; Giuseppe Clericetti, “La verità e altre bugie,” Recercare 26/1–2 (2014): 127–45.

^[57] On this topic, see Murata, “Wo die Zitronen blühn,” passim; Murata, “Gems, Glories, and Capolavori of Early Italian Opera,” in D’une scene à l’autre: L’opèra italien en l’Europe, ed. D. Colas and A. Di Profio (Liège: Mardaga, 2008), 1:279–301.

^[58] Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 39.

^[60] All quoted and translated by Murata, “Gems, Glories, and Capolavori,” 296; Murata draws these passages from Parisotti’s Arie antiche, vols. 1 and 2.

^[61] Luigi Torchi, Eleganti canzoni ed arie italiane del secolo XVII (Milan: Ricordi, 1893), 9, 12, 30, 51; translations are my own.

^[62] It is interesting to note how, despite their fabricated nature and incongrous features, the three manuscripts continue to be described as “elegant” in recent literature. Zanotelli refers to MS 743 as an “elegant anthology” (“elegante antologia”): Zanotelli, Domenico Freschi (2001), 21. Claut describes MS 740 as being “very elegant” and points to the fact that MSS 742 and 743 are both “elegantly bound”: Claut, “Gli italiani a Parigi” (2014), 34–35.