The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 29 (2023) No. 1

Annali della stampa musicale romana dei secoli XVI–XVIII. By Saverio Franchi, with Orietta Sartori. Vol. 1, part 1: Edizioni di musica pratica dal 1601 al 1650. Rome: IBIMUS, 2006. [lii, 948 pp. ISBN 978-88-8862-735-9.] Vol. 1, part 2: Indici to vol. 1, part 1. Rome: IBIMUS, 2012. [viii, 140 pp. ISBN 978-88-8862-720-5.] Vol. 2, part 1: Edizioni di musica pratica dal 1651 al 1670, edited by Orietta Sartori. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2021. [xlviii, 301 pp. ISBN 978-88-5543-039-5.] Vol. 2, part 2: Indici e Repertorio annalistico, 1671–1800, edited by Orietta Sartori. Lucca: LIM, 2022. [xii, 124 pp. ISBN 978-88-5543-127-9.]

Reviewed by Margaret Murata*

1. Volume 1, part 1; and Volume 2, part 1

2. Finding Tools and Scope

3. Corpus and Connections

References

1. Volume 1, part 1; and Volume 2, part 1

1.1 Anyone who has used the two volumes of Saverio Franchi’s indispensable Drammaturgia romana, a chronological bibliography of plays and librettos for drammi musicali, oratorios, and occasional works published in Rome from 1600 to 1750, as well as printed argomenti or scenari, knows the scope and detailed research that make it much more than a reference work or finding tool. The first volume of Franchi’s Annali della stampa musicale romana is a towering cousin, a massive year-by-year exhibition of musical scores issued in Rome, including, besides masses, motets, and madrigals, all other genres of psalms, villanellas, operas, responsories, toccatas, guitar tablatures, sonatas, etc., as well as entries for prints now lost (e.g., Lorenzo Ratti’s Motetti della Cantica of 1619). Items are numbered within each year; so for example, we have only two prints for each year from 1604 to 1606 (Del Negro, Merulo, Agazzari, Cifra, and Anerio), but fourteen for 1617, twenty-one for 1621, twenty-two for 1627 (from Frescobaldi’s second book of toccatas to Quagliati’s motets and dialogues), and thirty items for 1620. Many prints will be familiar to those working in individual genres; some tables of contents may be viewed in Emil Vogel’s bibliographies or indeed, in Kurtzman and Schnoebelen’s catalogue of sacred music printed in Italy in JSCM Instrumenta that extends from 1516 to 1770, not to mention various RISM catalogues of scores. In many cases, however, Franchi’s comments correct RISM entries and add biographical or new bibliographical information. Although arranged chronologically by year of publication, it forms a useful, specialized companion to Franchi’s earlier Le impressioni sceniche, a bio-bibliographical compilation of dramatic texts and libretti for music published in Rome and Lazio, from 1579 to 1800.^[1]

1.2 After diplomatic transcriptions of title pages (most also illustrated), entries give standard bibliographic information (size, pagination, gathering registrations); transcriptions of front matter including, most usefully, Italian translations of Latin prefaces and dedications; colophons, and the like. Franchi also gives shelfmarks of primary library holdings, RISM ID numbers where extant, pertinent bibliographical studies, and his own richly researched observations. In several cases he tracked down copies that were previously unknown and found or was able to complete sets of partbooks. Thus, for Carlo Crivelli’s six masses published in 1615, a page and a half of description and transcription are followed by almost two pages of shelfmarks, citations to other studies, comments, and translations into Italian (1:203–6). The entry for Antonio Cifra’s Sacrae cantiones of 1638 runs to a little over ten large pages.

2. Finding Tools and Scope

2.1 The wealth of cross references and material in the commentaries is made accessible by the separate Index volumes (vol. 1, part 2; and vol. 2, part 2), which both begin with summary tables of authors, titles, printers, and dedicatees arranged by year. This permits quick browsing or scanning by year, since the main volumes are rather too big to browse. Five pages in vol. 1, part 2 (pp. 26–30) then list additions and corrections to printed RISM volumes in the series A/I and B/I; for example, adding to RISM a complete set of partbooks in Poland (PL-Kj) of Abbatini’s 1627 Mass for four choirs for S. Giovanni in Laterano (discussed in 1:570–72). For both volumes 1 and 2, six more separate indexes follow: of names, of places and institutions; of religious and knightly orders; of coats-of-arms, emblems, printers’ marks and mottos; of instruments (including a serpentone); and finally, the necessary alphabetical index of text incipits and titles. (The researcher will need both index volumes to cover the years 1601 to 1670.)

2.2 At the end of the Index to volume 1, IBIMUS^[2] announced the title of the next volume, then in preparation, as “Editions of practical music from 1651 to 1800,” anticipated for 2014. Franchi’s health and untimely death in April of 2014 delayed the appearance of this second volume, which of necessity now terminates in 1670 and has been brought out by the Libreria Musicale Italiana (LIM) in Lucca. The arc of Franchi’s career had included thirty-two years teaching at the music conservatory in Perugia, then from 2006 at the conservatory in Rome and, from 2009 to 2012, teaching archival and library science at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”^[3] Thus, edited by his wife and long-time collaborator Orietta Sartori, the second volume came out in 2021. Scores were published in Rome in each of the nineteen years covered in this second volume, from a minimum of four to a maximum of fourteen prints (in both 1652 and 1657). The final entry is for Alessandro Melani’s opus 1, a set of seventeen motets for two to five voices, dedicated to Emperor Leopold I in Vienna, and for which there is only one complete set of partbooks, in the diocesan chapter archive in Asti. Also in this second Index volume, in addition to the summary table of editions and dedications and the expected indexes of names,^[4] text incipits and titles, etc., Sartori has included an updated essay from 2011 on stationers who sold and published music in seventeenth-century Rome, “Cartolai editori di musica nel Seicento romano” (pp. 57–86).^[5] Here, for example, we learn that after the death of the stationer Sebastiano Testa in 1729, it was revealed that Testa had owned the copper plates to Frescobaldi’s works that had been Nicolò Borbone’s, and that Testa had been responsible for making up some volumes of music manuscripts for the Rospigliosi and other noble families.^[6] What exactly this means in terms of personnel and production has yet to be investigated—one can imagine that music copyists and music printers were part of the same small professional universe. Their wares were handled by both booksellers and stationers. In this essay, Franchi also discusses the Roman reprints and prints of the works of Corelli.

2.3 A “Repertorio annalistico, 1671–1800” closes this project, with essential information for 147 items, including RISM ID numbers and holding libraries, but without analytical listings of contents or comments. (And it makes no claims to comprehensiveness.) It gives some indication of the coverage that Franchi had first envisioned. The final item is six “little songs” (canzoncine) by Pietro Delicati, issued in 1797. This chronology is followed by four pages of undated editions, for instance, of gagliards by G.F. Anerio; madrigals by Quagliati; solo sinfonie for violin, op. 1, by Carlo Manelli; and three string quartets by Gaetano Orsini (RISM O 131).

3. Corpus and Connections

3.1 Since we already knew that sales of printed music in Italy largely served liturgical and devotional purposes, and not only in Italy, the proportions of genres in these volumes are not surprising. Researchers investigating individual composers will of course cast wider nets. These annals are also not an evidentiary corpus of music by composers working in Rome—since in the earlier decades, Venetian houses often published music from Rome. Moreover, it is not possible to judge the number of these prints against the quantity of music surviving in manuscript, of all kinds, from these seventy years. And one expects that Franchi’s own discoveries of new sources and connections between prints (for example, reprints of music first published elsewhere) will quickly be uploaded to today’s principal digital databases. Nevertheless, Franchi and Sartori offer much more than a narrow focus on musical prints and insights into the aesthetics and activities of its publishers.

3.2 The specific bibliographic descriptions are gratifying to have (and allow comparisons between exemplars), and they are certain to be reliable; but delight lies not only in what was hitherto unknown but also in the expanded commentaries, the details that will lead historians to further connections and new questions. A single text incipit, for instance, “Non più cor mio,” leads one to the Madrigali spirituali of Corrado Bonfiglio––who can he be?––maestro di cappella of the Senate of Noto, a city on the southeast coast of Sicily. No spoiler alerts here, about how this madrigal for SAB and continuo, with its twenty-one companions for 2, 3, and 4 voices, came to be printed in Rome in 1663 and preserved in only two copies in the archives of the cathedral library in Mdina on Malta. They are not listed in Nuovo Vogel or RISM. That is Saverio Franchi’s story to tell.