The bedrock of biography is, naturally, facts. Scholarly investigation and observation tends to increase the volume of known facts; the ravages of time and the vagaries of preservation tend to diminish the pool of facts capable of being discovered. But it takes a long time to exhaust the pool of discoverable facts, and once a fact has been recorded in modern scholarly literature its survival is guaranteed even if its accuracy is sometimes not. So the history of Vivaldi biography sees an incremental accumulation of facts ā in some periods rapid, in others slow.
But facts alone do not make biography. The other vital element is supplied by the interests and attitudes of the biographer, which although in part purely personal can always be related to a wider social, national, and religious or ideological framework. Even before the available facts are evaluated under the readerās scrutiny, they will have been thoroughly sifted: some will have been passed over in silence, others marked out for special emphasis. Indeed, whatever efforts the biographer makes to augment the factual basis of his account through his own investigations are likely to be governed to a great degree by his personal interests, since such investigations are necessarily very selective.
The mutual confrontation of facts and attitudes produces a third category: that of inferences or conjectures. In many respects these are what imparts the strongest flavour to a biography and provides the greatest stimulation for the reader. A scrupulous writer will always distinguish meticulously between fact and inference, but there is no guarantee that the reader will do so. So there is always the danger that inferences will spill over into the realm of facts and become accepted as such. The tradition of Vivaldi biography in the present century, especially in anonymous, derivative versions intended for popular consumption, is full of inferences masquerading as facts. As we all know, many of these inferences, which seem to strike a responsive chord in the public mind, persist stubbornly, even when factual evidence has long since invalidated them.
My purpose is not to chart the advances of Vivaldi biography from 1948 to the present day in an exhaustive or even systematic way, nor to score easy points over fellow Vivaldians of an earlier generation. (Indeed, I would be most imprudent to criticize mistakes in others self-righteously when I have to acknowledge so many errors in my own writings on Vivaldiās life and works that appeared in 1978).1 What I intend to do, rather, is to select certain biographical āthemesā or ātopicsā and examine how their treatment has evolved since they were discussed in Pincherleās famous book Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale that came out in 1948.2 Pincherle was not in fact the first Vivaldi biographer to produce a complete book, since he was preceded both by Michelangelo Abbado, whose short study of 46 pages appeared in 1942,3 and by Mario Rinaldi, whose account, published in 1943, is very comparable in length and scope.4 But the sharpness and clarity of Pincherleās writing, his great insight into musical processes, and his ability, born of a remarkable familiarity with the eighteenth-century repertory, to relate one composer ā Vivaldi ā to a dense network of musical activity before, during, and after his lifetime established him in most eyes as the leading international authority on Vivaldi. His position as a non-Italian, which disadvantaged him to some extent in his efforts to gain access to musical and archival material in Italy during the Fascist era, became instead a great benefit to him when the time arrived to convey the fruits of his long researches to an international musicological community which in the immediate post-war years was dominated somewhat more than it is today by scholars from the German and Anglo-Saxon worlds ā scholars who for the most part were much happier reading French than Italian.
To understand the outlook of Pincherleās great book it is important to be aware of two things. First, Pincherle was a good violinist who was particularly interested in technical questions concerning his instrument; the study of violinist-composers forms the heart of his scholarly Åuvre. Second, his researches into Vivaldi began over forty years before the appearance of Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale; even in 1948 his research findings bear traces of their early origins.5 That Pincherle chose to devote his book entirely to Vivaldiās instrumental music, reducing mention of the vocal music to the absolute minimum (when the existence of large quantities of it had been known since the late 1920s), probably reflects, first, the lack of any great personal interest in vocal repertories; it may also owe something to a kind of inertia with which every scholar is familiar ā the reluctance, when a task is within sight of completion, to broaden its scope as a result of receiving unexpected new information.6 There is of course a broader context for the emphasis on instrumental music: Pincherle was heir to the nineteenth-century view, still influential even today, that instrumental music, āuncontaminatedā by the extra-musical associations and precise meanings inherent in verbal texts, was the highest, purest, and most characteristic form of music. Further, Pincherleās emphasis on the concerto genre almost to the exclusion of the sonata reveals another bias typical of the time. According to the then dominant āevolutionaryā view of musical history and aesthetics, composers were held to have made their greatest musical contribution in those areas where historical testimony and musical analysis showed them to have been most influential. Vivaldiās concertos were admired and imitated by his contemporaries: his sonatas were not. Ergo the concertos were better music than the sonatas, hence more worthy of the scholarās attention. Pincherleās own justification for the neglect of the sonatas is so neat as to be almost a reductio ad absurdum of my explanation. He writes:
Je ne me suis pas appesanti sur les sonates. Il nāen sera question quāincidemment. Plusieurs ne manquent ni de charme, ni dāĆ©clat, mais la part dāinnovation est faible. Jusque dans le choix des thĆØmes, il se comporte en disciple respectueux de Corelli. Cāest dans le concerto et la sinfonia quāil se rĆ©vĆØle crĆ©ateur.7
This bias towards instrumental music in general and the concerto in particular meant that in his own biographical investigations Pincherleās main concern was to establish the context in which the concertos were conceived and performed during the composerās lifetime. He did not, for instance, conduct investigations of his own into Vivaldiās theatrical activities, although he naturally profited from existing studies and available documentation concerning them.
Although Pincherleās account of Vivaldiās concertos marked an important advance in knowledge ā even today, some of its insights are as fresh as ever ā the biographical sections were little more than a summation of the data that Pincherle and a number of Italian scholars had been able to glean in the inter-war period. The biography proper, entitled āLa Vieā, occupies twenty pages (15ā34), while a further twenty-six pages (35ā50) first sketch in the Venetian background (āLa vie musicale Ć Venise au dĆ©but du XVIIIe siĆØcleā) and then deal at greater length with the Venetian ospedali and the PietĆ ; more information on Vivaldiās activity at the PietĆ , including some transcriptions of documents, is found in two appendices (pp. 291ā293). Most of the biographical information contained in the book was foreshadowed in two major articles published by Pincherle much earlier. An essay on the life (Antonio Vivaldi: saggio biografico) first came out in 1929 in āLa rassegna musicaleā and reappeared the following year in a French-language version in āLa Revue musicaleā.8 The composerās association with the PietĆ was discussed in an article, Vivaldi e gli ospedali di Venezia, published in āLa rassegna musicaleā in 1937; this reappeared in English one year later (as Vivaldi and the āOspitaliā of Venice) in āThe Musical Quarterlyā.9
Pincherleās account of Vivaldiās life was unrivalled for its time in the use it made of eighteenth-century travel literature and critical literature, particularly from northern Europe. Pincherle was not alone, however, in his efforts to reconstruct a biography from primary sources preserved in Italy. In 1928 Arcangelo Salvatori produced a prize-winning essay on Vivaldiās life published in the āRivista mensile della cittĆ di Veneziaā;10 1938 saw an article by Rodolto Gallo that presented new facts about Vivaldiās family and provided the first confirmation of the date and place of his death (1741, Vienna);11 five years later, Mario Rinaldi synthesized the state of knowledge in Italy in Antonio Vivaldi. Pincherle, as he admits in the foreword to his book, was embarrassed by his apparent in...