Music, Theatre and Patronage in Venetian Society

In Venice, a republic in northeastern Italy that lasted until 1797, music depended on institutions that paid performers, trained musicians and organized public sound. Churches maintained salaried chapels; lay confraternities commissioned feast-day performances; charitable foundations taught music to selected pupils; and commercial theatres sold admission to opera. Each arrangement joined musicians’ work to a different civic, religious or financial purpose.

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Church music and professional employment

At St Mark’s Basilica, the Republic supported a musical chapel for worship and state ceremonies. In 1527, the composer Adriano Willaert became its maestro di cappella, or music director, with an annual salary of 70 ducats. His pay rose to 100 ducats in 1529 and 200 a few years later. During Mass and Vespers, the evening service, singers and instrumentalists performed within the basilica. Two facing choir galleries let groups answer one another across the space before joining in fuller passages. A pipe organ produced sustained notes when its keyboard opened valves that admitted air into individual pipes. Willaert’s published psalms of 1550 included settings for one and two choirs.

A post at San Marco could provide a continuing salary, but musicians also took paid work at other churches, confraternities and private palaces. Claudio Monteverdi became music director there in 1613. St Mark’s therefore served as both a major employer and one point in a larger market for skilled singers and instrumentalists.

Confraternities and charitable music schools

Venetian scuole were lay confraternities, religious associations of people outside the clergy. Their officers organized worship, charity and public ceremony, hiring musicians for saints’ feasts and processions. From 1577 to 1597, the annual feast at the Scuola della Trinità employed leading city musicians, including singers Giovanni Croce and Baldassare Donati, wind players and organists such as Giovanni Gabrieli. A feast gave the confraternity a formal public ceremony and gave musicians a paid engagement beyond their regular posts.

The ospedali were charitable institutions that combined care and education. By Vivaldi’s time, four large establishments operated with government oversight and private support. At the Pietà, selected girls and women learned music for the institution’s liturgy. The school trained singers and increasingly, during the seventeenth century, instrumentalists; its pupils supplied music for worship. In the eighteenth century the Pietà also rented benches in its church to listeners, bringing income to the institution.

Antonio Vivaldi joined the Pietà in 1703 as a violin teacher. In 1716 he became maestro de’ concerti, the director of instrumental performances, with greater responsibility for composing and directing music for the school’s ensemble.

Public opera and its business

In 1629 a fire destroyed the Teatro San Cassiano. After the government ordered its reconstruction, the owning Tron family received permission to stage opera, a drama performed through singing with instrumental music. The theatre reopened in 1637 with L’Andromeda, performed by a company led by composer Francesco Manelli and librettist Benedetto Ferrari. A librettist wrote the words sung in an opera. San Cassiano became an early public opera theatre, where spectators bought tickets and wealthy customers could rent boxes.

An impresario, or theatre manager, assembled a season by renting the theatre, scenery and machinery, then contracting composers, librettists, singers, designers and musicians. The manager paid for performances and operating costs such as lighting and heating. Box rents and ticket sales helped cover those expenses. Paid admission took opera beyond a private court, but seventeenth-century audiences remained socially elite.

Ownership and seasonal management could remain separate. A noble company opened La Fenice in 1792 and entrusted each season to impresarios, who hired performers and assembled productions.

Music in civic ceremony

When Henry III of France entered Venice in 1574, twenty drummers and twenty trumpeters greeted him at the palace. As he arrived from the state barge, cannon, trumpets, drums and church bells sounded. These instruments placed music at both the palace and the king’s route into the city.