by the Melos Chorus
Third and final instalment of our portrait of Giovanni Sollima. A Roman cellist of three centuries ago, and a city that loved music on an immoderate scale.
Rome, 3 September 1704. Giovanni Battista Costanzi is born, and his contemporaries will call him Giovannino del violoncello, or Giovannino da Roma. He begins studying the instrument around 1712, probably with Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier and Giovanni Antonio Haym, and at seventeen enters the service of the richest musical court in the city, that of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni at the Palazzo della Cancelleria. He stays nineteen years, until the cardinal’s death in 1740.
Ottoboni’s Cancelleria is where Roman music takes its own measure. On Mondays there are academies; oratorios, cantatas and theatrical feasts are staged. The house’s first violin, for more than twenty years, had been Arcangelo Corelli, and Corelli had taught Rome to expect big numbers: in 1687, for the English embassy received by Christina of Sweden at Palazzo Riario, there is talk of a hundred and fifty strings under his direction. For the time, an enormity; for those who heard it, a celebration.
In 1737 Costanzi is named head of instruments to Ottoboni: the very title Corelli once held.
From there the career climbs rung by rung through the city’s churches. Cellist at San Luigi dei Francesi in 1722, maestro di cappella of the same church in 1729, then of the Madonna di Loreto, San Marco, Santa Maria in Vallicella, Sant’Apollinare. In 1754 he is elected president of the Congregation of Santa Cecilia, the association of Roman musicians recognised by Pope Sixtus V in 1585, from which today’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia descends. In 1755 comes the highest post, maestro of the Cappella Giulia at St Peter’s, and he holds it until his death on 5 March 1778.
He writes a great deal, for the church and for the theatre. A Santa Cecilia in 1725, the festa teatrale Carlo Magno for Ottoboni in 1728, a cantata for Christmas 1727 on a text by Metastasio, and then oratorios on Metastasio, Gioas re di Giuda in 1748 and La morte di Abele in 1758, and every year from 1746 an oratorio for the Collegio Clementino. On the instrument he leaves a precise technical mark: the use of the capotasto, the thumb laid across the string to climb into the high positions, the double mordent, the arpeggiated chords. Tradition places him among the teachers of the young Luigi Boccherini, in Rome in 1757.
Then, for two and a half centuries, almost nobody plays him.
It happens to many Roman musicians of the eighteenth century: the manuscripts end up in the archives of churches and libraries, the name survives in the dictionaries and vanishes from the programmes. What pulls him out is a cellist from Palermo who knows the road from the archive to the stage. Giovanni Sollima studies Costanzi’s sonatas and sinfonias for cello and basso continuo, plays them, records them for the Glossa label. Giovannino del violoncello sounds again thanks to a Giovanni of the cello born two hundred and fifty-eight years later.
The parallel goes beyond the shared name. Costanzi lived in a city that treated music as a collective affair, with ensembles that seemed limitless for their day and an audience used to feasts that lasted for hours. In 2012, in Rome, Sollima brought a hundred cellos together in an occupied theatre; with the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina he has crossed nights of twelve hours. Both are cellists, both composers, both tied to the Roman congregation of musicians: Costanzi was its president, Sollima is an Academician of Santa Cecilia and has taught there since 2010.
On Sunday 15 November The Classical Rave Party closes the Romaeuropa Festival in the Sala Santa Cecilia, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. In the morning the 100 Cellos, in the evening the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina with Giovanni Sollima among the guests. It is hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Giovannino del violoncello: his city, his congregation, and far more cellos than he ever saw gathered in one place. Tickets at romaeuropa.net, TicketOne and Vivaticket.