Antonio Vivaldi, “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione”, Opus 8, Book 1. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 1926 the Salesian College of San Carlo, at Borgo San Martino in the province of Alessandria, needs money for building work. Among the house’s holdings are some old collections of music, which came by bequest and which nobody has ever looked at. The decision is made to sell them, and an appraisal is requested from the University of Turin. The professor who opens the volumes is named Alberto Gentili, teaches music history, and realises within a few pages that he has before him autograph manuscripts of Antonio Vivaldi.
Not one or two. Fourteen volumes, with whole works, concertos, sacred music, almost all unknown. Until then Vivaldi had been for European scholars little more than a name inside Bach’s transcriptions: the collections printed in his lifetime were known, and that was all.
Gentili notices two things at once. The first is that this material must not leave Italy, and in 1926 the international antiques market would have taken it in a week. The second, looking at the numbering of the volumes, is that the collection is half of something: the other half is missing.
For the first part he finds a private individual willing to buy and donate everything to the National Library of Turin: the businessman Roberto Foà, who sets a single condition, that the collection bear the name of his son Mauro, who died as a child. The Foà collection enters the library in 1927.
Then begins the hunt for the other half, which lasts four years and reads like a novel. Gentili reconstructs the path of the volumes backwards, from the Salesian college to a noble inheritance, and arrives in Genoa, at the Durazzo house, where the missing volumes have been for generations. The owner has no intention of selling. It takes years of negotiation, and in the end, in 1930, the remaining thirteen volumes arrive in Turin thanks to a second patron, Filippo Giordano, with exactly the same condition: the collection will be named after his son Renzo.
The result is the largest Vivaldi collection in the world, twenty-seven volumes, almost all autographs, with about three hundred concertos, some fifteen stage works, cantatas, oratorios, sacred music. Inside is also the Gloria in D major, today Vivaldi’s most performed choral piece, which before 1926 no living person had ever heard. The twentieth-century rediscovery of Vivaldi begins here, materially: without those two businessmen and that professor, the Vivaldi who is played everywhere today would not exist.
There is a coda that must be told because it is in the documents and for decades went unsaid. Alberto Gentili was Jewish. With the racial laws of 1938 he was expelled from the university, and his name was removed from the official account of the discovery. He died in Turin in 1954, after returning to his chair. In the later literature the credit was for a long time attributed to others, and the philological reconstruction of the affair came only much later.
The collection can be consulted at the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria in Turin and a growing part of it is digitised. Anyone who opens the reproductions of the autographs finds the thing that most strikes one about Vivaldi and that no modern edition restores: the haste. Fast handwriting, abbreviations, indications pared to the bone, corrections made over the top without scraping. They are the working papers of a man who delivered, not sheets prepared for posterity.
In the Melos library this is the case that explains why we concern ourselves with archives. Between the moment music stops being performed and the moment someone reopens the chest, a hundred and seventy years can pass. The heritage is not what has survived: it is what someone has taken the trouble to go and look for.