»With lutenist Lukas Henning, glossa unveils a striking new talent as he presents Bella incognita, a recital devoted to the enigmatic 16th-century Venetian composer Marco dall’Aquila.«
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»Henning draws a lucid, ringing sound and a gamut of timbres to capture the variegated colours of each piece. His technique is nigh flawless: agile passagework, nimble ornamentations.«
★★★★★ [BBC Magazine 9/2019] »Henning moves through subtle shifts in tempo, in tonal shading, in agogics. The two magnificent performances with which the recital ends seal the deal.« [Gramophone Magazine, 9/2019] »– un très beau disque: très coloré comme une fleur rose dans une campagne.« [France Musique, 6/2019] »Wer Lautenspiel mag, sollte diese CD hören. Wer Lautenspiel noch nicht kennt, wird es anschließend mögen.« ★★★★★ [Rondo Magazin, 06/2019] |
Bella incognita
The Imagination of Marco dall'Aquila
»Venice the 11th of March 1505
Serenissimi Principe eiusque Sapientissimo Consiglio,
At substantial expense and with no small effort have I, Marco dall’Aquila, for the benefit of numerous ladies and gentlemen who delight in the noblest of instruments, developed a process that allows the printing of tablature for the lute. To this end I arranged various songs, which might otherwise never be printed were Your Excellency not to issue exclusive privilege to humble aforesaid petitioner.«
Serenissimi Principe eiusque Sapientissimo Consiglio,
At substantial expense and with no small effort have I, Marco dall’Aquila, for the benefit of numerous ladies and gentlemen who delight in the noblest of instruments, developed a process that allows the printing of tablature for the lute. To this end I arranged various songs, which might otherwise never be printed were Your Excellency not to issue exclusive privilege to humble aforesaid petitioner.«
Marco dall’Aquila was about twenty-five years old when this request was granted. Once issued said privilege entitled him to manufacture and sell those music books the Venetians so coveted. A lucrative business in the flourishing trade city. Yet – no trace of Marco’s prints! Neither are the reasons for his endeavour’s sudden abandoning documented. Only four years prior the publishing house Ottaviano dei Petrucci had made history with its Odhecaton, the first music print ever! Numerous publications followed, in 1507 suddenly also for the Venetians’ eleven-string darling – a mere two years after Marco dall’Aquila had received that very privilege. Meanwhile his own compositions remained unpublished.
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From the preface to Intabolature di liuto de diversi, con la Bataglia e altre cose bellissime [Milan 1536]:
»The world stands indebted to Ottaviano dei Petrucci, inventor of tablature-printing according to the way exhibited in his books. Still, as these books have grown old and our times more refined (with such men as Josquin or the lutenist Gianmaria Alemani, only to name a few of this new school’s founders, having overshadowed his name’s repute) Petrucci’s once-lauded things have found themselves set aside. And although the incomparable virtues of a Francesco da Milano, Alberto da Ripa or Marco dall’Aquila enrapture many a fine intellect with the desire to imitate them, we painfully lack the means that Petrucci once posessed. Yet I, Francesco Marcolini, tired resting from my service at the virtuous, tread beyond foreign steps on the path Ottaviano dei Petrucci concealed in the belief no other shall set foot upon it ever.«
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Just three years earlier that same publisher had printed Il Marescalco, a comedy by Venetian satirist Pietro Aretino, who writes in its prologue:
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"So tell me, am I not handsome?
– Ravishing. Not virtuous? – Verily so. Could I not have all the beauties in the world? – Them all. And my lute playing? – Like that of Marco dall’Aquila." |
Giorgio Vasari in his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori [1550]:
»In the year 1504 a disastrous fire broke out near Rialto bridge devouring the Fondaco dei Tedeschi and all of the merchandise therein, to the German merchants’ great loss. Its reconstruction, commissioned by the city, was swiftly completed and surpassed the previous building in size, splendour and beauty. Right around this time the painter Giorgione da Castelfranco came to great fame in Venice. After some consideration it was thus decided to commission him with the frescoes.«
»In the year 1504 a disastrous fire broke out near Rialto bridge devouring the Fondaco dei Tedeschi and all of the merchandise therein, to the German merchants’ great loss. Its reconstruction, commissioned by the city, was swiftly completed and surpassed the previous building in size, splendour and beauty. Right around this time the painter Giorgione da Castelfranco came to great fame in Venice. After some consideration it was thus decided to commission him with the frescoes.«
Eventually the providence that also led Marco dall’Aquila to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi would allow some of his music to survive into our present. In 1788 Paul von Stetten documented:
Already Vasari had lamented the salty-humid scirocco’s devastating effect on paint and plaster as it blows through Venice’s lagoon. Giorgione’s frescoes must have lost much of their colorful radiance when the Bavarian merchant’s son arrived at his Italian journey’s destination. Several dozen of his teacher’s compositions, hastily copied into a manuscript, found their way back over the alps in the luggage of its teenage owner: first to his hometown of Augsburg, then Munich’s state library, to be digitized into its publicly accessible digital database in 2016.
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One of the pieces contained therein, titled Recercar de Maestro Marco da Laquila–caro–a–H–HE, has the appearance of a dedication to his student Hans HErwarth, not only judging by the initials: For his short Ricercar Marco makes use of a thematic fragment found in Pierre Passereau’s mega-hit Il est bel et bon (»He is good and handsome«), which he also made his student Hans copy into his manuscript as a lute arrangement.
Vasari writes further:
»Giorgione delighted in the sound of the lute and his music making was so divine that Venice’s nobles would not seldom invite him to their parties for his singing and playing.« – where he without a doubt met Marco more than once. And, as these parties go, people sooner or later get into a conversation. |
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At any rate we know the central lutenist in his mysterious Pastoral Concert, dressed in contemporary Venetian fashion, isn’t a self-portrait. Regarding the curly-haired shepherd to his left this seems more likely. Still, the eerily illuminated figures in the foreground, neither muses nor nymphs, deny any conclusive interpretation as to what kind of scene this is. Just like the unknown beauty of Giorgione’s frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi these idealized figures exist somewhere between mythological figure, allegory and goddess. We certainly aren’t dealing with an everyday scene here, but if this depicts a myth – which one?
Giorgione is continuing an experiment already undertaken by his teacher Giovanni Bellini in the Holy Allegory: Preceding artist had always worked with a given subject, be it liturgical, historical or mythological, where every figure and action was readibly identifiable. Giorgione was among the first to consciously emancipate his painting from that so called storia. To this end he developed a new visual language of pictorial poetry, to the art critics’ despair:
»With his frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi Giorgione adhered to nothing but drawing the figures out of his own fantasia and demonstrating his skill thus. The scenes depicted forbid the deriving of an unambiguous storia, be it the deeds of notable figures from antiquity or from the present. I, for one, have nevery really understood his pictures. With some woman here, some men in all kinds of poses over there, one with a lion’s head, the other with an angel or cupid… who knows what all of this is supposed to mean.«
– writes Giorgio Vasari in his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, considered the earliest substantial publication on art history. |
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Among the works attributed to Marco dall’Aquila most carry the simple genre denomination Recercar as their title – meaning a kind of »searching« when translated literally. Originally this freely improvised form served little more than the purpose of leading into the musician’s performance proper.
Even a virtuoso like quattrocento-Ferrara’s celebrated Pietrobono de Burzellis would string his lavishly ornamented variations along ever pre-determined lines from known compositions. As an instrumentalist he was servant to the cantus firmus, just as the painters to their storia.
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Marco dall’Aquila does things differently: In his Ricercare he combines and modifies borrowed fragments of the vocal polyphony he had already spent so much of his time arranging for the lute. From French chansons like Passereau’s Il est bel et bon he’d lift melodic motives like Giorgione a nymph or shepherd from painted myth, a counterpoint from Josquin’s motet Benedicta es caelorum regina like a knot of cupids from an altarpiece. Flow and coloration from a likely never composed Italian frottola emerge in his Ricercare like the anonymous Venetian’s portrait in Giorgione’s Arcadian dreamscape.
The Pastoral Concert would turn out to be one of Giorgione's final attempts at that visionary painterly language. Vasari concludes his biography thus:
»At one of the many evenings he spent at the houses of his friends, invited to delight them with his music, Giorgione fell in love with a lady and they shared much joy between the two of them. It came to pass that his lover became infected with the plague in the year 1511 and following one of their frequent meetings he soon fell victim to the disease at the age of thirty-four, mourned by the many friends he had grown dear to for his virtues, and by the world altogether. What offered consolation were the two excellent apprentices surviving him, among them Titian, who would soon not only equal but eventually even surpass him.« |
Marco dall’Aquila's innovative style of polyphony entirely proper to the lute had only little in common with the Ricercare of his predecessors – and thus called for a new name. One of the more complex Ricercare in Hans Herwarth’s manuscript is also found among the three compositions printed in aforementioned Milanese anthology, though this time under another title:
For lutenists of the succeeding generation, with Francesco da Milano as its most significant exponent, the Fantasia would gradually replace the Ricercar. Up until that point they had been confined to their own niche in a hierarchy dating back to the middle ages:
Above the instrumentalists stood the composers and organists, whose vocal polyphony they constantly arranged, after all. Further up theorists placed the »musici«, as they used to call themselves. The newly developed Fantasia apparently raised some first doubts in this ancient order:
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– writes Giovanni Spataro, whose work, as history would have it, is today vastly overshadowed by that of his colleague Pietro Aron.
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Another take on professional hierarchies comes from above-mentioned Venetian satirist Pietro Aretino. A letter to his publisher Paolo Manuzio represents the last surviving document that mentions Marco dall’Aquila, dated 9th of December 1537:
»…and little does it surprise me to see the cackling of other writers printed by you when the likes of a Francesco da Milano, Alberto da Ripa or my very own Maestro Marco dall’Aquila can find delight in the jangling of a barber’s lute. Likewise a random ornamental head blotted onto Titian’s cupboard by some chestdauber may enjoy its owner's occasional appreciation.«
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me:mo episode 23
❧ My CD-debut "Bella incognita – The imagination of Marco dall'Aquila" on glossa. ❧ Pietro Aretino's pornographic sonnets ❧ Censorship in the Renaissance ❧ Pietro Aron and the Greek modes ❧ Il est bel et bon & the fallacy of a "sexless past" |