Controversial composer had little time for opera
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| A 19th century bust of Marcello, housed in Palazzo Loredan in Venice |
Marcello is mainly remembered for his composition Estro poeticoarmonico, a setting for voices and instruments of the first 50 Psalms in the Bible. An edition with words in English was brought out in 1757, after his death.
In his amusing pamphlet Il teatro alla moda, which was written in 1720, Marcello expressed strong opinions about the state of musical drama at the time.
Born into a noble family in 1686 in Venice, he was intended by his father for the law. Marcello became a member of the Venetian Council of Forty in 1711 and in 1730 he went to Pola in Istria as Governor, but he managed to combine his work with writing and composing music.
Eight years later, Marcello retired to Brescia as papal chamberlain. During his life he composed many operas, oratorios, cantatas, concertos and sonatas.
He was also a poet, translated John Dryden’s Timotheus as a text for one of his own cantatas, and wrote a libretto for the 1709 opera, Arata in Sparta, by Guido Ruggeri.
As a young man Marcello was a contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi in Venice and it is thought that his music has a flavour of Vivaldi’s work.
Although Marcello wrote an opera, La fede riconosciuta, which was produced in Vicenza in 1702, he had little sympathy with this form of music, as he showed when writing his pamphlet Il teatro alla moda.
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| The cover of Marcello's satirical pamphlet, Il teatro alla moda |
The library of the Brussels Conservatoire possesses some interesting volumes of chamber cantatas composed by Marcello for his mistress.
The composer Joachim Raff wrote an opera entitled Benedetto Marcello, based loosely on the lives of Marcello and Rosanna Scalfi.
The Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia - also known as the Venice Conservatory - was named after him. The conservatory is housed in Palazzo Pisani a San Stefano, which faces Campo Santo Stefano in the San Marco sestiere.
A street in Rome, Largo Benedetto Marcello, is also named in his memory.
Marcello's birthplace in Venice, in the Palazzo Marcello on the Grand Canal in the Cannaregio sestiere, is marked with a plaque.
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| The Palazzo Marcello on the Grand Canal in Venice, Benedetto's birthplace |
Visitors to Venice who arrive by train at Santa Lucia railway station are greeted by the magnificent sight of the Grand Canal when they come out of the station. They can choose to sail down to Piazza San Marco in style on a vaporetto, or to walk down Lista di Spagna and through fascinating back streets in the direction of the Rialto bridge and Piazza San Marco. Walking through the Santa Croce area in the direction of the Rialto will bring you to the Campo della Pescheria and Venice’s famous fish market, which has been developed into a vibrant area with bars and restaurants where you can eat outside looking out over the Grand Canal. Venice’s most famous opera house is Teatro La Fenice in Campo San Fantin, inaugurated in 1792, but it is predated by the Teatro Goldoni, which originated as Teatro di San Luca, founded in 1622. La Fenice’s heyday was during the 19th century when the premieres of Rossini’s Tancredi and Semiramide and Verdi’s La traviata were held there. During the Austrian occupation of Venice, the audience threw red, white and green flowers on the stage to represent the Italian flag and shouted ‘Viva Verdi’. They weren’t just praising the composer, Giuseppe Verdi, but using the letters of his last name as code for ‘Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia’, expressing support for the first King of Italy.
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| Brescia's 11th century Duomo Vecchio, also known as La Rotonda because of its cylindrical shape |
Brescia, where Benedetto Marcello was residing when he died, is a town of great artistic and architectural importance. Although it is the second city in Lombardy after the capoluogo, Milano, and has Roman remains and well-preserved Renaissance buildings, it is not as well-known to tourists as other historic Italian cities. Brescia became a Roman colony before the birth of Christ and remains from the forum, theatre and a temple can still be seen. The town was fought over by different rulers in the Middle Ages, but came under the protection of Venice in the 15th century. There is a distinct Venetian influence in the architecture of the Piazza della Loggia, an elegant square in the centre of the town, which has a clock tower similar to the one in Saint Mark’s square in Venice. Next to the 17th century Duomo is an older cathedral, the unusually shaped Duomo Vecchio, also known as la Rotonda, which is open to the public. The Santa Giulia Museo della Cittá covers more than 3000 years of Brescia’s history, housed within the Benedictine Nunnery of San Salvatore and Santa Giulia in Via Musei. The nunnery was built over a Roman residential quarter, but some of the houses, with their original mosaics and frescoes, have now been excavated and can be seen while you are looking round the museum.
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More reading:
Antonio Vivaldi, the musical priest who died impoverished
Tomaso Albinoni, the Vivaldi contemporary who became a prolific composer
Bartolomeo Cristofori, the 17th century musician credited with inventing the piano
Also on this day:
1759: The birth of Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia
1843: The birth of painter Eugene de Blaas
1921: The birth of tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano
1931: The birth of film director Ermanno Olmi