Attilio Ariosti (1666–1729)
Six Cantatas (1724)
Attilio Ariosti was born in Bologna in 1666 into an
illegitimate branch of a noble family. He joined the
Servite order in 1688, taking his vows and lower orders
the following year, to be ordained deacon in 1692. He left
the monastery in 1696 and entered the service of the
Duke of Mantua and Monferrato. His earlier
compositions had included, in 1693, the oratorio La
passione, and 1696 brought the first performance of his
pastoral opera Tirsi, with a libretto by Apostolo Zeno, at
Carnival in Venice. The following year he went to Berlin
at the request of Sophie-Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, a
great-granddaughter of James I of England and daughter
of the Electress Sophie of Hanover, an enlightened
patroness of the arts, with a keen interest in music.
Ariosti, who enjoyed the particular favour of the Queen,
wrote or collaborated in the writing of a number of stage
works performed for the court in Berlin.
Service at a Protestant court led Ariosti’s religious
superiors to recall him to Italy, but he delayed his
departure, and on his way back spent time in Vienna,
where he provided in 1703 a poemetto drammatico for
the name-day of the Emperor Leopold I, La più gloriosa
fatica d’Ercole (The Most Glorious Labour of Hercules).
His connection with the Habsburg court continued, with
the office of minister and agent to all the courts of Italy,
bestowed by the Emperor Joseph I. In 1708 he returned
to Vienna, but on the death of the Emperor in 1711 he
found himself banned for religious reasons from all
Austrian territories by the Empress, who asked the Pope
to have him expelled from his order. It is not clear
whether this last actually happened.
By 1716 Ariosti was in London, where he played the
viola d’amore at performances of Handel’s opera
Amadigi di Gaula. His own opera Tito Manlio was staged
there in 1717, and he continued to write for the stage, his
name joined with those of Handel and Bononcini. An
American writer of the time distinguishes the particular
qualities of each, suggesting that Ariosti can give
expression to ‘good Dungeon Scenes, Marches for a
Battel, or Minuets for a Ball, in the Miserere’ (quoted by
Christopher Hogwood: Handel, 1984). The ‘dungeon
scenes’ seem to allude to Ariosti’s most successful work
for the London stage, Coriolano, the prison scene in
which is praised by Sir John Hawkins as ‘wrought up to
the highest degree of perfection that music is capable of’.
The opera Vespasiano, staged in 1724, contained not
only a diplomatic preponderance of arias for Anastasia
Robinson, soon secretly to marry the Earl of
Peterborough, but provides evidence of the other
characteristics noted above; one performance of the
opera caused an uproar, when Anastasia Robinson
objected to the too close proximity on stage of the
castrato Senesino, leading to the violent intervention of
her elderly beau. Mainwaring, in his 1760 Memoirs of the
Life of the late George Frederic Handel indulges in an
imaginative account of Ariosti’s earlier acquaintance
with Handel in Berlin, when he showed the latter much
kindness, encouraging him to play the harpsichord and
seating him on his knee. It was in 1724 that Ariosti
published his Six Cantatas and a collection of six lessons
for the viola d’amore, dedicated to King George I,
brother of Queen Sophie-Charlotte who had died in 1705
at the early age of 36. The work attracted a distinguished
list of royal and noble subscribers, fraudulently included,
if Sir John Hawkins’s later report is to be believed.
Ariosti’s contribution to the repertoire of the viola
d’amore is extensive, including a large number of sonatas
and other compositions for the instrument. His final years
brought less success, with the apparent failure of the last
opera with which he was concerned, Teuzzone, in 1727.
He died in London in early September, 1729.
The composers of the trio sonatas here included need
less introduction. The trio sonata itself, a form that owed
much to the example of Arcangelo Corelli, a leading
Italian composer of the preceding generation, generally
involves four players, two performers on melody
instruments, most often two violins, and a chordal
accompaniment on a keyboard or plucked instrument,
with a bass line contributed by an instrument of suitable
register, most usually the cello or viola da gamba. It often
reflects the pattern of the concerto grosso.
Pietro Antonio Locatelli was born in Bergamo in
1695. He was employed there as a violinist at the Basilica
of Santa Maria Maggiore, before being sent to Rome,
where he was able to study with Corelli’s disciple
Giuseppe Valentini, a composer and violin virtuoso, and
to work together with other musicians of Corelli’s circle
under the patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni. His first set of
concerti grossi was published in Amsterdam in 1721. He
seems to have spent time in Venice and in 1725 was
given the title virtuoso da camera in the service of
Vivaldi’s patron, Landgrave Philipp of Hessen-
Darmstadt, Habsburg ruler of Mantua. He spent the
following period at various courts in Germany, including
Berlin. In 1729 he settled in Amsterdam, where he was
able to take advantage of the city’s effective musicpublishing
business to arrange for the publication of his
own works, remaining there until his death in 1764. His
published compositions include a set of trio sonatas,
Opus 5, issued in 1736.
Antonio Vivaldi, a native of Venice, where he was
ordained priest, for years intermittently directed the
music of the famous Ospedale della Pietà, one of the
institutions for the education of illegitimate, orphan or
impoverished girls which enjoyed a distinguished
musical reputation. He was also active in the composition
and direction of operas in Venice, and was himself
among the great virtuoso violinists of his day. His
achievement as a composer is reflected particularly in the
five hundred or more concertos he wrote, and his
pioneering work in the establishment of the form of the
Italian solo concerto.
Keith Anderson
