Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts

PAUL EVERETT

On 30 September 1729, the violinist Giovanni Battista Vivaldi (1655–1736) was granted
the permission of the procurators of S. Marco, Venice, to take a year’s leave of absence
in order to accompany a son of his to ‘Germania’.1 This son was surely Antonio Vivaldi
(1678–1741), by then already a celebrated composer of opera and instrumental works,
who seems to have relied a great deal on the services of his father. A close professional
relationship between the two men had existed for many years. Giovanni Battista had
been Antonio’s violin teacher and had helped to establish his career in Venice before
becoming his most trusted copyist. Blessed with longevity, he remained his son’s prin-
cipal assistant until as late as 1733.2
The primary purpose of the Vivaldis’ visit to German-speaking lands remains un-
certain, and we do not know details of their itinerary. In general terms, the trip may
have been an attempt by Antonio to refresh or enhance his association with Charles
VI, the Habsburg emperor, first formed in 1727 when the composer dedicated to him
the Op. 9 collection of concertos, La cetra (published in Amsterdam by the firm of Le
Cène), and pursued in 1728 with the similarly dedicated manuscript collection of
twelve concertos, also entitled La cetra, preserved in Vienna.3 The composer had for
some time enjoyed contacts with other persons, including Prince Philip of Hesse-
Darmstadt, governor of Mantua from 1714 to 1735, and Count Wenzel von Morzin
(1676–1737) to whom the Op. 8 collection of 1725 was dedicated, which suggest that it
is entirely logical to view the visit of 1729–30 to ‘Germania’, like Vivaldi’s final journey
to Vienna where he died in July 1741, as but one among many sometimes related

The present article was originally published, in Czech translation by Michaela Freemanová, as
‘Vivaldiho bohemikální rukopisy’, Opus musicum, 44/3 (2012), 14–25. It is published here in English
for the first time.
1 Venice, Archivio di Stato, Procuratori di S. Marco de Supra, Chiesa, Registro 153, fol. 117v.
2 See Paul Everett, ‘Vivaldi’s Italian Copyists’, Informazioni e studi vivaldiani, Bollettino dell’Istituto Itali-
ano Antonio Vivaldi, 11 (1990), 27–88: 33–7.
3 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 15996.

Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 8 (2012–13), p. 41

 Paul Everett

episodes in the composer’s career that are connected with the Habsburg empire.4
Whatever it involved, the trip appears at least to have fostered further patronage, from
Francis Stephen (1708–65), duke of Lorraine (later the emperor Francis I) and the Vien-
nese Joseph Johann Adam (1690–1732), prince of Liechtenstein.
It has been assumed, but perhaps too readily,5 that Vivaldi was in Prague for the
production of a version of his opera Argippo, RV 697,6 at the theatre of Count Franz
Anton von Sporck during the autumn season in 1730 and perhaps for the revival there
of Farnace, RV 711, in the spring of the same year; certainly, the composer’s provision
of music for Antonio Denzio’s company of singers in Prague during the period 1724–
38 is established.7 But whether Vivaldi was present or not, we know that these two
operas were attended by the Bohemian Count Johann Joseph von Wrtby (Jan Josef z
Vrtba, 1669–1734), who certainly had contact with the composer. That Wrtby was a
patron of Vivaldi during the visit of 1729–30 was long ago inferred from the fact that
three autograph manuscripts, of works scored for lute and other instruments, exhibit
inscriptions to him (quoted under RV 82, 85 and 93 in Table I, below). Indeed, this
implies that Wrtby himself might have been a player of the lute. But such annotations
are not necessarily to be thought of as dedications when they appear not on copies
presented to a patron but on Vivaldi’s own drafts of the music which he retained, and
they do not necessarily indicate patronage of the conventional kind involving employ-
ment. Vivaldi regularly sold manuscripts of his instrumental pieces individually or in
sets, and these autograph inscriptions may simply show that a scribe was directed to

4 Fully summarized in Michael Talbot, ‘Vivaldi and the Empire’, Informazioni e studi vivaldiani, Bollet-
tino dell’Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 8 (1987), 31–51. See also Theophil Antonicek, ‘Vivaldi in
Österreich’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 33 (1978), 128–34; and Oskar Prinz zu Bentheim and
Michael Stegemann, ‘Vivaldi und Böhmen. Wenige Fakten, viele Fragen’, Informazioni e studi vival-
diani, Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 9 (1988), 75–89.
5 As noted by Michael Talbot in ‘The Fortunes of Vivaldi Biography, from Pincherle to the Present’, in
Chigiana, 41 (1989): Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, ‘La prima “Settimana musicale Senese”
e la Vivaldi Renaissance (1939–1989)’ (Florence: Olschki, 1991), 113–35: 126.
6 ‘RV’ work-reference numbers follow Peter Ryom, Verzeichnis der Werke Antonio Vivaldis (RV); kleine
Ausgabe (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1974), and Ryom, Répertoire des ouevres d’Antonio
Vivaldi. Les compositions instrumentales, (Copenhagen: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1986).
7 See Pravoslav Kneidl, ‘Libreta italské opery v Praze v 18. století’, Strahovská knihovna, 1 (1966) , 97–
131; Tomislav Volek and Marie Skalická, ‘Vivaldis Beziehungen zu den böhmischen Ländern’, Acta
Musicologica, 39 (1967), 64–72; Reinhard Strohm, ‘Vivaldi’s Career as an Opera Producer’, in Essays on
Handel and Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122–63: 156; and Daniel E.
Freeman, The Opera Theater of Count Franz Anton von Sporck, Studies in Czech Music, 2 (Stuyvesant,
NY: Pendragon Press, 1992).

JSMI, 8 (2012–13), p. 42
Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts

provide copies for Wrtby who might therefore have been a customer or client on a
temporary basis.
Neither the rarity, among Vivaldi’s works, of music for lute nor the fact that the
autographs of RV 82, 85 and 93 employ a non-Italian paper, unusual for him, went
unnoticed in scholarship of the 1970s,8 and on that basis it was concluded that these
pieces were perhaps specially commissioned by Wrtby and almost certainly composed
while Vivaldi was in Bohemia or at some other location north of the Alps during 1729–
30. Because RV 82 and 85 are labelled ‘2’ and ‘5’ respectively, it was also recognized
that Vivaldi might have furnished Wrtby with a whole set of trios involving the lute
and that the remaining autographs are lost.9 But it was later discovered, when the
whole corpus of Vivaldi’s manuscripts preserved in the Foà and Giordano collections
in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin was thoroughly investigated in the 1980s by the
present writer, that these three sources were not isolated cases: eleven further manu-
scripts (of RV 155, 163, 186, 278, 282, 288, 330, 380, 473, 500 and 768) were found to
comprise similar materials.10 All are autographs except that of RV 155, which is a
copyist’s score with some autograph annotations. Shelfmarks, superscriptions and
identifications are shown in Table I; Table II gives the incipit of the first movement of
each work.11
We cannot conclude that these eleven concertos were also written in connection
with Wrtby (for they lack explicit inscriptions to that effect), but it is highly probable
that they are scores prepared at about the same time as the lute works from a limited
stock of music paper that Vivaldi acquired while on tour. They hint that the composer

8 Michael Talbot, Vivaldi (London: Dent, 1978, second edition, 1993), 59.
9 Because the numbers are each not part of the inscription to Wrtby and may have been added some
time after the scores had been completed, and because Vivaldi quite regularly added numerical
markings to his scores whose functions cannot yet be adequately explained, this view may not be
correct. Besides, the autograph of RV 93 also carries the number ‘2’ in one corner of its first page. See
Paul Everett, ‘Vivaldi’s Marginal Markings: Clues to Sets of Instrumental Works and their Chrono-
logy’, in Gerard Gillen and Harry White (eds), Irish Musical Studies. 1: Musicology in Ireland (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 1990), 248–63: 254 and 256–7.
10 First reported in Paul Everett, ‘Towards a Chronology of Vivaldi Manuscripts’, Informazioni e studi
vivaldiani, Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 8 (1987), 90–107.
11 It is not the intention of the present article to dwell on the textual contents of these sources, which is
properly the concern of literature devoted to Vivaldi’s music. Of particular interest, however, is the
inclusion in this group of one of the composer’s concertos with special titles, ‘Conca’; for a full
discussion of the concerto RV 163, see Michael Talbot, ‘Vivaldi’s Conch Concerto’, Informazioni e studi
vivaldiani, Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 5 (1984), 66–82, which provides a facsimile of
the first page of the manuscript.

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 Paul Everett

was occupied with providing instrumental music, perhaps for imminent perfor-
mances, and therefore that the purpose of the visit might not have been to oversee
operatic productions after all. It is unlikely to be merely accidental that no vocal music
written on similar paper is preserved among the Foà and Giordano manuscripts,
Vivaldi’s personal archive that he retained until his death.

TABLE I

RV 82 I–Tn; Foà 40, fols 6–9. Trio in C major, for lute, violin and basso continuo. Autograph
score, superscribed 2[?] Trio P[er] Leuto, Violino, e Basso [space] Originale del Viualdi /
P[er]. S[ua]. E[ccellenza]. S[ignor]:e Conte Wrttbij. Paper X, 3/65.5.
RV 85 I–Tn; Foà 40, fols 2–5. Trio in G minor, for lute, violin and basso continuo. Autograph
score, superscribed Trio P[er] Leuto, Violino, e Basso 5[?]. [space] Originale del Viualdi /
P[er] S[ua]. E[ccellenza]. Il:[?] Conte Wrttbij. Paper X, 3/65.5.
RV 93 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 297–302. Concerto in D major, for lute, two violins and basso
continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to con 2 Violini Leuto, e Basso [space] Del
Viualdi / P[er] S[ua]. E[ccellenza]. Il:[?] Con[te]: Wrttbij. Paper X, 3/65.5.
RV 155 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 188–193. Concerto in G minor, for two violins, viola and basso
continuo. Non-autograph score with autograph annotations, superscribed Con:to Del
Viualdi. Paper Y, 1/10.6.
RV 163 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 251–254. Concerto in B flat major, ‘Conca’, for two violins, viola
and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Conca [space] Con:to [space] Del
Viualdi. Paper Y, 1/10.6.
RV 186 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 261–268. Concerto in C major, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi. Paper X,
2/36.5 (fols 261, 262, 267 and 268) and X, 2/34 (fols 263–266).
RV 278 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 225–240. Concerto in E minor, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi. Paper Y,
1/10.6.
RV 282 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 212–224. Concerto in F major, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi. Paper X,
2/36.5 (fols 212–223) and X, 3/65.5 (fol. 224).
RV 288 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 194–201. Concerto in F major, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi. Paper Y,
1/10.6.
RV 330 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 202–211. Concerto in G minor, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi. Paper X,
3/65.5.
RV 380 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 241–250. Concerto in B flat major, for principal violin, two
violins, viola and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi.
Paper Y, 1/10.7.

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RV 473 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 313–320. Concerto in C major, for bassoon, two violins, viola and
basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to P[er] Fagotto [space] Del Viualdi.
Paper X, 3/65.5.
RV 500 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 305–312. Concerto in A minor, for bassoon, two violins, viola
and basso continuo. Autograph score, superscribed Con:to Del Viualdi / P[er] Fagotto.
Paper Y, 1/10.6.
RV 76812 I–Tn; Giordano 35, fols 303–304. Concerto in A major, for principal violin, two violins,
viola and basso continuo. Autograph score lacking superscriptions of the work’s
identification: a draft made when the composer converted the concerto RV 396 for solo
viola d’amore (autograph score, I–Tn; Foà 29, fols 324–331) into the present version for
violin. Paper Y, 1/10.6.

TABLE II

12 Formerly classified as ‘RV 744’. Ryom, Répertoire, 70–1, 443–4 and 705.

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The hundreds of autographs in the Turin collections overwhelmingly prove that

Vivaldi normally used batches of music paper acquired in Venice or elsewhere in
northern Italy: paper of excellent quality with the generic three-crescents watermark
(tre mezze lune), purchased as folded but uncut quires with staves already ruled on the
pages. Patterns of stave-ruling, or ‘rastrographies’, show that the commercial provi-
sion of music paper was considerably more advanced in the Veneto than in other
regions of Italy and elsewhere in Europe early in the eighteenth century, both in terms
of the quality of the product and the technology it involved.13 In contrast, the two
varieties of paper—which we may call ‘X’ and ‘Y’—exhibited by the fourteen manu-
scripts of putative Bohemian provenance are of inferior quality with stave-rulings in a
relatively unsophisticated style: rulings of only one, two or three staves at a time,
made using hand-held rastra.14
Distinguishable only by their watermarks, paper-types X and Y are as sufficiently
similar as one can expect of varieties of a single regional provenance. Both are parti-
cularly dense papers with minimal translucency, red-brown though mottled in colour,
with a sheet size of around 430 x 340 mm (horizontal and vertical dimensions,
respectively). The sheets of both types exhibited by the present manuscripts were im-
posed in folio format: i.e. each was folded only once to give two upright leaves. It is
because they are upright that they were bound into Foà 40 and Giordano 35; the re-
maining twenty-five Turin volumes which contain Vivaldi’s manuscripts are all
oblong, the four-leaf quire in oblong quarto format (most frequently with ten staves
across each page) being the standard unit of music paper to which he was accustomed.
Three-crescents papers have a considerably larger sheet size (around 630 x 470 mm)
than types X and Y; even when imposed in upright quarto format, they give a spacious
leaf-width of about 235 mm. The upright leaves of types X and Y, being roughly 215

13 The kinds of music paper that Vivaldi most frequently used have ten staves per page (i.e. 50 lines)
ruled in a single stroke, probably by machine. Information on the range of papers and their rastro-
graphies is given in Paul Everett, ‘Vivaldi Concerto Manuscripts in Manchester: II’, Informazioni e
studi vivaldiani, Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, 6 (1985), 3–56 (especially 8–10), and
Everett, ‘Towards a Vivaldi Chronology’, in Antonio Fanna and Giovanni Morelli (eds), Nuovi studi
vivaldiani; edizione e cronologia critica delle opere, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 729–57 (especially
737–47).
14 A list of 25 surviving rastra (singular ‘rastrum’, Latin for ‘a rake’), with photos of some of them, is
given in Jean K. Wolf and Eugene K. Wolf, ‘Rastrology and its Uses in Eighteenth-Century Manu-
script Studies’, in Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner (eds), Studies in Musical Sources and Styles:
Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue (Madison: A-R Editions, 1990), 237–91. Four are preserved in the
National Museum, Prague: Muzeum český hudby (Czech Museum of Music), Sign. 31 K, 32 K, 33 K
and 136 K.

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Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts

mm wide, must have seemed to Vivaldi rather narrow for their height and incon-
venient to use. Evidence showing that he was having to cope with music paper of an
unfamiliar kind indeed exists. For the score of RV 155, he used the leaves upside-
down. The lower edges of the manuscripts of RV 186 and 330 were severely trimmed
(perhaps in an attempt to make their height conform to the dimension of Italian
manuscripts with which they may have been kept) to the extent of removing the
lowest (twelfth) stave from the pages of RV 330 with a consequent loss of text on fols
204v and 211v. That this mishap occurred during the composer’s lifetime, before the
sources were bound in their present volumes, is demonstrated by the fact that Vivaldi
rectified the mistake on fol. 211v (but failed to spot the problem with fol. 204v) by
adding the missing notes of the bass part on an otherwise void first-violin stave with
the remark ‘Questo è il Basso perche sotto è stato tagliato’ (this is the bass because below
it was cut out).
Because of the density of the paper, it has proved to be impossible to discern the
watermarks clearly, and the drawings presented here are sketches based, as shown, on
measurements. (Vertical lines indicate chain indentations which surround and cross
the mark, spaced apart by the horizontal distances indicated in millimetres; the dotted
lines in Figure 2a are conjectural.) It is hoped that they are sufficiently definitive,
nevertheless, to allow other scholars to associate with them similar or related marks
that might be found elsewhere. Paper X possesses only one mark, a design of some
kind, positioned at the centre of the sheet so that portions appear near the gutter in
conjugate leaves in upright folio format: Figure 1 is the lower left-hand portion. Paper
Y has a principal watermark at the centre of the left half-sheet (when the paper is
viewed from the indented, ‘mould’ side), and a countermark positioned centrally in
the right half-sheet. The former (Figure 2a) is probably a crowned double-headed
eagle, a common feature of paper manufactured in the Empire; the latter, a device that
I could not identify, possibly comprises the paper-manufacturer’s initials (Figure 2b).15

15 Many watermarks featuring the double-headed eagle are reproduced in Georg Eineder, The Ancient
Paper Mills of the Former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Their Watermarks (Hilversum: Paper Publi-
cations Society, 1960), especially tracings 228–575, passim. This study’s section on paper-making in
Bohemia (pp. 105–32) confirms that several paper mills were active in Vivaldi’s day in the region of
Prague, notably to the north and north-west, for example near Aussig (Ústí nad Labem). See also
Józef Dąbrowski, Paper Manufacture in Central and Eastern Europe Before the Introduction of Paper-
making Machines (2008), published online by the International Association of Paper Historians at
http://www.paperhistory.org/dabro.pdf (accessed 16 April 2013).

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 Paul Everett

Figure 1:

Figure 2a:

Figure 2b:

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Vivaldi’s Bohemian Manuscripts

It remains only to discuss the stave-rulings exhibited by these manuscripts and

their important implications. Each stave-ruling or ‘rastrography’ may be recorded by
noting the number of staves drawn in a single stroke, the span-measurement between
the highest and lowest lines drawn, and—most crucially—by taking a cross-section of
all the lines drawn; by this means one may discover the appearance of identical rulings
in two or more manuscripts.16 In Table I, a classification is given for each manuscript;
‘3/65.5’, for instance, refers to a rastrography with three staves in a stroke with a span-
measurement of 65.5 mm. Twelve staves—or thirteen in the case of paper Y with 1/10.7
rastrography (for RV 380)—were ruled on each page as follows:

Y, 1/10.6: 12 staves ruled in 12 strokes per page.

Y, 1/10.7: 13 staves ruled in 13 strokes per page.
X, 2/34: 12 staves ruled in 6 strokes per page.
X, 2/36.5: 12 staves ruled in 6 strokes per page.
X, 3/65.5: 12 staves ruled in 4 strokes per page.

Because certain manuscripts possess precisely the same rastrographies as others,

possibly significant groupings of sources may be distinguished: see Figure 3. With
these sources, as with others of the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, we may
assume that the use of identical music paper (characterized, that is, not by paper-type
alone but by one particular rastrography) suggests the approximate contemporaneity
of the documents. In theory at least, Vivaldi would normally have acquired from a
dealer or stationer a supply of music paper sufficient for imminent tasks—a quantity
likely to have exhibited only one rastrography or very few distinct rastrographies—
and would exhaust it within a short period.17 Indeed, the similar rastrography (3/65.5)
of the manuscripts of RV 82, 85 and 93 seems to confirm the notion of contemporaneity
implicit in these three documents’ references to Wrtby, and it follows that the scores of

16 For an introduction to this method of source analysis, see Paul Everett, ‘The Application and Useful-
ness of “Rastrology”, with Particular Reference to Early Eighteenth-Century Italian Manuscripts’, in
Marco Di Pasquale (ed.), Musica e filologia (Verona: Edizioni della Società Letteraria, 1983), 135–58.
The interpretation of rastrographical evidence in specific manuscript repertories is demonstrated in
the same writer’s The Manchester Concerto Partbooks, 2 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1989);
‘A Roman Concerto Repertory: Ottoboni’s “what not”?’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association,
110 (1983–84), 62–78; ‘Vivaldi Concerto Manuscripts in Manchester: II’ and ‘Towards a Vivaldi
Chronology’ (as note 13).
17 Many caveats must qualify this argument, of course; it would be unwise to believe, for instance, that
Vivaldi always exhausted a batch of paper within a short time. See Everett, ‘Towards a Vivaldi
Chronology’, 744–9.

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Figure 3:

Y, 1/10.6 Y, 1/10.7 X, 3/65.5 X, 2/36.5

RV 282
RV 155 RV 380 RV 82
RV 163 Conca RV 85
RV 186
RV 278 RV 93
RV 288 RV 330
RV 500 RV 473 X, 2/34
RV 768

RV 330 and 473, compiled from the same batch of music paper, may share the same
approximate date. As shown in Figure 3, the use of two varieties of music paper for
each of the scores of RV 186 and 282 enables us to extend the argument; we may
conclude that at least two batches of music paper of type X were simultaneously
available to the composer. The lack of links of this kind which would associate directly
the groupings of type-Y manuscripts with each other or with the X group does not
necessarily preclude the contemporaneity of all these sources; the rarity of the ma-
terials, among the hundreds of Turin manuscripts, itself suggests that the documents
share a common and unusual origin. Thus, although we possess no precise dates for
these manuscripts of putative Bohemian provenance or actual proof that they were
compiled during the trip of late 1729 and 1730, a clear sense of their close relative
dating emerges nonetheless. The impression created accords perfectly with the idea of
Vivaldi producing a number of compositions in a short period while absent from Italy.

Paul Everett
University College Cork

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