Giacomo Antonio Perti
Two Cantatas about Venice defeating the Turks
edited by Giulia Giovani
(Vocal Chamber Music, 1)

XVIII, 22 p.; 29,7 x 21 cm
Italian/English Introduction and Apparatus

- Odi Regno infelice («Invito alla Turchia a sottomettersi al dominio veneto») (“Hear, Unhappy Kingdom – Exhortation for Turkey to yield to Veneto rule”), for Contralto, strings and continuo

- Pallida in fronte («La Turchia piange le sue sconfitte») (“Pale-Faced – Turkey mourns her defeats”), for Contralto, strings and continuo

Perti’s body of cantatas consists of several manuscript sources, mostly at the San Petronio archive, plus a printed volume, Cantate morali e spirituali (Bologna, 1688). The two above titles, from a cycle on Turkish wars, are written for similar instrumentations — contraltos (two inOdi, one in Pallida), violins, violetta, and continuo — and have come fromthe autograph manoscript. They belong in a subgenre, not uncommon in Perti and his generation, celebrating the thriumph of Christian faith on Islam—an event regarded as primarily military, rather than religious. While the cantatas printed in 1688 celebrated the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold i, these pay homage to the Venice Republic, embodied in St. Mark’s Lion and the Adria River.

Giulia Giovani, Ph.D. in Music History, Science and Technique at Rome 2 University, teaches Applied Musicology at the Communication Sciences Faculty, Teramo University, and is a fellow at the Centro Internazionale di Studi della Civiltà Italiana “Vittore Branca” (Giorgio Cini Foundation), where she is currently cataloging musical and textual sources of Antonio Vivaldi’s cantatas and serenatas. She wrote essays on 17th- and 18th- century Italian cantatas and Bologna music publishers, and edited Alessandro Grandi’s Cantate op. I (with Aurelio Bianco and Sara Dieci). She wrote entries for musical encyclopedias and dictionaries such as Die Neue MGG, Das Händel-Lexikon, and the Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani. She is staff coordinator of Clori. Archivio della cantata italiana(www.cantataitaliana.it) and has been collaborating since 2006 to the annual bibliographical review issued by Fonti Musicali Italiane. She was awarded the International “Prince Ruspoli” Prize (Musicology section) in 2009.