Valentini, Giovanni (i)

(b ?Venice, 1582/3; d Vienna,29/30 April 1649). Italian composer, keyboard player and poet. Antimo Liberati (Lettera … in risposta ad una del Sig. Ovidio Persapegi, 1684, 1685, p.52) called him ‘a Venetian of the famous school of the Gabrielis’. There are a number of contemporary and later references to him as a keyboard player. His earliest printed collections of canzoni (1609) and motets (1611) identify him as organist of King Zygmunt III of Poland, whose chapel he joined in 1604 or 1605. He arrived at the Graz court of Archduke Ferdinand of Inner Austria in 1614 as the ‘newly appointed chamber organist from Poland’. In 1617 Urban Vielhawer von Hohenhaw, court organist to Archduke Karl, Bishop of Breslau, praised him as a virtuoso performer in connection with an enharmonic ‘clavicymbalum universale, seu perfectum’ with 77 keys for the four octaves from C to c''' (also mentioned by Michael Praetorius in his Syntagma musicum, ii, Wolfenbüttel, 1618, 61–66). Following Ferdinand II’s election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1619, Valentini moved to Vienna with the other musicians of the Graz music chapel. A list of the court officers dated 10 December 1619 names him as first imperial court organist with an annual salary of 360 florins. He received several large monetary gifts from the emperor during the 1620s and was appointed imperial Kapellmeister on 15 June 1626, following the death of Giovanni Priuli. In the following year he was ennobled and, at about the same time, assumed the duties of regens chori at the Michaelerkirche in Vienna, a post he retained until at least 1631. He continued to serve as imperial Kapellmeister under Ferdinand III, and was involved in the production of the earliest operas in Vienna during the 1620s and 30s. He taught Kerll in the 1640s and seems to have devoted his last years to writing sacred dramatic works and Italian poetry (including the earliest sepolcri, for which only librettos survive). He enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the imperial family during Ferdinand III’s reign (1637–57), serving as an authority on musical and literary matters.

Valentini cultivated most of the important styles and genres of the early 17th century. Some of his large-scale sacred works are cast in a stolid polychoral style, but much of his music employs a modern concertato idiom that reveals a highly adventurous, even avant-garde composer. Capricornus cited Valentini as an authority on compositional technique and Liberati commended his fine sense of the difference between vocal and instrumental writing. Valentini's Secondo libro di madrigali (1616) was the first published collection of madrigals to combine voices and instruments, and many of his madrigals show the Viennese predilection for large scorings combining voices and instruments. At times, the instruments merely furnish ritornellos or double vocal lines in tutti passages; at other times, especially in the Musiche concertate (1619), the instruments are fully integrated into the vocal texture. The Musica di camera (1621) includes a number of compositions built on ostinato bass patterns, including the pass’e mezzo, romanesca and Ruggiero. The Musiche a doi voci(1621) contains early examples of the dramatic dialogue and shows his flair for the experimental: three verses of ‘Con guardo altero’ are entirely in 5/4 time, and ‘Vanne, o cara amorosa’ contains consecutive bars with proportional signs 9/8 and 7/9, presumably to encourage the singer to declaim the recitative-like line freely.

Valentini’s sacred works include large-scale ceremonial compositions, works in the stile antico, polychoral pieces reminiscent of Giovanni Gabrieli’s later style, parody masses, concertato works, as well as few-voice motets and monodies. His seven-choir Messa, Magnificat et Jubilate Deo is written in a larger number of parts than any music printed hitherto and contains some of the earliest printed trumpet parts. His printed masses are unadventurous: a conservative concertato style pervades the 1619 collection and three of the four masses from the 1621 print are polychoral parody masses. In contrast, many of his large-scale psalm and motet settings employ an up-to-date concertato style that unites virtuosic instrumental writing with monodic, duet and dialogue textures. His Sacri concerti (1625) include some of the earliest sacred works written north of the Alps to make extensive use of the stile recitativo. They also employ the duet and dialogue textures that Valentini had pioneered in his Musiche a doi voci and contain vocal writing in a luxuriant manner reminiscent of the duets from Monteverdi’s seventh book of madrigals. Several motets feature striking shifts between the natural and flat hexachords and other forms of chromaticism. Similar harmonic experiments are found in some of the instrumental sonatas, for example the so-called ‘enharmonic sonata’, whose opening phrase in G minor is answered immediately in B minor. These chromatic experiments may be related to the musica reservata of Graz court and to the court’s use of enharmonic keyboard instruments. Like Biagio Marini and Buonamente, Valentini was one of the first composers to introduce the new italianate style of violin writing north of the Alps. Valentini’s sacred dramatic works and Italian poetry frequently treat themes central to the so-called Pietas Austriaca, a unique strain of Catholic piety cultivated by the Habsburg dynasty during the 17th and 18th centuries.

WORKS

published in Venice unless otherwise indicated

WRITINGS

poems and texts partly for setting to music

Ragionamento sovra il Santissimo da recitarsi in musica (Vienna, 1642)

Rime sovra la colonna, flagello, corona di spine, croce, e lancia di Christo da recitarsi in musica il Venerdì Santo (Vienna, 1642)

Dialogo la vita di S. Agapito fanciullo (Vienna,1643)

Santi risorti … sonetti, canzoni et madrigali spirituali (Vienna, 1643)

120 anagrammi sovra S. Saverio, apostolo dell’Indie (Vienna, 1646)

Rime sacre all’augustissimo … imperatore Ferdinando terzo … dedicate (Linz, 1646)

Lege aUgUste fortIs, benIgne InsIgnIs reX CronographICUM IoannIs VaLentInI tUae CapeLLae reCtorIs (n.p., 1646)

Mariae Annae reginae hispaniarum … ut luna splendita (Vienna, 1647)

134 anagrammi sovra il glorioso nome di Santa Caterina Martire (Vienna, 1647)

Anagrammata supra nomen Jesum (Vienna, 1649)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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WaltherML

H. Federhofer: ‘Graz Court Musicians and their Contributions to the Parnassus musicus Ferdinandaeus (1615)’, MD, ix (1955), 167–244

H. Federhofer: Musikpflege und Musiker am Grazer Habsburgerhof der Erzherzöge Karl und Ferdinand von Innerösterreich (1564–1619) (Mainz, 1967)

E. Urbanek: Giovanni Valentini als Messenkomponist (diss., U. of Vienna,1974)

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

H. Seifert: Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof im 17. Jahrhundert (Tutzing, 1985)

T. Antonicek: ‘Musik und italienische Poesie am Hofe Kaiser Ferdinands III’, Mitteilungen der Kommission für Musikforschung, xlii (1990), 1–22

S. Saunders: ‘Giovanni Valentini’s “In te Domine speravi” and the Demise of the Viola Bastarda’, JVdGSA, xxvii (1991), 1–20

S. Saunders: ‘The Hapsburg Court of Ferdinand II and the Messa, Magnificat et Iubilate Deo a sette chori concertati con le trombe (1621) of Giovanni Valentini’, JAMS, xliv (1991), 359–403

S. Saunders: Cross, Sword, and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg, 1619–1637 (London, 1995)

HELLMUT FEDERHOFER/STEVEN SAUNDERS