Benedetto Marcello

{{Infobox person | honorific_prefix = | name = Benedetto Marcello | honorific_suffix = | image = Marcello Benedetto.jpg | image_upright = | landscape = | alt = | caption = | native_name = | native_name_lang = | pronunciation = | birth_name = | birth_date = June or July 24, 1686 | birth_place = Venice | baptised = | disappeared_date = | disappeared_place = | disappeared_status = | death_date = July 24, 1739(1739-07-24) (aged 52–53) | death_place = Breschia | death_cause = | body_discovered = | resting_place = | resting_place_coordinates = | burial_place = | burial_coordinates = | monuments = | nationality = | other_names = | siglum = | citizenship = | education = | alma_mater = | occupation = Legal scholar, composer | years_active = | era = | employer = | organization = | agent = | known_for =

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Il teatro alla moda

Benedetto Giacomo Marcello (* June 24 or July 24, 1686, † July 24, 1739) was, like his brother Alessandro Marcello, an Italian composer of the Baroque period.

Life

Legal career Benedetto Marcello came from a Venetian family of advocates,[1] and so it was natural that he should also study law.[1] In 1711 he was elected to the Council of Forty; he held this office for 14 years.

In 1730 he was sent to Pola in Istria in present-day Croatia as Provveditore (Governor) of the Republic of Venice. However, Marcello, who was already ailing, could not tolerate the climate there; his health deteriorated to such an extent that he had to return to Venice in 1737. But already the following year he was transferred to Brescia as camerlengo (chancellor, treasurer). Here he died on July 24, 1739, at the age of 53; the Pope[1] ordered a one-day mourning.

Marcello as a musician Despite his professional obligations, Marcello never neglected music from the beginning. Only when he had to go to Pola did he stop composing.

Already as a young man he had published songs and sonatas. However, because composing was always only possible alongside his public career, he always referred to himself as a nobile Veneto dilettante di contrappunto, that is, a lover, or layman, of music. Eventually, however, he took up his compositional studies with Francesco Gasparini (1668-1727) and Antonio Lotti (c. 1667-1740).

The first setting of Italian psalm paraphrases, L'Estro Poetico-Armonico, brought the now 38-year-old Marcello fame throughout Europe. The extensive work of 50 solo psalms after Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani was an early attempt at "archaizing solo singing." In all, this work consists of eight volumes, for one to four voices with continuo for organ or piano, some with obbligato cello or two violins. A more traditional contrapuntal compositional technique predominates in this work. But it too often alternates quite unexpectedly with compact, homophonic, almost folkloristic passages. These psalm settings follow the text down to the smallest detail. The work also includes, among others, a setting of Mao's Zur, a song sung in the Jewish liturgy at Hanukkah, and a version of the Kaddish prayer.

A master of the solo cantata, Marcello is one of the last exponents of the great pathetic vocal style, sometimes placing small dramas within the framework of the genre. Marcello also wrote sonorous chamber music such as piano, violoncello, and flute sonatas, as well as instrumental concertos.

Il teatro alla moda Marcello was less successful as an opera composer. He may have wanted to take revenge on this genre when he wrote the satire Il teatro alla moda in 1720. In it he rebuked the excesses of the theater, its habits and its schematism. The criticism, however, concerned only the externals of an opera business that had become routine. The despotism of singing, the prima donnas and castrati had become so rampant that there was hardly any leeway left for the music and the composers themselves were put in ever more and tighter fetters. Of course, the excesses of this system in artistic and social terms were also denounced elsewhere. But Marcello's satire brought the conditions of Venetian opera most sharply to the point.

This culturally and historically interesting work did not initiate a reform of opera; this only came about through French musical aesthetics and, based on Marcello, through Ranieri de' Calzabigi (1714-1795) and Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787).

Works Benedetto Marcello's complete works include 380 secular cantatas and several instrumental concertos in addition to numerous sacred works. Among his stage works is Arianna, which was probably premiered in the winter of 1726/27 in the salon of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Venice (further performances followed in 1948 in Bologna and in April 2010 at the Salzburg Landestheater). The soon-needed reprints of his psalm settings were later euphorically recommended by Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), and Johann Mattheson (1681-1764).

Benedetto Marcello in Philippe Jaroussky's discography, filmography and performance history

Studio albums

Year	Title	Studio album

Concert programs

Year	Title	Studio album

See the respective program page for a list of possible recordings.

Complete list of musical pieces by Benedetto Marcello

This listing only reflects the musical pieces performed by Philippe Jaroussky.

Year published or performed	Title	Lyricist	Work	Album, video or concert program	Year first published/performed