The Venturi Music Collection (in Italian, ''Fondo musicale Venturi'', or ''Fondo Venturi'') is a collection of musical documents housed at the Public Library in

Montecatini Terme Montecatini Terme is an Italian municipality (''comune'') of c. 20,000 inhabitants in the province of Pistoia, Tuscany, central Italy. It is the most important center in Valdinievole. The town is located at the eastern end of Piana di Lucca ...

, Italy.Official Site of the Public Library of Montecatini
It conserves many handwritten copies by composers who were active in the second half of the 1700s; for example, there are autographs, which are one of a kind, of composers from the Pistoia and Florence area. (Italian site)

History

The Collection began with the private collection of the Sermolli family, a Tuscan nobile family that had bought musical manuscripts until the 1700s. In 1933, Antonio Venturi (1905-1981), teacher at Montecatini High School, musician, and collectionist, convinced Alessandro Pichi-Sermolli, who was on the verge of selling all of his belongings, to entrust him with the management of the musical documents.Kishimoto, Hiroko (ed.), ''Il Fondo musicale Venturi nella Biblioteca comunale di Montecatini Terme: catalogo'', Firenze, Giunta Regionale Toscana/Milano, Editrice Bibliografica, 1989. Venturi united the Sermolli manuscripts with his own personal paper collection, bought from ragmen, originating from the Distanti Academy, running in Pistoia and Gavinana (San Marcello Pistoiese). For fifty years, Venturi was the only curator of the entire collection, to which over time he added many materials, even some of which are multimedia. Aware that the musical manuscripts represent the most precious items of his collection, in 1958, he allowed an inventory to be completed by Raymond Meylan,Meylan, Raymond, ''La collection Antonio Venturi, Montecatini Terme (Pistoia), Italie'', in ''Fontes artis musicae'', n. 5 (1958), Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1958, pp. 21-44. a musicologist and flautist from Switzerland, and who was Venturi's colleague in the summer season orchestra of the Giglio Theater in Lucca. When Venturi died in 1981, his daughter donated everything to the Public Library in Montecatini, which in 1989 carried out a complete cataloguing on the collection. In 2016, the musical manuscripts were restored thanks to a grant given by the Tuscan Region, and inserted in the OPAC for the Documentary Network of the Pistoia Province (Rete documentaria della provincia di Pistoia: REDOP) and National Library Service. For the on-line recataloguing, the Center of Tuscan Musical Documentation (Centro della Documentazione Musicale Toscana: CeDoMus) collaborated.

Description

The Collection consists of 399 musical manuscripts, originating from Buggiano,

Pistoia Pistoia (, is a city and ''comune'' in the Italian region of Tuscany, the capital of a province of the same name, located about west and north of Florence and is crossed by the Ombrone Pistoiese, a tributary of the River Arno. It is a typi ...

and

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

, most of which date from the second half of the 1700s and include works of some internationally famous composers (

Domenico Cimarosa Domenico Cimarosa (; 17 December 1749 – 11 January 1801) was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan school and of the Classical period. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is ''Il matrimonio segreto'' (1792); most of his ...

Giovanni Paisiello Giovanni Paisiello (or Paesiello; 9 May 1740 – 5 June 1816) was an Italian composer of the Classical era, and was the most popular opera composer of the late 1700s. His operatic style influenced Mozart and Rossini. Life Paisiello was born in T ...

Pasquale Anfossi Pasquale Anfossi (5 April 1727 – February 1797) was an Italian opera composer. Born in Taggia, Liguria, he studied with Niccolò Piccinni and Antonio Sacchini, and worked mainly in London, Venice and Rome. He wrote more than 80 operas, both ...

Giuseppe Sarti Giuseppe Sarti (also Sardi; baptised 1 December 1729 – 28 July 1802) was an Italian opera composer. Biography He was born at Faenza. His date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 1 December 1729. Some earlier sources say he was born o ...

Florian Gassmann Florian Leopold Gassmann (3 May 1729 – 21 January 1774) was a German-speaking Bohemian opera composer of the transitional period between the baroque and classical eras. He was one of the principal composers of '' dramma giocoso'' immed ...

Giovanni Francesco Giuliani Giovanni may refer to: * Giovanni (name), an Italian male given name and surname * Giovanni (meteorology), a Web interface for users to analyze NASA's gridded data * '' Don Giovanni'', a 1787 opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, based on the legend ...

), and of many local musicians (such as Alessandro Felici, son of Bartolomeo Felici, Giuseppe Aloisi,

Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti (born Christian Joseph Lidarti) (Vienna 23 February 1730 – Pisa(?) after 1793) was an Austrian composer, born in Vienna of Italian descent. Life Lidarti was a nephew of the Viennese Kapellmeister Giuseppe Bonno. Whi ...

, Vincenzo Panerai, Charles-Antoine Campion), which often represent the only examples that exist today. It also conserves theoretical works, such as ''Musico prattico'' by

Giovanni Maria Bononcini Giovanni Maria Bononcini (bap. 23 September 1642 – 18 November 1678) was an Italian violinist and composer, the father of a musical dynasty. In 1671 Bononcini the elder became a court musician at Modena Modena (, , ; egl, label= Modene ...

, ''L'armonico pratico al cembalo'' by

Francesco Gasparini Francesco Gasparini (19 March 1661 – 22 March 1727) was an Italian Baroque composer and teacher whose works were performed throughout Italy, and also on occasion in Germany and England. Biography Born in Camaiore, near Lucca, he studied in ...

, and the three notes, titled ''Combinazioni di registrature'', ''Regole generali'' and ''Regole generali per la Messa'', which was anonymous and conserved by the nobleman Pietro Sermolli of Buggiano on the correct recording of the organ during the performance of the eight ecclesiastic tones of the Latin mass. These examples represent one of the extremely few existing records dedicated to the established customs of the organ in the 1700s.Pineschi, Umberto, ''Una tabella settecentesca toscana di registrazioni organistiche''
pdf published at the on-lin
Accademia Gherardeschi di Pistoia
and i
CeDoMus
(Italian sites and texts) Given the uniform dates of the works conserved in the collection (all of the manuscripts come from the second half of the 1700s in the area around Pistoia), the collection is an essential source for the reconstruction of the production and circulation of the musical culture in the Eighteenth Century.

Expositions

Music collected in the ''fondo'' have been exposed in an exhibition in 2016 prepared b
Lucca's Institute of History (division of Montecatini and Monsummano)
and in an on-line exhibit created in 2017 by the same institute and b
Musical Documentation Center of Tuscany
published in th
Movio
platform a
''Note di Carta''
(''Paper Music Notes'').{{cite web, url=http://notedicarta.altervista.org, title=Note di Carta, publisher=Movio (page of the entire 2017 exhibition) t/ref>

References

Baroque music Age of Enlightenment Music libraries Tuscany Music organisations based in Italy