Perrine Devillers

Serenissima: a Musical Portrait of Venice Around 1726 Perrine Devillers

The 1750 Project proposes a journey from 1720 to 1750, each stage of which will allow us to discover the richness and specificity of a city's musical life at a key juncture in its history. For the first episode in the 1750 Project, we stop off in Venice around 1726, at a pivotal moment in the history of music when the meeting of two styles led to an aesthetic turning point. The city, then dominated by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), also welcomed several other leading Italian composers, including the Neapolitan Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) and the Milanese Giuseppe Sammartini (1695-1750), who was about to revolutionise the world of wind instruments.

The city on the lagoon was a cultural hub and a mandatory destination in the itinerary of many nobles and musicians from northern Europe who wished to round off their training and culture. Several German composers, including Pisendel, Quantz, Hasse and Handel, passed through Venice in the early eighteenth century before returning to their native regions to spread the gospel of Italian music. Let us therefore, for a short while, put ourselves in the shoes of an imaginary traveller discovering the musical life of Venice around 1726.