SKU: HH.HH500-FSP

ISBN 9790708185109.

The eighteenth century saw a great increase in secular music for solo voice and continuo set to texts in Venetian, which was then a recognized literary language, not a mere dialect of Italian. Most of these compositions are short gondola songs or canzonettas, but a few are cantatas in several movements indistinguishable from their counterparts with Italian texts except in language and subject matter, which favours contemporary themes treated in a comic manner. The two Venetian cantatas for soprano and continuo by Diogenio Bigaglia (1678–1745) published here for the first time – they are probably the first of their type ever to appear in a modern edition – are excellently crafted examples of their type, revealing an unexpectedly racy side of their composer, a Benedictine monk. One is a set of instructions for a shopping trip given by a nun to her aged servant, and the other is a woman’s catty description of the rise from rags to riches of one of her neighbours through prostitution. The editions come with translations of the texts and a brief note on the pronunciation of Venetian.