Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802), recognized in his lifetime as one of the central figures of his generation, nowadays belongs to the category of largely neglected eighteenth-century Italian composers. At most he is remembered for ‘providing’ his famous contemporaries with sparkling melodies to be quoted in their operas: the aria ‘Come un agnello’ from the dramma giocoso Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode resounds in the finale of Act 2 of Mozart's Don Giovanni, while excerpts from his opera seria Giulio Sabino are quoted in Salieri's Prima la musica, e poi le parole. But for these operas, the most performed and stunningly successful in his day, let alone his other works, no critical editions exist.
Sarti's professional career began in his native town, Faenza (1748–1752); it continued in Copenhagen (1753–1765 and 1770–1775), Venice (1767–1768), Florence (1777–1778), Milan (1779–1784), St Petersburg (1784–1787 and 1793–1801) and Krementchug, Ukraine (1787–1791). Shrewdly, and with impressive flexibility, Sarti displayed a great flair for combining local traditions with his personal style. He composed operas to Italian, French, Danish and Russian librettos and liturgical works for Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox services, together with oratorios, chamber cantatas and ceremonial music. Sarti's talent and personality won him the admiration of King Frederik V of Sweden, Emperor Joseph II, Empress Catherine II and of the European aristocratic elite elsewhere. In De la musique mécanique et de la musique philosophique (Paris, 1826) Henri Berton described him as ‘one of the most learned composers of his epoch’ (17).
This overwhelming esteem notwithstanding, scholarship on Sarti remains at the germinal stage. Even such fundamental aspects as biographical research via primary documents, source studies of the music and the history of the music's reception can be found only sporadically, generally focusing on specific works and genres and discussing Sarti in light of canonic figures such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Sarti research has faced additional obstacles, mostly on account of his being associated with ‘peripheral’ trends in European musical life, in terms of both geographical remoteness and ‘secondary’ cultural significance compared with the perceived mainstream of musical development. Although the main repository of his oeuvre is the Biblioteca Comunale in Faenza, many compositions are scattered in archives and libraries all over the world, some of which have long been inaccessible.
The recently launched research project ‘A Cosmopolitan Composer in Pre-Revolutionary Europe – Giuseppe Sarti. Individual Style, Aesthetical Position, Reception and Dissemination of His Works’, generously sponsored by the Einstein Foundation, Berlin, aims to fill this lacuna, at least in part. The project is being led by Christine Siegert (Universität der Künste Berlin), Bella Brover-Lubovsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Dörte Schmidt (Universität der Künste Berlin). Additional institutions, such as the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar Detmold-Paderborn and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, are also involved. International cooperation of this nature is essential for exploring a cosmopolitan figure such as Sarti, merging various research traditions as well as attaining complementary perspectives by combining editorial, analytical and aesthetic approaches. The project aims to reconstruct some of Sarti's important compositions and to conduct an overarching exploration of his work and activities, contextualizing these within the political and cultural life of pre-Revolutionary Europe.
Among the project's main purposes is the preparation of critical editions:
(a) The musical spectacle The Early Reign of Oleg (St Petersburg, 1790) was created in collaboration with Vassily Pashkevitch and Carlo Canobbio, on a text by Catherine II. Oleg's music constitutes the first example of a full orchestral score ever printed in Russia (St Petersburg, 1791), but its print run comprised only 152 copies. Although fragments of this work were revived in 2006 in St Petersburg, it remains unknown even among experts: in recently published studies, its genre has been erroneously defined as an ‘opera’ (see Inna Narodnitskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114–139) or even as a ‘Baroque Gesamkunstwerk’ (see Larissa Kirillina, ‘In modo antico: The Alceste Scene in The Early Reign of Oleg’, Die Tonkunst 7/1 (2013), 53–67).
(b) The two Italian operas Giulio Sabino and Fra i due litiganti will be presented in digital editions, taking into account for the first time the genre-specific needs of Italian opera of that period. Usually, editions try to reconstruct an author's original text. This is particularly inadequate for Italian operas, though, which were adapted to the institutional circumstances when they were performed in other theatres. Giulio Sabino (Venice, 1781) was Sarti's most successful opera seria, with more than forty productions up to 1805. The opera has survived in at least twenty-four manuscript copies and was published in Vienna in about 1782, which was exceptional for Italian opera of that time. Nevertheless, printing obviously did not codify the work, as can be seen in a considerably modified copy of this print in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Our edition will demonstrate that Giulio Sabino has been changed just as much as Italian operas normally were. Fra i due litiganti (Milan, 1782) had more than eighty performances in Italy and abroad; it was also translated into Danish, German and French, with spoken dialogues substituting for recitatives. About forty manuscript copies of the opera can be traced, including a partly autograph score preserved in the Mariinsky Theatre Archive, St Petersburg.
Our digital editions incorporate various possibilities for the editing of eighteenth-century Italian operas, bearing in mind the arrangement practices that were characteristic of the time. As online open-access publications, they will present solutions that visualize different versions of the operas using the tools of the Edirom project (Hochschule für Musik Detmold / Universität Paderborn) and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), which enables the encoding of variants in the MEI mark-up language. This has been developed by Perry Roland and is continuously being advanced by an international group of researchers; see <http://music-encoding.org/> (23 April 2012). (See also Perry Roland, ‘MEI as an Editorial Music Data Format’, in Digitale Edition zwischen Experiment und Standardisierung, ed. Peter Stadler and Joachim Veit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), 175–194.) By using these programmes, we are able to document the insertion and deletion of entire numbers as well as small variants. Thus our edition will consider Sarti's operas as works defined by the sum of the surviving sources. Such editions enable us to dissect the processes of cultural transfer documented in the sources and their consolidation.
Further, we will prepare a monograph addressing Sarti's activities as a dramatic and church composer, teacher and impresario. By studying previously inaccessible historical documents in Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, we will add to known data on Sarti's compositional and pedagogical activity and his political engagement and service at the courts of Catherine II and Pavel I in St Petersburg (1784–1787, 1793–1801), including his accompanying the Russian army in Bessarabia in the course of the Second Turkish War and the largely obscure period of his ‘exile’ in Ukraine in Prince Potemkin's service (1787–1791).
We intend to present the first results of the project and to map it within a broader context at an international conference (July 2014) hosted by the Universität der Künste Berlin, followed by publication of the conference proceedings. Another conference-workshop, with an emphasis on practical issues of editing, interpreting and performing late eighteenth-century Italian opera, will be held in Jerusalem in February 2015.
Given its focus on a cosmopolitan composer such as Sarti, who was active in Italy, Austria, Denmark, Russia and Ukraine, and who composed in various cultural and political environments, the project is ideally situated in Berlin, the city where Sarti ended his life and which symbolizes a reunified Europe. We shall also explore the cultural network of Sarti's family, his contribution to the musical life of the city and the traces of Sarti still to be found in Berlin today; this will form part of a separate study.
The current state of the project will be updated on the website <www.udk-berlin.de/musikwissenschaft/sarti>.
