Soprano voice and basso
continuo
SKU:
HH.HH500-FSP
Composed
by Diogenio Bigaglia.
Edited by Michael Talbot.
Full score and parts.
Edition HH Music
Publishers #HH500-FSP.
Published by Edition HH
Music Publishers
(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.
