Carolyn Gianturco ha studiato musica e musicologia nelle Università di Marywood (B. Mus. in piano e composizione), di Rutgers (M.A.) e di Oxford, dove ha completato il suo D. Phil. sotto la guida di Sir Jack Westrup. Le sue ricerche sono dedicate soprattutto alla persona e alla musica di Alessandro Stradella (1639-82), ma anche alla definizione e la divulgazione dei generi poetico-musicali italiani del Seicento, alla scoperta della musica della Toscana e della sua storia, ecc.

I risultati delle sue ricerche sono state presentati in 7 volumi, 4 capitoli, 48 articoli, 165 voci di enclopedie, ecc., e in 16 volumi di cantate italiane in facsimile; ha anche curato numerosi volumi di atti di convegni e di edizioni di musica. E' coautrice del primo catalogo tematico della musica di Stradella ed è autrice della prima documentata monografia della vita del compositore con analisi delle sue più di 300 composizioni.

Inoltre ha fondato e dirige la doppia-collana Studi Musicali Toscani. Ricerche e cataloghi, 13 voll. e Studi Musicali Toscani. Musiche, 4 voll. ed è Presidente dell'Edizione Nazionale dell'Opera Omnia di Alessandro Stradella (un progetto di 42 voll. istituito nel 2000 dal Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali), 11 voll. finora.

E' stata Fondatrice e Presidente dell'Associazione Toscana per la Ricerca delle Fonti Musicali, Presidente della Società Italiana di Musicologia e Vicepresidente della Società Internazionale di Musicologia. Per molti anni ha insegnato Storia della Musica all'Università di Pisa. Attualmente è anche Coordinatore del Centro per la diffusione della cultura e della pratica musicale.

Howard E. Smither on Carolyn Ginaturco

«Carolyn Dooley Gianturco’s journey from her birth place in Jersey City, New Jersey, to her faculty position at the University of Pisa and her standing as the premiere authority on Alessandro Stradella’s life and music has resulted in an extraordinary gift to the musicological community. After completing her Bachelor of Arts in Music at Marywood College in 1955, she worked in New York City as an accompanist for singers and in Woodstock, New York, as associate director of the Turnau Opera Company. In 1964 she received the Master of Arts degree at Rutgers University. Moving on to Oxford University, she completed her doctorate there in 1970 on the operas of Alessandro Stradella, a topic suggested to her by Sir Jack Westrup. In addition to this study of Stradella’s operas, her two major achievements are Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682): A Thematic Catalogue of His Compositions (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1991), on which she collaborated with Eleanor McCrickard, and Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682): His Life and Music (Oxford, 1994).

The Thematic Catalogue, by far the most nearly complete of any catalogue or list of the composer’s music made to date, is by no means the first, as its compilers point out. In fact, the earliest list may have been made soon after Stradella’s death in 1682. Other lists and catalogues date from the se-venteenth century through the second half of the twentieth. A glance at the list of libraries where Stradella sources were found for this catalogue – locations throughout Europe and the United States – testifies to the thoroughness of its compilers. With very few exceptions, in which microfilms had to be used, one or both of the compilers personally examined every source listed for each work.

Carolyn’s process of discovery as she worked on Stradella’s biography makes a fascinating story, one that speaks volumes for her tenacity, her efforts to discover the truth about this composer, and her thoroughness and insight as a research scholar. Carolyn’s friend and one of her mentors at Oxford, Fred Sternfeld, suggested that she write the book. She had already studied the operas, was working on other Stradella compositions, and assumed that much of the biographical work had already been reliably done by Remo Giazotto in his Vita di Alessandro Stradella (2 vols., Milan, 1962). As she began to check Giazotto’s sources, however, she soon became frustrated. As she states in the «Foreword» to the Life and Music (pp. vi-vii) «I could not find most of the documents he reported – such as those recording Stradella’s baptism, or related to his parents and siblings, or establishing his contacts with poets and patrons, or dating his works, or tracing his career, or connected with his death». In fact, I recall having had conversations with her in Rome during the 1970s about this problem. Up to that time, it had been generally assumed that Stradella was a Roman. Giazotto had even printed a facsimile of a baptismal record (vol. 2, Tavola XI) that «proved» it. She told me of her visit with Giazotto, who assured her that his work was accurate. After several years of blind alleys, however, she was forced to conclude that although he had not called it a novel, Giazotto’s work was more fiction than fact, and she set out to find reliable documents on which to base a biography.

In Pisa Carolyn discovered that Stradella’s father had been a member of an order of Pisan knights. In searching their archives, she found he had come from Nepi, near Viterbo. In Nepi she struck gold. She found numerous notarial documents about the Stradella family, including – much to everyone’s surprise – confirmation that Alessandro was not a Roman but a Nepesino. She announced her new information in «Alessandro Stradella: A True Biography» (Musical Times, November, 1982), a short article in which she stated (p. 756), after having been thus thrown off the track of truth for so many years, recent discoveries now enable me to say not simply that I cannot find Giazotto’s «documents» (a complaint which, of course, has never been sufficient for the musicological community), but that his book might be taken out of the «Biography» section of our libraries and put under «Novels». Not only must we correct Giazotto’s version of Stradella’s place and date of birth, his family, his musical education, his patrons, his compositions and so on; we must even correct his date of death. The purpose of this article is to set forth, for the first time, an accurate if brief life of Alessandro Stradella. (Perhaps his guiding spirit has been at work, for these new documents have come to light during the 300th anniversary of his death.)

A longer article appeared in the same year with full and detailed documentation of her findings: «La famiglia Stradella: Nuovi documenti bio-grafici» (Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, XVI, 1982).

Carolyn’s book on Stradella synthesizes her many new archival findings into an accurate and eminently readable biography of an outstanding composer whose life for three centuries had been represented by fantastic legends, which in turn became subjects of nineteenth-century operas, songs, and novels, and finally of Giazotto’s fanciful, novelistic «biography» in the twentieth century.

Important as Carolyn’s biographical findings are, more significant is her discussion of the music, which constitutes the major portion of the book, the most authoritative treatment thus far of Stradella’s compositions. For the vocal works, the bulk of the composer’s output, she carefully treats both the poetic text and the composer’s response to it, which in the cantatas is particularly revealing of Stradella’s sensitivity to the poetry. Whenever possible, and especially in the section on theatre music, she also includes information on the contexts within which the works were created and performed. Of special interest in the appendixes is the presentation of Stradella’s extant writings (letters, opera dedications, and motet texts), in both their original language and English translation.

Another of Carolyn’s major contributions is her general editorship of the sixteen volumes of cantatas in facsimile, The Italian Cantata in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1985-1987), each volume edited by a specialist in the music of the composer or composers in question. The series represents twenty-six composers, the major cantata composers of the period within and outside Italy, and includes over 400 compositions in all. A significant feature is the inclusion of the texts not only underlaid but printed separately in poetic layout. Heretofore, cantatas of the seventeenth century had been available only in scattered manuscript and printed sources. Thanks to this series, it is now possible to arrive at a more accurate characterization of the seventeenth-century Italian cantata, both its music and poetry. In her next step Carolyn did exactly that.

In the collection of essays in honor of F.W. Sternfeld, The Well Enchanting Skill (Oxford, 1990), Carolyn’s article, «The Italian Seventeenth-Century Cantata: A Textual Approach», takes full advantage of opportunities offered by the new series to study the role of poetry in musical settings of cantatas. Her conclusion, contrary to much previous scholarship, is that the text played a dominant role in determining the style a composer used in setting it. The character and structure of the text typically determined whether the composer wrote a passage in recitative or as an aria, how he structured the arias, when he wrote in arioso style, and whether he used a refrain or ritornello. Thus she cautions scholars to examine the poetic text before deciding that a given style or structure was purely the choice of the composer or indicated his predilection for certain compositional procedures.

Carolyn has also applied her textual approach to refining concepts of genre. In «‘Cantate spirituali e morali’ with a Description of the Papal Sacred Cantata Tradition for Christmas 1676-1740» (Music and Letters, 73, 1992) she calls attention to the repertoire of the non-secular cantata and successfully distinguishes between the two types mentioned in the title. In the same article, on the basis of text, she further distinguishes between the non-secular cantata and the oratorio. In «Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno: Four Case-Studies in Determining Italian Poetic-Musical Genres» (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 119, 1994), she treats Handel’s three settings of versions of the text given in the title of the article, plus a setting by Carlo Cesarini. This fascinating study again raises the question of genre. Are these moral cantatas or oratorios? Carolyn’s careful approach to the thorny problem reveals the insights gained from years of study of Italian texts for music and is a model of textual and contextual analysis. In her article «Opera sacra e opera morale: due ‘altri’ tipi di dramma musicale» (Il melodramma italiano in Italia e in Germania nell’eta barocca, Como, 1995), she applies her textual approach to genre distinction in opera with perceptive conclusions. In particular, she convincingly concludes that Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s La rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo (1600), is an opera morale, and indeed, the first one in the history of the genre.

Carolyn’s major contributions in the fields of Stradella research, the Italian cantata, and the textual approach to analysis and genre distinction by no means confined her to these areas. As the list of her publications shows, she has made contributions to the literature on Monteverdi, Mozart, and the staging of genres other than opera, among other topics, and has written numerous dictionary and encyclopedia articles on a variety of subjects. Throughout her many publications, the unifying threads are scholarly rigor, perseverance, and integrity in her search for historical and analytical truth.

Carolyn’s well deserved honors and professional positions have included among many others, Honorary Citizen of Nepi, President of the Associazione Toscana per la Ricerca delle Fonti Musicali, President of the Società Italiana di Musicologia, and Vice President of the International Society of Musicology. Carolyn richly deserves the honor of the present volume for her splendid work. We look forward to more.»

Howard E. Smither

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

In Florilegium Musicae. Studi in onore di Carolyn Gianturco, a cura di ed. ETS, 2004

Enciclopedia Garzanti della Musica, Garzanti Editore, Milano 1974

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
a cura di S. Sadie, Macmillan, London 1980

La Nuova Garzanti Enciclopedia della Musica, Garzanti Editore, Milano 1983

The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
a cura di S. Sadie, Macmillan, London 1992

The New Gove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2.da ed.,
a cura di S. Sadie e J. Tyrrell, Macmillan, London 2001

Howard Smither, Introduction, in Florilegium Musicae. Studi in onore di Carolyn Gianturco a cura di Patrizia Radicchi e Michael Burden, ETS, Pisa 2004, pp. xxxiii-xxxvi [contiene anche una valutazione critica del contributo della Gianturco]