Giovanni Battista Rogeri 1642-1710
Who was Giovanni Battista Rogeri? Well he wasn’t Francesco Rugeri for starters, and for the rest? Well this maker is an interesting hybrid, not so easy to pin down in the past but now that we have more of an idea who this man is come and find out more.
Transcripts of Giovanni Battista Rogeri
Ep 1. Giovanni Battista Rogeri
Far, far away in a place called Silene, in what is now modern day Libya, there was a town that was plagued by an evil venom spewing dragon, who skulked in the nearby lake, wreaking havoc on the local population. To prevent this dragon from inflicting its wrath upon the people of Silene, the leaders of the town offered the beast two sheep every day in an attempt to ward off its reptilian mood swings.
But when this was not enough, they started feeding the scaly creature a sheep and a man. Finally, they would offer the children and the youths of the town to the insatiable beast, the unlucky victims being chosen by lottery. As you can imagine, this was not a long term sustainable option. But then, one day, the dreaded lot fell to the king's daughter. The king was devastated and offered all his gold and silver, if only they would spare his beloved daughter. The people refused, and so the next morning at dawn, the princess approached the dragon's lair by the lake, dressed as a bride to be sacrificed to the hungry animal. It just so happened that a knight who went by the name of St George was passing by at that very moment and happened upon the lovely princess out for a morning stroll. Or so he thought. But when it was explained to him by the girl that she was in fact about to become someone else's breakfast and could he please move on and mind his own business he was outraged on her behalf and refused to leave her side. Either she was slightly unhinged and shouldn't be swanning about lakes so early in the morning all by herself, or at least with only a sheep for protection, or she was in grave danger and definitely needed saving. No sooner had Saint George and the princess had this conversation than they were interrupted by a terrifying roar as the dragon burst forth from the water, heading straight towards the girl. Being the nimble little thing she was, the princess dodged the sharp claws. As she was zigzagging away from danger, George stopped to make the sign of the cross and charged the gigantic lizard, thrusting Ascalon, that was the name of his sword, yep he named it, into the four legged menace and severely wounded the beast. George called to the princess to throw him her girdle, That's a belt type thing, and put it around the dragon's neck. From then on, wherever the young lady walked, the dragon followed like a meek beast. Back to the city of Silene went George, the princess, and the dragon, where the animal proceeded to terrify the people.
George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to becoming Christian. George is sounding a little bit pushy, I know. But the people readily agreed and 15, 000 men were baptized, including the king. St. George killed the dragon, slicing off its head with his trusty sword, Ascalon, and it was carried out of the city on four ox carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. George on the site where the dragon was slain and a spring flowed from its altar with water that it is said would cure all diseases.
This is the story of Saint George and the Princess. It is a classic story of good versus evil, and of disease healing miracles that would have spoken to the inhabitants of 17th century Brescia. The scene depicting Saint George and the Princess is painted in stunning artwork by Antonio Cicognata and was mounted on the wall of the Church of San Giorgio. Giovanni Battista Rogeri gazed up at this painting as family and friends, mainly of his bride Laura Testini, crowded into the church of San Giorgio for his wedding. Giovanni was 22 and his soon to be wife, 21, as they spoke their vows in the new city he called home. He hoped to make his career in this town making instruments for the art loving Brescians, evidence of which could be seen in the wonderful artworks in such places as this small church. Rogeri would live for the next 20 years in the parish of San Giorgio. The very same George astride an impressive white stallion in shining armour, his head surrounded by a golden halo. He is spearing the dragon whilst the princess calmly watches on clad in jewels with long red flowing robes in the latest fashion. In the background is the city of Brescia itself, reminding the viewer to remember that here in their city they too must fight evil and pray for healing from disease ever present in the lives of the 17th century Brescians.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius. Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery, that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome to this first episode on the life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. After having spent the last few episodes looking at the life of the Ruggeri family, we will now dive into the life of that guy who almost has the same name, but whose work and contribution to violin making, you will see, is very different. And we will also look at just why, for so many years, his work has been attributed erroneously to another Brescian maker.
The year was 1642, and over the Atlantic, New York was called New Amsterdam. The Dutch and the English were having scuffles over who got what. Was it New England? New Netherlands? In England, things were definitely heating up, and in 1642, a civil war was in the process of breaking out. On one side there were the parliamentarians, including Oliver Cromwell, and on the other side were the Royalists, who were the supporters of King Charles I. This war would rage on for the next 20 years, and not that anyone in England at this time really cared, but the same year that this war broke out, a baby called Giovanni Battista Rogeri was born in Bologna, perhaps, and for the next 20 years he grew up in this city ruled by the Popes of Italy. He too would witness firsthand wars that swept through his hometown. He would avoid dying of the dreaded plague, sidestep any suspicion by the Catholic church in this enthusiastic time of counter reformation by being decidedly non Protestant. And from an early age, he would have been bathed in the works of the Renaissance and now entering churches being constructed in the Baroque style.
Bologna was a city flourishing in the arts, music and culture, with one of the oldest universities in the country. But for the young Giovanni Battista Rogeri, to learn the trade of lutai, or violin maker, the place he needed to be was, in fact, 155. 9 km northwest of where he was right now. And if he took the A1, well, today it's called the A1, and it's an ancient Roman road so I'm assuming it's the same one, he could walk it in a few days. Destination Cremona, and more precisely, the workshop of Niccolo Amati. An instrument maker of such renown, it is said that his grandfather, Andrea Amati, made some of the first violins and had royal orders from the French king himself. To be the apprentice of such a man was a grand thing indeed.
So we are in the mid 1600s and people are embracing the Baroque aesthetic along with supercharged architecture and paintings full of movement, colour and expression. There is fashion, and how the wealthy clients who would buy instruments in Cremona dressed was also influenced by this movement.
Emily Brayshaw.
You've got these ideas of exaggeration of forms and you can exaggerate the human body with, you know, things like high heels and wigs and ribbons and laces. And you've got a little bit of gender bending happening, men wearing makeup and styles in the courts. You know, you've got dress and accessories challenging the concept of what's natural, how art can compete with that and even triumph over the natural perhaps. You've got gloves trimmed with lace as well. Again, we've got a lot of lace coming through so cravats beauty spot as well coming through. You've got the powder face, the, the wig. Yeah. The makeup, the high heels. Okay. That's now. I actually found a lovely source, an Italian tailor from Bergamo during the Baroque era. The Italians like really had incredibly little tailors and tailoring techniques. And during this sort of Baroque era. He grumbles that since the French came to Italy not to cut but to ruin cloth in order to make fashionable clothes, it's neither possible to do our work well nor are our good rules respected anymore. We have completely lost the right to practice our craft. Nowadays though who disgracefully ruin our art and practice it worse than us are considered the most valuable and fashionable tailors.
So we've got like this real sort of shift. You know, from Italian tailoring to sort of French and English tailoring as well.
And they're not happy about it.
No, they are not happy about it. And this idea that I was talking about before, we've got a lovely quote from an Italian fashion commentator sort of around the mid 17th century. His name's Lam Pugnani, and he mentions the two main fashions. meaning French and Spanish, the two powers that were ruling the Italian peninsula and gradually building their global colonial empires. And he says, “the two main fashions that we have just recorded when we mentioned Spanish and French fashion, enable me to notice strangeness, if not a madness residing in Italian brains, that without any reason to fall in love so greatly Or better, naturalize themselves with one of these two nations and forget that they are Italian. I often hear of ladies who come from France, where the beauty spot is in use not only for women, but also for men, especially young ones, so much so that their faces often appear with a strange fiction darkened and disturbed, not by beauty spots, but rather by big and ridiculous ones, or so it seems somebody who is not used to watching similar mode art”.
So, you know, we've got people commentating and grumbling about these influences of Spain and France on Italian fashion and what it means to be Italian. When we sort of think about working people, like there's this trope in movie costuming of like peasant brown, you know, and sort of ordinary, you know, people, perhaps ordinary workers, you know, they weren't necessarily dressed. In brown, there are so many different shades of blue. You know, you get these really lovely palettes of like blues, and shades of blue, and yellows, and burgundies, and reds, as well as of course browns, and creams, and these sorts of palettes. So yeah, they're quite lovely.
And I'm imagining even if you didn't have a lot of money, there's, I know there's a lot of flowers and roots and barks that you can, you can dye yourself. Yeah, definitely. And people did, people did. I can imagine if I was living back there and we, you know, we're like, Oh, I just, I want this blue skirt. And you'd go out and you'd get the blue skirt. The flowers you needed and yeah, definitely. And people would, or, you know, you can sort of, you know, like beetroot dyes and things like that. I mean, and it would fade, but then you can just like, you know, quickly dye it again. Yeah, or you do all sorts of things, you know, and really sort of inject colour and, people were also, you know, people were clean. To, you know, people did the best they could keep themselves clean, keep their homes clean. You know, we were talking about boiling linens to keep things fresh and get rid of things like fleas and lice. And people also used fur a lot in fashion. And you'd often like, you know, of course you'd get the wealthy people using the high end furs, but sometimes people would, you know, use cat fur in Holland, for example, people would trim their fur. Their garments and lined their garments with cat fur. Why not? Because, you know, that's sort of what they could afford. It was there. Yeah, people also would wear numerous layers of clothing as well because the heating wasn't always so great. Yeah. You know, at certain times of the year as well. So the more layers you had, the better. The more, the more warm and snug you could be. As do we in Sydney. Indeed. Indeed. Canadians complain of the biting cold here. I know. And it's like, dude, you've got to lay about us. It's a humid cold. It's awful. It's horrible. It just goes through everything. Anyway. It's awful. Yeah.
So at the age of 19, Giovanni Battista Rogeri finds himself living in the lively and somewhat crowded household of Niccolo Amati. The master is in his early 60s and Giovanni Battista Rogeri also finds himself in the workshop alongside Niccolo Amati's son Girolamo II Amati, who is about 13 or 14 at this time. Cremona is a busy place, a city bursting with artisans and merchants.
The Amati Workshop is definitely the place to be to learn the craft, but it soon becomes clear as Giovanni Battista Rogeri looks around himself in the streets that, thanks to Nicolo Amati, Cremona does indeed have many violin makers, and although he has had a good few years in the Amati Workshop, Learning and taking the young Girolamo II Amati the second under his wing more and more as his father is occupied with other matters. He feels that his best chances of making a go of it would be better if he moved on and left Cremona and her violin makers. There was Girolamo II Amati who would take over his father's business. There were the Guarneri's around the corner. There was that very ambitious Antonio Stradivari who was definitely going to make a name for himself. And then there were the Rugeri family, Francesco Rugeri and Vincenzo Rugeri whose name was so familiar to his, people were often asking if they were related. No, it was time to move on, and he knew the place he was headed.
Emily Brayshaw.
So, you've also got, like, a lot of artisans moving to Brescia as well, following the Venetian ban on foreign Fustian sold in the territory. So Fustian is, like, a blend of various things. Stiff cotton that's used in padding. So if you sort of think of, for example someone like Henry VIII, right? I can't guarantee that his shoulder pads back in the Renaissance were from Venetian Fustian, but they are sort of topped up and lined with this really stiff Fustian to give like these really big sort of, Broad shoulders. That's how stiff this is. So, Venice is banning foreign fustians, which means that Cremona can't be sold in these retail outlets.
So, Ah, so, and was that sort of That's fabric, but did that mirror the economy that Brescia was doing better than Cremona at this point? Do you, do you think? Because of that?
Well, people go where the work is. Yeah. Cause it's interesting because you've got Francesco Ruggeri, this family that lives in Cremona. Yeah. And then you have about 12 to 20 years later, you have another maker, Giovanni Battista Rogeri. Yeah. He is apprenticed to Niccolo Amati. So he learns in Cremona. And then he's in this city full of violin makers, maybe, and there's this economic downturn, and so it was probably a very wise decision. He's like, look, I'm going to Brescia, and he goes to Brescia. He would have definitely been part of this movement of skilled workers and artisans to Brescia at that time, sort of what happening as well. So, you know, there's all sorts of heavy tolls on movements of goods and things like that. And essentially it collapses. And they were, and they were heavily taxed as well. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
It was the fabulous city of Brescia. He had heard stories of the city's wealth, art, music and culture, famous for its musicians and instrument makers. But the plague of 1630 had wiped out almost all the Luthiers and if ever there was a good time and place to set up his workshop, it was then and there. So bidding farewell to the young Girolamo Amati, the older Nicolò Amati and his household, where he had been living for the past few years. The young artisan set out to make a mark in Brescia, a city waiting for a new maker, and this time with the Cremonese touch.
Almost halfway between the old cathedral and the castle of Brescia, you will find the small yet lovely Romanesque church of San Giorgio. Amidst paintings and frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints, there stands a solemn yet nervous young couple, both in their early twenties. Beneath the domed ceiling of the church, the seven angels of the Apocalypse gaze down upon them, a constant reminder that life is fragile, and that plague, famine and war are ever present reminders of their mortality. But today is a happy one. The young Giovanni Battista Rogeri is marrying Laura Testini. And so it was that Giovanni Battista Rogeri moved to Brescia into the artisanal district and finds himself with a young wife, Laura Testini. She is the daughter of a successful leather worker and the couple most probably lived with Laura's family. Her father owned a house with eight rooms and two workshops. This would have been the perfect setup for the young Giovanni to start his own workshop and get down to business making instruments for the people of Brescia. He could show off his skills acquired in Cremona, and that is just what he did. Since the death of Maggini, there had not been any major instrument making workshops in Brescia.
Florian Leonhard
Here I talk to Florian Leonhard about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's move to Brescia and his style that would soon be influenced by not only his Cremonese training, but the Brescian makers such as Giovanni Paolo Maggini
I mean, I would say in 1732. The Brescian violin making or violin making was dead for a bit, so until the arrival of Giovanni Battista Rogeri, who came with a completely harmonised idea, into town and then adopted features of Giovanni Paolo Maggini and Gasparo da Salo. I cannot say who, probably some Giovanni Paolo Maggini violins that would have been more in numbers available to him, have influenced his design of creating an arching. It's interesting that he instantly picked up on that arching because Giovanni Battista Rogeri always much fuller arched. The arching rises much earlier from the purfling up. Right. So he came from the Cremonese tradition, but he adopted the, like, the Brescian arching idea. He, he came from Niccolo Amati and has learned all the finesse of construction, fine making, discipline, and also series production. He had an inside mould, and he had the linings, and he had the, all the blocks, including top and bottom block. And he nailed in the neck, so he did a complete package of Cremonese violin making and brought that into Brescia, but blended it in certain stylistics and sometimes even in copies with the Brescian style.
For a long time, we have had Before dendrochronology was established, the Giovanni Paolo Magginis were going around and they were actually Giovanni Battista Rogeris.
Brescia at this time was still a centre flourishing in the arts and despite the devastation of the plague almost 30 years ago, it was an important city in Lombardy and was in the process of undergoing much urban development and expansion. When Giovanni Rogeri arrived in the city, There were efforts to improve infrastructure, including the construction of public buildings, fortifications and roads. The rich religious life of the city was evident, and continued to be a centre of religious devotion at this time, with the construction and renovation of churches in the new Baroque style. The elaborate and ornate designs were not only reserved for churches, but any new important building projects underway in the city at this time. If you had yourself the palace in the Mula, you were definitely renovating in the Baroque style. And part of this style would also be to have a collection of lovely instruments to lend to musicians who would come and play in your fancy new pad. Strolling down the colourful streets lined with buildings covered in painted motifs, people were also making a statement in their choice of clothing.
Another thing that the very wealthy women were wearing are these shoes called Chopines, which are like two foot tall. And so you've got like this really exaggerated proportions as well. Very tall. I mean. Very tall, very wide. So taking up a lot of space.
I'm trying to think of the door, the doorways that would have to accommodate you.
Yes.
How do you fit through the door?
So a lot of the time women would have to stoop. You would need to be escorted by either servants. And then you'd just stand around. I did find some discussions of fashion in the time as well. Commentators saying, well, you know, what do we do in northern France? We either, in northern Italy, sorry, we either dress like the French, we dress like the Spanish, why aren't we dressing like Italians? And kind of these ideas of linking national identity through the expression of dress in fashion. So, we're having this
But did you want to, was it fashionable to be to look like the French court or the, to look like the Spanish court.
Well, yeah, it was, it was fashionable. And this is part of what people are commenting about as well. It's like, why are we bowing to France? Why are we bowing to Italy? Sorry. Why are we bowing to Spain? Why don't we have our own national Italian identity? And we do see like little variations in dress regionally as well. You know, people don't always. Dress exactly how the aristocracy are dressing. You'll have your own little twists, you'll have your own little trimmings, you'll have your own little ways and styles. And there are theories in dress about trickle down, you know, like people are trying to emulate the aristocracy, but they're not always. Trying to do that. Well, yeah, it's not practical if you're living, you know, if you're and you financially you can't either like some of these Outfits that we're talking about, you know with one of these hugh like the Garde in Fanta worn by Marie Theresa that outfit alone would have cost in today's money like more than a million dollars You can't copy these styles of dress, right? So what you've got to do is, you know, make adjustments. And also like a lot of women, like you, these huge fashion spectacles worn at court. They're not practical for working women either. So we see adaptations of them. So women might have a pared down silhouette and wear like a bum roll underneath their skirts and petticoats and over the top of the stays.
And that sort of gives you a little nod to these wider silhouettes, but you can still move, you can still get your work done, you can still, you know, do things like that. So that's sort of what's happening there.
Okay, so now we find a young Giovanni Battista Rogeri. He has married a local girl and set up his workshop. Business will be good for this maker, and no doubt thanks to the latest musical craze to sweep the country. I'm talking about opera. In the last episodes on Francesco Ruggeri, I spoke to Stephen Mould, the composer. at the Sydney Conservatorium about the beginnings of opera and the furore in which it swept across Europe. And if you will remember back to the episodes on Gasparo Da Salo at the beginning of the Violin Chronicles, we spoke about how Brescia was part of the Venetian state. This is still the case now with Giovanni Battista Rogeri and this means that the close relationship with Venice is a good thing for his business. Venice equals opera and opera means orchestras and where orchestras are you have musicians and musicians have to have an instrument really, don't they?
Here is Stephen Mould explaining the thing that is opera and why it was so important to the music industry at the time and instrument makers such as our very own Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
Venice as a place was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Everything was there, and it was a very, it was a very modern type of city, a trading city, and it had a huge emerging, or more than emerging, middle class. People from the middle class like entertainment of all sorts, and in Venice they were particularly interested in rather salacious entertainments, which opera absolutely became. So the great thing of this period was the rise of the castrato. Which they, which, I mean, it was, the idea of it is perverse and it was, and they loved it. And it was to see this, this person that was neither man nor, you know, was in a way sexless on the stage singing and, and often singing far more far more virtuosically than a lot of women, that there was this, there was this strange figure. And that was endlessly fascinating. They were the pop stars of their time. And so people would go to the opera just to hear Farinelli or whoever it was to sing really the way. So this is the rise of public opera.
As opposed to the other version.
Well, Orfeo, for example, took place in the court at Mantua, probably in the, in the room of a, of a palace or a castle, which wouldn't have been that big, but would have been sort of specially set up for those performances. If I can give you an idea of how. Opera might have risen as it were, or been birthed in Venice.
Let's say you've got a feast day, you know, a celebratory weekend or few days. You're in the piazza outside San Marco. It's full of people and they're buying things, they're selling things, they're drinking, they're eating, they're having a good time. And all of a sudden this troupe of strolling players comes into the piazza and they start to put on a show, which is probably a kind of comedia dell'arte spoken drama. But the thing is that often those types of traveling players can also sing a bit and somebody can usually play a lute or some instrument. So they start improvising. Probably folk songs. Yeah. And including that you, so you've kind of already there got a little play happening outside with music. It's sort of like a group of buskers in Martin place. It could be very hot. I mean, I've got a picture somewhere of this. They put a kind of canvas awning with four people at either corner, holding up the canvas awning so that there was some sort of shade for the players. Yeah. That's not what you get in a kid's playground these days. You've almost got the sense. Of the space of a stage, if you then knock on the door of one of the palazzi in, in Venice and say to, to the, the local brew of the, of the aristocracy, look, I don't suppose we could borrow one of your rooms, you know, in your, in your lovely palazzo to, to put on a, a, a show. Yeah, sure. And maybe charged, maybe didn't, you know, and, and so they, the, the very first, it was the San Cassiano, I think it was the theatre, the theatre, this, this room in a, in a palace became a theatre. People went in an impresario would often commission somebody to write the libretto, might write it himself. Commissioner, composer, and they put up some kind of a stage, public came in paid, so it's paying to come and see opera. Look, it's, it's not so different to what had been going on in England in the Globe Theatre. And also the, the similar thing to Shakespeare's time, it was this sort of mixing up of the classes, so everything was kind of mixed together. And that's, that's why you get different musical genres mixed together. For example, an early something like Papaya by Monteverdi, we've just done it, and from what, from what I can gather from the vocal lines, some of the comic roles were probably these street players, who just had a limited vocal range, but could do character roles very well, play old women, play old men, play whatever, you know, caricature type roles. Other people were Probably trained singers. Some of them were probably out of Monteverdi's chorus in San Marco, and on the, on when they weren't singing in church, they were over playing in the opera, living this kind of double life. And That’s how opera started to take off. Yeah, so like you were saying, there are different levels.
So you had these classical Greek themes, which would be more like, you're an educated person going, yes, yes, I'm seeing this classical Greek play, but then you're someone who'd never heard of Greek music. The classics. They were there for the, you know, the lively entertainment and the sweet performers.
Yes. So the, the, the Commedia dell'arte had, had all these traditional folk tales. Then you've got all of the, all of the ancient myths and, and, and so forth. Papaya was particularly notable because it was the first opera that was a historical opera. So it wasn't based on any ancient myths or anything.
It was based on the life of Nero and Papaya. And so they were real life a few hundred years before, but they were real. It was a real historical situation that was being enacted on the stage. And it was a craze. That's the thing to remember is. You know, these days people have to get dressed up and they have to figure out how they get inside the opera house and they're not sure whether to clap or not and all of this sort of stuff and there's all these conventions surrounding it. That wasn't what it was about. It was the fact that the public were absolutely thirsty for this kind of entertainment. Yeah. And I was seeing the first, so the first opera house was made in in about 1637, I think it was. And then by the end of Monteverdi's lifetime, they said there were 19 opera houses in Venice. It was, like you were saying, a craze that just really took off. They had a few extra ones because they kept burning down. That's why one of them, the one that, that is, still exists today is called La Fenice. It keeps burning down as well, but rising from the ashes. Oh, wow. Like the, yeah, with the lighting and stuff, I imagine it's So, yeah, because they had candles and they had, you know, Yeah, it must have been a huge fire hazard. Huge fire hazard, and all the set pieces were made out of wood or fabric and all of that. Opera houses burning down is another big theme. Oh yeah, it's a whole thing in itself, yeah. So then you've got These opera troupes, which are maybe a little, something a little bit above these commedia dell'arte strolling players.
So, you've got Italy at that time. Venice was something else. Venice wasn't really like the rest of Italy. You've got this country which is largely agrarian, and you've got this country where people are wanting to travel in order to have experiences or to trade to, to make money and so forth. And so, first of all if an opera was successful, it might be taken down to Rome or to Naples for people to hear it. You would get these operas happening, happening in different versions. And then of course, there was this idea that you could travel further through Europe. And I, I think I have on occasion, laughingly. a couple of years ago said that it was like the, the latest pandemic, you know, it was, but it was this craze that caught on and everybody wanted to experience.
Yeah. So you didn't, you didn't have to live in Venice to see the opera. They, they moved around. It was, it was touring. Probably more than we think. That, that, that whole period, like a lot of these operas were basically unknown for about 400 years. It's only, the last century or so that people have been gradually trying to unearth under which circumstances the pieces were performed. And we're still learning a lot, but the sense is that there was this sort of network of performers and performance that occurred.
And one of the things that Monteverdi did, which was, which was different as well, is that before you would have maybe one or two musicians accompanying, and he came and he went, I'm taking them all.
And he created sort of, sort of the first kind of orchestras, like lots of different instruments. They were the prototypes of, of orchestras. And Look, the bad news for your, the violin side of your project, there was certainly violins in it. It was basically a string contingent. That was the main part of the orchestra. There may have been a couple of trumpets, may have been a couple of oboe like instruments. I would have thought that for Venice, they would have had much more exotic instruments. But the, the, the fact is at this time with the public opera, what became very popular were all of the stage elements. And so you have operas that have got storms or floods or fires. They simulated fires. A huge amount of effort went into painting these very elaborate sets and using, I mean, earlier Leonardo da Vinci had been experimenting with a lot of how you create the effect of a storm or an earthquake or a fire or a flood. There was a whole group of experts who did this kind of stuff.
For the people at the time, it probably looked like, you know, going to the, the, the first big movie, you know, when movies first came out in the 20s, when the talkies came out and seeing all of these effects and creating the effects. When we look at those films today, we often think, well, that's been updated, you know, it's out of date, but they found them very, very, very compelling.
What I'm saying is the money tended to go on the look of the thing on the stage and the orchestra, the sound of the orchestras from what we can gather was a little more monochrome. Of course, the other element of the orchestra is the continuo section. So you've got the so called orchestra, which plays during the aria like parts of the opera, the set musical numbers. And you've got the continuo, which is largely for the rest of the team. And you would have had a theorbo, you would have had maybe a cello, a couple of keyboard instruments, lute. It basically, it was a very flexible, what’s available kind of.
Yeah, so there was they would use violines, which was the ancestor of the double bass. So a three stringed one and violins as well. And that, and what else I find interesting is with the music, they would just, they would give them for these bass instruments, just the chords and they would improvise sort of on those. Chords. So every time it was a little bit different, they were following a Yes. Improvisation. Yeah. So it was kind of original. You could go back again and again.
It wasn't exactly the same. And look, that is the problem with historical recreation. And that is that if you go on IMSLP, you can actually download the earliest manuscript that we have of Papaya. And what you've got is less than chords, you've got a baseline. Just a simple bass line, a little bit of figuration to indicate some of the chords, and you've got a vocal line. That's all we have. We don't actually know, we can surmise a whole lot of things, but we don't actually know anything else about how it was performed.
I imagine all the bass instruments were given that bass line, and like, Do what you want with that.
So yeah, it would, and it would have really varied depending on musicians. Probably different players every night, depending on, you know, look, if you go into 19th century orchestras, highly unreliable, huge incidents of drunkenness and, you know, different people coming and going because they had other gigs to do. Like this is 19th century Italian theatres at a point where, you know, It should have been, in any other country, it would have, Germany had much better organized you know, orchestral resources and the whole thing. So it had that kind of Italian spontaneity and improvised, the whole idea of opera was this thing that came out of improvisation. Singers also, especially the ones that did comic roles, would probably improvise texts, make them a bit saucier than the original if they wanted for a particular performance. All these things were, were open.
And this brings us to an end of this first episode on Giovanni Battista Rogeri. We have seen the young life of this maker setting out to make his fortune in a neighbouring city, alive with culture and its close connections to Venice and the world of opera.
I would like to thank my lovely guests Emily Brayshaw, Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhardt for joining me today.
Ep 2. Giovanni Battista Rogeri
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband, Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect. But here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to part two of The Life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Rogeri's early life. His apprenticeship with the master Niccolo Amati himself in Cremona. He's moved to Brescia seeking out greener pastures. And now he is in Brescia where we will see his style really come into its own and take a look at this thing Opera, that was really changing the musical landscape for musicians and instrument makers alike.
So stay with me as we take a dive into the life and career of Giovanni Battista Ruggieri. Not Ruggeri, Rogeri. Before we move on, I would like to say that I am an independent podcaster and really appreciate the support people have been showing in helping this show happen. If you would like to be one of those people helping me make more content for you to enjoy, consider going to patreon.com forward slash the violin chronicles, where you can have access to extra episode and help make things happen.
We now find ourselves in the home of Laura and Giovanni Rugeri. The year after this young couple married in 1665, they had their first child called Pietro Giacomo and would go on to have at least six more children. Two years after Pietro's birth, they had another son called Gio Paolo. These two sons would be the only surviving boys of the Rogeri's five sons and would go on to become violin makers as well. In these early years, there is not much we know about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's work, but five years on, into the 1670s, we see an active workshop Giovanni definitely had his own style. When working for Niccolò Amati, his hand can be seen in that cremonese workshop as his instruments differed to those of Niccolò. His bolder style even influenced the young Girolamo II Amati in the development of his own characteristic instruments.
Now, if you can cast your minds back to the first few episodes of the Violin Chronicles, where we spoke about the city of Brescia, we looked at its close connection with Venice. And now that Venice is embracing this exciting new art form called opera, it's no surprise that Brescia is not far behind. And the year before Rogeri married, in 1664, Brescia opened its very own commercial opera house. And this first theatre was called the Teatro degli Erranti. Cremona would never embrace opera to the extent that the Venetian state did. And here we find Giovanni Battista Rogeri setting up his workshop in the midst of this exciting time for the city of Brescia. Here I talk to Stephen Mould about how opera was so different to anything people had ever seen how it was pulling on human emotion and the impact music would have had on people at this time in this part of Italy.
Linda Lespets
And, and also I've, the, with the history of opera, we're sort of going from this Renaissance style. And we sort of move through to the Baroque, which is more, so we're going from the, you know, the Pythagorean theory of music was sort of God's omnipotence and to music being this source of bringing out human emotion. It's sort of the, the idea of music and the sort of thinking behind music was changing during this time of opera developing as well. Yeah. And can we see that in the operas?
Stephen Mould
Look, what you're talking about is absolutely valid. I tend to think of all of those kinds of ideas, they were sort of in the air.
Linda Lespets
Yeah. In the same way that Yeah, because I feel like opera really was, it's all about drama. It is. And human emotion. Like love and jealousy and revenge.
Stephen Mould
Yes. And so the interesting thing is how those things are expressed on the stage, how those things are played out. Again, I come to this idea of the stratas of society in that, let's say, people from the lower classes or peasants or whatever, who had oral traditions of passing on poems or stories and things, and have this very immediate form of street theatre where people, they're actually looking into people's eyes and gazing to get a connection with their audience.
Now, If you look at the way people behaved in the aristocratic circles, they didn't do that too. You might've had an arranged marriage to somebody and never actually been alone in a room with them or looked them in the eyes that it's all, it's all done according to certain social conventions. So although these Pythagorean ideas and everything else were present, I feel that that was a bit more of a background thing. And that, that was. material that was really available to the more aristocratic classes who had time to sit and read and Think about these things. Think about things. I feel particularly in Venice that this emergent middle class was much more much more volatile. It was a time of extraordinary change, but what were interesting was the interactions between the classes. And what I would say then is, if you think of Mozart's the three Don Giovanni, Così Fan Tutte, and the Marriage of Figaro, these are also about different classes of people. And you see all the music, So, for example, in the, in the Marriage of Figaro, you've got Figaro and Susanna who are the servant class and the kind of music that Mozart uses for that are peasant dances, other musical forms that come from their class. When the Count and Countess are talking or singing, they have a different realm of music. In Don Giovanni, you've got The scenario of the Don, who is an aristocrat, and his servant Leporello, who's from the servant class. And I mean, the opera opens with Leporello going, I'm sick of being a servant, I want to be the master. So there's this class conflict, and at a certain point in the second act, they actually disguise one another as, so Leporello disguises himself as Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni disguises himself as Leporello, so there's this weird sort of change. And it then occurs in the music as well. So it's this idea of having different musics from different places. So, to map out all these stations. And the music really was part of the storytelling. Absolutely. And, and the, so the, the, see, we don't, we, we don't sit in a Mozart opera and go, Oh, there's a gavotte. That's this class or that, but they, they didn't even have to have that conversation with themselves. They just knew it. And, and I mean, to bring it back to history, when Louis and Mary Antoinette had to escape from Versailles because of the, all the, it was the revolt coming from Paris. They went out the servant's door of Versailles disguised as their servants. So you see all of this switching around. So I see that as probably the. Dominant thing, which animated opera. This sort of connection with people and their, their class.
Linda Lespets
Right. Yeah. And, and in, with the violin makers, it was a little bit, there's a bit of that story as well, where you've, the violin maker was an artisan, but had to, was making for the aristocracy, but also dealing with, you know it was very, there was sort of a bridge between classes as well, that were working with tradespeople and yeah, the music in general, we seemed to have this like bridge of
Stephen Mould
Yeah. Sort of eng globed a lot of classes. It, it was a way I mean if, if you think of when, when you said that, I think of Hayden for example, who was basically a servant all his life and Mozart who was determined not to be, and only in Vienna.He, could he really do that.
Linda Lespets
But now in Brescia, Rogeri was making instruments using fine wood for his wealthy clients. And for those with a more modest budget, he would use plainer pieces. And to save time, simply draw on the purfling on the backs, for example, of some of his instruments by scratching in the lines with a tracer and filling the grooves in with black. I talked to Florian Leonard about G.B. Rogeri instruments that have historically been confused with Maggini’s and the characteristics of Rogeri instruments that distinguish them from other makers.
Florian Leonhard
Before dendrochronology was established, the Maggini’s were going around and they were actually GB Rogeri’s.
Linda Lespets
Right, yeah, we did a we did a condition report on a Giovanni Paolo Maggini and It had an old certificate and then we did the dendocrinology and so I had to change the title to attributed to.
Florian Leonhard
Yeah. And it might've been, you know, I mean, I have seen about three, three Rogeris that used to be G. P. Maggini’s Okay. Yeah. Very nicely made. But you can see that the construction behind it doesn't have that more loose idea of creating that shape, but it was a constructed shape. Of course it had the linings, it had the corner blocks in the right way, it had but another feature I found always that was a dead giveaway is the volute. So the scroll, Rogeri had a very strong character of, of how he constructed the scroll in an Amati style. So obviously it was influenced by Amati, but it is his own idea. And you can see right away when he makes his own style, not, not, not a Maggini style, that he has quite a flat cutting out of the, of the back of the scroll and also the front of the scroll.
So that's very flat, incredibly flat. And the similar thing is also from the side. So it comes from, it arrives from the peg box and then runs up into the first turning. And that hardly goes into depth. And he manages to still have the chamfer relatively sharp without having a round cut. He has a very flat cut into the volute. And then he arrives in the eye in the almost Amati school way. And he does, when he cuts the, the Maggini scroll, it just looks as if he just had a different model, but it's the same attitude. It's incredible to see that. So he could not hide that. And I don't think he tried to fake anyway. He just built that model, but it was totally him.
It's like the Maggini copy by Vuillaume I mean, it does totally not look like Maggini, so it looks like a Vuillaume so the Vuillaume couldn't hide his character behind it. Even though Vuillaume’s intention was more to be quite real, he did for his time, do quite nice copies, but of course the copy wasn't intellectually analysed as detailed as somebody would think.
Linda Lespets
The labels Rogeri printed to insert into his instruments are peculiar in that they are printed in red ink. Okay, so not all of his labels are in red ink, but quite a few are. We don't really know why, but what we do know is that red ink was the most popular colour after black. And in legal and notarial documents, red ink was used. It was used for important headings and quotes. Think of red letter Bibles, for example. Fun fact, accountants would enter in black ink, positive figures on business financial records and the negative figures in red, hence to be in the red or the black. That aside, it could have just been that it was an aesthetic choice or a mistake by the printer. Although he had worked in the Amati workshop in his formative years, and one of their signature moves was an almost imperceptible dot in the centre back of instruments, thought to be from a compass in the measurement process in making the instrument, Giovanni Battista Rogeri did not have this on his instruments. We have today many fine violins and cellos by Giovanni Battista Rogeri, but there is, and this is interesting for Brescia, not many violas coming out of his workshop. And this was not because he had a personal problem with viola players, but simply a question of compositional style. Things had changed by the end of the 17th century and the fashion was for trio sonatas that consisted of two treble instruments, such as two violins and a bass, and often a keyboard instrument playing the continuo parts. That confusingly makes four people playing the trio. But in any case, the viola was no longer needed, for now, and this could explain the fact that there is a dip in viola making after 1700 in both Cremona and Brescia. Never fear, the violas do come back in, the later Baroque and Classical periods, but our violin maker will no longer be with us.
Giovanni Battista Rogeri's business in Brescia is a success and he will live with his family in San Giorgio for the next 20 years. His children will grow up and the boys, Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo, will eventually be apprenticed with their father. Rogeri, as we have mentioned earlier, had an influence on Girolamo II Amati's style, But Niccolò Amati definitely had a huge influence on Rogeri and his style. He modelled many of his instruments on Niccolò Amati's grand pattern. And although we see this strong influence, Rogeri cannot help but have his own particular style, a type of Cremonese/Brescian fusion. It is sweepingly bold and finely executed, drawing on Cremonese and Brescian influences. He uses local maple for his instruments, backs, ribs, and scrolls. Some of his instruments are remarkably like Niccolo Amati's, and the next could be a Maggini copy with short corners, double purfling around the contours of the instrument, and decorative motifs on the back. Depending on the client's demand, he could do it all, one day Cremonese and Brescia the next, and yet with his own distinct style that you can see, in the sweep of the sound holes of his instruments, that is quite distinctive.
I asked Florian Leonhard what he thought about the influence Brescian makers such as Maggini and Rogeri could have had on Stradivari in his phases of experimentation.
Florian Leonhard
Antonio Stradivari went through a period of making longer violins. These are called his long pattern instrument, and his arching became fuller and evolved. He would keep experimenting until he culminated in his golden period. But could the Brescian school and G.B. Rogeri have played a part in this thought process at that time? Brescia was plodding along with their style on their own. and creating something that, yeah, they just were confident because the musicians wanted to have those instruments.
They were busy, They got rich from it, You know, nobody was poor making those instruments and they, which we can see in the archives today. So you can, you can see that they were successful. They had constantly musicians from all over the country because the musicians were the ones driving what was in demand, you know, in parallel, in the parallel universe, Cremona supplied some other chords with their instruments, and they were successful within that and that system worked very well, but I don't see much cross pollination there going on between those cities. So Cremona will have noticed that Musicians like sometimes to have this kind of Maggini like instruments, and Rogeri was already making such instruments as well. Maybe visible for Cremonese, violin makers, because they, the musicians would travel, because Brescia and Cremona is not that far apart.
But Obviously, the link wasn't so established culturally, as you can tell from the violin making history. So, but Stradivari who totally deserves his name as the genius of our profession, he was constantly, from day one, from the earliest instruments, when we analyse him, you can see from the earliest instruments, his strong character and drive to find out how to make it better. So I think from day one, he tried to see how can I improve this thing. And by 1690, he arrived by saying, let's radically change the design of the arching, because, because the musicians talking about the sonority and warmth and depth of Maggini instruments. And so he, he felt that's lacking.
Let's try to find this out. And then he saw something and he said, let’s try it. And he did it. And it created some effect and he continued this. And so he did it for, for just under a decade, building those long pattern instruments, because long machines were longer and they were fuller arched. And you see that in, in Stradivari's design. But Stradivari still was bound by the very strong, incredible principles that the Amati’s have created in Cremona. So he had the discipline to build it beautifully, with long, slender corners, with a choice of wood that looks magnificent. And it's very, It's aristocratic in the way. So the Amati model by Stradivari doesn't look like Amati you know, so it's, it's a much more graceful in design, in my view.
He combined in the, in the golden period, the two things, so his arching became fuller, which is the major change in study varius designs. For the sound.
Linda Lespets
Yeah, there's less of that there's the scooped, like, towards the edges, It's less, although, Yes, I mean, the Amati brothers, I don't, yeah. The brothers Amati were already quite full.
Florian Leonhard
Yeah. Yes. There's a, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's hard to tell. Since you mentioned the Amati brothers, the Amati brothers were more advanced in the arching from our modern perspective of, of ideal arching than Niccolo, because Niccolo exaggerated that deep, long, wide, wide channel, and therefore has nearly a slightly pinched arching, which you see in some Ruggieris as well.
Linda Lespets
In the 1670s, Rogeri, now in his 30s, his workshop is a busy place. Business is good, and he has a young family with many children. As was the case with many other families, infant death was sadly a common thing, and three of his boys were killed. The two sons that did make it to adulthood were Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo.
As they grew up, they would help their father more and more in the workshop. And in the year 1688, when Giovanni was in his late 40s, the family would move house. Perhaps his father in law had died and the house they had been living in for the last 20 years had to be sold. But now Ruggieri, his wife and their five children, the two boys and three daughters, moved into a rented house nearby to the Cortell del Polini.
Giovanni Battista Ruggieri's workshop was busy. He was making instruments in his own bold style, based on the techniques he had learnt as an apprentice from his master Niccolò Amati. His work definitely showed the style of the great Cremonese maker, in the shape of the scroll and the outline of his violins. But the sound holes, they were his own thing. Their shape showed his unique stamp on the instrument, and as he was now settled in to life in Brescia, he also embraced some of the local models such as Maggini. Although he wouldn't construct the instrument as Maggini had done, he would copy the model The double purfling, the short corners with open sea bouts, and that distinctive Brescian scroll.
But the making process was indeed Cremonese. This is what he had learnt, and it had worked for him. He used an inside mould with blocks and side linings for those instruments that had to be made quickly. He would sometimes not even do the purfling on the back. It would be drawn on. Time is money, hey? For his instruments, Rogeri had a good stock of fine spruce and beautifully figured maple.
Like Rugeri, Rogeri also made smaller cellos. It is the late 1660s and overwound gut strings are starting to appear. This means that bass instruments could be made smaller. They didn't need room for gigantic gut strings on the lower strings. Composers in Bologna, Naples and Rome also started to write music with the cello in mind.
And it is around now we find cellos by Rogeri. He is using his own model and it is small and powerful. We can imagine that some of Rogeri's instruments would have been played by the local musicians in orchestras, religious processions and the opera house that was in full swing in downtown Brescia. The players in this city would have needed Rogeri and other instrument makers to maintain their instruments and repair them if any mishap occurred, and occur they would in these lively orchestras at the time.
This was the world of the theatre at its best. Now, Venice at this time was the first place to create a commercial opera house. And what this meant was that it was a business. So you pay for your ticket, you went, and this meant that there was a mixture of classes crossing over in the theatre. Move to France and the other royal courts of the time, opera was a court entertainment and a very different experience.
Stephen Mould
So in the 17th century, a woman who came from a family without money and so forth and wanted to remain independent in society and life to some extent and to, and to do well. They had three Possibilities. Become a courtesan, a high class prostitute. This is assuming they didn't want to become a street walker or an opera singer. Those three professions were seen as being intertwined. And just they, they were the social climbing options.
Linda Lespets
Right. And was it like was there as much drama off the stage as on the stage?
Stephen Mould
Oh, I'm sure. In these like milieus, in this like, yeah. You mean amongst all the operas?
Linda Lespets
Yeah, amongst them, yeah.
Stephen Mould
Well, Don Giovanni was premiered in Prague and the, I think it was the Donna Elvira, her name was Saporito. So she's an Italian singer. Saporito means a tasty dish. And she was evidently so promiscuous during the whole production period of Don Giovanni that she was nearly expelled from the city. And so in the score of Don Giovanni in the last act you know, they're having dinner and Don Giovanni refers to Saporito, a tasty dish. There are all these in jokes. You can imagine all of what went on behind the scenes.
Linda Lespets
So in, in Italy, yeah. So I'm imagining the violin makers In Cremona, their, their clients are maybe in the church or in you know, entertainment, opera And amateurs amongst the Yes, the, yeah, they're great clients, yeah even for us. And so, yeah, so in Italy you've got that happening and you could suppose that it would be the same thing happening in Paris. But what was happening in Paris at this time?
Stephen Mould
Well, I think the centre of the world at that time was Versailles, and that's where the king tended to hang out. So this is, this is a really interesting one because it shows how opera tends to reinvent itself according to circumstances. So Lully was born in, he was born somewhere in Italy. I think he did come from Florence. And he was a really, really, really good dancer. And he turned up, I'm not quite sure how, in, in France and was introduced to the king, who was also a very good dancer. And Lully effectively used his position with the King of Influence to create French opera. And it's just, it's a bit like making a minestrone, I have to say. What was popular then, obviously, ballet. Dance. That was the main art form, the most popular. So the, you know, all the ballet operas that have got extensive amounts of ballet in them that he realized that that ingredient was going to be a big ingredient in the soup. It was more than a bay leaf. Then there was the, the spoken drama, which there was a great tradition of. And so he created the specific French style of recitative, which is rather different to the Italian. The Italian. And secco recitative is just in the rhythm of the words. What you see on the paper is not what you do.
It's very conversational in that. Whereas the French the way the French actors delivered their lines was very, very declamatory. Even into the 19th century, when you hear actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, there's, there's recordings of her speaking and it's, it, it almost sounds comical. So French recitative is much more in time and it's got this sense of declaimed rather than spontaneous speech. The other thing that Lully did was he invented the French overture. He just thought, well, we'll need a style of overture and he kind of like dotted rhythms and so forth. Yeah. which paradoxically are called scotch snaps. So he created a product. Then it becomes interesting. All of the other operas were about, they in a way had the life of pop, pop songs that there would be a few performances would be over. And then everybody just wanted the next opera. Nobody said, Oh, you remember that really good opera we heard five years ago. Let's revive that. No idea of revival, no idea of anything that it was all just the next, the next, the next. Now I have a funny feeling that Louis didn't. I'm not sure that he had the best musical ear. He certainly wasn't in, didn't have an inquiring ear, and I rather suspect that he saw opera as being a kind of cool thing that he could go and a bit like watching a sitcom on the television at night, but he happened to have a little opera house in his, his palace, but he could talk during it and, you know, do what he wanted to do while, while the opera was going. That wasn't so unusual in those days.
So It so happens that in Lully's time, this was the beginnings of the so called opera repertoire. There was a repertoire of operas that Lully wrote, and you can see here a work like Thésée. It was first performed in 1675. Last performed in 1779, and it was in the repertoire for 104 years. Now this only happened in the rarefied world of Versailles. That these, these operas, so it was, it was like, you know, having a certain number of television channels. Probably Louis would say, Oh, let's have Prosperine. You know, remember that one? And so they then did it and then clocked up a few more years. It was in being performed for 78 years. So instead of constant. So in that sense, Lully was also kind of a good strategist and businessman. I imagine he wanted to be out there dancing, not sitting at his desk writing operas all the time. So he had this little. You know, library of operas, if you will, or repertoire of operas. So this idea of sort of leads into the institutionalized opera house and the idea of an opera repertoire of pieces that you vibe. Right. And so in Italy, was it more just one after the other? Yes, it was much more haphazard as it still is in Italy. And now we're like. We're really stuck in the Versailles, we're doing the Versailles method.
And so he, he, you know, he was, he seemed to me to have been a terrific strategist, businessman, very good at dealing with kings of that hand. He only really made one mistake, which was putting his baton through his foot and dying of gangrene. And he, they were going to amputate the foot because he wouldn't be able to dance.
Linda Lespets
I mean, that's how important it was. It's like, if I can't dance, I'm going to die.
He was a very. So it kind of makes sense that Louis had to sort of recycle the operas.
Stephen Mould
Recycling's a great word.
Linda Lespets
Because, I mean, he had a lot more on his plate. There was, Louis XIV, he just loved to dance. So there was so much dancing. And I imagine that's why ballet was more a thing in France, whereas Italy was, it was all about opera. But Louis was like, oh, yeah. Like he really wanted more ballet as well. So Lully had to do the ballets The the opera as well. He's like look, I don't have time to come up with new operas We're just gonna do these again But then in doing that like each time you redo an opera people will always compare it to another one the one before And they'd have to refine it.
Stephen Mould
I suppose and so you'd So again, coming back to what you were saying about the changes in thought between the Renaissance and the Baroque and so forth, it was probably more about, I mean, if you think of an opera as being like a variety show, and I'm, I'm being a little silly in saying it, but it was, whatever were the customs of that period. Place, the call for opera, and it was, it was always answering a demand was for something that fulfilled the needs of a court or a ruler in terms of providing a suitable entertainment and I kind of, I guess the advantage of opera was that it was one, a one stop entertainment, that you got a bit of music, you got, you got a bit of recited TV kind of spoken drama, you got a fun overture, people got up and danced in, in the, in the ballet bits. So in a, in a sense it was a kind of something for everyone. So the primary function of opera, as far as I can see, is that it has always answered a social need and in doing that it's sometimes been a social, delivered a social critique as well.
Linda Lespets
And so in, in Venice, when it was like, you were saying it's all the mixture of classes in France, that was not the case, was it? Because it was in Versailles?
Stphen Mould
No, this was, this was much more. So, so all of the themes of the of the Lully operas are, I believe, classical. Yeah. Because they're catered for the, noble class. Yes. And, and so this is like, you know, if you go into the Louvre today and see all those big historical paintings of ancient times, it's like the current Monarch is in this sort of very European thinking that there's this line of this lineage and that these great ancient battles that were fought that's what Napoleon thought he was fighting in in the 19th century he had that he was this Roman Emperor yeah he had that that mental sense of that was his that was his world you know he'd read about it and everything and Probably lived it a little bit too much in his head, if you know what I mean. So, all of those things, and then this distant classical world that was somehow they were able to recreate it. It wasn't lost, it was something that they could re find in their everyday life. If only they shut that down. the rest of the world out. And we all know where that ended up. But that's, so this is, these types of pieces are a kind of escapism. Maybe even you know, something like a 17th or 18th century painting come to life with music with it, of this sort of Arcadian sort of aspirations and, and this, this idea that civilization began with the Greeks, which I mean, today we know that that is utter rubbish. But people have clung on to it as a nice idea for a very, very, very long time. So your experience, say you were a French nobleman and you'd seen an opera in Versailles and then you go to Venice, it would be a totally different experience. Completely different. And there was a lot of travel amongst the aristocracy. Yes, so it was constantly being reinvented. With the public opera, you've got maybe not the absolute, you know, penniless lowest of lowest classes, but you've got a mixture of classes, so I would say a whole lot of people in a room for an opera performance, the smell, the amount of noise, the whole thing would be probably Yeah. I mean, I prefer It probably was like a The lighting, I mean there was no electricity right? So it was all candles and It was very, it was very dim lighting compared to Until it caught fire. Until it caught fire, yes.
You know, in music history, if you're an instrumentalist, you say that the most natural and beautiful instrument is the violin. I happen to work in the world of opera, so it's the human voice. And there is probably, in the philosophies, More this idea that the instruments imitate the human voice, which is the God given or natural voice so the violin's beautiful because it sounds like the human voice. So this rise of public opera, I'm sure, I mean, don't know so many examples from the, let's say, the 16th or the 17th, sorry, the 17th or the early 18th century, but you did get to a point where there would be arias that had a solo violin obbligato.
There are some in Mozart.
Linda Lespets
Ah, yeah. And oh I have written here, was opera political?
Stephen Mould
Always. Yes. So that, yeah, so not only was it this amazing spectacle, but it was like it was political as well. Which made it even more, that's an extra level of drama. And look, when everything was going well that was okay, but then it was constantly subject to censorship. Censorship. Verdi could not write an opera without having the libretto past the censors. He wanted La Traviata, which was written in 1851 or 1853, I can't remember which, but the Victor Hugo novella was written at that time. So it was an opera about a courtesan at that time. Verdi was fascinated by it because he was never married to his final, or did they get married? But she was his mistress for years and years and years and years and years and had kind of been an opera singer slash courtesan. So he was fascinated by the subject, since it wasn't having any of that, it had to be set back in the 17th century. Which makes it a lot safer. There was a whole thing with the marriage of Figaro about not having dancing in it. Because, was it Charles II? I always get these people confused, but in Vienna, somebody had died. Maybe Charles I died, I can't remember, but the court, or the king was kind of in mourning, so he said there's to be no dancing on the stage. But also, the marriage of Figaro with all the thing about the, the classes that, that Figaro and Susanna are smarter than the count and the Countess. And the count, having to beg for the Countess’s forgiveness and all this stuff. The play of Behe was setting off. It was like it did not start the French Revolution, but it, it was one of those things that was in the air. It was revolutionary in its ideas, in, its in its ideas, and that was more than just putting on an opera. That was, that was, playing with the politics at the time in a slightly dangerous way. Yeah.
Linda Lespets
With his two sons helping him in the workshop, Giovanni Battista Rogeri is making instruments to order with Pietro and Gio Paolo. This is seen in the workmanship of the instruments. The sons style was slightly different, but this did not stop the father and son from making instruments together. Elements of several people on the one instrument are evident. Giovanni would work with his two sons who over the years grew up. Gio-Paolo in 1667 is thought to have died sometime in his 30s. There is no death certificate for him but at some point he died. Instruments from him just stop. Now, Giovanni's older brother, Pietro Giacomo, married, but over the years it became evident that they would have no children. Pietro worked with his father on orders, taking more and more responsibility in the workshop as his father aged. For now, he would finish the outline of the instrument with his distinctive long hooked corners that were quite different to his father's work. But his father, Giovanni, always insisted on cutting the sound holes. Later, as time went on and his father stopped spending so much time in the workshop, we can see instruments with the same Pietro outline and his own, not his father's, hand in cutting the sound holes. Into the instruments they would glue their label that gave the name of Rogeri, not Rugeri. Even then, people would confuse them. After his name, he added that he was a student of Niccolo Amati, and in the city of Brescia. This is all in Latin, and there's the date. Something his Brescian predecessors did not do.
So now we know just when he made his instruments. Sometime around the late 1690s, when Rogeri was in his mid to late 50s, it looks as though he took on a young apprentice called Gaetano Pasta. Giovanni knew Gaetano's father Bartolomeo Pasta from his days in Cremona when he was working in the Amati workshop in the early 1660s. When Giovanni Rogeri had arrived as a young man, Bartolomeo Pasta was only two years older than him, was finishing up his apprenticeship and about to move to Milan. There was less competition there as Cremona was now bursting at the seams with luthiers. But over the years, being in trade, Giovanni Rogeri and Bartolomeo Pasta may have stayed in contact. His workshop in Milan was going well and he had three sons who had followed their father in the trade. Perhaps three brothers in the one workshop was a bit too much testosterone, especially with sharp tools at hand and delicate instruments to smash. In any case, Gaetano Pasta was in his late teens and out of there. He left for Brescia to work for Rogeri and the strong influence of Rogeri can be seen in his work. His labels are written Milanese, Alevio del Amati di Cremona. But this may have been because it sounded better to be from Cremona and the Amati workshop. Giovanni Rogeri sons were at least 10 years older than Gaetano Pasta, and by this time, a new set of hands in the workshop were welcome. Pasta's move to Brescia may have been to be apprenticed in another workshop, see the world and learn from his dad's friend, who had just happened to have the most successful shop in Brescia at the time, but very soon he met the lovely Caterina Pavarino, or perhaps it was her lovely dowry, being the widow of a late colleague, Stefano Lassigne, who was a violin maker. So at the age of 22, Gaetano Pasta was married to a local girl. Probably inherited a bunch of useful stuff from his wife's first husband, and so, he stays. As time goes on, Pietro Giacomo Rogeri will take over the workshop from his father, making more and more instruments, continuing in his father's style, but exaggerating it with extended trumpeting corners to the instruments and not quite matching the elegance of his father. Giovanni Battista Rogeri would die in 1710 at the age of 68. Over in Cremona, Stradivari was well into his golden period of making. And then 14 years after Giovanni's death, his son Pietro Giacomo would die, bringing an end to the Rogeri workshop in Brescia.
And this brings us to an end of the series on Rogeri and Rugeri. I hope now you can tell the difference between these two makers. They both worked in one of the most exciting and industrious times of instrument making in this part of the world and have drawn influencers and influenced other great makers of this age.
A big thank you to my guests. Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhard for joining me in this episode. And if you have enjoyed these episodes, please tell a friend about it or write a review on the app you have listened to. This does in fact help. And this piece of music you're listening to right now is a live recording of Boccherini by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Finally, thank you for listening. And I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles.