Published in Venice between 1724 and 1726 in eight folio volumes, the fifty psalms of the Estro poetico-armonico (poetry by Girolamo Ascanio Giustiniani, music by Benedetto Marcello) represent one of the most ambitious and innovative attempts of paraphrasing of psalm texts in Italian verse. Marcello's intonation, conducted in a style only partly analogous to that of the contemporary production of oratorios, cantatas and chamber duets, openly distanced itself from the most popular genres of the time, in an attempt to refound the relationship between text and music. It was not by chance that the ideas formulated in L'Estro found echoes in the writings on opera in music by Algarotti and Calzabigi, or that they constituted a model to be contrasted with the much less elitist ideals of Saverio Mattei's later vulgarization of the psalmody. Also thanks to a complex apparatus of erudite prefaces, Giustiniani and Marcello's work had a vast echo in 18th-century Europe and continued to be a much-admired musical monument in the following century. Of particular interest is the inclusion of transcriptions of Hebrew melodies belonging to the oral traditions of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities of Venice: "a remarkable methodological accomplishment" (Edwin Seroussi, 2002) also from an ethnomusicological point of view.
8/02/2021, ore 17