Francesco Antonio Vallotti

Francesco Antonio Vallotti

Source: Wikipedia

It is during the Renaissance that commercial enterprise began its rise toward rivalry with royalty in terms of wealth and power, the Medici banking family in Italy an apt example. It was during the Baroque that early capitalism became the alternative to not being luckily born. Such as mining precious metals in the Americas and trading derivatives would lead from the economic scenario of a few rich whilst the most poor to a few rich whilst the most poor with some middle class (bourgeoisie) in the middle. Among the largest companies on the globe were in shipping, driving the colonial expansion of Europe. The British East India Company had been chartered in 1600 as The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. That was three years after the staging of the first opera in 1597, Jacopo Peri's 'Dafne', and two years before Gulio Caccini published his work 'Le Nuove Musiche' ('The New Music') in 1602, the latter the year of the founding of the Dutch East India Company. That "new music" was baroque, to which opera would become both a major limb and the highly competitive business of theatre. Come the Dutch West India Company in 1623. The Portuguese East India Company had been formed as early as circa 1500 but was a royal monopoly until 1628. The burgeoning of commerce that preceded the Industrial Revolution, however, was not without gamble, evidenced by the South Sea Company Bubble of 1720 nine years after its founding. Howsoever, it was of commercial growth in Europe largely pushed by trade across the seas that during the Baroque musicians were able to seek patronage from other than royalty. Aristocrats weren't the only wealthy anymore and opera became itself a major commercial industry. Francesco Antonio Vallotti, however, availed himself of the original source of patronage in music that had been the Roman Catholic Church several centuries before such as kings became notable sponsors of music.

Born in Vercelli, Italy, on 11 June 1697, Vallotti wasn't a major composer, though he wrote a strong body of sacred music including psalms, hymns, responsorials and other liturgical works. Responsorial singing, between a cantor and congregation, had well preceded Jesus. It had been a Jewish development in singing the psalms of David [Jewish Music Resource Center]. Compare responsorial to antiphonal. Vallotti had been largely neglected by history until the publishing of his text on temperament in 1950 by G. Zanon. Though that has seen acknowledgement among professional musicians it didn't increase his audience a lot, such that Vallotti's remains an unfamiliar name.