Jacopo
Dear listener, let me introduce myself. I am Jacopo Ristori, the creator of the project “In copisteria del Conte”. If you have come to listen to this audio track, you have probably listened to the music collected on the CD, if not all, at least some of it. This special track aims to disseminate information for those who are interested in knowing the key aspects that inspired me to carry out this project. How does this disclosure happen, you ask? It will happen through an interview. I thought a chat between two people interested in music and history was the most enjoyable way. Usually this information is contained in the booklet attached to the CD but living in an era in which digital diffusion has taken over, I thought it was more effective to record an interview as if it were an episode of a podcast. Today I am in Genoa, which is my hometown. But it is also the city of our copy shop and I am happy to have Professor Davide Mingozzi, a Genoese musician and musicologist, in front of me for this occasion. Professor Mingozzi is the author of several publications. Many concern the Genoese territory including an extensive article on count Taccoli who is our copyist. This is the reason why I decided to involve him and I am very happy that he reacted with enthusiasm. Good afternoon Professor Mingozzi.

Davide
Good afternoon and thank you for the beautiful introduction and the invitation you extended to me to participate in this project, which I accepted with great enthusiasm.

Jacopo
I’m glad we finally have managed to meet, after exchanging many messages for planning it. I have prepared a list of questions that will help us continue this interview and if you agree I would start with the first.

Davide
Let’s go!

Jacopo
I would start from the title “In the copy shop of the Count”. First of all, what was a copy shop and what did it mean to have a music copy shop in the mid-eighteenth century; was it a publishing house or something different?

Davide
Before the birth of the large-scale diffusion of music printing, music was mainly passed down by manuscript. This was especially true for the 17th and 18th century in Italy. Other countries, such as England or even more so France, already had a very large diffusion of music publishers during the eighteenth century. In Italy, however, this did not happen; to an extent that many composers, take Vivaldi for example, printed their works outside Italy, in either France or Holland. In Italy there were small music publishers but they certainly didn’t have the diffusion that musical publishing houses had in the rest of Europe.
If somebody, for example, needed one of Tartini’s sonatas, what did he do in Italy? He went to the local copy shop (whether there was only one or whether there were several depended on the city) and looked at what was available in the internal catalogue, so he could purchase a manuscript copy of this sonata.
The copy shops also and above all worked for the theatres, so in addition to the full score they supplied the parts for the individual instruments, the parts for the singers and everything that was necessary to organize the show from a musical point of view. Copy shops also had a function, if I may use the term, as souvenir shops and, for example in Venice, it was common for copy shops to prepare manuscripts on a large scale which were then purchased by tourists who were on a ‘Grand Tour’ and who brought back many musical souvenirs from the city and from Italy in general. We cannot say that they were real publishing houses because the stipulation of a publishing contract did not yet exist. Therefore a musician did not have agreements with the copyist for the diffusion of his music as could instead happen for the printed repertoire. But it was certainly from copy shops that modern music publishing houses were born in the 19th century. For example in 1808, Giovanni Ricordi in Milan transformed his copy shop into a music-publishing house that is still active and well known today.

Jacopo
The difference you describe between what was happening on the peninsula (Italy) and the rest of Europe is very interesting. It reminds me of a doctoral thesis by Simone Laghi on the birth of the Italian quartet repertoire at the end of the 18th century that I recently read. It struck me because he quotes the words of Samuel Sharp, a famous 18th-century surgeon who, referring to the city of Naples, said that it was so difficult to find printed music that even Neapolitan masters could not read the music at first sight. And that was because they were not used to printed characters. Then he continues to say, in accordance with what you told me before, that printed music was also so scarce because it was more expensive than copied music.

Davide
Music printed in Italy was more expensive. If you think about the French editions of Rameau, Pièces de Clavecin for example, they are all printed. Next to that we had manuscripts circulating – not that there was not any print in Italy, but there were certainly much fewer. Let’s think for example of Frescobaldi: his books of Toccate are printed. Another example, concerning opera: Monteverdi’s Orfeo is one of the first works – in addition to being one of the first operas – to be printed. This is uncommon because operas were generally speaking not printed and were only handed down in manuscript. I remember that Charles Burney, during his Grand Tour through Italy, selected musical manuscripts in every city and gave his servant the task to send boxes full of these manuscripts to London.

Jacopo
In the recording there is a somewhat particular case. The two quartets that I found under the name of Pietro Nardini are actually attributed to Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Taccoli is the only one to attribute these two compositions to Nardini and for this reason Professor Federico Mari, who wrote a thematic catalog on Pietro Nardini does not include them in the ‘certain’ compositions. We can find these two pieces in the edition printed around 1790 in Amsterdam by publisher Schmidt: six quartets opus 9 by Hoffmeister. We also find two manuscript pairs, I think in Berlin and Vienna, both under the name of Hoffmeister. Anyway the question that arises is why pieces of music got attributed to the wrong composer or at least why the wrong name is on the cover of a manuscript.

Davide
Imagine: you are given a long text of several pages to copy. It is practically certain that sooner or later some error may slip through due to distraction or tiredness and this is very frequent in manuscript music. Music copyists were professionals so they knew how to read music. We must not think that the copyists were ignorant people who copied “dots and in the right places”, they had a basic musical preparation that allowed them to read what they had in front of them. However, in the number of copies made manually, errors could occur. Philology is the discipline that deals with studying the manuscript sources but it studies also printed editions, since they can contain errors as well. I don’t have an answer as to why these specific quartets bear Nardini’s name, but I can tell you that it is a frequently asked question and it often happened that scores were attributed to other composers. The reasons may be various: probably Taccoli on that occasion used a manuscript that had an incorrect title page and therefore he copied what he saw, or he owned a series of quartets by Nardini and Hoffmeister bound together and then he attributed all of them on his own initiative to Nardini. The bottom line is that since they are works of human ingenuity, errors are common. It is up to us philologists to reconstruct both the attributions and the musical text in the version closest to what the author intended. Here in Genoa, for example, we have a manuscript of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, which differs in many points from Pergolesi’s text due to a great amount of errors coming from the sources that were copied. The manuscripts are beautiful and interesting but must always be read with a critical eye. Manuscripts cannot be relied upon completely as they are not critical editions; relying solely on a manuscript means performing that type of music according to that testimony. It is no longer “philological”, if I may use the term, to use the manuscript rather than a print. The best choice is always the critical edition conducted by a philologist because it reconstructs, as we said before, what in the philologist’s idea is the author’s will. The manuscript, even if it were autograph, does not necessarily represent the author’s ‘last will’. It is certainly interesting but it is a source that tells you something about a specific environment.

Jacopo
I was smiling because I agree with what he said. However, as a historical musician, my choice is often to use a single source as I try to identify with a musician of the time, who might only have had that one available, despite being aware that it may be incorrect in some parts. Obviously critical editions are fundamental as they tell the history of the piece and the history of the scores of that piece.

Davide
The Stabat Mater by Pergolesi that I was telling you about before, was played about a year ago by my dear friend Luca Franco Ferrari, and with this he gave a vision of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in eighteenth-century Genoa.

Jacopo
Another question comes to mind: is it possible that sometimes the copyist would make changes to the music, according to his own taste, while copying?

Davide
It is possible but what happened more frequently is that the copyist interpreted a certain passage incorrectly, either because it was wrong in the source he was copying, he realizes that, and then tries to correct the mistake, or because he misinterprets the musical meaning and then modifies it. This is very frequent in textual philology and especially medieval philology, but also in musical philology. In my opinion, changes made voluntarily by copyists are rarer.

Jacopo
At the time there was still respect for the composer’s wishes even if it was very different from what there is today. Well, at this point I would like to ask you the last question that brings us back to the title of the project. The figure of the Count has been mentioned several times and so I would like to ask you: who was Count Taccoli?

Davide
We are talking about Federico Taccoli who was a nobleman, probably born in Modena around 1722. At a certain point in his life after the death of his father, which occurred quite early, he had strong disagreements with his stepbrothers and this probably pushed him to leave Modena and move to Genoa where we find him already in 1743. In Genoa he began his activities as a music copyist. Taccoli was an extravagant character and was involved in any (il)legal traffic you can think of: he lent money, rented instruments, sold music and not always in a completely legal manner. He had a fiery temperament and often started arguments. He left behind a huge number of judicial documents also due to the eccentricity of his lifestyle, which aimed to recreate the typical comfort of the noble status that had belonged to him before his move to Genoa. For example, he kept horses even though he didn’t have the economic means to manage them; he rode around the city even though that was forbidden. In short, he had a fiery temperament, a temperament that he passed on to his son Giuseppe Taccoli who also orbited in the musical theatre field because he was a prompter at the theatre. Of this son we know for example that he got involved in several fights and duels. Taccoli also had a daughter, Maria Caterina, with a milder temperament. She worked in the copy shop and was mistreated and oppressed by her father and brother, so much so that at a certain point she tried to run away from home by taking refuge with some nobles asking for help to enter the convent, help that unfortunately never arrived. So Federico Taccoli was certainly a curious character with an interesting biography. This does not take away the fact that Taccoli managed the main copy shop in Geno from the 1850s and practically until his death in 1809. The manuscripts are very beautiful, with a very elegant handwriting, very precise – so the errors he makes are also rare – and always very clear. He left a huge quantity of manuscripts that we find not only in Genoa but also in many libraries in Italy. So, for the Genoese musical environment he was truly a character of fundamental importance.

Jacopo
Certainly! Was he the only copyist in Genoa or were there competitors?

Davide
The copy shops collaborated with the theatres, providing them with full scores or also the parts for the orchestra musicians and the singers, which then became part of the theatre archive or the impresario’s private archive. Apart from this, the copy shops played an important role in spreading music: an amateur could go to Count Taccoli and ask for a piece of music that he wanted to play if it was available. There were other, non-professional figures like Taccoli, who worked in Genoa as copyists. They were often orchestra musicians. For example Giovanni Battista Fossa, who was a double bass player in the orchestra, was apparently paid for copying some works. So Taccoli was not the only one. However, from 1794 Taccoli obtained from the government the primacy on the copying of manuscripts for the theatre, that is, that he was the only one who could collaborate with the Genoese theatres. He obtained this primacy after a very long trial against the impresario Francesco Benedetto Ricci who was the impresario active in Genoa at the time.

Jacopo
So we can say that the main clients of the copy shop were the theatres and amateurs, being the Genoese nobility.

Davide
Yes exactly. Because, let’s not forget that there was a very high musical quality in the amateur level. Amateurs could even reach executive peaks equal to those of professionals without calling themselves professionals because their social status did not allow it. The word dilettanti (meaning amateurs) was used because it means you are diverting yourself with something you like. There was no negative connotation to the word amateur as it has today. Certainly, in many libraries and archives of noble Genoese families we find manuscripts by Federico Taccoli either because they were played or because they were collected, that is, they liked to keep a certain aria inside their library. For example in the Brignole Sale family library in Genoa we find many manuscripts copied by Taccoli himself, either because this family liked to collect music or because they actually organized performances: Anton Giulio III Brignole Sale married Anna Pieri in 1783 and they were both music amateurs (singers). They organized, in their residence at Palazzo Rosso and even more in the villa in Voltri, in which there is still a theatre today, real theatrical performances. They commissioned works from important composers of the time and then performed in them as singers themselves. This is to underline how amateurism was understood at the time. Also in this case we are talking about manuscripts that came from the pen of Federico Taccoli.

Jacopo
Very well. If you agree, I would conclude here.

Davide
Thank you very much for the invitation. I was very pleased to talk about Genoa and Federico Taccoli.

Jacopo
I am grateful for your contribution, which adds a lot of value to this project in my opinion. I would like to invite all the listeners who have accidentally stumbled upon this track to listen to the rest of the CD. And for those who wish to know more, it is possible to find more information and the digital version of the CD on my website www.jacoporistori.com or on the website of the recording label www.snakewoodeditions.com. Thank you and enjoy the listening!