A French history of music begun by Abbé Pierre Bourdelot and completed and published in 1715 by his nephew Jacques Bonnet established the myth that long surrounded the first attempt to murder Alessandro Stradella (1639–1682). According to this tantalizing story, a Venetian nobleman engaged composer Stradella to give music lessons to his mistress. Stradella eloped with his pupil to Rome, pursued by two assassins hired by his vengeful employer. On arrival in the Eternal City, the bravi learned that the faithless Stradella was to perform a new oratorio on the next day at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, one of Rome’s four patriarchal churches. The murderous pair planned to attack the composer when he left the church, but they were so strongly moved by the beauty of his music that they could not bring themselves to strike. Instead, they implored Stradella to save his life by leaving Rome immediately.
The Stradella legend is so romantic that, according to Stradella’s biographer Carolyn Gianturco, it inspired six nineteenth-century operas of which the best known is Alessandro Stradella (1837) by Friedrich von Flotow. In Flotow’s comic opera, Stradella’s music softens the hearts of his would-be killers and of the master whom they served. At the end of the second act, the bandits who have entered Stradella’s house surreptitiously are diverted from their bloody mission when he sings a ballad of landscape painter Salvator Rosa glorifying the compassion of highwaymen. In the opera finale the vindictive nobleman also recovers his humanity, calling on Stradella to forgive and forget after hearing the composer’s rehearsal of a hymn to the Virgin Mary.
Gianturco’s Alessandro Stradella, 1639–1682: His Life and Music has made the most decisive shift from fiction to fact in treating the biography and career of this significant figure in music history. Stradella, described by Ellen Rosand in her review of Gianturco’s book as “an important composer of vocal and instrumental music in Italy during the third quarter of the seventeenth century,” produced cantatas, operas and other theater music, oratorios (including one of his finest works, San Giovanni Battista), vocal pieces, madrigals, and instrumental music. He is credited with inventing the concerto grosso.
The birthplace of Stradella was the city of Nepi, near Viterbo in central Italy. His father, Marc’Antonio, was, according to Gianturco, “one of the leading figures of Nepi,” and the family was well-connected with luminaries in aristocratic and church circles. Marc’Antonio died in 1648, and five years later the fourteen-year-old Alessandro moved with his mother, Vittoria, and his brother, Stefano, to Rome; Vittoria joined Duke Ippolito Lante’s household, which her two sons served as pages. The details of Alessandro’s musical training are obscure, but in 1667 a Latin oratorio of his was performed during the Lenten season in a series paid for by a society of aristocrats. Throughout his productive life, Stradella served many patrons. A particularly loyal supporter was a Venetian nobleman, Polo Michiel, and in about 1675 Queen Christina of Sweden (who had taken up residence in Rome after her abdication) made one of her many contributions to his career, writing a scenario that was developed into a verse that Stradella set to music in his cantata Il Damone.
The fact that Stradella served numerous masters was a mixed blessing at best. The continuity of his work was not assured, and his noble patrons were not always quick to pay for the music that they had commissioned. These inherent risks of musical freelancing may have been exacerbated by Stradella’s high living. Whatever the causes, by the autumn of 1670 the young composer found himself in debt for 7,000 scudi and turned to Cardinal Flavio Chigi for assistance. In a letter of November 27 to the cardinal, Stradella emphasized both his humility and the danger he faced: “I am here with this sheet of paper, prostrate at Your Excellency’s feet, kneeling before Your Clemency to beg for help, and to request your magnamity to free me from a disgrace which is hovering above me, [a situation] in which, if I have no protector, I could be deprived of my belongings, reputation, and perhaps also freedom.” The root cause of his misery, Stradella submitted, was his professional independence: “Your Excellency should . . . know that it is already two years that I am free-lancing to earn some money, and that so far I have had reasonable good luck; but, whoever navigates this particular sea, and does not have someone to protect him from the abuses of fortune, must succumb to several encounters with the same.” Stradella informed the cardinal that to satisfy his needs, a loan of 2,000 scudi would be sufficient because he had already put together the rest. He then attempted to apply time pressure: “The time left to remedy this misfortune is only until the coming Saturday; it is therefore the shortness of the [time] that leads me to disturb Your Excellency. If by any chance you would agree to help me, your money is safe.” It is not known whether or how the cardinal responded, but Gianturco suggests that Stradella’s plight may have been ameliorated by 1671 when he became active in work for Rome’s first public opera theater, the Teatro Tordinona.
Years earlier, however, Stradella had set a dangerous precedent for supplementing his income by disreputable marriage brokering. Gianturco summarizes a 1667 letter from Abate Settimio Olgiati to Polo Michiel informing him that Stradella “has arranged a marriage and, because of it, has had to escape to a religious institution and may even have to leave Rome.” A similar affair cropped up nine years later. Stradella makes a veiled reference to this new misstep in his letter of October 20, 1676, to Polo Michiel, where he alludes to “a certain misfortune having happened to me in Rome, which does not permit me to live here at the moment.” One account cited by Gianturco asserted that “he contrived to get 10,000 scudi from a woman ‘of low birth, not respectable, . . . also ugly and old.’” Another version of the rumor claimed that Stradella and an accomplice, a well-known contralto castrato, tried to cover their tracks by marrying their victim off to a relative of Cardinal Alderano Cibo; supposedly the chosen husband was an unidentified member of the Cibo family. The consequence of this attempted offense against family honor was that the cardinal had the woman put in a nunnery, “one of the most vile” in Rome. Stradella thought it best to decamp for Venice.
No sooner had he arrived there than he became involved in a new imbroglio before which his earlier troubles paled. Alvise Contarini, a member of a rich and powerful Venetian family, asked Stradella to give music lessons to his inamorata, Agnese Van Uffele. But by June 1677 the composer no longer had tutorial duties on his mind; he eloped with the young woman to Turin, capital of the Duchy of Savoy. Contarini was furious, railing not over a broken heart but stolen goods; he insisted that the fugitives had robbed him of 10,000 ducats. He was not believed, Gianturco relates, “since he was talking about jewels of little value which he had given his mistress.” The nobleman’s anger, if not his financial loss, was real, for in late July he arrived in Turin in search of the lovers; he found that the girl had sought refuge in a convent for “lost sheep” and her lover had claimed sanctuary at the Convent of San Domenico. Through pressure applied by an archbishop, Contarini insisted that Agnese either marry Stradella or become a nun. By the end of the month, Contarini left the city, and Stradella turned to his patron Polo Michiel for intercession. In a letter of August 21, 1677, Stradella asked Michiel for written recommendations to the Turin court.
The reason why I ask Your Excellency this favour is because Signor Aluigi [Alvise] Contarini having advanced his cause here just by saying that I am a thief, that I robbed him of money, with a thousand other lies, . . . I need letters to this court which testify to my actions. . . . The same Signor Aluigi was nevertheless not believed, and they excused his slander by believing him to be very passionate and in love; but with all that, I have always been open with the court and . . . am always ready to receive every reprimand whenever I have committed by my actions a positive error. As far as the woman is concerned, . . . I did not take her away to remove her from Signor Aluigi, but because of the compassion that I had for the misfortunes of the same, for the dangers in which I saw her, and because of the continuous and innumerable supplications she made me.
On September 11 Stradella wrote again, expressing the hope that Michiel would lend his support in the continuing dispute, since he had “the opportunity of using [his] very powerful contacts with Signor Aluigi Contarini.” By the following month, negotiations seemed to be bearing fruit. On October 8 an informant reported to Michiel that Stradella had at last agreed to marry Agnese; in return, Contarini would return the girl’s belongings. After the wedding, the nobleman would in writing both pardon Stradella and recommend him to Savoy’s regent, Maria Giovanna. The rejoicings of the now affianced couple were, however, premature, as a news bulletin from Turin to Rome soon reported: “Sunday evening [October 10] Alessandro Stradella, Musico Romano, was assaulted by two outsiders [forestieri], and they dealt him several knife wounds, leaving him on the ground for dead, and being brought into the Palazzo of S. Giovanni, orders were immediately given by Madama Reale [Maria Giovanna] to bring him to the rooms he has in the Convent of San Domenico, and therefore a rigorous search is being made to find the emissaries.” In fact, the identity of the man who ordered the attack (from which Stradella recovered) was, in the minds of many, an open secret. On October 16 the Bavarian ambassador reported the crime to Munich and named Contarini as responsible. Ultimately, nobody was brought to justice because the case became snarled with diplomatic quarrels between France and Savoy.
Stradella’s correspondence with Michiel shows that the victim of the assault was also quick to put the dangerous conflict behind him. He informed Michiel on November 26, 1677, that “every difference that the most excellent Signor Aluigi Contarini had with me is completely settled to my great satisfaction, as well as the way [it was done],” and in a letter of December 16 he further assured his patron: “Your Excellency is already well informed of my peace of mind with regard to the most excellent Signor Contarini.”
There is no further mention of Agnese Van Uffele in Stradella’s correspondence. This passionate triangle disappears from history only to reemerge in the happier form of the Bourdelot-Bonnet myth and the Flotow opera. For Stradella, though, destiny proved far harsher than these fictions. Although to all appearances unchastened by his close brush with disaster, he thought it best to move to Genoa, where he was well-settled by January 1668. It was in this city that the composer’s reckless nature set him on a course leading to a last misadventure.
From a professional point of view, Stradella’s years in Genoa turned out to be brilliantly successful. To keep this musical star in their city, a group of Genoese gave him an annual stipend of 100 Spanish doubloons as well as a house, food, and a servant; he was also entrusted with management of the Teatro Falcone. In Genoa Stradella produced three of his operas, La forza dell’amore paterno, Le gare dell’amor eroico, and Il Trespolo tutore; another opera was commissioned from Rome and an oratorio, La Susanna, was presented in Modena. His pupils burgeoned among the nobility.
In other respects, however, Genoa was far from a perfect location for Stradella. Both the public and private spheres of the city were extremely puritanical. The three ruling doges, as well as the Genoese Senate, closely regulated the social behavior of citizens. Rules of conduct published in 1680 made detailed prescriptions for clothing and adornment, decreeing black for the dress of women and requiring simplicity in jewelry and wigs. The rigor of such ordinances was contagious, arousing the public to emulate the zeal of its government. Gianturco cites an anonymous letter of complaint to the governing council in which an unflattering reference was made to Stradella. The writer found that women were ostentatious and their husbands extravagant. The men, he fulminated, gave too much money to a fashionable hairdresser nicknamed “the Roman” and to two composers, Stradella, and his friend, Carlo Ambrosio Lonati, a hunchbacked singer, violinist, and composer—“they throw money so that these brazen scoundrels can stay in Genoa.” The letter concluded that the three offenders should be expelled from the city. Gianturco notes that the thrust of the letter’s author was ambiguous, targeting either money or immorality: “He is opposed to women being glamorous and, what is more, suspicious of their dealings with men outside the family. . . . He is against all expenditures for things he believes valueless, for example money paid to Stradella and Lonati supposedly for their compositions or music lessons. He would presumably have seen their lessons to ladies as immoral encounters simply because of the proximity of the sexes.”
A spate of anonymous letters beginning on December 2, 1681, commented on the recent wounding of Pier Francesco Guano that required twelve stitches on his face. The letters asserted that Guano had been attacked for having “talked too loudly and sarcastically especially about having seen nude noblewomen.” On February 28, 1682, a news brief sent from Genoa to Florence reported another attack, this one claiming the life of Alessandro Stradella: “Wednesday evening [February 25] at two at night [about 7:00 P.M.] while he was going home accompanied by his servant who had a cape in his hand, the musician Stradella was stabbed three times, and died immediately without being able to say a word, and the servant whom he had ahead [of him] observed nothing until he saw him fall flat on his face, and then he died, and it is not yet known who did it.” A composer of admired music, Stradella died in silence. His burial in Santa Maria delle Vigne, one of Genoa’s most aristocratic churches, confirmed what his unbroken ties with noble patrons had already demonstrated: private indiscretions had not dimmed the respect he had enjoyed because of his music and his family ties.
Although the news report of February 28 termed the perpetrator unknown, political and public opinion, expressed anonymously, placed the blame on the four Lomellino brothers. One unsigned note in the records of the investigation suggested that if Stradella “had paid attention to the admonitions he had received in Turin[,] he would not have had such an accident which might have been caused by his wanting to raise his sight to the sun. Therefore whoever rises too high is bound to fall.” This implication that Stradella’s sin was to pursue love affairs in Genoa’s high society was sardonically phrased in musical terms by news reports stating that “in order to touch too high he had played in the bass.” Reports also claimed that three other leading musicians had left Genoa so as to avoid Stradella’s fate.
On March 5 the Genoese Senate ordered Giovanni Battista Lomellino (known as Bacciolo or Baccio) and his brother Domenico to be imprisoned. A month later the men were released on a payment of 2,000 silver scudi. They were never formally charged with Stradella’s murder, nor was sufficient evidence assembled to support such an accusation. Anonymous letters had charged that the killing was arranged because Stradella was having an affair with the accused men’s married sister, Maria Lomellino Garibaldi. This imputation may have been no more than an attempt to suggest comparison to Alvise Contarini’s commissioned act of revenge in Turin. Apart from the lack of proof, biographer Gianturco finds an additional reason to doubt this theory, finding it “a bit surprising to learn that Maria Caterina Lomellino’s husband, Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi (one of the managers of the Teatro Falcone), took care of distributing the composer’s possessions to his heirs, and not only kept Stradella’s music for himself but tried later on to enlarge his personal collection of it, behaviour one would think too generous and full of respect for a nobleman towards a musician who had cuckolded him.” This reservation is superficially appealing, but it is possible that Garibaldi’s apparently “generous” conduct might have been well-calculated to protect his wife’s virtue or to immunize his in-laws against criminal reputations.
One of the news bulletins from Genoa gave another reason for deadly anger of the Lomellino brothers against Stradella. According to this rumor, an actress had been impregnated and abandoned by a priest; Giovanni took the young woman under his protection but became jealous when he found that she was in love with Stradella.
It is difficult to choose between the two hypotheses that both point to guilt within the Lomellino family. However, despite the puzzles that remain about the details of the Stradella assassination plot, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the composer was undone by his old nemesis, revenge for love.
My source for the biography of Stradella is Carolyn Gianturco’s Alessandro Stradella, 1639–1682: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 262–65, 266–67, 33, 267–69, 272–73, 42, 56, 57, 59, 60. This includes, in Italian and English, Stradella’s extant writings, among them twenty-four letters that have been translated into English and published for the first time. Gianturco opines that “many of the documents which [Remo] Giazotto cites” in his two-volume Vita di Alessandro Stradella (Milan: Curci, 1962) “cannot be found, whereas others which contradict them have since come to light.” I note that Giazotto has misnamed Agnese Van Uffele, the first femme fatale in Stradella’s life.
Ellen Rosand’s review of Gianturco’s biography appeared in the online Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 1, 1 (1995), http://sscm-jscm.press.uiuc.edu/v1/no1/rosand.html (accessed Dec. 13, 2007).
The origin of the “Stradella myth” is in the biography of the composer in Histoire de la musique depuis son origine, les progrès successifs de cet art jusqu’ à présent, et la comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (Paris: C. Cochart, 1715), which was begun by Abbé Pierre Bourdelot, continued by Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot, completed and published by Jacques Bonnet.
Friedrich Wilhelm Riese’s libretto for Friedrich von Flotow’s opera, Alessandro Stradella, is provided with the Capriccio two-CD recording 60117 of a 2004 production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne, Germany.
Novelists have been attracted by Stradella’s love affair with the Venetian nobleman’s protégée. Examples include Marion Crawford, Stradella (New York: Macmillan, 1909); and Philippe Beaussant, Stradella (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). In Beaussant’s novel the tradition that Stradella was spared assassination because of the beauty of his oratorio is found to be rooted in the myth of Orpheus, whose music charmed wild beasts. Beaussant comments, “A myth makes sense only if it is always true and if an Italian of the seventeenth century can repeat what already has been done. All I know is that the story of Stradella’s music stirring the souls of the assassins to the point of disarming them has come down through the centuries. Everyone has believed it to be true, admirable and exemplary. Me too” (222).