To accompany Sankerib's Bonporti Week celebrations, you might like to read a little about this composer's life and career:(b Trent, bap. 11 June 1672; d Padua, 19 Dec 1749). Italian composer. Of good family, he was educated in his native city and Innsbruck in philosophical and humanistic subjects appropriate to the clerical vocation he was to follow. While studying theology at the Collegio Germanico in Rome in 1691–5 Bonporti took music lessons (presumably not his first). Corelli is said to have instructed him in violin playing, and Pitoni in the composition of sacred vocal music, but there is only slender evidence of this. Bonporti returned to Trent ordained as a priest and obtained a minor office in the cathedral in 1697. His op.1, a set of ten trio sonatas (he consistently grouped his instrumental works in tens rather than twelves), had been published the year before. On the title-page the composer called himself ‘gentiluomo di Trento’, noting his non-professional status as a musician. 11 further sets followed, all except one (op.3) consisting of secular music with a bias towards da camera specifications; of these the majority appeared during the first decade of the 18th century, when there was an unprecedented boom in the publishing of Italian instrumental music both inside and outside Italy.
Bonporti regarded himself as primarily a priest rather than a composer, although, ironically, his clerical advancement was no more rapid than the spread of his musical renown. This explains the otherwise puzzlingly ‘secular’ nature of his musical output; for despite the care which he obviously lavished on even the least substantial of his compositions, music was for Bonporti a means towards a non-musical end: his appointment to a canonry at Trent or an equivalent clerical post elsewhere. Each new opus saw an increasingly desperate attempt to win the favour of a dignitary who might secure his advancement. Beginning modestly with dedications to local, mostly ecclesiastical potentates, he worked his way up the feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchy until in a letter of 1716 we hear of no less a person than George I of England being solicited. (In letters to the secretary of the Elector of Mainz written in 1715 Bonporti offered to forgo a year's salary if appointed chaplain to the emperor at Vienna.) Such gains as Bonporti made through these representations were merely titular. In 1721 he signed himself in a letter to Prince Schwarzenberg ‘maestro dei concerti di S. M[aes]tà Ces[are]a e Catt[oli]ca’, and in 1727 he was made an ‘aulic familiar’ by Charles VI. The canonry remained remote. It is known that rivalry between German and Italian speakers in the church hierarchy at Trent (where the former, associated by language and culture with the seat of the empire, enjoyed an advantage) prevented his appointment whenever vacancies arose. Embittered by this failure, Bonporti moved to Padua in 1740, lodging in the house of a fellow priest. A final appeal to Empress Maria Theresa in 1746, in which op.12 was enlisted, proved fruitless. He died three years later and was buried in Padua.
Bonporti's merits as a composer were first realized in modern times when it was announced in 1911 by Werner Wolffheim that four of his inventions for violin and continuo, op.10 nos.2, 5, 6 and 7, had been included by Alfred Dörffel in volume xlv of Bach's works following an incorrect attribution to Bach in a manuscript source. Not only may Bach have imitated Bonporti in his use of the unusual term ‘Invention’ as a title, but the third movement (‘Ecco’) of the tenth invention in Bonporti's op.10 may have provided Bach with a model for the corresponding movement, similar in conception, of his Ouverture in B minor for harpsichord (bwv831). The celebrated violinist F.M. Veracini is known to have included op.10 in his repertory on German tours in 1715. By then the work, which had originally appeared in 1712, was known as La pace, the composer having seized the opportunity afforded by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 to add this ingratiating sobriquet to later editions. (The ‘Triumph of the Grand Alliance’, opp.8 and 9, dating from c1710, betrays similar motives.)
In common with other north Italian instrumental composers of his generation, Bonporti based his musical language on Corelli. But whereas the main concern of many of his contemporaries, such as Dall'Abaco, was the expansion and clarification of form, Bonporti seems to have concentrated on the enhancement of melodic detail. (A limited parallel with Bach can be drawn here.) In the Recitativo movement of the first work in op.10 Bonporti offers what is in effect a copiously graced Adagio, entirely instrumental in idiom. But the similarly titled movement in the fifth concerto of op.11 (a very impressive publication in the domain of the concerto) introduces inflections of unmistakably vocal origin, highly original and effective in their unexpected context. Beneath the ‘extravagance’ (as contemporary writers would have termed it) of Bonporti's technically highly evolved writing for the violin a solid musical intention can be discerned; this is expressed through cogent, if not always highly systematized, forms, imaginative harmony and lively part-writing.
The present-day neglect of Bonporti's music owes something to the scarcity of surviving source material, something to the undervaluing of works in the chamber idiom and something to his non-adherence to any regional school of acknowledged historical importance, such as the Venetian. It does scant justice to his stature as a composer.
M Talbot/E Careri from Grove Music (acc. 20022012)
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