SKU: AP.6-256820
ISBN 9780486256825. English.
Includes 78 toccatas, preludes, chorale variations, chorale fantasies, chorale preludes, fugues, canzonettas and chaconnes, comprising virtually all of his organ works in this one volume. 320 pgs.
SKU: HH.HH500-FSP
ISBN 9790708185109.
The eighteenth century saw a great increase in secular music for solo voice and continuo set to texts in Venetian, which was then a recognized literary language, not a mere dialect of Italian. Most of these compositions are short gondola songs or canzonettas, but a few are cantatas in several movements indistinguishable from their counterparts with Italian texts except in language and subject matter, which favours contemporary themes treated in a comic manner. The two Venetian cantatas for soprano and continuo by Diogenio Bigaglia (1678–1745) published here for the first time – they are probably the first of their type ever to appear in a modern edition – are excellently crafted examples of their type, revealing an unexpectedly racy side of their composer, a Benedictine monk. One is a set of instructions for a shopping trip given by a nun to her aged servant, and the other is a woman’s catty description of the rise from rags to riches of one of her neighbours through prostitution. The editions come with translations of the texts and a brief note on the pronunciation of Venetian.