La Fidelíssima - Antonio Caldara: Sonate a tre (2003)

Venice was one of the most fertile centres of Italian Baroque music. The serenity of its inhabitants and their immoderate taste for celebration, carnivals, entertainment and pleasure were the envy of the whole of Europe, as were the beauty of the city and its fine situation, its prestige and its magnificence. In the City of the Doges music was a necessity. ‘There are concerts somewhere almost every evening,’ wrote the French scholar and politician Charles de Brosses in 1740.
The greatest musicians had helped to make musical life in the city particularly intense. Claudio Monteverdi had ruled over St Mark’s from 1613 until his death in 1643, spending there his happiest and most fruitful years. Then at the turn of the century Antonio Lotti, founder of the musical fraternity of Santa Cecilia, Antonio and Benedetto Marcello, Tomaso Albinoni, and Antonio Vivaldi, who taught and composed prolifically for the Ospedale della Pietà from 1703 onwards, dominated theatre and concert.
That was the context in which Antonio Caldara, the son of a violinist and theorbist, was born, probably in 1670, since his death certificate indicates that he died in Vienna in 1736 at the age of sixty-six.
Precociously gifted thanks to his father’s lessons, he was soon a choirboy at St Mark’s, under the direction of the maestro di cappella Natale Monferrato, then his successor Giovanni Legrenzi. And he also studied several musical instruments, including the viol and the cello.