Nuove fonti corelliane: il Fondo Bolognetti nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano e i documenti nell’Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu

This contribution is in two parts: in the first I examine in detail some documents relative to Corelli that I recently published with José María Domínguez in our joint essay Nuove fonti per la vita musicale romana di fine Seicento: il Giornale e il Diario di Roma del Fondo Bolognetti all’Archivio Segreto Vaticano, published in La musique à Rome au XVIIe siècle: études et perspectives de recherche, edited by Anne-Madeleine Goulet and Caroline Giron-Panel (Rome, Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2012). Because of the large number of documents included in this volume, we had not been able to study them all in depth and to put them into their context. Among these published sources, more than thirty concern Arcangelo Corelli, who is cited in various performance situations as director and violinist in operas, serenades, oratorios, sacred music, and music for special circumstances. I examine here in detail all documents relative to Corelli in order to enrich our knowledge of a crucial moment in his biography in the last decade of the seventeenth century.
The second part of my article presents an unpublished collection of archival sources preserved at the Archivio Generale della Compagnia di Gesù. It contains payment lists for singers and instrumentalists (from 1676 to 1692) for the celebrations of Saints Andrew and Stanislaus in the church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. During such occasions Giovanni Battista Giansetti, maestro di cappella at the Chiesa del Gesù, directed the music, and the ‘extraordinary’ singers and instrumentalists involved came from various Roman musical institutions. Corelli’s presence in these documents appears in the period between the mid-1680s and 1692.