«Per l’ammirabile armonia che spiegò con il flauto». Antonio Bononcini, Giuseppe I, Vienna e il flauto dolce: su alcune cantate inedite

The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek preserves a small number of chamber cantatas with recorders, some of which are attributed to Giovanni and Antonio Bononcini. Those by Antonio in particular are of great interest, because they are conceived as a collection (three for soprano and three for contralto), provided with separate parts and analogous to another group of cantatas with strings (studied by Livio Marcaletti). The single parts have been undervalued in the research on this repertory and ignored in performance, probably because they are catalogued under a different shelf mark than the score; yet they constitute an element of considerable interest for the particularities relating to performance practice that they bring out. The analysis of the six cantatas is anchored in the Viennese context of the early eighteenth century, against the backdrop sketched by Lawrence Bennett in his monograph on the Italian cantata in Vienna; it attempts to identify the possible performers, among them probably the Emperor Joseph I and other members of the Austrian royal house. The study extends as well to examples drawn from repertoire with recorder by other composers.