Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 46 No. 1, 2020.
Original scientific paper
Shackles of the Island in the Sea of Want: Intellectual and Music Activity of Julije Bajamonti on the Island of Hvar
Ivana Tomić Ferić
Abstract
In its intent is to present new musicological revelations of life and work of Julije Bajamonti (1744-1800), one of the most significant enlighteners of the entire Croatian history, the text sheds light on his creative activity and gives an overview of his handwritten and printed works made during his five-year sojourn in Hvar (1785-1790). In addition to his medical work, the polymath of Split explored island history, was interested in sources, old writers, Hvar dialect and Renaissance poets, and was actively involved in music the entire time he was there - he occasionally played at the cathedral pro bono, worked on new compositions, and taught the young Joseph Raffaelli, a gifted Hvar composer and organist who continued his music education in Italy. Their successful music collaboration was confirmed by a joint performance of Bajamonti’s cantata La Passione di Gesù Cristo (1788), composed to the verses of the famous Pietro Metastasi, and performed by the two musicians on Maundy Thursday 1789 in the Hall of the Bishop’s Palace, where the educated bishop of Hvar Ivan Dominik Stratiko organized literary and concert events. On the side-lines of European trends, with an almost total lack of openness to advanced intellectual tendencies, Hvar as an environment was mostly too small and unfit for Bajamonti's life and public activity. Apart from only a few like-minded people with whom he shared his everyday life, he achieved the only true and inspiring »companionship« through letters. The circle of his friends and acquaintances was truly wide, as evidenced by the regesta of letters preserved in several volumes, over a total of 227 densely written pages in the Archives of Bajamonti Heritage at the Archaeological Museum of Split. This study will reveal to whom, where and what Bajamonti wrote about Hvar, but also whose letters he received in moments of solitude, shedding a much richer light on his own creative activities and the social background of his work. The value of Bajamonti’s music should certainly be sought through appropriate standards and in its actual correspondence with the needs and performance potential of the environment in which it was created. Selected correspondence segments will also present many of Bajamonti’s music and non-music connections with the intellectual elite of the domestic and Western European cultural circles, with the aim of unravelling the network of intercultural dialogues and complementing the image of the complex Adriatic and wider European cultural relations and pervasiveness in the period of the late 18th century.
Keywords
Julije Bajamonti; Hvar; correspondence
Hrčak ID:
246504
URI
Publication date:
20.10.2020.
Visits: 1.361 *