Matteo Bevilacqua

6 Venetian folk songs
12 waltzes

Scores transcribed for instruments by Andrea Balzani

We know very little about the life and musical education of Matteo Bevilacqua. Born in Trapani (originally thought to be from Florence; only recently his baptism certificate was found at the church of San Pietro in Trapani, dated 26 December 1768), he was a poet, guitarist, composer and teacher; he worked mainly in Vienna, where he made friends with the highest city authorities and married the young baroness Marianne von Stupan, with whom he had a daughter, Paulina. As a poet he was the first to translate Giovanni Meli’s La Lyrica from Sicilian to Tuscan Italian; the book was printed in Vienna in 1816, a year after the death of the famous abbot, and was followed by a translation of the poem Don Chisciotte e Sancho Panza nella Scizia (1818). As a composer and guitarist, his catalogue remains patchy and incomplete; he wrote a huge number of compositions for solo guitar, guitar groups, guitar and voice, guitar and piano, flute, violin and other instruments (many of his manuscripts are preserved in the archives of various Italian and European libraries). He also wrote a Method for Guitar, but to date no copy of this has been found. Bevilacqua died in 1821 in Rodi Garganico, Puglia – then part of the Kingdom of Naples (and not in Vienna, as other sources erroneously state), probably due to typhus, and in utter poverty.

The 6 Venetian folk songs are presented here in new versions for voice and piano, arranged by Balzani in 2019. The 12 waltzes are also arrangements by Balzani for guitar and piano, completed in 2019.