DOMENICO ZIPOLI
When Domenico Zipoli entered the Society of Jesus in 1716, he had already enjoyed for some time a successful career as a composer, with a reputation matching that of Vivaldi. As a religious, he was sent to work in the mission field in South America, where he served as organist of the Jesuit church in Buenos Aires; and he remained there until his death, in 1726. During those years he exerted a major influence on the musical culture there, in person as a teacher, and indirectly through the use of his compositions, not only in Buenos Aires itself, but also and more importantly throughout the thirty communities of the so-called Jesuit Republic, situated in Paraguay.
The story of that Republic, to which Zipoli contributed so much, is a happy one, while it lasted, and a tragic one in its ending. To begin with, the Jesuits were given sole permission to enter the territory. Spanish colonists, who wreaked such havoc elsewhere, were forbidden to enter. The Jesuits, of course, regarded conversion to Christianity as the prime object of their mission. But they carried out their mission in a way that was extraordinarily enlightened, with a profound respect for indigenous spirituality and traditions of social organization. Each community was governed by a chieftain in consultation with a tribal council; and the priests, usually two in each community, sat in on the council meetings as supporters, not as dictators. They rescued the Guarani people from a hand-to-mouth existence by introducing the latest and most progressive European farming techniques. They studied, with open minds, the native traditions of treating disease with herbal remedies, and added up-to-date medical know-how to those traditions. They unified the many Guarani dialects into a common Guarani language, and published its grammar and vocabulary. They founded schools with a special emphasis on literacy, mathematics, and music. They had a profound zeal for what we now call human rights, and they believed that no society can call itself civilized which does not take fully into account the needs of its members for economic, moral, intellectual, and spiritual well-being.
They were there, in Paraguay, from 1609 to 1768. If that little pocket of near-Paradise, lasting for a century-and-a-half, seems like a strange precursor of the nearby Liberation Theology movement two centuries later, the likeness is both attractive and persuasive. And if the latter has been ruthlessly suppressed nowadays by the ecclesiastical powers-that-be, the former suffered a similar and disastrous fate at the hands of the combined ecclesiastical and commercial powers. In the seventeen-sixties, the Paraguay missions were targeted by would-be colonists who wanted to enter the territory and exploit it as other colonists had elsewhere in the Americas; and joining forces with them were churchmen who were sworn enemies of the Jesuit Order. Between them, they prevailed on the Spanish monarchy to rescind the law giving Jesuits sole rights in Paraguay, and to require their expulsion. That expulsion was endorsed by the Jesuit Superior-General, who had reason to fear that failure to comply might bring about a world-wide suppression of the Society of Jesus, which many non-Jesuits hoped for. Accordingly all the Jesuits were forcibly removed, back to Europe; and colonists quickly took their place, expropriating the land and either massacring or enslaving the Guarani — those who escaped fled back into the ancestral jungle, but never forgot the happy life they had once led.
All of this happened long after the death of Zipoli. But while the Jesuit missions were still prospering, he made a large contribution to their musical achievements. Nor was he alone in this. Throughout the missions, musical life was strongly encouraged. The Guarani people had a fondness for music anyway; and after the Jesuits arrived, this was channelled into sophisticated European techniques, both instrumentally and vocally. Guarani craftsmen produced a wide variety of instruments in great numbers: organs, spinets, harpsichords, zithers, harps, lyres, guitars, citterns, rebecs, violins, cellos, bugles, trumpets, cornets, flutes, obees, clarinets, bassoons, and drums. Each mission had its own first-rate choir, big enough to perform works for double-choir or triple-choir or even, in one case, quadruple choir. These choral performances were always accompanied by full orchestra, every Sunday at Mass and on all special occasions. And prominent among the works so performed were the compositions of Zipoli. He did not himself work in the Paraguay missions, but his influence was everywhere felt through his teaching: budding organists from the missions came to him, in Buenos Aires and Còrdoba, to develop their art under his tutelage. And another teacher of importance was Anton Sepp von Reinegg SJ, who founded an academy in Yepeyú with master classes for the best Guarani musicians.
Two details of musical life in Paraguay then are worth mentioning, because they were both progressive and unusual for their time. In a period when there was, in most Catholic lands, a hidebound fixedness in the use of Latin in church (the vernacular being regarded as a symptom of Protestantism) the Jesuits in Paraguay introduced the Guarani language into the liturgy. The other innovation was even more revolutionary: knowing and admiring the Guarani tradition of male dancing, the Jesuits encouraged groups of men dancers to develop a new tradition of sacred dance as an adjunct to the liturgy. This was consistent with the Guarani culture, which confined dancing to men. But it should not be thought that the Jesuits were male chauvinists in attitude: for recitations during refectory, they had passages sung from the Bible, in Latin, and from the Lives of the Saints, in Spanish and Guarani; and the singer was always a soprano.
Zipoli left no autobiography. So we do not know whether he felt any homesickness for his native Tuscany, or any regret for the flourishing musical career he had left behind in Italy. But it is a reasonable speculation that he enjoyed his life in South America: he had useful work to do, he had ample opportunity to have his music well performed, and he must have felt, as a religious, that the missions, to which he was indirectly attached, were realizing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth far more faithfully than was anywhere the case in Europe.
We can be thankful that he did not live to see the Expulsion, in old age: it would have been a great grief to him. But it is a shame that he died so young, when there was so much more he could have done: like Mozart and Purcell, he was only in his thirties when he died.
In a sad and tragically ironic footnote, it is necessary to record that Paraguay, in the twentieth century, fell into a trap of extreme right-wing dictatorship, supported in part by a large community of German immigrants; and it became a haven, after 1945, for refugee Nazis who had been involved in the Holocaust, among them Josef Mengele, the vile perpetrator of atrocity in Auschwitz. History, the Guarani must have thought, has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
