Lucca is lucky in its considerable number of ex-churches, monasteries and convents which have been put to new uses as libraries, arts, conference and academic centres. For example, the former convent of the Poor Clares at San Micheletto has been turned into a fine library, arts and conference centre, the Fondazione Ragghianti, with its photographic and media archives. The nuns have since 1973 found a new home in a country villa at San Quirico (see https://insantaunita.org/lucca-monastero-s-micheletto/) which we have also visited and where we had an interesting conversation on spiritual matters with the young Mother Superior.

Another monastery, that of Saint Francis with no less than four large cloisters, has similarly been given new life as the budding university of Lucca, the IMT (see https://www.imtlucca.it/). We were present at its lavish inauguration which is covered in my post at: https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/magisterial-monastery/

The most recent reinvention of former Luccan ecclesiastical complexes is the ‘Real (‘Royal’) Collegio’ of Lucca. This is a non-profit organization in Lucca which was originally aimed at the city’s public education. The building where it is based once housed a monastery of the regular Canons of San Frediano and, when the convent was dissolved, the public library, the University of Lucca and the Real Collegio occupied it.

The original structure enclosed the convent annexed to the basilica of San Frediano and its oldest part dates back to the sixth century. In the 16th century the monastery contained an important theological school and was one of the centres of the Protestant reform in Lucca. (The first Italian translation of the Bible was disseminated from Lucca). In the second half of the 18th century the building became the seat of the Public Library, the Lucchese Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts and the University of Lucca (which sadly was closed down in the nineteenth century, although there is promise that the new IMT institute of higher education may soon become a university). In 1818 the Academy was transferred to the nearby Palazzo Lucchesini, while the San Frediano building continued to house the Library and a preparatory high school with an adjoining boarding school called the ‘Real Collegio’. Among its students was the famous Luccan architect Lorenzo Nottolini who built Bagni di Lucca’s chain suspension bridge at Fornoli.

With the requisition of the monastery annexed to the church of Santa Maria Corteorlandini, (the ‘church of the Black Madonna’ – see my post on that extraordinary building at https://longoio.wordpress.com/tag/santa-maria-corteorlandini/ –

the library was moved there in 1877 where it remains.

The very extensive buildings of the Real Collegio are now for hire for a large variety of activities including concerts, trade fairs and the city’s comix and games festival. It was this last event when we first came across the Collegio since the Japanese manga displays were exhibited there. Today an activity takes place there virtually every day. It’s worth looking at the web page at https://www.realcollegiolucca.it/ to see what’s currently happening at the Collegio.

I visited this fine ex-monastery the other day to attend a concert of music for two pianos. A few days previously I’d been to a concert for one piano and four hands. Now it was going to be TWO pianos with four hands.

I had a quick look around the Real Collegio and was impressed by its size, its three cloisters, each one very different from the other and by the spaciousness of its refectory and chapter house.  In one of the cloisters there was a conference on dental implants. How nail-biting!

I thought to myself that in most cases in Italy when monasteries were dissolved they were luckily put to other uses including conversion into housing. How different from the disastrous story in the UK when that country’s monasteries were dissolved by the ghastly criminal Henry VIII and largely demolished for building material. What wonderful concert and exhibition spaces would have been provided by such places as Fountains, Tintern and Rievaulx abbeys if they had been left complete!  (At least Tintern provided Wordsworth with probably his finest poem. The following lines are particularly ecstatic:

“Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things”)

There were two pieces in the concert held in the courtyard of the first and oldest cloister, the Chiostro di Santa Caterina.

The Sonata in D major K448 for two pianos was composed by Mozart in November 1781. It is brilliantly written in a gallant style with moments of rare intensity and beauty, such as the central adagio. The finale is especially full of extreme brilliance and sparkling fun. There is, indeed, an almost orchestral texture to this wonderful sonata and I feel it could very easily be scored for a symphony orchestra.

You can hear the sonata here:

The second program piece was a transcription for two pianos of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony by Ernst Naumann, (1832 – 1910). Transcribing works of complex orchestral writing was a very widespread practice during the course of the nineteenth century; through this practice, the dissemination of works was guaranteed even in those places where there were no full orchestras. The transcribed text – Liszt wrote – “is to the orchestral composition like the engraving of a picture: it multiplies it, transmits it to everyone and, if it cannot render the colours, it still reproduces the lights and shadows”. (Clearly that comment was made before the invention of photography and sound recording.)

Beethoven’s symphonies are eminent among the works that were transcribed. Liszt, for example, did a piano adaptation of the first eight symphonies, while he transcribed the Ninth for two pianos.  (I have a fine vinyl recording of the legendary Glen Gould playing Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s fifth).

Of course, what is more difficult is re-creating the original’s orchestral timbre. However, what stood out in the evening’s performance was the exhilaratingly dominant rhythmic impetus of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony which Wagner described as the ‘apotheosis of the dance’. But others have not said such exalted things about the Seventh; Friedrich Wieck (Clara Schumann’s father) remarked that such music could have only been composed by the hand of a drunkard!  

(I am somehow reminded of Sybil Fawlty’s remarks to Basil , who was listening to a recording of classical music in his office asking why he hadn’t written the menu and hung the picture on the wall:

“You could’ve had them both done by now if you hadn’t spent the whole morning skulking in there, listening to that racket.”

To which Basil Fawlty replies”Racket? That’s Brahms! Brahms’s third racket!”)

I myself was drunk with the intoxicating rhythms driven hard by two pianos which are, after all, percussive instruments.  The pianists, Claudio Cantini and Giovanni Passalia, both graduates of Lucca’s ‘Luigi Boccherini’ conservatoire, played with real energy and sensitivity.  I am sure their hands and arms must have needed a warm bathe after the frenetically galloping rhythms of Beethoven’s Seventh.

In the beautiful setting of a Royal college and in the glorious evening of a July in Lucca with the twitter of birdsong filling the cloister’s yard and sweetly adding grace notes to the music being performed I could think of no better way to pass my time apart, of course, for that quattro stagioni pizza which followed it in the lively Piazza Napoleone of the walled tree-lined city!

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