Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

419 LETTERS is committed to the service and decorum of S. Antonio. The third is that the Prince in his edict intends to assign the tax to bodies and fraternities, so that the burden is proportionally distributed among the people forming the body or fraternity by their respective superiors and members of the bench, and none are exempt. But this time the superiors and the members of the bench were called upon by the representatives to assign the tax to them: no longer the particular and separate person, as was done other times. If it is true that the musicians of S. Antonio form a body, as is more than certain, for their most immediate superiors are the presidents of the Venerable Ark, then these should have been called by the representative to assign them the tax, so that by the aforementioned it would be proportionately distributed among the musicians salaried by them; and never (as has happened) should the representative have the tax assigned to each musician one by one, in a way that is disproportionate to their salary. Nor should anybody have been left out as exempted, so that a higher burden fell upon those taxed. If then it was believed that in general the musicians of Padua should be taxed, because this city in particular gives higher profits to them than the other mainland cities, the opposite of what is actually the case has been believed, or wished to be believed. The churches and the theatres are the main source of the musicians’ earnings. In Padua, where there are twenty-four and more nunneries, in none of their churches is music made, as per prohibition of the ecclesiastical superior, and in all the mainland cities music is played in any one of their churches, because there is no prohibition. In Padua more than once it has happened that the whole orchestra has been engaged by the ruling city for service at the theatre, without a single Paduan musician having had a place there: a situation with no examples in any mainland city, where there are musicians of the town suited to the need. These are public facts, by force of which there should have resulted a consequence contrary to what happened; that is to say, that in the other mainland cities the musicians should have been taxed, while in Padua they should not have been. But in Padua they are, while in any mainland city they are not; therefore, I entreat you etc. 135. Tartini to the magistrate of deputies By his Excellency, the former Captain, at the end of his tenure the musicians of Padua were individually taxed. Given that all (except two only) serve at the Ark of Saint Anthony, in order to be released from the tax they submit their reasons as a body, because they form a body of employees salaried by the Venerable Ark; and they submit them after having obeyed the last edict with the full deposit of their tax, carried out in the chamber on the fourth of the present month of March. Their reasons are that in the