Venezuela

The Province and, from 1777, the Captaincy General of Venezuela had no mint of its own, so it reckoned and paid in the silver peso of eight reales struck at Mexico City, Santa Fe de Bogotá and Potosí, much of it worn cob money, with the gold escudo and its multiples as the large denominations at two pesos to the escudo. Coin was chronically scarce in a colony whose wealth was cacao rather than bullion, and through the seventeenth century cacao beans themselves served as a local money of account; hard currency circulated more freely only after the Compañía Guipuzcoana began its monopoly trade in 1728. What survives is overwhelmingly ecclesiastical and municipal: the acts of the Caracas cathedral chapter, the cabildo minutes of the city, and the Sección Iglesias of the Archivo General de la Nación, which preserves the mayordomo’s loose receipts, many of them signed by the musicians themselves, because the cathedral had to account for every peso to the crown’s tithe comptroller. That accounting habit makes the territory unusually rich: a poor province with no court and no printing press nevertheless left itemised, signed receipts pricing an individual Mass, motet or symphony to the real.

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Caracas Cathedral’s Payment to Juan Manuel Olivares for Five Sacred Works 1791

On 16 April 1791 Martín de Ascanio, administrator of the revenues of Caracas cathedral, paid the free pardo composer Juan Manuel Olivares sixty-three pesos for five sacred works delivered complete with performing parts: a Good Friday Lamentation for solo tenor with full orchestra at 18 pesos, the motets Popule meus and Quia eduxite at 7 pesos 1 real, the responsory Venite adoremus for four voices and orchestra at 1 peso 3 reales, a Stabat Mater at 16 pesos 4 reales, and a four-voice Mass with orchestra at 20 pesos. Olivares was the leading composer of the circle around Padre Sojo’s academy at Chacao and the teacher of José Ángel Lamas, and he was never on the chapel payroll; the cathedral bought his music work by work, 186 pesos of it in 1791 alone. The receipt is signed in his own hand. The sum was paid in silver pesos and is converted at the official par of two pesos to the gold escudo of 3.383 g at 0.917 fine.

~97.7g

Archivo General de la Nación (Caracas), Sección Iglesias, Tomo XLVI, fol. 297, receipt signed by Juan Manuel Olivares, Caracas, 16 April 1791; Stevenson, Robert. “La música en la Catedral de Caracas hasta 1836.” Revista Musical Chilena 33:145 (1979).