Since the beginning of the Renaissance, the D=Estes of Ferrara had been more than dutiful guardians of culture; the discernment and zeal of the D=Estes helped to shape the history of music in the Renaissance and early baroque eras.
In 1579, Count Alfonso II D=Este took as his third wife a vivacious fifteen year old, Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua. Between 1580 and the dissolution of their court in 1597, they built up the most distinguished and influential musical establishment in Italy. It included a choir and a large band of instrumentalists. A chamber group, the Amusica secreta,@ was directed by Luzzasco Luzzaschi, arguably the most important keyboard player of the era before Frescobaldi. Within the musica secreta, Luzzaschi and the duke and duchess nourished an ensemble of women virtuosi, called the concerto delle donne.
The first generation of Asinging ladies,@ gifted amateurs of aristocratic birth, were gradually replaced by highly trained and gifted professionals. Laura Peverara, Anna Guarini, Tarquinia Molza, and Livia d=Arco were superb singers who also played harp, lute, and viola da gamba.
When they arrived at the D=Este court, the duke provided them with a good livingCincluding a suitable husband. However, mostly the concerto led disciplined lives of hard work. Evening concerts were frequent and lengthy, and the women were required to show off all their musical skills. The great achievement of the concerto was their perfect execution of written-out embellishments, composed mostly by themselves. The composer Alessandro Striggio, visiting from Mantua, wrote,
Here the duke of Ferrara . . .favored me by allowing me to hear for two hours without break his concerto di donne, which is truly extraordinary. Those ladies sing excellently; both when singing in their concerto [from memory] and when singing at sight from part books they are secure. The duke favored me continually by showing me written out all the pieces that they sing by memory, with all the diminutions [tirate e passagi] that they do. Here the duke of Ferrara . . . favored me by allowing me to hear for two hours without break his concerto di donne, which is truly extraordinary. Those ladies sing excellently; both when singing in their concerto [from memory] and when singing at sight from part books they are secure. The duke favored me continually by showing me written out all the pieces that they sing by memory, with all the diminutions [tirate e passagi] that they do.
—29 July 1584
Another later writer described the legendary charm and oratorical persuasiveness of their performances:
. . . they moderated or increased their voices, loud or soft, heavy or light, according to the demands of the piece. They were. . . now singing long passages legato or detached, now groups, now leaps, now with long trills . . . again with sweet running passages sung softly . . . they accompanied the music and the sentiment with appropriate facial expressions, glances and gestures, with no awkward movements of the mouth or hands or body which might not express the feeling of the song.
—Vincenzo Giustiani, Discorso sopra la musica, 1628
Throughout the life of the concerto, dozens of composers, poets, and performers visited Ferrara and were captivated by the virtuose. Their influence was to be felt for generations.
Luzzaschi=s Madrigali was published in 1601, after the concerto was disbanded. The pieces are eerily beautiful and backward looking, evocative of the improvised diminution techniques perfected by the virtuose. The written-out ornaments are embellishments of the music rather than the meaning of the text, in the manner of the mid-sixteenth century. Giaches de Wert, the great madrigalist of the Gonzaga court at Mantua, also wrote many pieces for the concerto, which, though composed earlier, are in some ways more forward looking. Elaborate coloratura writing always serves the sense of poem in a Wert madrigal.
Several rival concerti were founded between 1590 and 1600 in Florence, Mantua, and Rome. The Medici in Florence instituted a concerto directed and accompanied by Giulio Caccini, the ideological father of monody and recitative. That ensemble included his wife Lucia, their daughters Francesca (an important composer in her own right) and Settima, and the formidable Vittoria Archilei, whom Giustiani calls the creator of Athe true method of singing for females.@ The ambitious Sigismondo d=India felt it was important for Archilei to know and perform his work:
. . . and on my return to Florence, I myself sang some [of my songs] to Signora Vittoria Archilei. . . ; being extremely intelligent in this profession, she exhorted me to continue this style of mine. She added that she had never heard a style so forceful and so expressive of the meaning of the text.
On another occasion, d=India was indeed privileged to hear Archilei and Caccini perform his songs.
The Gonzaga court in Mantua was closely related to the D=Estes by marriage, and their artistic communities were closely interconnected. Early members of the Mantuan concerto were Isabella and Lucia Pellizani (who played cornet and trombone), Catarina Romana, and Lucrezia Urbani. In later years, singers included Claudia da Cattaneis, who married Monteverdi; her pupil Caterina Martinelli, for whom Monteverdi wrote L=Arianna; and the great contralto Adriana Basile.
Monteverdi=s madrigals are strongly influenced by both Wert=s compositional style and his attitude of accommodation towards the singers he knew and loved. In his later years in Venice, Monteverdi continued to exploit the strengths of individual singers, particularly in opera. His chamber duos and trios are clearly descended from Wert=s madrigals, continuing to develop Wert=s ideas of text, expressive coloratura, and chromaticism.
Venice never fostered an official concerto. Nevertheless, individual women there are known to have performed ornamented madrigals in the style of the Ferrarese concerto. Barbara Strozzi is thought to be the last great singer/composer who performed in the manner of the Asinging ladies.@ By her time, the middle of the seventeenth century, the ornamented madrigal was archaic; her preferred genre was the solo or ensemble cantata; she published more of these than any other seventeenth-century composer.
Her milieu was intimate—always the chambers of the Academia degli Unisoni, the literary association her father Giulio Strozzi founded to showcase her talents. Llike the women of Ferrara and Mantua, she was highly trained (by the composer Cavalli), erudite, and witty.
Secular musical life in Venice in the mid-seventeenth century was to a large degree controlled by Giulio Strozzi and influenced by Monteverdi. The Academia delle Incogniti, also founded by Giulio, was devoted to the establishment of opera as a going concern in Venice. They acted as a kind of press agency for Anna Renzi, the mezzo-soprano generally recognized to be the first diva. Strozzi wrote of her many virtues as a performer:
The action that gives soul, spirit, and existence to things must be governed by the movements of the body, by gestures, by the face and by the voice . . . at times speaking hurriedly, at others slowly, moving the body now in one, now in another direction . . . now with little, now with much agitation of the hands. Our Signora Anna is endowed with such lifelike expression that her responses and speeches seem not memorized but born at the very moment. In sum, she transforms herself completely into the person she represents.
—Le glorie della Signora Anna Renzi romana, Venice, 1644
Interestingly, Strozzi=s language echoes the words of praise written sixty years earlier for the ladies of Ferrara. Renzi=s most important role, as far as music history is concerned, was Octavia in Monteverdi=s opera The Coronation of Poppea, first performed in Venice in 1642.
Italy and Spain enjoyed a complex relationship throughout the seventeenth century. The Spanish Habsburgs controlled Sicily, Naples, and Milan for much of that time. However, Spain in general and Madrid in particular tended to be culturally isolated; Madrid maintained its own tradition of musical theater. Both male and female roles were assumed by singing actresses. These women were not highly trained; they could not read music and had to learn their parts by rote. The delightful part-songs that survive in manuscript collections are probably arrangements of theater songs; they abound in syncopated rhythms but offer little vocal challenge to the singers.
One of the few operatic successes in Spain was Celos aun del aire Matan, written and composed by Calderón de la Barca and Juan Hidalgo for the marriage of the Spanish Infanta to Louis XIV. The important roles were composed with specific actresses in mind: Clarin, the feisty servant who sings the marvelous jacara ANoble en Tinacria naciste@ was played by Manuela de Escamilla, a diminutive entertainer who was twelve years old at the time.
Italians were not unreceptive to Spanish music: Adriana Basile, a member of the Mantuan concerto, was raised in Naples. By the time she came to work for the Gonzaga, she had memorized repertoire of over three hundred Italian and Spanish songs, which she herself accompanied on the Spanish guitar. The Spanish guitar became an extremely popular accompanying instrument from about 1620 to 1680. Most importantly, the chordal formulas upon which guitarists improvisedCthe chaconne, passacaglia, and foliasCbecame the standard Agrounds@ upon which hundreds of vocal and instrumental works were constructed. The first vocal chaconne to be published was Arañes= AChaconna.@ It bears no resemblance, however, to the most famous vocal chaconne, Monteverdi=s AZefiro torna.@ Sances, who worked in Vienna and Venice, was one of three composers to write chaconne-duets that are in a way deliberate tributes to Monteverdi.
—Mary Springfels
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