Luigi Rossi (c. 1598–1653)
Vaghi rivi
from Il palazzo incantato ovvero La guerriera amante (1642)

Or che l’oscuro manto

Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566–1613)
Canzon francese del Principe
Arrangement for Harp and Archlute

Giulio Caccini (1551–1618)
Non ha ’l ciel cotanti lumi
La bella man vi stringo
from Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverla (1614)

Dovrò dunque morire
from Le nuove musiche (1602)

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (c. 1580–1651)
Canzone prima
from Libro quarto d’intavolatura di chitarone (1640)

Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677)
Sul Rodano severo
from Cantate, ariette, e duetti Op. 2 (1651)

Intermission

Giulio Caccini
Tu ch’hai le penne amore 
from Nuove musiche (1614)

Dolcissimo sospiro
from Le nuove musiche (1602)

Bernardo Storace (fl. 1650)
Passacaglia in A minor
from Selva di varie compositioni d’intavolatura per cimbalo ed organo (1664)
Arrangement for Harp

Luigi Rossi
Mio ben, teco il tormento più
from L’Orfeo (1647)

La bella più bella

Lagrime, dove sete?
from L’Orfeo

Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713)
Preludio. Largo – Allemanda. Allegro
from the Sonata in E minor Op. 5 No. 8 (1700) 
Arrangement for Archlute and Harp

Barbara Strozzi
Che si può fare?
from Arie Op. 8 (1664)

Tradimento
from Diporti di Euterpe ovvero cantate e ariette a voce sola Op. 7 (1659)

Muses, Might, and Monodies
Vocal Chamber Music from Early-Baroque Italy

Christoph Schaller

February 1642—carnival season in Rome. During the revelries, the Eternal City would become the backdrop for sumptuous gala banquets, boisterous masked parades, spectacular fireworks, and, not least, the infamous chariot races on Via del Corso. Among many other nobles, Antonio Barberini had planned something special for this carnival season, the only time when operas were allowed to be performed in the Holy City.

Anyone seeking to play a leading role in the city’s society during the early Baroque era had to master the art of public self-promotion—and at the beginning of the 17th century, Antonio Barberini and his family may have been the ultimate masters of using music and the arts to that effect. Since Antonio’s uncle had risen to the center of Roman power by becoming Pope Urban VIII in 1623, immediately distributing cardinal hats to his nephews—as was the custom at the time—the family residence had been expanded according to designs by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, turning it into an impressive palazzo, its walls decorated with frescoes by Pietro da Cortona and paintings by Caravaggio.

The performance of the opera Il palazzo incantato (The Enchanted Palace) on February 22, 1642, in the Barberini’s private theater was intended to underscore the family’s claim to leadership with extravagant sets, costumes, and stage effects. The music, to a libretto by the cleric Giulio Rospigliosi, a family friend and subsequent pope, was written by Luigi Rossi, one of Rome’s most sought-after composers, who had joined the Barberini household after leaving the employ of the Borghese family—as prominent in Rome as his new employers. In the prologue Vaghi rivi, the beginning of which opens tonight’s program, the character of Pittura—an allegory of painting—tries in vain to capture the beauty of silvery brooks. To depict the enchantment of their continuous flow the timebound art of music is required. Following the subsequent action, however, outlandishly confusing and featuring no less than 16 solo roles, presented a challenge even to contemporary audiences. Unreliable stage machinery, which was prone to literally leaving the protagonists up in the air, played its own role in preventing Il palazzo incantato from conjuring the intended enchantment—despite Rossi’s dramatically clever and musically diverse setting.

Al modo d’Orfeo

Rossi was more successful in enchanting audiences with compositions for significantly smaller forces: at exclusive private performances at the Palazzo Barberini and elsewhere, a new form of vocal chamber music was practiced, still in its infancy in the early 17th century and calling for solo voice and a small accompanying ensemble consisting of lute, theorbo or chitarrone, and harp or harpsichord.

It is likely that Rossi—a trained vocalist but best known for his virtuosity on keyboard instruments—and his wife Costanza da Ponte, an outstanding harpist, often performed the instrumental parts themselves. These merely provided a basic harmonic structure above which the vocal line could unfold. The separation of vocal melody and instrumental accompaniment over a continuous bass line represented a fundamentally new way of creating musical settings. It had established itself around 1600, in contrast to the interwoven intricacies of the preceding century’s vocal polyphony—musicologists would later label it monody.

Rossi wrote almost 300 works of this type, copies of which circulated throughout Europe. They included such complex pieces as Or che l’oscuro manto, in which sections of recitative and arioso alternate freely, but also song-like compositions setting a series of regular verses, such as La bella più bella, in which repeated text passages are used as a musical refrain. The formal diversity of Rossi’s works is typical for a period of transition from the linear motion of the earlier madrigal to the cyclical form of the aria that was to come. This was also a time of renewal for the poetry these pieces were based upon: in addition to the irregular metrical rhythms of classical madrigal poetry, more unified patterns of recurring accents were emerging, opening up entirely new possibilities for musical settings.

From the Canzona to the Sonata

No works in the new monodic style by Carlo Gesualdo are known to exist. Of noble birth, the composer remained true to the structure of the cinquecento madrigal with its five or six voices, albeit as one of its most innovative reformers, given the daring nature of his works. Still, Gesualdo’s music was known at the Barberini court—at least in instrumental arrangements, performed by artists such as Girolamo Frescobaldi, the leading harpsichord virtuoso of his time, or his German-born colleague Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, both of whom were on Antonio’s brother Francesco’s payroll. Presumably, the four-part Canzon francese del Principe was part of their repertoire—one of only a handful of instrumental works by Gesualdo, who was reputed to be an excellent lutenist himself.

Kapsberger, in particular, was the reason the theorbo, then still often called “chitarone,” established itself not only as an accompanying instrument in the continuo group of the new monody style, but also as a virtuoso solo instrument. In 1604 he published the first anthology of works for solo theorbo ever, which was to be followed by many more; the Libro quarto d’intavolatura di chitarone of 1640 was one of the last publications of this composer, known as “Tedesco della tiorba” and celebrated during his lifetime for his unmatched virtuosity.

As a title for instrumental music, the term canzona or canzon may seem slightly misleading today. In fact, it was originally applied to instrumental arrangements of predominantly French chansons for multiple voices (hence the descriptor francese in the title of Gesualdo’s work); from the mid-16th century onwards, the term became increasingly divorced from its vocal origins and, as canzona a sonar, came to designate freely composed instrumental works with several parts, such as the influential canzone by Frescobaldi.

Another composer still part of this tradition was Bernardo Storace, who worked in Messina and of whom little more is known than his anthology Selva di varie compositioni d’intavolatura per cimbalo ed organo, published in Venice in 1664, which contains several canzone in addition to the Passacaglia performed tonight. At this point, however, the canzona had been displaced almost entirely by the sonata—a genre designation originally indicating the same type of piece, which, over the course of the century, went on to describe a characteristic musical form of its own. By the time Arcangelo Corelli published his anthologies of sonatas in the 1680s, at the very latest, it had become a model emulated far beyond the borders of Italy.

The sophisticated musical life at Palazzo Barberini came to a sudden end the death of Pope Urban VIII, shortly after the first performance of Rossi’s Il palazzo incantato. When Innocence X, a representative of the enemy house of the Pamphili, ascended to the Holy See, the Barberini were forced to abandon the city in haste. They fled to the French court, where their former confidant Giulio Mazzarino—now Jules Mazarin—had risen to become prime minister under Louis XIV. With the Barberini, Mazarin also brought numerous Italian artists to Paris, including Rossi, who was given a second chance at opera here. A similarly confusing libretto for L’Orfeo by Francesco Buti notwithstanding, the premiere of the first Italian opera written for French audiences in 1647 was held in much better memory well into the 18th century.

Whose Invention Was It, Anyway?

If one could ask Giulio Caccini, the origins of opera and accompanied solo singing in the late 16th century would be associated primarily with one name—his own. Born in Rome, he spent most of his life at the Medici court in Florence and in 1602 published the first volume of an anthology of Nuove musiche, in which he shamelessly claimed the invention of monody for himself alone.

The vocal polyphony of his time was anathema to him, mainly, wrote Caccini, because it was guilty of what he termed laceramento della poesia: by giving priority to the compositional rules of traditional counterpoint—prima la musica—it “lacerated” the text’s meaning and context to the point of unintelligibility. Therefore, he claimed, he had come up with a new form of setting texts to music, practicing una certa nobile sprezzatura, a “certain noble disdain” for the rules and prohibitions of composition and the conventions of singing, focusing instead on the content and emotions of the words being sung, thereby truly speaking through music.

Caccini was not aiming to interpret individual words in the manner of a madrigal. Rather, the emotional state of the lyrical subject as a whole became the basis of musical invention. Liberated from the contrapuntal corset of the preceding century, the vocal lines in settings such as Dovrò dunque morire or Dolcissimo sospiro follow the natural flow of spoken declamation, or rather its heartfelt emotions and emotional outbursts. In the course of this pursuit, Caccini said, alcune false, some dissonances “forbidden” by the traditional rules of counterpoint, were unavoidable.

Moreover, the Nuove musiche also include canzonetta settings such as Ottavio Rinuccini’s Non ha ’l ciel cotanti lumi or Tu ch’ai le penne Amore, which Caccini calls arie or arias. Here, the regular pattern of accents and rhymes provided by the text and the strophic musical structure, with instrumental ritornellos as interludes, form a new, symbiotic alliance. The music follows the text, but the text is conceived to be set to music in the first place.

The earliest pieces of Nuove musiche, according to Caccini, were written in the 1580s. At the time, he belonged to the exclusive circles of the Florentine scholars Giovanni de’ Bardi and Jacopo Corsi, which Caccini was the first to label “camerata.” This was where a group of intellectuals, writers, poets, and musicians such as Jacopo Peri and Emilio de’ Cavalieri explored the potential of the new monodic style in theory and practice. Caccini’s contribution to the development of the art of in armonia favellare is unquestionable; however, his comrades-in-arms—or rather opponents—probably would not have been enthusiastic at his clever ploy of presenting himself as the sole musical innovator, which he repeated in 1614 with the publication of the second volume of the Nuove musiche—successfully, as it were, for musicologists repeated his version of history well into the 20th century.

Signora degli Unisoni

For a long time, the name of Barbara Strozzi was dogged by a similar and persistent misunderstanding—that of the composing courtesan who would offer her services to the male members of the Venetian elite and entertain them with her musical abilities during their gatherings. This theory is not that far off: young women who were not part of the nobility and, like Strozzi, ineligible as wives for “honorable” men because of their illegitimate birth, frequently faced a choice between prostitution or joining a monastery. The latter path, however, was often barred by the horrendously high dowry that was necessary to take the veil.

In fact, more recent biographical research indicates that Strozzi managed, in a remarkable and perhaps unique way for her time, to tread a highly self-determined path in life that was extremely successful in artistic terms, while also maneuvering her way through and beyond these social strictures.

The foundation for this was laid by her father Giulio, like her born out of wedlock, a writer and librettist who had worked hard to gain access to the intellectual elite of the Venetian society, which was far more liberal in its outlook than its mostly aristocratic Roman counterpart. His teenage daughter, who thanks to his support was able to study music with Francesco Cavalli, impressed those attending the regular academies held at his house during the 1630s with her singing—to such an extent that a short wile later he founded a new association, the Accademia degli Unisoni, whose explicit mission was to provide a stage and outlet for Barbara’s musical talent. She not only presented her latest compositions there, she also set the tone during subsequent discussions, which earned her the nickname “Signora degli Unisoni,” as the musicologist Daria Perocco writes.

Strozzi eventually began addressing her works to a larger public after her four children were born and her father had died. She published no fewer than eight volumes of works between 1644 and 1659, containing—with the exception of Opus 1, a collection of five-part madrigals—exclusively vocal chamber music for solo voice (or voices) and basso continuo. More than three quarters of these pieces are written for her own voice range, soprano. Strozzi thus published more music in this genre than any of her contemporaries.

Within the musical framework at her disposal, Strozzi employed all imaginable variations of solo vocalism, for example in Tradimento from Op. 7, in which contrasting musical characters, meters, and textures alternate in rapid succession. In the cantata Che si può fare from Op. 8, she uses one of her favorite compositional tools: a four-note descending bass line, the musical signature of lamentation since Monteverdi had employed it to great effect. Strozzi succeeded in finding highly prominent dedicatees, and therefore financial backers, for her publications—another argument against the courtesan theory, for as a courtesan, she would not have been likely to win over such exalted personalities for her purposes.

With a duration of almost 15 minutes, the lament Sul Rodano severo from Strozzi’s Op. 2 is not only by far the longest work on tonight’s program, its text is also an exception. While most of the other pieces deal with the trials and tribulations of love and heartache, here we have a poetic commentary on a contemporary political event: King Louis XIII of France discovers the corpse of his former protégé Henri, the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, on the “harsh banks of the Rhône.” The latter had instigated a conspiracy against the prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, at the French court, for which Louis had sentenced him to death. The ghost-like shadow of “handsome Henri” sings a harrowing lamentation of his fate and the hasty condemnation by the king, causing Louis to tremble in fear and the earth to shake in Paris.

This choice of subject may have been motivated by artistic considerations as much as by a clever understanding of cultural politics: Strozzi dedicated her Opus 2 to none other than Emperor Ferdinand III of Habsburg, a sworn enemy of the French royal family—who most likely accepted the dedication of this particular work with a sense of schadenfreude, and therefore all the more willingly.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Christoph Schaller studied musicology and philosophy at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Following freelance work as a program annotator for the orchestras and chorus of Bavarian Radio and other concert presenters, he has been a dramaturg at the Pierre Boulez Saal since 2017.