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John Walter Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Vol. 1 xx + 453 pp.; vol. 2 xii + 458 pp. ISBN 0 19 8166133.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

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Reviews
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Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2000

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References

1 See, for example, the historical novel by Brigante Colonna, La nepote di Sisto V: Il dramma di Vittoria Accoramboni (1573–1585) (Milan, 1939).Google Scholar

2 James Chater, ‘Musical Patronage in Rome at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Cardinal Montalto’, Studi musicali, 16 (1987), 179–227.Google Scholar

3 The reference is to the classic study by Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 209–96 (pp. 215–43).Google Scholar

4 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Venice, Giovanni Alberti, 1612; repr. Florence, 1974), 157. ‘Title given to parishioners of the parish churches of Rome; today they are ecclesiastical princes, from whom, and from the number of whom, is created the papacy, almost cardinals of the Church of God.’Google Scholar

5 Hill specifically refers to the editions of Caccini's Nuove musiche (1602), Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (1614) and Euridice (1600). Notable importance is given to Caccini's letter of 1614 to Virginio Orsini, in which the musician explains his poetica and his differences with his rival De’ Cavalieri (cited in i, p. 59, n. 11).Google Scholar

6 According to Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993), 100ff., the musician's real name was Scipione Vecchi. Originally from Siena, he may have gone to Naples for the performance in 1545 of the Sienese comedy with music Gli ingannati, in which he was an actor. He is also mentioned in the Dialoghi delta musica by Luigi Dentice (Naples, 1552) as among the best singers active in Naples and, following his death, as ‘il primo cantante di quel secolo [XVI]’ (Antonio Brunelli, Canoni varii musicali, Venice, 1612). In contrast to Hill, who prefers the name ‘del Palla’, I use here the version ‘delle Palle’, as chosen by Kirkendale, on the basis of a personal hypothesis: as the singer was originally Tuscan, it is possible that his nickname was derived in Naples from his link (documented by the Florentine ruoli from 1560 to his death in 1569) to the Medici court in Florence (whose emblem incorporated the palle).Google Scholar

7 Pirrotta, Nino, Li due Orfei: Da Poliziano a Monteverdi (Turin, 1969), 249.Google Scholar

8 Brown, Howard Mayer, ‘The Geography of Florentine Monody: Caccini at Home and Abroad’, Early Music, 9 (1981), 147–68, and especially his ‘Petrarch in Naples: Notes on the Formation of Giaches de Wert's Style’, Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris (Sydney, 1990), 16–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Cardamone, Donna G., The ‘Canzone villanesca alla napoletana’ and Related Forms, 1537–1570, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1981); eadem, ‘The Prince of Salerno and the Dynamics of Oral Transmission in Songs of Political Exile’, Acta musicologica, 67 (1995), 77108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Palisca, Claude V., ‘Vincenzo Galilei and some Links between Pseudo-Monody and Monody’, Musical Quarterly, 46 (1960), 344–60; idem, ‘The Camerata Fiorentinca A Reappraisal’, Studi musicali, 1 (1972), 203–36.Google Scholar

11 Carter, Tim, ‘Giulio Caccini: New Facts, New Music’, Studi musicali, 16 (1987), 1331 (p. 14; ‘The boy will have to represent a youth of 15 or 16 years, we would like him to have a beautiful voice and the good grace in singing with embellishments in the Neapolitan manner, and the voice should be natural, not falsetto').Google Scholar

12 Tufo, Giambattista Del, Ritratto o modello delle grandezze, dtlitie e meraviglie della nobilissima città di Napoli (MS in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples), ed. C. Tagliareni (Naples, 1959), 67ff.Google Scholar

13 Giustiniani, Vincenzo, Discorso sopra la musica [1628], ed. Angelo Solerti, Le origini del melodramma: Testimonianze dei contemporanei (Turin, 1903), 98128; see also the English translation by Carol MacClintock (Rome, 1962), 63–80. A more recent Italian edition, Discorsi sulle arti e sui mestieri, ed. Anna Banti (Florence, 1981), also includes other related texts, but with an unhelpful and incorrect musical commentary.Google Scholar

14 Ferrara, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Bentivoglio, 41, f.255 and f.512, letters from Bernardo Bizzoni to Enzo Bentivoglio dated 28 July and 22 August 1607, edited for the first time in Dinko Fabris, ‘Frescobaldi e la musica in casa Bentivoglio’, Girolamo Frescobaldi nel IV centenario della nascita, ed. Sergio Durante and Dinko Fabris (Florence, 1987), 67, and now in Hill, docs. 18 and 21, pp. 305–7.Google Scholar

15 Elio Durante and Anna Martellotti, Le due ‘scelte’ napoletane di Luzzasco Luzzaschi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1998), i, 37–48 and passim. The second volume contains editions of all the madrigals of the two Neapolitan scelte by Luzzaschi. The first volume contains not only the most complete and thorough examination of the noted testimonies concerning Luzzaschi and Gesualdo, but also a very effective reconstruction of the musical panorama of Naples between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries and discussion of the musical interests of Cardinal Montalto and his relations with Naples (pp. 100ff.).Google Scholar

16 For a historical treatment of the interests of Italian princes in the acquisition of titles and fiefs in the Kingdom of Naples during this period, see Spagnoletti, Angelantonio, Principi italiani e Spagna nell'età barocca (Milan, 1996).Google Scholar

17 Durante and Martellotti, Le due ‘scelte’ napoletane, i, 98ff.Google Scholar

18 Friedrich Lippmann, ‘Giovanni de Macque fra Roma e Napoli: Nuovi documenti’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 13 (1978), 243–79.Google Scholar

19 'Libro de cartas y romances espanoles dell'illustrissima senora duchessa di Traetta mi senora que Dios guarde nel anos 1599’ (MS I-Rvat Chigi L.VI.200). The duchess is Cornelia Carafa, widow of Antonio Gesualdo, cousin of Prince Carlo Gesualdo's father.Google Scholar

20 GB-Lbl Add. MS 30491, facsimile edn ed. Alexander Silbiger (New York and London, 1987). The duke and protector of Luigi Rossi in the Neapolitan years is Don Luigi Gaetani d'Aragona, husband of the above-mentioned Cornelia. Hill says (p. 42) that the duke of Traetto during these same years was Luigi Carafa, prince of Stigliano (perhaps confusing the surname of the wife), while the identification by Durante and Martellotti (Le due ‘scelte’ napoletane, 98) with Don Luigi Gaetani is based on the contemporary testimony (1591) of Scipione Ammirato, Delle famiglie nobili napoletane, ii (Florence, Massi, 1651), 228.Google Scholar

21 On Fabrizio Dentice, see Fabris, Dinko, ‘Vita e opere di Fabrizio Dentice, nobile napoletano, compositore del secondo Cinquecento’, Studi musicali, 21 (1992), 61113, and especially the introduction to Da Napoli a Parma: Itinerari di un musicista aristocratico: Opere vocali di Fabrizio Dentice (c. 1530–1581), ed. Dinko Fabris (Milan, 1998).Google Scholar

22 Research in progress by my colleague Cesare Corsi, cited in my Da Napoli a Parma, 57, n. 30.Google Scholar

23 Cardamone, Donna G., ‘Orlando di Lasso and Pro-French Factions in Rome’, Orlandus Lassus and his Time: Colloquium Proceedings, Antwerpen 1994, Alamire Yearbook, i (1995), 2347.Google Scholar

24 It must be noted that the same Vincenzo Galilei, a noble lutenist and theorist, praises the unsurpassable art of the Neapolitan cavaliere Fabrizio Dentice.Google Scholar

25 Cf. the abundance of material catalogued in Massimo Preitano, ‘L'accompagnamento strumentale dell’ “aria” a Firenze nella prima metà del Seicento’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Paria, 1991–2).Google Scholar

26 Rodrigo de Zayas, ‘II canzoniere italo-castigliano di Mateo Bezon’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento (Rome, 1987), 93103 (on a manuscript dated Naples, 1599 in the private collection of the author). The same author provides a detailed directory of Neapolitan guitar sources from the Seicento in his edition of Gaspar Sanz, Opera omnia (Madrid, 1985).Google Scholar

27 Chater, ‘Musical Patronage in Rome’, 206.Google Scholar

28 The reference for the proposed identification is Dinko Fabris, Andrea Falconieri Napoletano: Un liutista-compositore del Seicento (Rome, 1987), 23–5. The new documentation on Lorenzino is in Marco Pesci, ‘Lorenzo Tracetti, alias Lorenzino, suonatore di liuto’, Recercare, 9 (1997), 233–42, which also proves that the death date of the ‘cavaliere del liuto’ given in Chater (p. 195), Fabris (p. 23) and Hill (p. 23) is incorrect: the musician died on 23 November, not September, 1608. Still more recently, Carlo Stringhi has identified a passage of the Ragguagli di Parnaso by Traiano Boccalini (Rome, 1612–13) in which the ‘cavaliere del liuto’ is defined as a certain Vincenzo Pinti, whom Marco Pesci has identified as a Roman cavaliere elected in 1588 as a deputy judge in a litigation between string-makers for the lute. Despite the implications of these new hypotheses, hard facts are still missing which would resolve this small historical enigma.Google Scholar

29 Among those scholars who have consulted this archive (which contains letters from Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Caccini, Marazzoli, Legrenzi, Vivaldi and other artists such as Guercino, Guarini and Testi) are Cavicchi (1967), Capponi (1968), Reiner (1964, 1968 and 1974), Lavin (1968), Newcomb (1977), Fabbri (1985), Hammond (1983 and 1994), Hill (1986, 1990 and 1994), Southorn (1988) and Fabris (1983 and 1986). The results of my pluralistic research on the letters of the Bentivoglio family, begun in 1983, can now be read in Dinko Fabris, Mecenati e musici: Documenti sul patronato artistico dei Bentivoglio di Ferrara nell'epoca di Monteverdi (1585–1645) (Lucca, 1999): included among the over 1,000 letters are also those edited by Hill.Google Scholar

30 This refers to the definitions already explored in another context, in Ernest Gellner, ‘Patrons and Clients’, Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Cultures, ed. Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (London, 1977), 1ff.Google Scholar

31 In particular, the introduction to La musica e il mondo: Mecenatismo e committenza musicale in Italia tra Quattro e Settecento, ed. Claudio Annibaldi (Bologna, 1993), other works published in 1996 and 1998, and unpublished essays. The journal Il saggiatore musicale has organized discussions on themes proposed by Annibaldi and has received contributions which further develop the methodology, such as Franco Piperno, ‘Guidubaldo II Della Rovere, la musica e il mondo: Lo studio della committenza musicale e il caso del Ducato di Urbino’, Il saggiatore musicale, 4 (1997), 249–70.Google Scholar

32 Mecenati e musici, 96ff.Google Scholar