Luca Marenzio
Luca Marenzio was an influential Italian composer of the late Renaissance, renowned primarily for his madrigals. Born in a small town near Brescia, Italy, around the late 1550s, Marenzio received a solid early education and possibly studied music under Giovanni Contino, the choirmaster at Brescia's cathedral. His career unfolded in Rome where he served notable patrons, including Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo and Cardinal Luigi d'Este, whose support significantly facilitated his rise as a composer.
During his productive years, Marenzio published numerous collections of madrigals, showcasing a wide emotional range and intricate word-painting techniques. His works often incorporated texts from revered poets such as Petrarch and Torquato Tasso. Following the death of Cardinal Luigi, Marenzio's connections allowed him to establish relationships with various patrons, including the Medici family, and he eventually took up a position as maestro di cappella for King Sigismund III of Poland.
Despite his contributions to sacred music, Marenzio's madrigals became more celebrated, leading him to be recognized as one of the leading composers of Italy by the time of his death in 1599. His impactful musical legacy continued to spread throughout Europe, influencing composers like Claudio Monteverdi, who built upon Marenzio's innovations in music.
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Luca Marenzio
Italian composer
- Born: 1553
- Birthplace: Coccaglio, near Brescia, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
- Died: August 22, 1599
- Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)
Marenzio took over the idiom of the late Renaissance Italian madrigal as shaped by elder contemporaries and became its most admired and productive master. Despite his short life, he created the classic corpus of madrigal composition at its most expressive.
Early Life
The father of Luca Marenzio (LEW-kah mah-REHNTS-yoh) was a notary in Brescia, the nearest city to the small town of his birth. The region was far from major cultural centers of the day. Nevertheless, presumably through his father’s efforts, the boy received good training. He seems to have had some good basic education, and tradition has it that he studied music with the choirmaster at Brescia’s cathedral, Giovanni Contino. There is virtually no firm information on Marenzio’s youth, so beyond several statements by contemporaries of uncertain accuracy, the claim that he sang as a boy chorister under Contino is now discredited.
It is speculated, however, that Marenzio might have accompanied Contino for at least part of the latter’s stay at the Gonzaga court of Mantua during the years 1568 to 1574. About the time of Contino’s death, and perhaps through his influence, Marenzio was taken into service by a former patron of Contino, Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, who by then had taken up residence in Rome. Madruzzo was an enthusiastic patron and connoisseur of music, and Marenzio served him until the cardinal’s death in 1578. Marenzio enjoyed a smooth transition into the service of a friend of Madruzzo, the worldly and pleasure-loving Cardinal Luigi d’Este. To that point, Marenzio had functioned primarily as a singer and expert lutenist for his patrons, only a single madrigal of his appearing in print in 1577, but this new period of the next eight years in the employ of Cardinal Luigi witnessed the blossoming of Marenzio’s productivity and reputation as a composer.
Life’s Work
Cardinal Luigi settled in Rome, with Marenzio in his retinue. The terms of service seem to have been flexible, and the composer apparently secured income from other patrons or sources. Cardinal Luigi himself seems to have been eager to advance the career of his protégé beyond his own household. In 1579, he attempted in vain to win him a post in the papal choir. Marenzio did, however, establish ties, as both singer and composer, to some of the important confraternities in Rome, although efforts to place him in positions at the royal court of France and the Gonzaga court of Mantua were unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Marenzio won his first attention as a composer, producing his initial books of madrigals, published between 1580 and 1587: five books of madrigals for five voices, four books for six voices, his first book of four-voice madrigals, a collection of five-voice madrigali spirituali, four books of light, three-voice villanelle, and his first volume of four-voice Latin liturgical motets. In this first half of his output, and with an extraordinary range of emotional variety from charm to passion Marenzio perfected in his madrigals (especially those for five voices) a style of highly rhetorical structure, rich in word-paintings and increasingly filled with daring harmonic surprises. His choice of poetic texts stressed the lyrics of such authors as Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, and the younger Giovanni Battista Guarini.
Cardinal Luigi’s death in late 1586 left Marenzio briefly without a patron, but about a year later, he was taken into the service of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. His primary activity in Florence was to contribute music for two of the six intermedii grafted into the playLa pellegrina, performed at the lavish celebrations of his master’s marriage in May, 1589. He was dismissed from Medici service later that year, however. New connections allowed him to move back to Rome, which served as his base for most of his remaining years.
By this time, he could arrange rather loose and multiple relationships with patrons. He enjoyed the favors of Duke Virginio Orsini and Cardinal Montalto, but he eventually established a particular closeness to the papal court, which allowed him to take up residence in the Vatican though an alleged appointment to the papal choir seems not to have been the case. Indeed, Marenzio succeeded in avoiding the professional obligations of any appointment as a church musician, the normal livelihood for musicians of the time. During these years, Marenzio continued his outpouring of compositions, embodied in new publications: following a 1588 collection of madrigals for four, five, and six voices, there came the fifth and sixth books of six-voice madrigals, books six through nine of his five-voice madrigals, and book two of his four-voice madrigals (now lost), as well as his second collection of Latin motets (also lost). In his central madrigal writing, Marenzio moved in this later period to greater darkness and intensity, his leaner, more daring and dissonant textures suggesting some influence of the new monodic experiments of his contemporaries. His choice of texts shifted, too, away from simpler lyrics toward more dramatic or more sentimental writings of Guarini (in his Il pastor fido, pb. 1590, pr. 1596; The Faithful Shepherd, 1602) and Livio Celiano.
It was at papal insistence that Marenzio undertook a journey to Poland, from 1595 to 1598, to serve as maestro di cappella (choir master) to King Sigismund III. In that capacity, he contributed to some important court occasions, including a Mass setting (now lost) that was the most ambitious of his polychoral liturgical works.
Back in Rome, Marenzio saw his last publications through the press and made at least one visit to Milan. His health deteriorated, however, whether from the exertions of the Polish residence or under a cloud of papal displeasure, and in 1599, he died in Rome, at the Villa Medici, domain of his former Florentine patrons. The attractions of his music outlived him in the inclusion of his secular and sacred pieces in anthologies past his death, and in two posthumous publications (one lost) of his liturgical compositions.
Significance
Despite his activity as a composer for the Church, Marenzio’s sacred music has suffered by comparison with his madrigals. Their wide popularity and dissemination not only from his earliest printed collections, but extending to their samplings in many printed anthologies of the day was based on Marenzio’s facile technique and daring scope of dramatic expression.
By his death, he was regarded as Italy’s leading composer, and his music continued to be widely circulated beyond his homeland, all over Europe, and with special attraction for musical circles in England. Claudio Monteverdi was soon to match Marenzio in his own terms and then, as he drew the madrigal out of the vocal-consort idiom into the radically new forms of early Baroque concert writing, to overshadow the older master, though without ever effacing “the Schubert of the madrigal.”
Bibliography
Arnold, Denis. Marenzio. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. A brief, trenchant, and perceptive study of Marenzio’s music and its characteristics.
Chater, James. Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577-1593. 2 vols. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981. Vol. 1 is a thorough and critical study of the composer’s life, output, and stylistic features. Vol. 2 contains critical editions of six of Marenzio’s madrigals, followed by examples of the music of a number of his contemporaries.
Einstein, Alfred. The Italian Madrigal. Translated by A. H. Krappe, R. H. Sessions, and O. Strunck. 3 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. The classic study of this musical form, its first two volumes a comprehensive but detailed survey of the idiom and its composers (including an eighty-page section on Marenzio), and its third volume containing transcriptions of ninety-seven madrigals by various composers.
Kirkendale, W. The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici. Florence, Italy: Olschki, 1993. Includes treatment of Marenzio’s service in Florence, especially his involvement in the extravaganza La pellegrina.
Macy, L. W. The Late Madrigals of Luca Marenzio: Studies in the Interactions of Music, Literature, and Patronage at the End of the Sixteenth Century. Ph.D. dissertation. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1991. An analysis of Marenzio’s later period of composition in its cultural context.
Maniates, Maria Rika. Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530-1650. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Reconsidering the broad concept of mannerism as a cultural label for this period, this intensive and probing study presents Marenzio as perhaps the central figure in its musical dimensions.