Luca Marenzio
The Career of a Musician Between the
Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation
Marco Bizzarini
Translated by James Chater
Sept 2003 400 pages incl
10b/w illustrations and 40 music examples
Hardback
0 7546 0516 7 £55.00
MusicWeb price
£52.50
Regarded by his contemporaries as the leading madrigal composer
of his time, Luca Marenzio was an important figure in sixteenth-century
Italian music, and also highly esteemed in England, Flanders and
Poland. This English translation of Marco Bizzarini's study of
the life and work of Marenzio provides valuable insights into
the composer's influence and place in history, and features an
extensive, up-to-date bibliography and the first published list
of archival sources containing reference to Marenzio.
Women play a decisive role as dedicatees of marenzio's magrigals
and in influencing the way in which they were perfomed. Bizzarini
examines in detail the influence of both male and female patrons
and performers on Marenzio's music and career, including his connections
with the confraternity of SS Trinità and other institutions.
Dedications were also a political tool, as the book reveals.
Many of Marenzio's dedications were made at the request of his
employer Cardinal d'Este who wanted to please his French allies.
Bizzarini examines these extra-musial dimensions to Marenzio's
work and discusses the composer's new musical directions under
the more austere administration of Pope Clement VIII.
Marco Bizzarini is a musicologist working at the Univerity
of Padua. His main field of research is Italian vocal repertoire
( the madrigal and cantata). He has published several studies
on a wide range of musical topics, with particular attention to
music's relation to history, literature and art.
James Chater took his D.Phil at oxford University under
the supervision of Frederick Sternfeld, Joseph Kerman and Denis
Arnold. He is the author of a two-volume study of Marenzio's madrigals
and has written several essays on various aspects of the Italian
madrigal. He lived in Italy for six years and now resides in the
Netherlands.
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