Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals, Part 4

Abstract

This edition presents, in four volumes, the complete unaccompanied madrigals of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, director of music at the Ferrarese court at the end of the sixteenth century. Luzzaschi was among the most important and most admired musicians of the period, the teacher of Girolamo Frescobaldi, the mentor of Carlo Gesualdo, and the object of explicit admiration from Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Merulo, Alfonso Fontanelli, Adriano Banchieri, and many others. Given Luzzaschi's importance, all surviving parts of his seven books of five-voice madrigals are transcribed. Given the importance of the Ferrarese school of literary madrigals, whose (otherwise usually unpublished) texts Luzzaschi was given to set, these texts have been transcribed and translated. Each setting by Luzzaschi is given a critical commentary by the editor, which often includes discussion of settings of the same texts by Luzzaschi's near contemporaries—settings which, if unpublished in modern edition are included in the present edition. Part 4 of the unaccompanied madrigals of Luzzaschi incorporates the madrigals of his first two books of madrigals. Dedicated to Lucrezia d'Este, the First Book (1571) is an exceptional first book in both its length and its preponderance of texts by the avant-garde poets working at the court of Ferrara, including Giovan Battista Pigna. Only three of the five partbooks appear to have survived, perhaps because of the limited distribution by a local printer, the Ferrarese Francesco de' Rossi. The Second Book (1576), the first of Luzzaschi's books to be published by the commercial Venetian printer Angelo Gardano and the first book of Luzzaschi's for which all parts survive, includes madrigals from the early 1570s through 1575 or early 1576. The edition also includes twelve additional madrigals heretofore unavailable in modern editions, most of them settings by Luzzaschi's near contemporaries of texts set by Luzzaschi in his first two books.