Marenzio's sacred music: the Roman context

Abstract

M ARENZIO is virtually unique among composers based in late 16th-century Rome in not having had any known church position or employment which involved the regular composition of sacred music. Only when he occupied the post of maestro di cappella to King Sigismund III of Poland, from 1595 to 1598, was the composition and direction of sacred music required of him.' For the bulk of his career Marenzio was employed by or otherwise associated with a succession of cardinals (Madruzzo, d'Este, Montalto, Aldobrandini) and noble families (Medici, Orsini). In the case of Cardinals Cristoforo Madruzzo and Luigi d'Este, Marenzio did have the title of maestro di cappella, but there is little evidence that his duties included the regular provision of sacred music (but see below for further on Madruzzo). This employment profile is reflected in the relative sizes of his surviving secular and sacred outputs (roughly in the proportion 5:1). At the same time, his 70 or so extant sacred Latin pieces represent a considerable body of work in diverse styles and deserve closer scrutiny. This study will attempt to place at least some of them in a Roman context, using available information on Marenzio's involvement on a free-lance basis in liturgical and paraliturgical celebrations, and seeking to map such occasions on to his surviving music. This involvement centred particularly on two of the most prominent of the city's confraternities. Recent work has highlighted the importance of confraternities as a locus of patronage in Rome, positioned between official institutions (such as the major basilicas) and private households, and overlapping with both.2 Free-lance work for confraternities provided one of the main means by which the city's musicians supplemented their earnings; Marenzio's Roman contemporaries such as Palestrina, Ruggiero Giovannelli, Asprilio Pacelli engaged in it assiduously.3 While the lack of access to a regular choir for much of his Roman sojourn might have hampered Marenzio in undertaking such work, this would have been counterbalanced by his network of contacts with the nobility and influential cardinals, from whose ranks the office-bearers in the city's leading confraternities were drawn. The earliest evidence for such employment comes from the archives of the German national church of S. Maria dell'Anima (illus.2). In June of the Holy Year of 1575 a payment of 4 scudi and 6o baiocchi was made 'al mag[ist]ro cappellae Ill[ustrissi]mi Card[ina]lis Trid[entin]i' for music at the procession of Corpus Christi, held on the Sunday within the octave of that feast.4 Unfortunately the maestro of the then Cardinal of Trent (Cristoforo Madruzzo) is not named, but it has been generally assumed that Marenzio was in this post by at least 1574. Similar payments for the same procession were made to the 'cantoribus Ill[ustrissi]mi Cardinalis Tridentini' in 1571, 1572 and 1573. The payment for 1574 simply says 'cantoribus', while those for 1576 and 1577 do not survive. In 1578, and frequently thereafter, Jean Matelart, maestro di cappella at S. Lorenzo in Damaso, was paid. Cardinal Madruzzo had succeeded Cardinal Truchsess von Waldburg as Protector of the German Nation in Rome in 1573, and he held this office until his death in 1578. It was thus politically appropriate that his singers should be called on to provide music for the German Church's