The Madrigals of Michelangelo Rossi (review)

Abstract

Michelangelo Rossi. The Madrigals of Michelangelo Rossi. Edited with an introduction by Brian Mann. (Monuments of Renaissance Music, 10.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, c2002. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; 6 plates; introd. (biography, the madrigals, the sources, bibliography), p. 1-37; crit. commentary, p. 39-53; the edition (editorial principles, transcriptions), p. 55-225; index of compositions, p. 227. Cloth. ISBN 0-226-50338-0. $150.] Michelangelo Rossi's reputation among twentieth-century scholars and musicians has long rested on his keyboard music collected and published in the volume Toccale e correnti d'intavolatura d'organo e cimbalo sometime in the 163Os in Rome. The daring harmonic language of many of these pieces fostered an early-and lastinginterest in his music, even in times when almost nothing was known about their author. Two toccatas and three correntes, for example, exist in concert arrangements for piano by Bela Bartok (first published in 1930 by Carl Fischer; reissued, along with other arrangements and an introduction by Lazlo Somfai, in XVII and XVIIl Century Italian Cembalo and Organ Music Transcribed for Piano [New York: Fischer, 199O]). During his lifetime, Rossi (1601/2-1656) was best known as a virtuoso violinist, hence the nickname Michelangelo del Violino. As a musician at the service of Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy, Taddeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII's nephew), and Francesco I d'Este, he also wrote a substantial amount of vocal music, including two operas, Erminia sul Giordano (1633) and Andromeda (1638, the music is lost), and two books of unpublished five-voice madrigals, published for the first time in the volume here under review. It is a much awaited and needed edition. The most remarkable feature of Rossi's madrigals is their audacious chromaticism, which was certainly inspired by the example of Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1561-1613). As argued by Alexander Silbiger (Michelangelo Rossi and His 'Toccate e Correnti', Journal of the American Musicological Society 36 [1983]: 18-38), it was the harmonic experimentalism of the Gesualdine model of that probably served as a compositional laboratory for the bold instrumental idiom for which Rossi would be remembered three centuries later. As far as we know, Rossi's thirty-two madrigals that have come down to us were never published during the composer's lifetime. They are preserved in an undated manuscript score of uncertain provenance that is now housed in the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at the University of California, Berkeley (MS 176). This is the main source of Brian Mann's carefully prepared and handsomely realized edition, which also includes a description of five incomplete manuscript sources regarded as peripheral to the Berkeley score (with the sole exception, perhaps, of a set of partbooks in the Conservatoire de Musique in Montreal). Variant readings are listed in the commentary on the individual compositions, and the small editorial comments placed at the foot of the score are quite unobtrusive. Sensibly enough, the editor did not follow the irregular barring of the manuscript but opted for regular measures of whole notes. On the other hand, given the highly chromatic character of the music, Mann did decide to retain the system of accidental notation found in the Berkeley score, in which a sharp or a flat alters only the note it precedes. The edition of the music is preceded by an extensive essay on Rossi's life and works. Of particular interest is the section on the circulation of the in the early seventeenth century, in which Mann, taking his cue from Lorenzo Bianconi (Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]), discusses the progressive editorial decline of the genre and the emergence of a niche market increasingly tied to the academic culture of the time. In this context, Rome would seem to have provided a particularly fertile environment also thanks to a devotee of the polyphonic madrigal such as Cardinal Antonio Barberini (p. …