Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci con alcuni di Giovanni Gabrieli: Venezia, Angelo Gardano 1589 by Andrea Gabrieli (review)

The Edizione nazionale delle opere di Andrea Gabrieli (hereinafter, Opere) represents an important contribution to a fairly small body of scholarship focused on the life and works of Andrea Gabrieli. The collection as a whole will eventually comprise seventeen volumes of music (ten consisting of works published during the composer’s lifetime, seven of works published posthumously), and will be the first complete modern edition of Andrea’s compositions. Four additional volumes of supplemental materials are planned (in the series Introduzione storico-critica, volumes 1 and 3 have already been published)—with details of biography and chronology, liturgical texts, poetic texts, and the role of Venetian musical and ceremonial culture in Andrea’s career—that will give scholars of sixteenth-century Venetian musical life much to celebrate. Though Andrea served as organist at San Marco rather than as maestro di capella, he was undoubtedly an important figure in Venetian musical circles, and this collected works project ultimately pays tribute to a prolific composer who mastered nearly all of the vocal and instrumental genres of his time.

It is perhaps surprising that such a project was so late in the making. A. Tillman Merritt’s edition of Andrea’s complete madrigal output (Andrea Gabrieli, Complete Madrigals, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 41–52 [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1981–84]) filled a significant gap in the availability of modern editions, while making it even more apparent that similar treatment was needed for the instrumental and sacred vocal works. The earliest volumes of the Opere, first published in 1988, were timely in their release, capitalizing on recently discovered documents suggesting that Andrea’s year of birth was almost certainly 1533, rather than “ca. 1510” as traditionally given. The new evidence in favor of a revised birth date certainly did not fill in all of the many gaps in our knowledge of Andrea’s life, but it did prompt a dramatic re-evaluation of his career within the context of his relationship to other musicians. The Opere, then, was well-poised to present a new and increasingly thorough account of the composer’s life while providing, for the first time, a complete account of his works.

Many of these works are known to us only through the efforts of Andrea’s nephew Giovanni. While a good number of Andrea’s works appeared in print during his lifetime—both in publications devoted solely to his music and in multicomposer anthologies—many more remained unpublished at the time of this death in 1586. Between 1586 and 1590, Giovanni devoted himself to organizing, editing, and publishing these pieces, many of which were madrigals. He was aided in his endeavor by Angelo Gardano, who had inherited a very successful printing firm from his father, Antonio, and proceeded to exceed his father’s prolific output with a steady stream of both new editions and reprints during the last third of the century. Since few of these posthumous editions contain dedications, it is likely that Gardano assumed much of the financial burden for the project. By all appearances, the...