Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance (review)

Renaissance man. The well-worn cliché applies like no other to Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, whose life was anything but. A soldier of supreme skill and courage, he fought from the 1530s to the 1560s in numerous battles in various lands and under various flags. After his final engagements, arms yielded to letters, as the aging soldier turned humanist. During the 1570s and 80s he penned ’trattati and discorsi on military matters, the finest of them a translation and commentary on his namesake’s De bello gallico. Where arms and the man went, finally, went the singer: references to Brancaccio’s “miraculous” bass voice began to appear in the 1540s, a voice that by the late 1570s won him yet another triumph, a place among the virtuosi of Alfonso II d’Este’s musica segreta.

To tell such a life’s story demands that biographer be as versatile as subject, skilled in social and literary history, musicology, and archival research. Richard Wistreich, himself a world-class bass, deploys such skills and more in the book under review. Curiosity about his distinguished predecessor drew him from the performance of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music to its study, and to that of the courtly culture that made it and Brancaccio’s varied careers possible. The result is a book at once rich in new documents and insightful interpretation. The former come mainly from Italian libraries and archives, but the author has also made or expanded upon important finds in Austria, France, and Spain. At the same time, he has sought to map the conflicts among Brancaccio’s identities by applying the New Historicist concept of self-fashioning. As he explains in the introduction, “I explore the connections between aspects of Brancaccio’s personal discourses . . . and various themes such as contemporary notions of nobility and honour, virtù, masculinity, dissimulation and performance” (5).

To untangle the strands of his subject’s life, Wistreich has cast his book in three parts. The first, “Identity of a Performer,” conforms most closely to traditional biography. Its first chapter, “Napolitano y de buena casta,” traces Brancaccio’s life from his birth in Naples, ca. 1515 (the exact date remains unknown), until he left the service of Charles V in 1554. Among the newly published documents is a letter to Ercole d’Este from 1538, which confirms Brancaccio’s claim of early contact with that family. The author also prints diplomatic correspondence concerning his subject’s ill-advised trip to England in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain an imperial pardon for the murder of a Spanish soldier. That disaster likely determined Brancaccio’s defection to France, and this part of his career Wistreich narrates in chapter 2, “Sieur Jule Brancasse, gentilhomme ordinaire de la Chambre de Roy.” Brancaccio, long a suspected Francophile, now served the French crown in battles against the Spanish, the English, and the Huguenots. Chapter 3, “Il più veterano tra’ soldati,” follows Brancaccio’s return to Italy around the end of 1570. Serving at various courts as a military consultant, his life now took on a touch of tragedy. Twice dismissed by Alfonso d’Este, he apparently died in Padua; once again, the exact date is unknown.

In part 2, “Bass Song,” musicology takes center stage. Near the beginning of chapter 4, “Il basso del Brancazio,” Wistreich has assembled contemporary references to Brancaccio’s singing. These come from early and late in his subject’s life, descriptions of performances in Naples in the 1540s and 50s forming one group, those in Ferrara the other. Unfortunately, none of the music survives, and Wistreich has therefore cast a wider historiographical net. He examines various repertories — among them villanelle alla napolitana and madrigals with ornamented bass parts — to uncover the music that Brancaccio likely sang. He also turns to descriptions and illustrations of Neapolitan florid singing...