Luca Marenzio: The Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation (review)

This is a translation into English of Marco Bizzarini's Marenzio: La carriera di un musicista tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Rodengo Saiano, [Brescia]: Commune di Coccaglio/Promozione Franciacorta, 1998), published before the quatrocentenary of Marenzio's death in 1999. That book was quickly recognized as something exceptional: not just the first biography of the composer by an Italian, but a work which set new standards for Italian musical biography in its integrated use of both documentary and musical sources. Its appearance in English translation is thus very welcome indeed. Bizzarini builds on previous work by Hans Engel, Steven Ledbetter, and others but, by returning to the documents and rereading them in a sixteenth-century context, he brings a host of new insights to our understanding of Marenzio's milieu. In particular, Bizzarini uses his sources to place the composer's life and works in the complex network of relationships with which he surrounded himself. Marenzio held no church post—he was almost unique in this for his time—but carved out a career working for cardinals and members of Italian ruling families, with a brief spell in Poland towards the end of his life. For this reason the political and personal relationships between these patrons are significant, and Bizzarini's most important contribution is his deep understanding of the networking of Roman/Florentine families and their interactions with papal politics and those of other Italian states. He shows an especially good understanding of the complex links which bound together the inhabitants of the city of Rome, at this period a relatively small city in which prelates, members of noble families or of confraternities, theatrical producers, artists, and musicians all rubbed shoulders constantly. Bizzarini makes particularly good use of the Avvisi di Roma, the regular reports sent by ambassadors to their masters at the Court of Urbino and other centers, for political insights as well as for gossip, which help clarify relationships and the social makeup at various events in which music played a part.

This English version has been translated by James Chater, himself a formidable Marenzio scholar, which is greatly to the book's advantage. Chater has also translated all Italian documents afresh, giving originals in footnotes. His introductory note on the problems of translation is an honest and useful discussion of the translator's role especially in relation to sixteenth-century Italian and its nuances. Chater and Bizzarini have taken the opportunity to revise some of the footnotes and to make some small additions to the text (for example, some extra information on the singer Vittoria Accoramboni on p. 102). In general, the translation sticks closely to the Italian original and now makes available to a wider audience a book of special quality and significance.

The bulk of the book deals with the madrigal. Marenzio also wrote some sacred music, but much of it has not survived, and there are still unanswered questions about that which has; these are honestly dealt with here. Bizzarini is particularly interested in studying each of Marenzio's madrigal publications in the round. As he says:

A madrigal book can be viewed as the outcome of the play of numerous forces dictated by the complex political strategies of patrons or the private aspirations of the author himself. It is the role of the historian to untangle this knot, to reveal the underlying relationship of the work to its context, as far as the fragmentary documentation and the eternal game of dissimulation typical of the cinquecento allows.

(p. 4)

This summarizes Bizzarini's program for his book as a whole. Having carefully examined the documentary evidence, he is not afraid to speculate and, since his speculation is well informed, it is always valuable. He is good at conveying an understanding of the motives of the churchmen from whom Marenzio...