Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (review)

Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. By John Walter Hill. (Oxford Monographs on Music.) Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. [Vol. 1 (text), xx, 453 p.; vol. 2 (music examples), xii, 458 p. ISBN 0-19-816613-3. $150.]

Interest in the patronage of music in Rome in the early baroque has not waned, nor has the appeal of archival and manuscript research, despite the allure of new subfields and methods in the discipline. One of the newest studies to exploit hitherto untapped sources is John Walter Hill's two-volume Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. It joins recent key studies of patronage in cardinals' households: Frederick Hammond's Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Claudio Annibaldi's "Il mecenate 'politico': Ancora sul patronato musicale del Cardinale Pietro Aldobrandini (ca. 1570-1621)" (Studi musicali 16 [1987]: 33-93; 17 [1988]: 101-78), Jean Lionnet's "The Borghese Family and Music during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century" (Music & Letters 74 [1993]: 519-29), and the fine earlier work on Montalto by James Chater and Hill (Chater, "Musical Patronage in Rome at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Cardinal Montalto," Studi musicali 16 [1987]: 179-227; Hill, "Frescobaldi's Arie and the Musical Circle around Cardinal Montalto," in Frescobaldi Studies, ed. Alexander Silbiger [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987], 157-94).

In a little over two decades of research on Roman monody and opera, Hill has worked through an enormous number of sources. Among new materials finding a place in this book are dozens of letters by musicians, notarial documents, payment records, and manuscripts of poetry. But most significant of all, and at the heart of the inquiry, are ten manuscripts and eight prints preserving solo songs by, among other composers, Ottavio Catalani, Giuseppino Cenci, Stefano Landi, Ippolito Macchiavelli, Cesare Marotta, Orazio Michi, Giovanni Bernardino Nanino, Giovanni Domenico Puliaschi, and Raffaello Rontani. Hill makes a case for a web of relationships among these music sources and links portions of their contents to musicians and performances around Alessandro Peretti (1571-1623), created cardinal "of Montalto" by his great-uncle Pope Sixtus V. Some of the sources have not been previously discussed in print, making this a doubly valuable part of his contribution.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the contents of Cardinal Montalto's large library (reportedly some 1,682 items) had been scattered. What music he had owned was not known, apart from nine printed collections of songs bound together under a cover bearing a coat of arms of the family (p. 140). This was the lacuna Hill faced when he began to search for the lost repertory in extant sources. That undertaking, and Hill's work in pinpointing the music within Roman compositional activity, mark considerable progress in the field; the wealth of material presented, and the results, are likely to be sifted and revised for years to come, perhaps, among others, by the author himself.

This is a handsome book, enriched by nineteen plates and a generous quantity of music examples and useful tables. Two appendixes provide transcriptions of over one hundred letters and list the full contents of twenty music sources, with identification of the composers, poets, musical and poetic forms, and concordances. Volume 2 offers transcriptions of one hundred sixty-four works (and alternate versions of ten of these), as well as a number of counterpoint exercises by Nanino. Editorial intervention is minor: modern clefs, some barring, and silent correction of "obvious" errors (2: xi). Hill does not provide critical notes or translations for each composition. These omissions are minor, however, in light of the large body of Roman music to which scholars are now given access.

The book begins with consideration of the economic, political, and cultural strata of the world...