Luca Marenzio - Life, Music, Influence

Composer, born near Brescia, Republic of Venice (modern Italy). He was probably a choirboy at Brescia before becoming a prolific writer of madrigals. He was in service with Cardinal Luigi d'Este of Rome (1578–86), then worked in Florence and Poland, before becoming a musician at the papal court in Rome.

Luca Marenzio (also Marentio) (October 18? He was one of the most renowned composers of madrigals, and wrote perhaps the finest examples of the form in its late stage of development, prior to its early Baroque transformation by Monteverdi.

Life

Marenzio was born at Coccaglio, near Brescia, and died in Rome.

After early training in Brescia and possibly some years spent in Mantua, he moved to Rome, where he was employed by Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo until 1578, evidently as a singer; By 1581 his music had become immensely popular, as shown by the frequency with which his published books of madrigals were reprinted, and also by the increasingly common appearance of his madrigals in anthologies.

Music

While Marenzio wrote some sacred music in the form of motets, and madrigali spirituali (madrigals based on religious texts), the vast majority of his work, and his enduring legacy, is his enormous output of madrigals.

Marenzio published at least fifteen collections of music, mostly madrigals but also canzonette and villanelle (related secular a cappella forms very much like madrigals, but usually a bit lighter in character). Stylistically, his compositions show a generally increasing seriousness of tone throughout his life, but in all periods he was capable of the most astonishing mood-shifts within a single composition, sometimes within a single phrase; In one madrigal (O voi che sospirate a miglior note) he modulated completely around the circle of fifths within a single phrase, using enharmonic spellings within single chords (for instance, simultaneous C-sharp and D-flat), impossible to sing unless some approximation of equal temperament is being observed.

Even more characteristic of his style, and a defining characteristic of the madrigal as a genre, is his use of word-painting: the technique of mirroring in the music a specific word, phrase, implication or pun on what is being sung.

Influence

Marenzio was hugely influential on composers in Italy, as well as in the rest of Europe. As an example, when Nicholas Yonge published his Musica transalpina in 1588 in England, the first collection of Italian madrigals to be published there, Marenzio had the second-largest number of madrigals in the collection (after Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder); and the second collection of Italian madrigals published in England had more works by Marenzio than anyone else.