Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals.

Luzzasco Luzzaschi. Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals. Edited by Anthony Newcomb. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., c2003-4. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 136, 139.) [Pt. 1, Quinto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1595); Sesto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1596); Settimo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1604): Abbrevs. and sigla, p. viii; acknowledgments, p. ix; introd., p. xi-xxii; texts, trans., and commentary, p. xxiii-lviii; 7 plates; score (including transcriptions and trans. of dedications), 136 p.; crit. report, p. 137-45; appendix, p. 147-84. ISBN 0-89579-535-3. $93. Pt. 2, Il quarto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1594) and Madrigals Published Only in Anthologies, 1583-1604: Abbrevs. and sigla, p. vii; acknowledgments, p. viii; introd., p. ix-xviii; texts, trans., and commentary, p. xix-xli; 4 plates; score (including transcription and trans. of dedication), 116 p.; crit. report, p. 117-23; appendix, p. 125-63. ISBN 0-89579-558-2. $76.] Appendix to pt. 1 includes settings of Ecco, o dolce, o gradita (by Alessandro Striggio, Pomponio Nenna); Se parti io moro (by Giuseppe Palazzotto e Tagliavia); Puo ben fortuna (by Paolo Bellasio); O sei geloso Amante (by Antonio Il Verso); Sorge la vagh'aurora (by Scipione Lacorcia); Cor mio, benche lontana (by Ruggiero Giovannelli); and Questa vostra pietate (by Giovanni de Macque, Giovanni Del Turco). Appendix to pt. 2 includes settings of Tra le dolcezze (by Scipione Lacorcia); Mentre la notte (by Paolo Virchi, Filippo di Monte); Io v'amo [t'amo], anima mia (by Bernardino Bertolotti, Scipione Lacorcia); and Dolorosi martir (by Alessandro Striggio, Giovanni Maria Nanino, Francesco Soriano).

In the half century since the publication of Alfred Einstein's The Italian Madrigal (3 vols., trans. by Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949; reprint 1971]), the complete works of most of the principal madrigal composers of the late sixteenth century have become available in modern editions. Luzzasco Luzzaschi (1544/5-1607) has until now been a glaring exception. When finished, Anthony Newcomb's edition of Luzzaschi's complete unaccompanied madrigals for the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance will fill a major lacuna in the field and make available for the first time a body of works that played a crucial role in the musical culture of their time. Luzzaschi is best known today for his Madrigali ... per cantare et sonare a uno, e doi, e tre soprani (Rome: Simone Verovio, 1601), which has been available in modern edition since 1965 (ed. Adriano Cavicchi, Monumenti di musica italiana, ser. 2: Polifonia, vol. 2 [Brescia: L'Organo]), but the bulk of his surviving output consists of unaccompanied madrigals: seven books for five voices (1571-1604) and an additional six pieces for four to six voices that appeared only in anthologies. Part 1 of this edition, published in 2003, contains books 5-7, and part 2 includes book 4 and the pieces from the anthologies. A-R Editions has not yet published volumes 3 and 4 devoted to books 1-3.

Luzzaschi was a figure of central importance in the late-sixteenth-century madrigal. A student of Cipriano de Rore (1515/ 6-1565), mentor of Carlo Gesualdo (ca. 1561-1613, who was said to have feared competition from no one else), celebrated organist, and teacher of Girolamo Fresco-baldi (1583-1643), he served as director of music under the music-loving Duke Alfonso II at the court of Ferrara, one of the most prestigious musical centers of the time. He was widely admired by his contemporaries; Claudio Monteverdi (as related by his brother Giulio Cesare Monteverdi in his 1607 edition of Claudio's Scherzi musicali a tre voci) included him among such luminaries as Rore, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri (1535/6-1592), Giaches de Wert (1535-1596), and Luca Marenzio (1553/4-1599) as a pioneer of the seconda prattica ("Explanation of the Letter Printed in the Fifth Book of Madrigals," in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. ed. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1998], 540). Nevertheless, his music had little circulation outside of a narrow circle of connoisseurs. His madrigals appeared in print only sporadically, and the majority of them were issued not by the well-connected commercial publishers of Venice, but by the Ferrarese ducal printer Vittorio Baldini (book 4, 1594; book 5, 1595; book 6, 1596). There was a hiatus of twelve years between Luzzaschi's third book of 1582 (Venice: Angelo Gardano) and the appearance of his fourth book. The close succession of books 4-6 occurred in the context of an intense spate of music publications by Baldini that included madrigal books by Gesualdo, Alfonso Fontanelli (1557-1622), and Giovanni de Macque (?1548/50-1614), as well as Luzzaschi. These publications were stimulated by the interests of Gesualdo, who married a niece of Duke Alfonso in 1594 and spent much of the next two years in Ferrara. They appear to have had small press runs (surviving copies are rare), intended for a select audience rather than a broad public. Luzzaschi's seventh madrigal book, which was issued by the Venetian publisher Giacomo Vincenti, did not appear until 1604, seven years after Duke Alfonso's death. Unlike the successful publications of his contemporaries, Luzzaschi's madrigal books were never reprinted, although some individual pieces were included in later anthologies. Thirty-nine previously published madrigals appeared in collections issued by the Neapolitan printer Giovanni Giacomo Carlino, probably under the supervision of Gesualdo, in 1611 (Madrigali di Luzasco Luzaschi et altri autori a cinque voci) and 1613 (Seconda scelta delli madrigali a cinque voci dello Zascho Luzzaschi).

The limited circulation of Luzzaschi's madrigals has led indirectly to the incomplete survival of many of them: only two of the five partbooks survive from books 1 (altus, quintus) and 7 (superius, bassus), and only one from book 6 (quintus). Some of the pieces from these books can be reconstructed from later sources, but most cannot. Because of the importance of the works, Newcomb wisely includes the surviving voices of the incomplete madrigals in his edition, and even provides useful comments on aspects of the music that can be observed from them. For one piece with three surviving voices ("Non sono, oime, queste mie luci degne," book 6, no. 4), he has composed the two missing voices in order to make the piece performable. (The newly composed voices are in small print, so that they cannot be confused with those from the sources.)

The discrepancy between Luzzaschi's fame and the distribution of his music among his contemporaries may be a consequence of two related factors: Duke Alfonso's cultural politics and the poetic and musical styles that were favored at his court. As is well known, Alfonso kept his private music strictly secret; Luzzaschi was able to publish the accompanied madrigals that he composed for the court's celebrated concerto delle donne only after Alfonso's death. Similar restrictions applied to the works of the Ferrarese court poets. Alfonso did not prohibit the publication of unaccompanied madrigals by his musicians, but unlike other patrons of the time (including his brother, Cardinal Luigi d'Este, the employer of Marenzio), he apparently did not encourage such publications either. Without the stimulus of Gesualdo's presence, most of Luzzaschi's later madrigals might never have appeared in print at all.

Duke Alfonso's policy of reserving his poetry and music for himself and his honored guests may have been motivated not only by possessiveness, but also by a desire to set his taste apart from that of the common people. The style of Ferrarese poetry and music in the 1590s was exceptionally refined and subtle. The poetry displays the aesthetic qualities advocated by Alessandro Guarini (son of Battista Guarini) in the letter of dedication that he wrote for Luzzaschi's sixth book of madrigals: "brevity, sharp wit, grace, and ... sweetness" (pt. 1, p. xiv). Concepts and emotions matter little; artful manipulation of words, images, and sounds is all that counts. Luzzaschi's madrigals, which are normally the first (and often the only) settings of their texts, are ideally suited to this type of poetry. Their tone is elevated and restrained. Their musical style is characterized by brevity, linear counterpoint, textural variety, rhythmic subtlety, avoidance of strong cadences, and extreme sensitivity to poetic nuance. Luzzaschi renounces or underplays the more obvious expressive qualities that attracted the madrigal-buying public of the 1580s and 1590s--passion, drama, playfulness, brilliance, virtuosity, and harmonic and formal clarity--and employs bold dissonances and chromaticism only occasionally. His works are aimed strictly at connoisseurs; he and his admirers may well have regarded an absence of popularity with the masses as a mark of distinction.

Within these broad limits, Luzzaschi's madrigals exhibit considerable variety. Their affects range from joyful to pathetic, and their compositional techniques from restrained to audacious. The contents of book 4 are more varied, both poetically and musically, than those of books 5 and 6, possibly because the works were composed over a longer period of time. Book 4 includes settings of a few texts by poets outside the Ferrarese court circle of the 1590s, while all of the attributed texts in books 5 and 6 stem from that circle, and the anonymous ones probably do as well. Book 7 is a miscellany of diverse pieces composed over a broad span of time; unlike books 4-6, it may have been published with an eye to profit, rather than prestige.

Newcomb's edition is much more than a transcription of Luzzaschi's madrigals into modern score; it is a major study of the repertoire and its cultural context, incorporating the fruits of several decades of research. Each volume includes a general introduction discussing Luzzaschi's career, his madrigal style, the specific features of the books in the volume, and suggestions for performance. There are detailed comments on the individual pieces, and critical notes documenting the sources, editorial problems, emendations, and variant versions applicable to each piece. The poetic texts are edited separately and provided with English translations.

The editorial comments contain detailed observations about the individual pieces, with emphasis on relations between music and text, and comparisons between Luzzaschi's madrigals and other settings of the same texts. As an added bonus, each volume includes an appendix of previously unedited madrigals by other composers based on poems set by Luzzaschi. These appendices provide a rich context for Luzzaschi's works and a window onto interesting byways of the madrigal that have been neglected by modern editors. Readers desiring a still fuller picture of Luzzaschi and his world should consult the study and edition by Elio Durante and Anna Martellotti of the thirty-nine Luzzaschi madrigals in the Carlino publications (Le due "scelte" napoletane di Luzzasco Luzzaschi, 2 vols., Archivum musicum. Collana di studi, G [Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1998]). Durante and Martellotti provide a full volume of commentary that focuses on the historical background, poetic texts, and cultural relations between Ferrara and Naples, but not on Luzzaschi's music. Their editions of the poems and the music differ from Newcomb's only in minor details (such as editorial punctuation and some editorial accidentals).

Each volume of the edition is designed to stand on its own; general information about Luzzaschi and his works appears in both volumes. Much of this information appears under the heading of "Quinto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (1595)" in part 1 and, lightly varied, under the heading of "Il quarto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (1594)" in part 2. While it is good to have this data in both places, the volumes would work better as a set if the common material were segregated from the comments that apply only to the individual books. Two minor emendations appear in part 2: the forms of the sonnet, ottava stanza, sestina, and canzone are correctly credited to Petrarch and Ariosto, rather than to Petrarch alone (pt. 1, p. xiv; pt. 2, p. xii), and the claim that Duke Alfonso did not allow his court poets to publish their works is softened from a point that "is clear" to one that "seems clear" (pt. 1, p. xv; pt. 2, p. xii).

Newcomb's editorial policies live up to A-R's stated goal of providing editions that fulfill the needs of both scholars and performers. Pitches and rhythms are the same as those in the sources. All source accidentals are retained, even when they are redundant in modern notation. Editorial accidentals, printed above the notes, are placed in parentheses when they are questionable or optional. The pieces are barred in breves, with modern time signatures of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] when the original signature is c, and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] when the original is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Passages in triple meter have modern signatures of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (for ternary groups of minims) or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (for ternary groups of semibreves). My preference would be for barring in semibreves in c and breves in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], because the semibreve is the largest musically meaningful unit in c, but this is simply a matter of taste; both alternatives are equally correct.

A more serious issue concerns the tempo equivalencies between duple and triple passages. Newcomb interprets all signs of triple meter as sesquialtera proportions (three notes in the time of two) without comment. These signs did not always specify exact proportions in the sixteenth century, and when they did, the proportion was usually triple (three notes in the time of one), not sesquialtera, when it was notated in ternary groups of semibreves (see my "Tempo Relationships between Duple and Triple Time in the Sixteenth Century," Early Music History: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Music 14 [1995]: 1-51, for details). Given the uncertainties surrounding the issue, I believe editors should either refrain from specifying tempo equivalencies or enclose such equivalencies in brackets. In either case, the issue as it applies to the given repertoire deserves attention in the critical notes.

The standard of quality and accuracy of the edition is exceptionally high. The music is well laid out, and the facsimile reproductions of sample pages from the sources are clear. A-R reports one minor error (pt. 2, p. 155) on its Web site (http://www.areditions.com/rr/rrr/rl39.html [accessed 23 August 2006]). I have found no others, but A-R deserves praise for providing a forum for such corrections whenever they may be discovered. Other publishers should take note.

With this superb edition, Luzzaschi can at last take his place not just as a famous name, but as a composer of a significant body of real music. Some of his music can already be heard on a compact disc by La Venexiana (Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Quinto libro de' madrigali, 1595, Glossa GCD 920905 [1995]). The remaining volumes of the edition, which will reveal the relation of Luzzaschi's late works to his early ones and make still more of his outstanding music available to scholars and performers, are eagerly anticipated.

RUTH I. DEFORD

Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York