Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] Fabbri, Anna Maria

1. Life.

Fontanelli’s father, Count Emilio Fontanelli, died in 1579, and in 1580 Alfonso married Veronica of the Conti di Correggio; they had one child, who died in infancy. Fontanelli’s activity as a servant of the Este family began in 1584, in which year he helped organize the festivities for the official visit of the Ferrarese Duchess Margherita d’Este to Reggio. In the same year he became maestro di camera of Alfonso d’Este, Marquis of Montecchio and uncle of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara; in 1586 he passed into the service of the marquis’s son Cesare, the future Duke of Modena. His service in the court of Cesare took him to Rome in 1586 and again in 1587, the second time with the delicate charge of settling the affairs of the debt-ridden Cardinal Luigi d’Este (Marenzio’s employer), who had died in late 1586. This protracted stay in Rome probably brought him into contact not only with Marenzio, but also with other Roman composers active in the 1580s. It was presumably his skill in handling Luigi’s estate (and perhaps reports of his musical skills) that caused him to be called in 1588 to the main centre of Este patronage, the court of Duke Alfonso II at Ferrara. His first surviving compositions probably come from the end of this period (Newcomb, 1974).

Fontanelli’s status as an increasingly trusted representative of the Este court was to take him to the principal centres of musical activity in Italy. Repeated official visits to the Gonzaga court in Mantua are documented in the early 1590s, as are visits to the Medici court in Florence in 1590 and 1592. In 1591 and 1593 he returned to Rome with Duke Alfonso to plead the case of the Este succession in Ferrara with Pope Clement VIII. In 1594 he accompanied Carlo Gesualdo in his visits to Florence, Venice, Venosa and Naples as part of the travels surrounding Gesualdo’s marriage to Eleonora d’Este, sister of Cesare. His first wife having died, Fontanelli married Maria Biancoli in 1591. His first published book of madrigals (1595) appeared with the group of madrigal books by Luzzaschi, Gesualdo, and other Neapolitan musicians published by the Ferrarese court in 1594–7. In Ferrara during those years there arose the famous dispute between Monteverdi and Artusi over dissonance treatment that led to Monteverdi’s proclamation of the seconda pratica. In all contemporary writings Fontanelli is listed as one of the leaders of this new style, and Orazio Vecchi’s preface to the second edition of Fontanelli’s first book confirms that his music had become involved in this controversy (although, as noblemen, neither Fontanelli nor Gesualdo were likely to be subject to Artusi’s direct attack).

Duke Alfonso II died childless in late 1597 and the duchy of Ferrara reverted to the Church; Cesare d’Este was forced to retire to the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, bestowed on the family by the Empire. Fontanelli followed the court to Modena and assumed the position of maestro di camera to Duke Cesare. This office again sent him to Florence (1599 and 1601), Rome (1600, with Orazio Vecchi, with whom he returned via Florence) and Paris (1600).

In November of 1601 Fontanelli was stripped of his property and banned from Este territory for the murder of his wife’s lover. In early 1602 he joined the service of Cardinal Alessandro d’Este, Cesare’s younger brother, as maggiordomo and effective head of the Roman household (reportedly a very lavish one) during the frequent periods when Alessandro was in Modena. A letter of April 1603 from Fontanelli to his friend and confidant Ridolfo Arlotti (Sirch, 1994) tells of the Thursday evening musicales that Fontanelli held in the Roman palace, attended by many of the principal musicians of the city. His second book of published madrigals (1604) appeared during this period.

Presumably through the offices of Alessandro and other influential friends, Fontanelli was returned almost immediately to the good graces of Duke Cesare, whose official resident in the papal court he became in 1605. Fontanelli continued to travel widely, and to visit musicians wherever he was. It seems that he also continued to compose. A letter of Marco da Gagliano (Vogel, 1889, 552–3) reports that Fontanelli had been in Florence in June of 1608, that his visit had led to continuous music-making, and that he had delighted musicians there with his ‘usual exquisite madrigals’ – presumably unpublished ones. Fontanelli was frequently at the Florentine court in the first decade of the century, where he belonged to the musical Accademia degli Elevati (Strainchamps, 1976). He is mentioned in the preface to Peri’s Euridice (1600) and the dedication to Del Turco’s Primo libro de madrigali (RISM 1602⁹), and he stood as godfather to one of Peri’s sons in March 1608 (Kirkendale, 1993).

In late November 1608 Fontanelli – apparently responding to heavy pressure from Duke Cesare, whose wife was a Medici – assumed the post of maggiordomo maggiore e Cavaliere d’honore at the court of the Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, the recently arrived wife of Prince and soon-to-be Grand Duke of Florence, Cosimo II. On 24 December of the same year he was appointed Capo principale et d’autorità over all the musicians of the Medici court (Santi 1910, 357). It would appear that Fontanelli was brought in to try to calm the bitter internecine fighting that went on among the musicians of the Florentine court, fighting that had been especially marked during the wedding festivities in October 1608 (Carter, 1983). Contrary to what is reported in some scholarship, Fontanelli does not appear to have been directly involved in these October festivities, but to have been brought in afterwards to restore order and decorum in the Medici music establishment. He remained in the post until mid-January 1610, when he remarked in a letter to his friend Arlotti that he could ‘take it no longer’.

In 1611–12 Fontanelli was sent to the court of Spain as the Este resident. In the next years he continued to travel widely in Italy (Milan, Turin, Venice, Rome) on missions for the Este court. By 1615 letters of his friend the poet Alessandro Tassoni remark on his renewed permanence in Rome, again in the circle of Cardinals Montalto and Scipione Borghese, among the richest and most powerful of the Roman cardinals. By early 1617 he had become increasingly involved with the Oratorio dei Filippini at the Chiesa Nuova (S Maria in Vallicella), for which he provided music at least from 1620 onwards. An undated letter from this period (Morelli, 1991, pp.26, 180–81) describes his life at this time, including musical visits to Cardinals Este, del Monte and Montalto. At the end of 1621 Fontanelli took priestly orders. A letter of Tassoni dated 5 March 1622 reports that he had died of an insect bite received in the Oratorio della Chiesa Nuova. The official record of his death gives the date as 11 February (Morelli, 1991).

2. Works.

Fontanelli’s music has long been both lauded and neglected. Becker wrote that he was among the best madrigalists of his time, and Einstein considered him the most gifted of the many noblemen-composers at the end of the century (whose number included such figures as Striggio and Gesualdo). His first printed book of madrigals is decisively in the new Ferrarese style of the 1590s, a style also represented by some pieces from Gesualdo’s first four books and from Luzzaschi’s fourth, fifth and sixth books. Like his colleagues in this style, Fontanelli was at times bold and experimental in his handling of dissonance and in his use of direct chromaticism and wide-ranging harmonies. But, like his mentor Luzzaschi and unlike Gesualdo, this is not the primary identifying feature of his style.

It is in his handling of texture that Fontanelli, like the later Luzzaschi, is distinctive. Fontanelli avoided the trio texture characteristic of the villanella and beloved of Marenzio, Wert and Monteverdi (mostly parallel 3rds or 6ths in the upper voices over an independent lowest voice). He also avoided almost entirely the diminution-like melismas characteristic of the ‘luxuriant style’ madrigals written for the various new concerti di donne of the 1580s. Much of his writing is discontinuous and complex in texture, with nervous imitation of jagged subjects declaimed in quavers and rich in cross-relations. Unlike almost all the madrigals of the closing years of the century, in many passages in Fontanelli’s madrigals it is nearly impossible to imagine a basso seguente and accompaniment by a chordal instrument. He was a master at avoiding strong cadential articulations in the course of a piece, and, again like Luzzaschi, he knew the rhetorical and articulative value of silence: the rest for all voices, often preceded by the weakest of cadences or none at all. Sections isolated by this method were usually repeated with their material recomposed, often involving the vertical rearrangement of the component parts. As a madrigalist Fontanelli was a miniaturist. Most of his pieces are no more than 35 breves long and take under three minutes to perform. The result was, as Gagliano said in 1608, madrigali rarissimi – exquisite lyric pieces meant for connoisseurs, both as performers and listeners. The preface to Fontanelli’s second book (1604) says that the composer had been careful to avoid sameness of style, even lowering his style on occasion, in order to please all tastes. Although most of the pieces in the book are in the exquisite and rarified style of the first book, there is also a polyphonically much simpler style reflected mainly in the last pieces of the collection. One must recall that Fontanelli was no longer composing for the esoteric tastes of the Ferrarese court.

Although documents make it clear that Fontanelli continued to compose after 1604 (Vogel, 1889, Strainchamps, 1976 and Morelli, 1991), none of this music has been identified. It has been suggested (Newcomb, 1974) that a manuscript of anonymous madrigals (in I-MOe) is a collection of pieces written by Fontanelli in the years immediately preceding July 1590 (when he referred to a manuscript collection of madrigals from his pen). The pieces in this manuscript, in their expansiveness and in some of their texts, suggest a composer more oriented towards Rome than was Fontanelli in the first book of 1595. If the composer of the manuscript is indeed Fontanelli, this Roman quality may reflect his sojourns in Rome in the later 1580s; the manuscript also would offer the only full collection of datable pieces by a member of the new Ferrarese-Neapolitan school of the later 1590s written during the decade before 1594.

WORKS

Primo libro de’ madregali senza nome, 5vv (Ferrara, 1595)

Secondo libro de’ madrigali senza nome, 5vv (Venice, 1604)

Madrigal 159214; ed. in Newcomb, 1974

15 madrigals, I-MOe Mus.F 1525; authorship uncertain, attrib. Fontanelli in Newcomb, 1974

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBI (Pelagalli and A. Scarpa)

EinsteinIM

NewcombMF

A. Pocaterra: Due dialoghi della vergogna (2/1607)

A. Banchieri: Conclusioni nel suono dell’organo (Bologna, 1609/R, 2/1626 as Armoniche conclusioni nel suono dell’organo; Eng. trans., 1982), 60

V. Giustiniani: Discorso sopra la musica (MS, 1628, I-La); ed. and trans. in MSD, ix (1962), 63–80

G. Guasco: Storia litteraria del principio e progresso dell’Accademia di belle lettere in Reggio (Reggio, 1711), 166ff

G. Tiraboschi: Biblioteca modenese, ii (Modena, 1782/R), 324–8; vi (1786/R), 114

G. Becker: ‘Aus meiner Bibliothek’, MMg, viii (1876), 155–7, 165–202

E. Vogel: ‘Marco da Gagliano: zur Geschichte des florentiner Musiklebens von 1570–1650’, VMw, v (1889), 509–68

V. Santi: ‘La storia nella Secchia Rapita’, Memorie della Reale Accademia di scienze, lettere, ed arti in Modena, 3rd ser., vi (1906), 355; ix (1910), 349–66

F. Vatielli: Il principe di Venosa e Leonora d’Este (Milan, 1941)

A. Newcomb: ‘Carlo Gesualdo and a Musical Correspondence of 1594’, MQ, liv (1968), 409–36

C.V. Palisca: ‘The Artusi–Monteverdi Controversy’, The Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1968, 2/1985 as The New Monteverdi Companion), 133–66

G. Watkins: Gesualdo: the Man and his Music (Oxford, 1973, 2/1991)

A. Newcomb: ‘Alfonso Fontanelli and the Ancestry of the Seconda Pratica Madrigal’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R.L. Marshall (Kassel and Hackensack, 1974), 47–68

E. Strainchamps: ‘New Light on the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence’, MQ, lxii (1976), 507–35

D. Butchart: The Madrigal in Florence, 1560–1630 (diss., U. of Oxford, 1979)

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Cronistoria del Concerto delle dame (Florence, 1979/R)

T. Carter: ‘A Florentine Wedding of 1608’, AcM, lv (1983), 89–107

K. Larson: The Unaccompanied Madrigal in Naples from 1536 to 1654 (diss., Harvard U., 1985)

L. Sirch: ‘Il Secondo Libro di Madrigali a cinque voci di Alfonso Fontanelli (1604)’, NRMI, xi (1986), 225–56

L. Sirch: “‘Era l’anima mia”: Monteverdi, Fontanelli, Pecci e Pallavicino’, Rassegna veneta di studi musicali, v–vi (1989–90), 103–35

A. Morelli: Il Tempio Armonico: musica nell’oratoria dei Filippini in Roma, AnMc, xxvii (1991)

W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)

L. Sirch: “‘Et è pur meglio un gentiluomo che un Giuseppino che canti”: un musico per il cardinale Alessandro d’Este’, Il madrigale oltre il madrigale, ed. A. Colzani, A. Luppi, M. Padoan (Como, 1994), 197–226

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Le due ‘scelte’ napoletane di Luzzasco Luzzaschi (Florence, 1998)

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

Directory: download -> 3062a7ba-8b89-4266-8568-82026f790e50 -> Bibliografia%20Básica
download -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations
download -> Bbc archives: Beyond the programme download
download -> Occupational health and safety
download -> Dynatest 3031 lwd light Weight Deflectometer
download -> Forth coming competitive exams
download -> English Olympiad Tasks: 10 th form Аудіювання, 10 клас. Текст
download -> Brush High School Morning Announcements Friday, September 05, 2014 all school
download -> Year 9 The Arts — Music
download -> Years 7 and 8 standard elaborations — Australian Curriculum: Music draft
Bibliografia%20Básica -> Oakeley, Sir Herbert (Stanley)

Download 19.1 Mb.

Share with your friends: