1553–1599 · Baroque
Luca Marenzio was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance who died in Rome in 1599. He worked as a singer and court musician for cardinals in Rome, in Florence and at the Polish court. He became famous for his madrigals, vocal pieces for several voices in which the music follows the meaning of each word. The site has his madrigal "Solo e pensoso".
Luca Marenzio came from Coccaglio, a little town close to Brescia. According to the biographer Leonardo Cozzando, who wrote in the late seventeenth century, his family was poor and had seven children; the father held a post as a notary’s clerk in Brescia. In childhood Luca probably learned church singing in Brescia.
He may have received his first music lessons from Giovanni Contino, who led the choir of Brescia Cathedral between 1565 and 1567. It is possible that in 1568 Marenzio went with Contino to Mantua, where Contino entered the service of the Gonzaga family. Later the composer himself mentioned spending five years in Mantua at the Gonzaga court, but he did not say when exactly this was.
After Brescia and Mantua, Marenzio ended up in Rome. There he served Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo until 1578, evidently as a singer. Madruzzo had earlier employed Contino as well, so it is possible that the place was found through him.
Marenzio then moved to the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, a friend of Madruzzo. Here he became known as a composer of madrigals. He styled himself the cardinal’s choirmaster in the dedicatory note of his first madrigal book, though Luigi had only a handful of musicians. The cardinal asked little of him and left him a good deal of time for his own music. Soon after hiring him, Luigi tried to win him a place in the papal choir but could not, for political reasons.
In the winter and spring of 1580–1581 Marenzio travelled with Luigi to Ferrara, one of the main centres of new secular music in the late sixteenth century. He took part in the festivities for the wedding of Vincenzo Gonzaga and Margherita Farnese, an occasion that called for equally lavish music. He may have heard the recently founded Concerto delle donne, an ensemble of virtuoso women singers whose repertory of “secret music” strongly influenced madrigal writing as the Renaissance drew to a close. In Ferrara he wrote two whole books of new madrigals and dedicated them to Alfonso II and Lucrezia d’Este.
His salary from the cardinal was modest, only five scudi a month, and in the dedication of his third book of madrigals for six voices (1585) Marenzio complained about it. In a letter of 1584 he asked to be paid more promptly. Extra income probably came from work in Rome, performing as a singer or playing the lute. During his years with Luigi he more than once looked for other work, applying to become chapel master at the court of Mantua. In 1583 Luigi toyed with the idea of presenting him to King Henry III of France in Paris, though nothing came of it, and Marenzio was greatly relieved.
Luigi d’Este died on 30 December 1586. By then Marenzio was famous internationally: his madrigal books were issued and reissued in Italy and in the Netherlands as well, and many pieces were included in anthologies. His contemporaries also knew him as an expert lutenist.
With his patron gone, Marenzio probably carried on freelancing in Rome. Sometime in 1587 he was in Verona, becoming acquainted with Count Mario Bevilacqua and attending the Accademia Filarmonica, a society that brought musicians and humanists together. By the end of that year he was serving Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and Florence is where he spent the next two years. Most likely he had entered Ferdinando’s service already in Rome, when Ferdinando was still a cardinal, and then followed him to Florence.
In Florence Marenzio worked with the musicians of Count Giovanni Bardi, in whose house artists gathered. It is hard to judge how far the Florentine composers influenced his music. He never wrote solo song, as Giulio Caccini and other Florentines did, but he did make friends with Piero Strozzi and Antonio de’ Bicci, two Florentine amateur composers.
Marenzio came back to Rome on 30 November 1589 and served a number of patrons while staying largely independent. Until 1593 he had rooms in the Orsini palace and worked for Virginio Orsini, whose uncle was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, was another key patron; he led an informal academy of writers and scholars and provided Marenzio with rooms in the Vatican.
John Dowland arrived in Italy in 1595 to meet Marenzio, with whom he had corresponded while still living in England. The Englishman reached Florence and said that he wished to study with Marenzio. Whether he did so is not known, and perhaps they never met at all.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century Marenzio travelled to Poland at the invitation of King Sigismund III. It was his final and a long trip. In Warsaw, where the court had recently moved, he took the post of chapel master: his predecessor, Annibale Stabile, had died after serving there for only two months.
In Warsaw he composed and conducted sacred music: motets for two choirs, a Te Deum for thirteen voices and the Mass Super Iniquo odio habui. Nobody knew where this Mass was for about four hundred years; it turned up once the Berlin Wall had come down. Writers before the twentieth century held that the Pope had ordered the trip to Poland and that it ruined the composer’s health.
In 1598 Marenzio visited Venice. On his way back from Poland he passed through that city and dedicated his eighth book of madrigals for five voices to the Gonzaga family. He was then appointed a musician at the papal court, but he died the following year.
Marenzio died in Rome on 22 August 1599, cared for by his brother at the Villa Medici, in its garden on the Pincian hill. He was buried at the San Lorenzo in Lucina church. In the course of his career he served several aristocratic Italian families, among them the Gonzaga, the Este and the Medici, and he spent most of those years in Rome.
Marenzio became famous as a composer of madrigals. He wrote around five hundred of them, mostly for five voices, with quite a few for four and for six. They differ widely in mood, from the very light to the very serious, and most are love lyrics or pastorals. Among the well-known ones are "Solo e pensoso", "O voi che sospirate" and "Cruda Amarilli". He took his texts from leading Italian poets, including Dante and Petrarch.
Marenzio joined separate pieces into multi-part cycles, in line with the general tendency to make the madrigal more dramatic. The Sixth Book, for example, contains the six-part "Giovane donna" ("Young lady"), set to a sestina by Petrarch, and the ten-part "Se quel dolor" ("What pain"), set to verses by L. Tansillo.
He treated each text as a separate problem and solved it by that text alone, so one cannot speak of a single Marenzio style. A typical device is music that mirrors a particular word or image: words about sinking in the sea, for example, are set to a descending line of notes. Over time the tone of his works grew more serious, and in his last decade he experimented boldly with chromaticism. In "O voi che sospirate" he passes through the entire circle of fifths inside one phrase.
His sacred music is less well known and was only partly published in his lifetime: four masses, two Magnificats, a collection of motets for the feasts of the whole church year (1585), a collection of spiritual madrigals (1584) and the Spiritual Songs, which appeared after the composer’s death in 1616. He also wrote lighter canzonettas and villanelles. Almost all his works first appeared in print in Venice. A complete edition prepared by Bernhard Meier and Roland Jackson came out in seven volumes between 1976 and 2000.
His music had a strong influence on madrigal composers in Italy, England and Germany. In England the collection Musica transalpina (1588) contained more of his works than of anyone else's except Alfonso Ferrabosco, and English composers later took his pieces as a model: Thomas Morley and John Wilbye, as well as Thomas Weelkes, learned from his music. The site currently has one edition, "Solo e pensoso", a madrigal for five voices; its level on our scale is intermediate.