SPREZZATURA
In Venice, 1528, Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) published a work called Il Cortegiano (The Courtier). It is a wide-ranging discussion about life at court and the ideals of courtly behaviour. One moral imperative – “never be tedious” – underlies his instructions. He also states that none of the courtier’s attainments in arms, letters, arts, sport, music or conversation should lack “sprezzatura”: the unforced ease of accomplishment and sense of effortless superiority which was to be looked on for centuries as the trademark of the perfect gentleman.

Castiglione’s ideal courtier was at home in all noble sports including: running, leaping, swimming and wrestling. He was a good dancer, an accomplished rider, and a master of several languages. He was also familiar with literature and had some knowledge of the fine arts. In music, a certain practical skill was expected of him, which he was bound, nevertheless, to keep as secret as possible. The perfect balance of these accomplishments – all governed by “sprezzatura” – resulted in the perfect man in whom no one quality eclipsed any other. This ideal encapsulated the European mind of the 16th century. Giulio Romano Caccini (1550-1618) was the first to apply the term “sprezzatura” to the composition of music. Caccini, a composer, singer and instrumentalist, began his career in church singing in Rome before gaining a place at the Court of Cosimi I dei Medici in Florence in the late 1560s. He toured the European courts including those of Paris and Ferrara where he first came into contact with the brilliantly executed florid singing of the concerto delle dame which was to influence his compositional style in years to come. In Florence he was accepted into the “academy” of Count Giovanni Bardi, where, by 1573, the most celebrated noblemen and musicians were engaged in the latest fashion of the day: discussing, and attempting to realise in music, ideals articulated from Greek antiquity.

It was the excessive use of polyphony – with its predominance of music over words – which prompted this return to Greek ideals: by shifting the emphasis away from polyphony, the Florentine Camerata hoped to bring about a new kind of dramatic expressiveness. Plato's Republic stated the precept that in a song (melos), the harmonia (agreement or relation of sounds) and the rhythmos (time and rhythm) should follow the logos (word or thought). This concept became the basis for a new compositional style, called stile rappresentativo. Also known as recitar cantando, or “singing recitation,” this new style came to dominate the composition of vocal solos called “monody” and was to contribute to the development of early opera. Caccini explicitly refers to this new emphasis in the preface to his work Euridice (Florence 1600), owning that he had “employed a certain sprezzatura” which he considered to have “something noble about it, believing that by means of it [he] could approach that much closer to the essence of speech.”

The new “monody” was a marriage of words and music characterised, roughly speaking, by a compositional technique which set a note to each syllable, but allowed for embellishment (and virtuosity) at significant moments: on accented syllables, or on the penultimate notes of the “close” or cadence. Caccini set out the rules for this “new music” in the lengthy preface to his first published edition of solo songs, Le NuoveMusiche (1602). He “only used counterpoint to bind the two parts [the song and the continuo] together, and to avoid certain obvious defects”. He wrote of introducing dissonances “negligently” (with the inevitable “sprezzatura”) to relieve the “blandness” of concord. Caccini directed, for example, that bars 15-17 of the madrigal “Deh, dove son fuggiti” be performed “without regular rhythm, as if speaking in tones, with the aforesaid negligence.” This use of rhythmic flexibility as an expressive device foreshadows the development of modern of rubato.



COMPOSITIONAL STYLE
Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche is a collection of works for solo voice and basso continuo. Caccini uses two distinct compositional styles in the collection: twelve “madrigals” – through-composed, somewhat rhythmically-free compositions with rhapsodic passages designed to emphasise the important words in the text – and ten “arias” which are shorter and usually strophic.

The type of solo “madrigal” pioneered by Caccini is distinguished from the polyphonic madrigal which was the most popular form of secular composition during the late Renaissance. By 1540 the polyphonic madrigal had achieved such popularity that virtually every professional composer in Italy wrote madrigals by the dozens, and many avowed amateurs had madrigals published. One of the most innovative and accomplished masters of the madrigal was Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). He published eight books of secular madrigals over a period of fifty years, each collection representing a different stage in the development of his compositional style. In the fourth and fifth books we observe the madrigal at its zenith: Monteverdi's clarity of line and careful use of word painting create a sensitive expression of the poetry, resulting in a collection of miniature masterpieces.

The compositional techniques Monteverdi employed from the third book onwards he termed seconda pratica. These techniques are distinguished from prima pratica (purely music-based rules of composition) by the primacy of the “word.”

On this disc the twelve solo madrigals of Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche contrast with six of Monteverdi’s five-voice madrigals chosen from Books III, IV and V. Interspersed with these are instrumental pieces from the period.

The Monteverdi and Caccini settings both use secular texts (often by the same poet). In each madrigal the melody and rhythm of each setting are dictated by the sense and shape of the poetic line. The absence of this quality in earlier forms of the madrigal was the object of a polemic by Caccini in his famous Preface to the 1602 edition of Le Nuove Musiche.

The goal of this new style of writing was “muovere gli affetti,” to “move the passions.” To achieve this end, each composer used his own style. Monteverdi employed a complex set of musical devices to reflect the mood of the verse: melody set to the rhythms of speech (homophony) alternating with contrapuntal passages; together with the use of dissonance and chromaticism. Caccini’s style made use of expressive melody over an elastic figured bass. The melody itself was illustrated through the controlled use of splendid vocal technique and virtuosity. The methods needed to develop such virtuosity and technique are set out by Caccini – who was a singing teacher – in his Preface to Le Nuove Musiche. This instructive introduction could be regarded as the first treatise on singing and performance practice.



COURTLY LOVE
Both Monteverdi and Caccini set poetry by Guarini (author of Il Pastor Fido and father of "pastoral poetry") and OttavioRinuccini. The latter collaborated with Peri and Caccini in the creation of the earliest Florentine operas and for the text of Monteverdi’s operatic Arianna and Il Ballodelle Ingrate. The texts of “Non piu guerra, pietate” and “Perfidissimo volto” are the same in both composers’ settings, and the poetry of the paired pieces “Amarilli mia bella” and “Cruda Amarilli” and “Fortunato Augellino” and “Quel Augellin” share the same spirit.

Castiglione’s courtier followed in the footsteps of Dante and Petrarch on the subject of Love. The ideal object of love was a woman who was married and therefore out of reach, but nonetheless longed for with an intensity which only unrequited love could enflame. The poems set by Caccini and Monteverdi sing of bitter tears, sweet sighing, painful partings, the cruelty of infidelity or rejection and the ardent fires of love. The use of pastoral rather than religious imagery represents a distinct shift away from the divine, and mirrors the evolution of Renaissance humanism. The use of such poetry also challenges the dominance of classical mythology and religious imagery as the principal means of expression for the educated man. Castiglione’s courtier could express and experience “love” in the vernacular language of the human, rather than the language of the mythic or divine. By loving thus he could, however – as Castiglione posited in the final book of Il Cortegiano – still approach the divine.



NOTATION AND ORNAMENTATION
Among the notational innovations developed by Caccini was the specification and writing out of ornamentation. Previously, ornamentation had always been left to the discretion of the performers. In order to eliminate “excesses” on the part of singers (which presumably obscured the text), Caccini wrote out the music exactly as he wished it to be performed. He did, however, still allow for improvisation to emphasise significant words and cadences. The use of ornamentation was thus restricted to expressing the text, and was no longer an end in itself, as had been the case in earlier vocal practice.

One type of ornamentation specified by Caccini, which may be less familiar to modern ears is the trillo: a kind of “tremolo” in which fluctuations of intensity are sounded like a reiteration of the note. Caccini includes the trillo in “the good manner of singing” as a thing written one way, but sung another way “for more grace” and “refinement” (“squisitezza”), qualities of which Castiglione would have approved.



INSTRUMENTATION
The lute was the pre-eminent accompanying instrument for secular song in the late Renaissance and at the beginning of the Baroque. The favourite instrument of Caccini was the large arch-lute or chitarrone, which played a conspicuous role in early monody. It could be used alone or in combination with other instruments.

Bellerofonte Castaldi (1580-1649) was a poet who wrote a small number of madrigals as well as a volume of instrumental music published in 1622. Castaldi championed the work of Giovanni GirolamoKapsberger (1580-1651), a Roman who was one of the first lute virtuosi to write for the chitarrone.

One of the most important Italian composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque was Girolamo Alessandro Frescobaldi (b. 1583), organist at St. Peter’s in Rome from 1608 till his death in 1643. His instrumental music is less well-known. Frescobaldi has much in common with the inventor of “sprezzatura” in vocal music. He, like Caccini, experimented with a more modern conception of tempo, abandoning the rigid tactus in favour of the expressive use of acceleration and deceleration within a piece.

Peter Philips (1560-1628) was an English composer, organist and Catholic priest exiled to Flanders after the start of the Reformation. One of the greatest keyboard virtuosi of his time, he transcribed motets and madrigals by Lassus, Palestrina and Caccini. His transcription of the famous tune “Amarilli,” may be found alongside other works in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Philips came into contact with these works whilst in service to Alessandro Cardinal Farnese in Rome between 1582 and 1585. From 1585-1590 he travelled to Genoa, Madrid, Paris and Brussels where, in 1607-1608, he met Frescobaldi.

Philips not only transcribed many of the vocal pieces written between 1530 and 1605, he also elaborated these with ornamentation, runs, trills and arpeggios, magnificently capturing on the keyboard the pioneering practice of the late Renaissance/early Baroque madrigal singing.

[The performance of Caccini's opera Il Rapimento di Cefalo (of which score sadly only the chorus on this disc remains), on 9 October 1600 at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence boasted a cast, chorus and orchestra of, by Caccini's account, 75 persons, and entertained (at vast expense) a Medici court audience of 3,800 persons as part of the festivities surrounding the marriage (by proxy) of Maria de' Medici to Henry IV of Bourbon.]