Alfonso Fontanelli: The Complete Madrigals

Anthony Newcomb

Alfonso Fontanelli (1557–1622) was a prominent musician and courtier in the Ferrarese court establishment during its great flowering in the last decades of the sixteenth century, where his colleagues included Luzzaschi, Wert, and Monteverdi. He went on to become and important figure in the musical worlds of Florence and Rome in the early seventeenth century. Fontanelli is consistently numbered among the most eminent composers of the time—in the first decade of the seventeenth century alone by the musicians Jacopo Peri, Giovanni Del Turco, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, Marco da Gagliano, and Adriano Banchieri. Such praise lasts at least until mid-century, as expressed by Marco Scacchi in 1649. Modern scholars since Alfred Einstein’s pioneering monograph of 1949 have agreed with the earlier assessment. The present edition will finally make this exquisite music (da Gagliano’s phrase) generally available to modern scholars and performers.

Einstein, in The Italian Madrigal, called Fontanelli “Gesualdo’s harmonious and well-balanced counterpart” and “perhaps more gifted” than any of the noblemen-composers of madrigals at the end of the century—that number includes Striggio, Gesualdo, and Del Turco. Unlike Gesualdo, however, Fontanelli was conflicted about exercising his musical gifts, worrying that it was an unseemly activity for a nobleman, and he seems to have renounced even anonymous publication once his career as a courtier and statesman was well-established. In any case, no compositions of his are known to survive from later than the Second Book of 1604, although he died in 1622.

This edition will include Fontanelli’s two anonymously published madrigal books (1595 and 1604), plus an anonymous manuscript anthology (ca. 1590) attributed by me to Fontanelli, on the basis of one concordant attribution, a series of letters by Fontanelli, and the choice of text set. I have aimed with particular diligence to assess the style of all the texts set by Fontanelli and to trace the provenance and authorship of these texts, many of which Fontanelli was the first to set. For each piece, texts, attributions of the text, if known, with sources, translations of the texts, and commentary on text and setting are provided.

The commentaries on the individual pieces, sometimes fairly extended, often discuss other settings of the same or closely related texts, especially where the relations with Fontanelli’s setting can illuminate elements of his distinctive style. Where modern editions of the comparison pieces are not generally available, editions of the pieces discussed are provided in the appendix to each volume. These appendices will include pieces by Ruggiero Giovannelli, Sigismondo d’India, Giovanni Maria Nanino, Antonio Cifra, Giovan Domenico Montella, Pomponio Nenna, Scipione Dentice, Giovanni Andrea Dragoni, Marc’ Antonio Ingegneri, and Filippo de Monte.

Title page of Fontanelli’s Primo libro, reissued by Angelo Gardano in 1603 (courtesy of Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale G.B. Martini, Bologna)

I have been interested in and working on the polyphonic madrigal emerging from the court of Ferrara in the final decade of the century for over twenty years now, and this edition, with its introductory commentaries, is an opportunity to bring to publication some of the fruits of this work. The major composers directly connected with this intense center of activity were Luzzaschi, the acknowledged mentor of both Gesualdo and Fontanelli (and Girolamo Frescobaldi), and Gesualdo and Fontanelli themselves. Each member of this triumvirate was separated in age by about a decade, Luzzaschi having been born in 1545, Fontanelli in 1557, and Gesualdo in 1566. Gesualdo’s madrigals have long been available in modern edition. Companion volumes to this present edition will include the complete madrigals without continuo of Luzzasco Luzzaschi. Thus we will finally be able to assess and compare the principle works of the creators of the Ferrarese seconda prattica.

In the process of working on both these editions, I have consulted one example at least of every printing of the madrigal books by these two composers, in search of variants, paste-on corrections, and handwritten emendations. In the case of Luzzaschi, I have looked at every surviving partbook. With Fontanelli, I have also been able to look at a fair selection of his letters, since a goodly number of them, both personal and official, survive. His personal letters reveal an urbane, mildly cynical, highly sophisticated, often ironically humorous character, and a figure in the thick of the musical politics of the time.

A similar style of elegant, sophisticated understatement marks the madrigals as well. Fontanelli’s musical style is closest to Gesualdo’s in their publications of 1595 and 1596, but it is always more distanced, more restrained in expression, more decorous, less self-important. In Fontanelli’s Second Book of 1604, the interaction seems to be more with a Florentine and Roman group of composers also publishing at the time (Caccini, Dentice, Nenna). It may also show an attempt to bring his ideal of the polyphonic madrigal into some accommodation with the trend towards accompanied monody.

Fontanelli’s madrigals are not as fiendishly difficult to sing as Gesualdo’s, and they allow their texts to speak with a quick directness that recalls the songs of Hugo Wolf. They should offer many a quintet of singers both professional and amateur a skillful and effective repertoire of vocal chamber music.♦