Recent Researches in the Music of the Music of the Renaissance

Part 1: Primo libro di madregali a cinque voci (Ferrara, 1595)
R 119	ISBN 0-89579-446-2	(1999) xxii+86 pp.	$45.00

Alfonso Fontanelli (1557–1622) was a prominent musician and courtier in the Ferrarese court during its flowering in the last decades of the sixteenth century, where his colleagues included Luzzaschi, Wert, and Monteverdi. He became an important figure in the musical culture of Florence and Rome in the early seventeenth century. Fontanelli is consistently included with the most eminent composers of the time by seventeenth-century musicians (Peri, Del Turco, Monteverdi, da Gagliano and Banchieri in the first decade of the seventeenth century) at least until Marco Scacchi (1649), and repeatedly by modern scholars, at least since Alfred Einstein's pioneering monograph on the madrigal (1949). The present edition will finally make this exquisite and important music available to modern scholars and performers.

The edition will include Fontanelli's two published madrigal books (1595 and 1604), plus an anonymous manuscript anthology (ca. 1590) attributed to Fontanelli by the editor of this edition. The editor has traced the provenance of authorship of the texts set by Fontanelli, many of which the composer was the first to set. In each volume of this edition a few hitherto unpublished and illuminating settings by other composers will be included in an appendix. Texts, translations, and commentary accompany each piece.

See the article on this volume in Embellishments 9.