To Speak Through Singing

Claudio Monteverdi, wrote in a letter in the 1630s that the goal of music was ‘to speak through singing” In spending much of my life researching, promoting, and performing the ‘new music’ of the 17th century, I have observed that it is characterized by an underlying urgent impulse to communicate the human experience - and it is precisely the intensity of that impulse that continues to draw me to music of this fascinating, unsettled, and dynamic period. [1]

The 17th century was a period of pervasive upheaval, which violently shook the very foundations of the world in all realms of life. It was a time when alchemy and empirical science easily coexisted, a time when the exploration of new worlds and the investigation of the sky challenged traditional conceptions of the place of earth in the universe, a time of religious persecution and political conflict - a time not that different from today. And like tumultuous periods throughout history it was also a time that produced some of our most treasured art, architecture, poetry, and music.

In the first decade of the 17th century Monteverdi wrote that he intended to publish a treatise describing the 'secunda pratica' or ‘second practice,’ the new compositional attitude that he and his colleagues had adopted. Drawing on Plato, he said that his book would be laid out in three parts and would begin with a chapter on oration. How appropriate that a manifesto of the new music of the 17th century should give such prominence to the rhetorical art, for the communication of words and the emotions they express was the dominant motivation driving composers of the period. Through the experiments that led to the creation of the genres of opera, oratorio, and cantata, composers sought to integrate drama and music into new compositional approaches that reflected the immediacy and engagement so essential to the art of oratory.

Perhaps because the fruits of these experiments remain fundamental to musical perception three centuries later, they take on a special significance for us. The basic elements of what we now call “common practice” tonality, the dominance of the keyboard as the basis of musical conception, the emergence of institutions like orchestras and opera companies and the appearance of professional virtuoso performers – the very notion that the purpose of music was to move the passions and communicate emotions – all this developed in the seventeenth century. I would argue that beyond a mere curiosity about the origins of our current musical universe, the music of the seventeenth century has a special resonance for us today because we also are living through a 'paradigm shift' comparable to the crises of the seventeenth century, with all the attendant upheaval characteristic of such times.

The culture of late 16th century Italy was marked by sharp philosophical contrasts and an eclectic intellectual climate. Historians typically portray this culture as a confrontation of conflicting intellectual, spiritual and social forces: classical versus Christian tradition, totalitarianism versus republicanism, feudalism versus capitalism, logic versus rhetoric, mysticism versus scientific rationalism. Certainly the turn of the seventeenth century was no worse than any other time – wars, famine, recessions, epidemics and religious controversies were not inventions of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless the constant political and economic insecurity of the 16th century had succeeded in shaking the self-confidence of Renaissance society to such a degree that awareness of a sense inescapable crisis, of the absurdity of human endeavor, could effectively replace his faith in the creative forces of man as a rational creature.

Just as powerfully, the effect of the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Catholic reaction had shattered any sense of spiritual universality (though this was always a myth in any case). Religious denomination became a favorite pre-text in power politics, the most horrific example being the Thirty Years War that dominated the lives of most of Europe for the first half of the 17th century.

The human species’ place at the center of the universe had been challenged by discoveries of Copernicus and especially by Galileo’s experiments with telescopes. Though it would not be until the 18th century that a conception of the Earth as a speck lost in an infinite universe would be widely accepted, doubt nevertheless prevailed about the accepted Aristotelian cosmology despite the draconian efforts of the Church to maintain it.

In his influential book Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, Gary Tomlinson focuses on the dichotomy between scholasticism and humanism in charting the development of Monteverdi’s music and his observations tell us a great deal about the fundamental shift in the attitudes of artists, musicians, and poets of the period and the new techniques and genres of expression that they created. This struggle between authority and innovation can serve as a useful window into the artistic climate of the time that highlights the role of oratory and rhetoric in stimulating its artistic expression.

Scholasticism arouse in the universities of the Middle Ages and was closely associated with the teaching there of theology, philosophy, medicine and law. It was characterized by a reliance on authority in the form of Scripture and Classical texts and a faith in the absolute truth of knowledge gained through rigorous deductive logic.

Aristotle in particular appeared to present a systematic exploration of the full potential of human reason itself. Many scholastic writers were confident that complete knowledge was attainable and indeed already had been attained by a few ancient and early Christian writers in their fields of expertise. It can be said that the scholastic vision assumed not only the existence of a universal order but also a substantial capacity of the human mind to grasp this order. The appeal of such a attitude is of course its fundamentally optimistic view of man’s intellectual capabilities and the fact that it reinforced the unity, perfection and authority of an omnipotent God.

However, if reality was closed, systematically ordered, and completely apprehensible as the scholastics believed, then knowledge itself must be limited. Accepting the authority of the ancients could ultimately entail rejecting the possibility of new ideas. Though it may be easy to dismiss the “Schoolmen” as hopelessly old fashioned, their arguments have much in common with the influential arguments of various fundamentalists of our own day. At any rate, facing the geographical, cosmological, technological, and other discoveries of the sixteenth century, the scholastic deference to authority sometimes hardened into dogmatism – a dogmatism that stimulated important questions about scientific, scholarly, and artistic innovation.

Humanism, by contrast, was native to Italy – a response to the imported scholastic ideas that seems to have been nurtured by the circumstances of Italian urban life. The necessities of business and self-governance encouraged a pragmatic view of the uses and ends of knowledge – learning was applied to everyday concerns and human actions, foreign to scholastic thinkers. A whole class of educated men emerged who were employed to work out contracts and negotiate with foreign traders and man the government bureaucracies. Soon a new breed of scholars, referred to as humanisti, appeared. They stressed moral philosophy and teachings derived from poetry and above all history. The humanisti promoted a new dialectic that blurred the distinction between scientific demonstration and plausible argumentation, marking a shift from syllogistic to topical logic.

In this new view, human will attained a centrality and importance that was at odds with its scholastic position as merely a mediator between reason and passion.
Petrarch, one of the first humanists, wrote that “It is safer to strive for the good and pious will, than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth.”

The Humanists esteem for man’s will and their pragmatic view of knowledge arose in interaction with the requisites of republican self-governance and commercial necessity. Through the will, more than the intellect, man’s passions could be swayed and channeled to result in right action. The importance of rhetorical persuasion to this new vision is obvious.

Behind the humanistic exaltation of oratory lay a recognition of the passions as dynamic forces directing human actions and thought and a need to control and exploit these forces. The humanist had little faith in the encompassing theories of the ancients, recognizing instead the validity of practical experience and accepting its fragmentary and unsystematic nature as the inevitable impression of a complex reality on the imperfect human intellect.

This humanist perception of reality encouraged a reconsideration of the relationships among the intellectual disciplines and the consideration of their differing methods and goals. Natural philosophy or science was seen by the scholastics as governed by universal laws and they distinguished their discipline, characterized by its logical search for universal truth, from the lower disciplines like astronomy, which merely observed phenomena. But in the face of ever more exact and diverse empirical observation humanists tended to admit their meager understanding of the laws of nature and came to a healthy realization of the limitations of classical authority. The unpredictable actions of man, ruled as often by his passions as by his intellect, became the focus of their study. So how did this opposition of humanism and scholasticism play out in music?

In the first decade of the 17th century a controversy has been preserved in an exchange of published letters between a Bolognese academic named Giovanni Maria Artusi, often under the guise of the pseudonym Bracchino da Todi (they were gentlemen after all) and Monteverdi. Monteverdi figures so prominently not only because he was arguably the most celebrated musician of the time but also because we are fortunate to have so much of his correspondence – so many of the composers of the 17th century left little beyond their music for our consideration. He also serves admirably as a representative of the new music of the 17th century. He was by no means a radical like Peri or Caccini or Galileo’s father Vincenzo. Rather he was a synthesizer, taking the avant-garde techniques of the time and fashioning it into powerful enduring masterpieces that exerted a profound influence on all who followed.

Artusi objected to certain contrapuntal practices he had observed in some as yet unpublished madrigals of Monteverdi, noting that they violated the rules of correct composition as laid down in the magisterial treatise of Zarlino in 1555 that was widely accepted as the authority on musical composition. Monteverdi eventually responded in the preface to one of his madrigal collections that was later expanded by his brother, Giulio Cesare. Essentially Monteverdi couldn’t really be bothered to engage with a pedant like Artusi but felt he must make some defense of new musical practices, which he saw as already well established by that time. It is here that he promised his treatise on the seconda prattica, or second practice, second as in following chronologically not as superior to or superceding the older or ‘prima prattica".

This new practice is not based on a compositional principle or a new set of rules but rather on a new attitude toward the respective roles of text and music. For thinkers like Artusi, the intellect and not the feelings were the last resort when judging a work of art. Monteverdi, however, perceived the goal of music as being an appeal to the emotions of the audience, not to their understanding and in attaining this goal, music was justified in using any means, even if it infringed on the established rules. For Artusi ‘art’ meant artistic skill, a craft at the highest level, constrained by a theory, which established its rules and thus made it teachable and learnable, debatable and controllable. For Monetverdi art began where it stopped for Artusi. The ingenious idea, the non-verifiable, the non-teachable, the step past the boundaries of instruction, was the essence of art – based, significantly on an otherwise compulsory set of rules, so that a transgression against them could be recognized as such. For Monteverdi a work of art distinguished itself by the very fact that it could not be completely understood, that it possessed something disconcerting, mysterious and not entirely explicable. Within this idea of the seconda prattica are found the origins of the later aesthetic theory of genius in which the genius breaks the shackles of tradition and creates his own rules.

Fundamental to Monteverdi’s rebuttal of Artusi is his claim that words should be the ‘mistress’ of the music and not the other way around. Later defenders of this new attitude sited with disdain composers who could write whole compositions of perfect counterpoint and afterward hang on the notes whatever words would fit. For a musician of humanist leanings like Monteverdi, the expressive power of music was a function of its relation to its text.

The highest goal that music could seek was to form a syntactic and semantic union with its text so perfect that the distinction of musical and nonmusical elements seemed to fade before the heightened oratorical power of a single musical speech. “To speak through singing...”

In its specifics, the dispute between Artusi and Monteverdi was over fairly minor compositonal procedures that strike us as arcane and inconsequential. Its importance lies in the insights it offers into the changing attitude to authority so characteristic of the period. Artusi grounded an optimistic view of the capabilities of human intellect in the comprehension of an unchanging natural order. He, and others like him, could not admit a universe so disconcerting that the sun itself had stopped moving and the earth had taken its place.

Monteverdi, as a representative of humanist inclinations among musicians of his time, understood that the artistic authorities of the past were conditioned by their own cultures to express themselves in ways not necessarily relevant to the present – he rejected the scholastic placing of theory over practice. Perhaps most importantly, Monteverdi’s concern for the joining of music to poetry in a single moving and persuasive language links him to the humanist’s high estimation of man’s will and their urge to sway the passions, associating him with the humanist’s pursuit of rhetorical eloquence, the key to those passions.


[1] This article, which originated as a lecture at the University Club in San Francisco in September, 2004, benefits substantially from several scholarly works. Due to its nature as an unpublished lecture for a general audience, I was not scrupulous about specific citations. I hope that a general citation in the following bibliography will convey my recognition of the role of the works cited in informing this article and excuse me for any unintentionally uncited quotes.

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Select Bibliography
Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel. The Monteverdi Companion. New York, 1968.
Bianconi, Lorenzo. Music in the Seventeenth Century. Turin, 1982.
Brouwsma, William. The Waning of the Renaissance. New Haven and London, 2000.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge and London, 1957.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, 1962.
Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley, 1987.

Il Pastor Fido, Aminta and the Pastoral Tradition in 16th century Italy

Guarini’s pastoral drama Il Pastor Fido was very consciously modeled on Aminta, written by his slightly younger colleague at the Este court in Ferrara Torquato Tasso. Both Aminta and the Pastor fido belong to the tradition of pastoral literature that was very much in vogue in Renaissance Italy. The fundamental characteristic of the pastoral drama was its idealized setting in ‘nature’, most often peopled by shepherds and nymphs who contradict the bucolic setting of their lives by expressing very urban sentiments in sophisticated language. Pastoral literature in general tended to idealize the innocent and serene lives of its rustic characters in contrast to complex and corrupt city life. The archetypal paradigm of the pastoral life was the Golden Age: a mythical, utopian time when human beings were content with their simple, peaceful lives, and when the uncultivated earth offered them everything they needed. The myth of the Golden Age, already present in the Greek poet Hesiod, was later treated by, among others, the Roman poet Virgil.[1]

The pastoral eclogue had been a relatively minor literary form in the classical times but was very popular among Renaissance humanists writing in first in Latin and then in the vernacular, and developed a rich complex of native, Christian, and classical themes in novels, lyric poetry, and drama. [2] While Boccaccio’s Ameto, can be considered a pastoral work, it is really Sanazaro’s Arcadia (1504) that has been considered the embodiment and culmination of the Renaissance pastoral tradition and it is from this Arcadian ideal that the new genre of pastoral drama arose. The genre had found expression as early as Poliziano’s Orfeo (1471), which was most likely the first of the Renaissance pastoral plays presented on stage to accompany courtly celebrations. The pastoral poem with its relatively free structure of dialogue developed into a stricter five-act format, typically in hendecasyllabic blank verse punctuated by more lyrical passages through the sixteenth century. Their were various attempts to codify this structure by Cinzio, Tansillo, Lollio, Argenti, and Beccari, all associated with the court in Ferrara, but it was only with Aminta and Il Pastor Fido that the pastoral drama acquired a place in the poetic canon between the dialogic eclogue and the developing melodrama.[3]

The fact that Il Pastor Fido shares so many themes and even plot lines with the earlier Aminta is certainly not a sign of simple plagiarism. Rather, it is more a sort of one-upsmanship, since Guarini intended to emphasize his rivalry with Tasso by writing several parallel scenes and in any case both plays used elements common to the tradition of pastoral drama. For example, Tasso presents the opposition between chastity and love, a common theme of Classical eclogues, in his opening dialogue between Silvia, the chaste shepherdess, and her companion Daphne, while Guarini places a similar dialogue in the first scene of Il Pastor fido with the dialogue between Silvio, the chaste hunter and his confidant Linco. An excerpt from Linco’s response became one of the most frequently set madrigal texts of the period, Quel augellin. Other similarities, like the presence of lustful satyrs in both plays are stock characters in pastoral dramas. The result in terms of reception history has often been to view Guarini’s work as derivative rather than complementary.

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1. Jernigan, Charles and Jones, Irene M. Aminta, a Pastoral Play by Torquato Tasso. New York, 2000.
2. Staton, Walter and Simeone, William. A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido. Oxford, 1964. p. x.
3. Jernigan. op. cit., pp. x-xi.

Singing Guarini's Il Pastor Fido

In our first set of concerts, Magnificat will explore musical settings of the most popular play of the Baroque era.

In 1605 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine wrote that Guarini’s play Il Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) was more harmful to Catholic morals than the Protestant Reformation itself. While such hyperbole is typical of polemical tracts of the period and is characteristic of conservative reaction to any challenge to the established order, the Cardinal’s comments nevertheless highlight the impact of Guarini’s pastoral drama on the artistic and cultural climate of the time. The arguments echo those leveled against Monteverdi by Giovanni Maria Artusi beginning in 1600: the unacceptable violation of established classical principles. In fact the madrigals that Artusi quoted in his attacks were settings of texts drawn by Monteverdi from Guarini’s play, though Artusi left out the texts and commented only on Monteverdi’s harmonic improprieties.

Of course ecclesiastical criticism of Guarini’s heretic mingling of the Aritotelian dramatic genres in creating his pastoral tragicomedy and the licentious behavior of its bucolic characters had little effect on the play’s continuing popularity. This popularity can hardly be overstated. In the five years that it circulated in manuscript copies before its first publication 1590, the Pastor fido had already attracted a large and enthusiastic following and by the time of Bellarmine’s complaints it had already seen more than twenty editions. The play’s fame was not limited to Italy, as it spread in numerous translations across Europe. In all, well over one hundred editions of the play were published including six different French translations, five in English in over thirteen editions, with translations also into Spanish, German, Greek, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, several Italian dialects and even Latin. It was arguably the most widely read work of secular literature in Europe throughout the seventeenth century and its vogue was only slightly less for much of the eighteenth.

Riding the wave of the Pastor fido’s fame, over 125 composers drew texts from the play for madrigals and monodies with over 550 settings surviving in print from the first decades of the seventeenth century alone. The play’s lyrical monologues of tearful nymphs and shepherds were particularly appealing to those writing in the affective style that became known as the seconda prattica. In spite of the reputation of the play and the attraction of its poetry to composers, the Pastor fido was never set as an opera during the seventeenth century and it was only in 1712 that a libretto based on the play was set by Händel.

Giovanni Battista Guarini (engraving above) was born into a prominent Veronese family of humanistic scholars in 1538 and, after studying in Padua, replaced his uncle as professor of rhetoric and poetics at the University in Ferrara in 1557. Ten years later he entered the service of the Este court in Ferrara and was elevated to the status of Cavaliere. He was employed as a diplomat, notably in the unsuccessful negotiations for obtaining the crown of Poland for Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. Except for occasional intervals when he was employed by the Dukes of Savoy and Mantua, he spent most of his time in the service of the Estensi in Ferrara, until the duke’s death in 1597. After Ferrara was absorbed under the control of the Vatican, Guarini frequented the courts of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Urbino and spent his last years in Rome and Venice, where he was surrounded by admirers and enjoyed great fame as a poet. Guarini's domestic life, however, was stormy and unhappy. His daughter, Anna Guarini was murdered by her husband, Ercole Trotti, apparently in a jealous rage and with the assistance of one of the poet's own sons. His own conduct towards the latter was at times appalling and his whole career was embittered by quarrels and never-ending lawsuits with them and others.

The combined careers of politics and art was not as unusual in the sixteenth century as it is now, and Guarini wrote poetry throughout his time of service to Este family. However, it was only upon his friend and rival Tasso’s imprisonment on grounds of insanity in 1579 that his position as chief court poet for the Este family was secured. Between 1580 and 1584, he worked on his Pastor fido, but waited until December 1589 before publishing it. With his play, grounded in the tradition of pastoral drama and self consciously modeled on Tasso’s Aminta, Guarini intended to establish a new genre of theatre, the tragicomedy, which blended elements of comedy and tragedy. With its central theme of the power of love to transform the human soul, Guarini’s play expands considerably on Aminta and other pastoral dramas, adding complexities and sub-plots with convoluted poetic conceits and erudite references to Classical and contemporary literature.

As early as 1586 it was the subject of criticism from the professor of moral philosophy in Padua, Giason De Nores, who called it a “monstrous and disproportionate composition”. De Nores objected on both stylistic and moral grounds, in the first case relying on a narrow reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, and in the latter on the play’s excessive lyricism, metaphorical extravagance, and, above all, its explicitly lascivious content. He contended that the play’s mixture of tragedy and comedy destroyed any artistic unity and that its pastoral poetry about rude shepherds and their passions was without value for moral instruction.

Guarini, both intelligent and vain, was quick to enjoin in his own defense, publishing two treatises in response to De Nores and adding over 200 pages of annotations to the definitive edition of the play published in 1602. His spirited defense of the tragicomedy sounds quite modern and the history of drama from Shakespeare forward confirms the validity of his arguments. “Art observes that tragedy and comedy are composed of heterogeneous parts”, wrote Guarini, “and that therefore if an entire tragedy and an entire comedy should be mixed they would not be able to function…because they do not have a single intrinsic natural principle. But art, a most prudent imitator of nature, plays the part of the intrinsic principle, and while nature alters the parts after they are united, art alters them before they are joined in order that they may be able to exist together and, though mixed, produce a single form.” As for the complaint about rude shepherds, Guarini argued at length that art exists not to instruct but to purge – tragedy to purge pity and fear, tragicomedy to purge melancholy.

Despite its unrivalled popularity, the play was to receive very few actual productions. The first took place in Ferrara in 1595 or 1596, and it was staged 5 or 6 times in the decade following, most significantly in 1598 in Mantua, where Vincenzo Gonzaga had hoped for a production of the Pastor fido since 1584 and had actively pursued one since at least 1591. The performances in Mantua featured music by Giaches de Wert and Francesco Rovigo that had been written for an earlier production, and possibly music by Monteverdi as well, though there is no specific reference. These performances and a few others aside, the Pastor fido was destined to be a play more to be read than acted, due in no small part to its formidable length and its dense and florid poetic style.

Judging from the philosophical debates it created, the imitations and emulations it inspired, and its near universal familiarity, the profound influence of Guarini’s play on the European culture of the seventeenth century is undeniable. Since there is no complete musical setting of the play from the period, it seemed reasonable to assemble settings from various composers and present them in the order the texts appear in the play. So, Magnificat’s first set of concerts in the 2005-2006 season will feature settings of excerpts from the Pastor fido by a variety of composers including, in addition to Monteverdi, Sigismondo d’India, Alessandro Grandi, Tarquinio Merula, and Heinrich Schütz, who opened his first publication with the two part madrigal O Primavera, drawn from the third act of Guarini’s play. Almost all the settings of the Pastor fido are in the polyphonic madrigal style, though from Grandi, d’India, and Merula we do have monodic settings. The performances will be on the weekend of September 30-October 2.

(This article will appear in the September, 2005 edition of the San Francisco Early Music Society Newsletter. for more information about the Society, visit their website)
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Bibliography
There is a considerable body of literature about Guarini and his Pastor fido. For this article I drew from the following sources.

Hogan, Robert and Nickerson, Edward A. The Faithful Shepherd: A Translation of Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido by Dr. Thomas Sheridan. Newark, 1989.
Perella, Nicolas J. The Critical Fortune of Battista Guarini's "Il Pastor fido." Florence, 1973.
Staton, Walter F. and Simeone, William E. A Critical Edition of Sir Fanshawe's 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini's "Il Pastor Fido". Oxford, 1964.
Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley, 1987.
Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago, 1974.
Whitfield, J. H. Introduction to The Faithfull Shepherd translated by Richard Fanshawe. Edinburgh, 1976.

The Estensi

Magnificat's first program this season features settings of texts drawn from Guarini's pastoral drama Il Pastor Fido. Like so many poets, artists, and muscians of the Italian Renaissance, Guarini benefitted from the patronage of the Este family of Ferrara. Both Guarini and his friend and rival Tasso had stormy relationships with the court that employed them and the intrigues within and battles outside the court doubtless caused misery for many, but from our vantage point several centuries hence we are indebted to them for the great works they supported.

The Estensi, a branch of the 10th-century dynasty of the Obertenghi, took their name from the township and castle of Este, near Padua. The founder of the family was the margrave Alberto Azzo II (died 1097), through whose son Folco I (died 1136?) descended the House of Este. The family first gained prominence as leaders of the Guelphs in the wars between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The Estensi influence in Ferrara dates from the 13th century and by the middle of the 14th century their court there had become one of the most magnificent in all of Europe.

Alberto d’Este (1347-1393) began the transformation of the city, establishing the university there in the last year of his life. His son Niccolò (1383-1441), a great patron of music and the arts in general, built the castle that still dominates the city. During Niccolò's reign, Guillaume Dufay began his long association with the d'Este family.
Leonello (1407-1450), who succeeded Niccolò, was cultivated classical writings, philosophy, and history while Borso (1413-1471) was more interested in law and medicine and provided great support for the university. Isabella, the daughter of Ercole I (1431-1505) born in 1471, inherited her father’s passion for the arts and, after her marriage to the Marquis of Mantua, became one of his chief competitors in collecting art.

Under Ercole I, Ferrara became one of the political powers and cultural centers of Europe. Composers came to Ferrara from many parts of Europe, especially France and Flanders; Josquin Des Prez, Jacob Obrecht, and Antoine Brumel all served during his reign. His son Alfonso I (1476-1534) was also an important patron; his preference for instrumental music resulted in Ferrara becoming an important center of composition for the lute. He also was a patron of the poets Pietro Bembo and Ludovico Ariosto. After his marriage to the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, Alfonso I was excommunicated by Pope Julius II, and attacked the pontifical army in 1512 outside Ravenna. He got on better with later popes, but relations between Ferrara and the Vatican remained strained throughout the sixteenth century.

Alfonso I’s son Ercole II (1508-1559) married Renée, daughter of Louis XII of France. He joined the pope and France against Spain in 1556, but made a separate peace in 1558. He also was a patron of the arts, as was his brother, Ippolito II, Cardinal d'Este (1509–72), an able diplomat who led the pro-French party at the papal court. Ippolito built the celebrated Villa d'Este at Tivoli. Ippolito was responsible for bringing Palestrina to the Este court during the 1560s. Another son of Ercole II, Alfonso II married Lucrezia, daughter of grand-duke Cosimo I of Tuscany, then Barbara, sister of the emperor Maximilian II and finally Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of the duke of Mantua. He raised the glory of Ferrara to its highest point, and was the patron of Torquato Tasso and Giovanni Battista Guarini.

During the reign of Alfonso II, Ferrara developed a remarkable musical establishment. Composers such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Lodovico Agostini, and later Carlo Gesualdo, represented the avant-garde of the late Renaissance. The reign of Alfonso II also witnessed the famous concerto di donne — the three virtuoso female singers Laura Peverara, Livia d’Arco, and Anna Guarini, daughter of the poet. Alfonso II however had no legitimate male heir, and in 1597 Ferrara was claimed as a vacant fief by Pope Clement VIII, ending the Este family’s control of the city.

The Image on Magnificat's Website and Season Brochure

The image used on the Magnificat Website and on the season brochure is taken from the frontispiece to the collected works of Jakob Böhme, published in Amsterdam in 1682. The orginal image is reproduced above. For the website the orginal type has been photo-shopped out and for the brochure only details were used.The brochure can be downloaded by clicking this link.
Jakob Böhme was born in 1575 in Altseidenberg, near Görlitz in eastern Germany. Following apprenticeship, he set up his own shop as a shoemaker in Görlitz, where he resided (except for a period of exile in Dresden) until his death on November 17, 1624. After a profound mystical experience at the age of twenty five (1600), while remaining active as a shoemaker and later a merchant, he embarked on a remarkable career of independent scholarship and writing. Though censured for heresy and silenced for seven years by his town council, he eventually produced some twenty nine books and tracts on philosophical theology, and gained a growing following among the nobility and professional classes of the day. (Source, where you can also find a discussion of his writings and philosophy.) A more extensive biography of Böhme can be found here. This is an excellent bibliography with lots of links, and a fabulous collection of engravings from his theosophical works can be found here.

In the publication the image is described as follows:

"Light & Darkness
At the intersection of light and the world of darkness, the human and the divine eye meet and merge in a visionary “looking-through,” which emerges “as a flash in the centre.”
The trumpet and the lily, the two ends of the pointer, herald the coming of the end of the world and the beginning of the age of the Holy Ghost. The seven circles are the qualities of nature, the days of the Creation and the spirits of God. The inner alphabet signifies “the revealed natural language,” which names all things sensually,” i.e., directly, according to their innermost quality. It was lost through Adam’s Fall from number 1, the divine unity."
J. Böhme, Theosophische Wercke, Amsterdam, 1682

Welcome to Magnificat's weblog.

Welcome to Magnificat's weblog. I intend to use this weblog to post information about Magnificat programs - notes about the music we will be performing and about the individual musicians who will be performing it. Often in the process of preparing programs I find myself making connections and discoveries that I would like to share with the audiences that will be hearing the music. Only so much can make its way into program notes and pre-concert lectures, so I hope this weblog will give Magnificat's supporters and anyone interested in the music and culture of the seventeenth century a way to enrich their experience of our concerts and Baroque music in general. I suspect that sooner or later other topics will make their way into the discussions here but my intention is to focus on music. My first project will be a running commentary on Magnificat's preparation for our first set of concerts, which will be on the weekend of September 30-October 2.

For information and tickets please visit Magnificat's website (see link on the right) or call 415-979-4500. Thanks for visiting the Magnificat weblog.Comments can be made on specific posts or can be directed to me at info@magnificatbaroque.org. Thanks Again!