The music in the courts of Florence and Mantua between the XVI and the XVII centuries

Music by Alessandro Striggio, Marco da Gagliano, Giaches de Wert, Salomone Rossi, Claudio Monteverdi

L’Homme Armé
Sonia Tedla Chebreab, soprano
Marta Fumagalli, mezzosoprano
Andrés Montilla Acurero, tenor
Riccardo Pisani, tenor
Gabriele Lombardi, baritone
Giovanni Bellini, theorbo
Bianca Cucini, viola da gamba
Fabio Lombardo, direction

Tickets €18
People up to 30 years of age € 12
Reduction for 3 tickets or more € 15 each
Reduced price of €15 at the box office upon presentation of a ticket from the National Museums of Tuscany.

At the end of the 16th century, with the decline of the Este court in Ferrara, relations between Florence and Mantua intensified, both for political and dynastic reasons—the marriage of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga to Eleonora de’ Medici—and for more specifically cultural reasons, a sphere in which music, considered an “ornament of princes,” played a far from secondary role. The Mantuan nobleman Alessandro Striggio had been a “servant” of the Duke of Florence, Cosimo I, since 1560, where he played a leading role at the Florentine court, including with memorable compositions (such as the 40-voice motet Ecce beatam lucem!). He collaborated with some of the musicians active in Florence in the final decades of the century, such as Francesco Corteccia, Cristofano Malvezzi, Jacopo Peri, and the young Giulio Caccini. In Mantua, too, he met Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Giaches de Wert, and Benedetto Pallavicino, as well as various other virtuosos present at that court. Within the context of the lively musical exchanges between the two courts, it was common to request collaboration and reinforcements for major events that required exceptional ensembles. This occurred in 1589, when several Mantuan musicians were requested to Florence to collaborate on the production of the grandiose Intermedi della Pellegrina. But it also happened in the opposite direction when several Florentine musicians were requested to Mantua for several major events in 1607-08, including the famous performances of Monteverdi’s L’Arianna and Marco da Gagliano’s Dafne, both with librettos by the Florentine Ottavio Rinuccini. In a “chamber” format, the program touches on some of the salient moments of the cultural exchanges between the Medici and Gonzaga courts, with chamber music that is strongly influenced by those cultural orientations and the musical tastes associated with them, highlighting in particular the coexistence between the late sixteenth-century madrigal style and the new monodic genre that, theorized and practiced by the Camerata dei Bardi, would rapidly spread throughout Europe.