Alessandro Striggio

Biography

Alessandro Striggio (c. 1536/1537 – 29 February 1592) was an Italian composer, instrumentalist and diplomat of the Renaissance. He composed numerous madrigals as well as dramatic music, and by combining the two, became the inventor of madrigal comedy. His compositions include the monumental Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno for up to 60 voices, rediscovered in 2005 after being lost for 400 years.
His son, also named Alessandro Striggio, wrote the libretto for Monteverdi's Orfeo.

Life

Striggio senior was born in Mantua, evidently to an aristocratic family. Records of his early life are sparse, but he must have gone to Florence as a young man. He began working for Cosimo de' Medici on 1 March 1559 as a musician, eventually to replace Francesco Corteccia as the principal musician to the Medici court. In 1560 he visited Venice, and produced two books of madrigals in response to the musical styles he encountered there. In 1567 the Medici sent him on a diplomatic mission to England. Throughout the 1560s Striggio composed numerous intermedi for the Medici, for weddings, visits, and other state occasions. In the 1570s he continued to work for the Medici, but there is some evidence he began to travel away from Florence. He had some connection to the Bavarian court in Munich, and may have gone there on more than one occasion (possibly for the performance of his 40-voice motet Ecce beatam lucem which he wrote for a royal marriage there). He became friends with Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer, during the 1570s; whether or not he was a member of the Florentine Camerata is uncertain.
During the 1580s he began an association with the Este court in Ferrara. Ferrara was one of Italy's avant-garde centers of musical composition in the 1580s and 1590s, and Striggio composed music in the progressive madrigal style he heard there, evidently commissioned by the Medici. This music is unfortunately lost. In 1586 Striggio moved to Mantua where he remained for the rest of his life, although he retained a close association with the Medici, composing music for them at least as late as 1589.
The late madrigals are not lost. Twenty-eight madrigals from Striggio's Late Period, were transcribed from microfilm for a graduate seminar at the University of California at Berkeley (under the tutelage of Dr. Anthony Newcomb in 1974). The full notation (120 pages in score form notebooks in pencil) will be available after August 1, 2024. (Contact Music Chair, David Milnes, at 104 Morrison Hall #1200, Berkeley, CA 94720.) A typed list of first-line poetry titles will be included.

References and further reading

Butchart, David S. (1981). "The Festive Madrigals of Alessandro Striggio". Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. 107 (1980–1981). Taylor & Francis, Ltd.: 46–59. doi:10.1093/jrma/107.1.46. JSTOR 766114.
Iain Fenlon: "Alessandro Striggio", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
Iain Fenlon: "Alessandro Striggio", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed April 21, 2007), (subscription access) Archived 2008-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
Iain Fenlon and Hugh Keyte, 'Early Music' July 1980. Reference in CD liner notes to Spem in Alium by Tallis Scholars, Gimell CDGIM 006.
Davitt Moroney, "Alessandro Striggio's Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts". Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 60 No. 1., pp. 1–69. Spring 2007. ISSN 0003-0139

Recording

Alessandro Striggio and others, Mass for 40 & 60 voices on YouTube
"La Caccia". "Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato" – on Banchieri Festino R. Alessandrini 1995 (Opus111)
"Il gioco di primiera", about the perils of gambling – performed by Kings Singers on Madrigal History Tour documentary