Marchetto Cara

Biography

Marchetto Cara (c. 1465 – probably 1525) was an Italian composer, lutenist and singer of the Renaissance. He was mainly active in Mantua, was well-connected with the Gonzaga and Medici families, and, along with Bartolomeo Tromboncino, was well known as a composer of frottolas.

Life

Very little is known of his early life. By 1494, he was already employed by the Gonzaga court at Mantua, and he evidently stayed there, without interruption except for travel to sing in nearby cities, until his death. Among his duties were directing the singers both in the Cathedral of San Pietro (Mantua) and in the private estate of the Gonzaga family. As lovers and patrons of music, they employed numerous musicians, and Cara was chief among them: he wrote music for weddings, for state occasions, for intermedi, and for private entertainments, and in so doing created some of the most refined light music of the time. Along with Tromboncino, he was the most famous composer of frottole, and his compositions continued to be collected and published after his death.
Most likely, he died in 1525, since his widow remarried in early 1526, and there was at the time a legal requirement for a widow to wait nine months prior to remarriage. When he died, he was a wealthy man, owning two houses in the city and two large country estates: evidently, the Gonzaga family paid him well.
Cara was famous not only as a composer, but as a singer and a lutenist. He sang at Mantua, for his employers, but also traveled throughout northern Italy, singing for the Medici, the Bembo family, the Bentivoglio family in Bologna, and other aristocrats in Verona, Venice, Padua, Pesaro, Cremona, as well as other cities. Baldassare Castiglione heard him sing, and wrote of him in his famous Book of the Courtier (Venice, 1528), in the same paragraph in which he praises Leonardo da Vinci:

And no lesse doeth our Marchetto Cara move in his singinge, but with a more softe harmonye, that by a delectable waye and full of mourninge swetnesse maketh tender and perceth the mind, and sweetly imprinteth in it a passion full of great delite (translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561).