Luca Marenzio
He was one of the most renowned composers of madrigals, and wrote some of the most famous examples of the form in its late stage of development, prior to its early Baroque transformation by Monteverdi.
Marenzio was influential as far away as England, where his earlier, lighter work appeared in 1588 in the Musica Transalpina, the collection that initiated the madrigal craze in that country.
Marenzio worked in the service of several aristocratic Italian families, including the Gonzaga, Este, and Medici, and spent most of his career in Rome.
According to biographer Leonardo Cozzando, writing in the late 17th century, Marenzio was born at Coccaglio, a small town near Brescia, as one of seven children to a poor family.
[citation needed] Marenzio had the opportunity to travel with Luigi in winter to spring 1580–1581 to Ferrara, the home of the Este family and one of the principal centers for composition of progressive secular music in the late 16th century.
Marenzio would have had an opportunity to hear the newly formed Concerto delle donne, the virtuoso female singers with the repertory of "secret music" that so influenced the course of madrigal composition at the end of the Renaissance.
[3] While Luigi made few demands on him, allowing him considerable time for his own musical pursuits, he paid him the tiny salary of only five scudi a month, about which Marenzio complained in the dedication (to Bianca Capello, Grand Duchess of Tuscany) of his Libro terzo a sei (1585).
He also became known as an expert lutenist, as indicated in a letter of 1581 from a singer to Luigi d'Este; and by the time the cardinal died in 1586, Marenzio had become internationally famous as a composer, with his numerous books of madrigals published and reprinted not only in Italy, but in the Netherlands.
[3][5] After the death of Luigi d'Este on December 30, 1586, Marenzio was without a patron, but probably continued to freelance in Rome; and sometime in 1587 he went to Verona where he met Count Mario Bevilacqua and attended the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica, one of the associations of musicians and humanists, dedicated to cultivating the most progressive trends, typical of the late Renaissance.
He went to Poland in between late 1595 and early 1596, staying at least through October 1596, accepting a position as maestro di cappella at the court of Sigismund III Vasa in Warsaw; his predecessor, Annibale Stabile, had just died after only being there two months.
[3] Marenzio did not live long after reaching Rome; he died on August 22, 1599, in the care of his brother at the garden of the Villa Medici on Monte Pincio.
[11] For example, in the madrigal O voi che sospirate a miglior note he modulated completely around the circle of fifths within a single phrase, using enharmonic spellings within single chords (for instance, simultaneous C sharp and D flat), impossible to sing without either pitch drift or tempering intervals such that singers would approximate a sort of circulating temperament.
An obvious example would be a setting of the phrase "sinking in the sea" to a descending series of notes, or accompanying the word "anguish" with a dissonant chord followed by an unsatisfying resolution.
Like many of his contemporaries, he used pastoral and love poems from well-known Italian poets, such as Dante and Petrarch, but few set texts as attentively to their full expressive potential as did Marenzio.
[citation needed] Outside of England, Marenzio's madrigals also influenced composers as widely distributed as Hans Leo Hassler in South Germany and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in the Low Countries.
