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Lodovico Grossi (1564-1645) took the name Viadana from his birthplace. Since the full title of his publication of 1602 bears the words, "con il basso continuo per sonar nell' organo," and the composer said that the music had been performed in Rome five years previously, he has a claim to being the inventor of the "basso continuo" or "thorough bass." Be that as it may, this revolutionary innovation, on the foundation of which the melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal freedom of baroque music was built, was "in the air" at the time. In this grand and moving prayer, with its opposition of equals between the strong melody and bass line (this opposition being what was meant at the time by "concerto"), we have a splendid example of the new style being formed.

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), born in Saxony, studied the music of two great and stylistically different Italian masters. One was Giovanni Gabrieli, who at St. Mark's in Venice brought the Renaissance to a glorious close, and with whom Schütz worked in 1609; the other, Claudio Monteverdi, the first genius of the baroque opera, whose art Schütz heard in 1628. Schütz had the genius to absorb these lessons, and create with them a body of German church music that had his own strong individu­ality, loveliness of melody and firmness of structure.

Italian Songs
BG-565, original LP cover

Masses, motets, madrigals and other polyphonic forms were the stock-in-trade of music in sixteenth-century Italy. It is wrong, however, to assume that there were no solo songs. Baldassare Castiglione, writing early in the century in his Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), thought that polyphony was all very well, "but to sing to the lute is much better" because then you had no difficulty in hearing all the words. There were indeed several kinds of solo song in the sixteenth century. Among them were "popular" settings of stanzas from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso sung to the lute, and the more sophisticated songs, accompanied by various groups of instruments, found in the elaborate masques and plays with music performed in flourishing musical centres like Venice or Florence. Two songs on this disc represent a third type: they were published as madrigals for four voices but could be performed, as they are here, with the top part sung as a solo to a lute accompaniment consisting of the other vocal parts. Giaches de Wert, a Fleming, was a distinguished musician at the Mantuan court and a prolific composer of madrigals; Dunque basciar is a setting of a stanza from Canto 36 of Orlando Furioso. Baldessare Donato, a versatile Venetian, was a prominent musician at St. Mark's; his song is a love song.

More and more madrigals were sung as solos towards the end of the century as their top parts began to stand out in ever sharper relief from the lower ones. People began to take less interest in purely polyphonic madrigals, and more songs were composed expressly as solos. This natural development was hastened by the activities of certain Florentine dilettanti (known as the Camerata), who conducted researches into the effects of the monodic music of ancient Greece and found that they were all that could be desired; writing from the point of view of the listener, they therefore strenuously attacked polyphony for obscuring the words and advocated instead the composition of solo songs in which, as Castiglione had observed, all the words might be clearly heard. Hundreds of solo songs (or monodies, as they are often called) were published in Italy between 1602 and about 1640, and they were among the most popular music of the time. Nearly all of them are settings of the kind of poems used for ensemble music in the sixteenth century. They differ in two ways in particular from the solo songs of the sixteenth century. In the first place, the emotional effect of the words of all but the lightest songs is enhanced by elaborate and subtle embellishments of the vocal line. Much credit is due to Giulio Caccini, who was associated with the Camerata, for shaping these embellishments and for rejecting to a great extent the deadening and otiose figuration often applied to polyphonic music in the sixteenth century. Caccini, a vain and conceited singer and composer who worked at the Florentine court, wrote the first songs in the new manner in 1602 and published them in Le Nuove Musiche (literally, The New Musics) ; he devoted much of his important preface to the question of ornamentation. The second strikingly new feature of monodies is that the accompaniments were no longer written out but were so subordinated to the vocal lines as to consist merely of simple chords improvised at sight from the recently-invented basso continuo on any chord-playing instru­ment that happened to be handy.

The familiar Amarilli (from Le Nuove Musiche), a love song that quickly won a European reputation, is an excellent example of the new monodic style just described. Caccini was a gifted lyrical composer and does not deserve to be remembered by one song alone. A song from his third and last book has therefore been included too: Pien d'amoroso affetto is a frank, not to say obscene pastoral dialogue between a lovelorn shepherd and shepherdess, which Professor Empson's seventh type of ambiguity lends at least surface respectability. The tremendous craze for monodies in Italy tempted a number of high-born amateurs to try their hands at them. The most successful of these was Claudio Saracini, a Sienese nobleman who published six books of them before he was forty, and nothing else besides. Da te parto, in which the anonymous poet laments a lost beloved, may not be a faultless professional piece of work, but the power of its passionate, rhapsodical declamation is undeniable. In Pallidetta, a tiny trifle about a shepherdess who has stolen away the poet's heart, Saracini seems quite at home in a completely different mood. In Valli profonde, imagination and professional musicianship go hand in hand, and the result is one of the finest songs of the age. Marco da Gagliano was a leading Florentine musician; his song is a setting of a sonnet by the sixteenth-century poet Luigi Tansillo, describing how a disconsolate lover wanders in a 'gothick' landscape of rocks and boulders, unburied bones, and walls overgrown with weeds, the whole gloomy scene capped by windswept storm-clouds.

Strophic songs (like Pallidetta) were generally lighter than this, but when the more serious madrigal declined even as a solo form in the 1620s they became the vehicles for more serious thoughts than hitherto. This change coincided with the appearance of the new form of recitative and aria, in which the main body of the poem was often crowded into the recitative and the aria became a refrain. Da grave incendio by Giovanni Pietro Berti, who worked at St. Mark's, Venice, is a fine example of such a song (though the last verse is different from the others).

The vast quantity of secular music composed in Italy towards the end of the seventeenth century remained to manuscript. As a rule, too, composers no longer wrote separate songs: operas and extended cantatas (sequences of recitative, arioso and aria) were the dominant forms. Favourite songs were taken out of these works and copied into a number of manuscripts, and it is often difficult to discover to what works they originally belonged. The harpsichord was now the usual continuo instrument. Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico's father, was one of the great composers of this period and founder of the flourishing Neapolitan school of opera-composers; he wrote over a hundred operas and some 600 cantatas and was gifted with, among other things, boundless melodic invention. Of the five songs on this disc, O cessate, from Pompeo (1683, probably Scarlatti's first big opera), is the most familiar: the wounding beauty of his beloved's eyes makes the singer long to die. Musically, O dolcissima is in a similar vein. The other three are like O cessate in being miniature do capo arias, that is, arias in which the opening words and music return at the end of each verse after a differing middle section. The lively Bellezza celebrates the joys of love; Difesa non ha explains that the heart, even a king's heart, that loves beauty is defenceless against loving glances; La speranza is the remarkably cheerful song of a lover betrayed by Hope – for every simple joy he suffers a hundred sorrows.

– Nigel Fortune

The selection by Cipriano de Rore is presented in a transcription of a half-century later with vocal ornamentation by Bovicelli, which shows the transition from madrigal to ornamented solo song. Then we move through the Baroque cycle to its close in Bach and Handel. In its course, a welcome light is thrown on the lesser-known English masters of the age of Purcell. The duets by Monteverdi are not only emblematic of the early Baroque master's florid style and mastery of fusing sacred text with vocal forms, but were fundamental building blocks of his multi-movement sacred works. Monteverdi's melodic style and movement structure formed a profoundly influential basis for a tradition continued by Vivaldi, Rossini, Verdi and composers of the twentieth century and even Italy's postwar avant-garde.

Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-612 (1-2 and 18), BG-565 (tracks 3-15) and BG-691

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