Discography

“With this recording of the Primo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci by Pomponio Nenna, the ensemble Comet Musicke reveals a joyful and radiant music. Born in Bari, in Apulia, in 1556, Nenna was a young man of 26 when he published this book in Venice in 1582. It is his very first opus. Nenna was not, strictly speaking, a professional musician. He belonged rather to the flourishing category of gentleman composers at the turn of the seventeenth century. As he states on the frontispieces of all his publications, Nenna inherited the title of “cavaliere di Cesare“, which his father had received from the very hands of Emperor Charles V in 1533. The imperial eagle has since adorned the family coat of arms. In 1582, Nenna had just been “elected” to the government of Andria, a small Apulian town on the Adriatic coast, some fifty kilometres north of Bari. He owed his good fortune to Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria and Count of Ruvo. A perfect courtier, Nenna dedicated his first book of music to him in gratitude, celebrating at the same time the birth of Antonio Carafa, the first son of his benefactor and of the latter’s wife, Maria. The Carafa family, like most Neapolitan patricians, then lived in Naples, on the other side of the Apennines, rather than on their Adriatic fiefs.
Nenna evokes the birth of little Antonio in his dedication, but also in his music. The collection indeed opens with a madrigal in six parts, Poi che legato il piè mi tien sì forte, on a canzone by an anonymous poet, a long strophic poem devoted entirely to singing the child’s happy birth and, incidentally, the praises of his father. Even though he signs the dedication of his book from Naples, rather than from Bari or Andria, Nenna stages the distance that separates him from his protector: “Since my foot is held so strongly bound, not by reason but by fate, and the harsh golden chain forbids me to go where desire leads me, I would, great Duke, turn myself into wind so as to be able to come where you are.” But Nenna charges the music with carrying his message: “Go, song, where I cannot go”, the last section of the piece tells us, in the manner of a troubadour’s envoi.
To set these joyful verses to music, Nenna adopts the vein of the light madrigal, popularised by Luca Marenzio in the early 1580s: a lively and radiant music, “pleasant to the ear” (“grata all’orecchie“), as Vincenzo Giustiniani would call it years later in his Discorso sulla musica de’ suoi tempi (1628). The interweaving of voices is frequently structured into highly legible harmonic areas, giving the music a gentle sense of whirling euphony; the melodies follow lively and playful rhythms; the artifices of counterpoint are never at the expense of listening pleasure. Nenna’s music is a touching testimony to the festivities organised for Antonio’s birth on the Duke’s fiefs: “Thousands of drums and bells are heard at all hours”, “the lights burning at the windows all around… in every street, in every place, the fire burning without respite turns a dark night into a bright day”. Nenna depicts these joyful scenes through as many ingenious figuralisms, demonstrating through his music his emotional attachment to the Carafa family.
Nenna sets texts of varied origins to music: many are by unknown authors, others are from the hand of Petrarch (the madrigal in two parts on the sonnet Lieti fiori et felici et ben nate herbe), of Remigio Nannini (the madrigal in two parts on the sonnet Itene o miei sospir ch’accesi in quella), of Lodovico Paterno (Dolce mio foco ardente) and, more singularly, of the poetess Chiara Matraini Contarini (Dalla più bella mano). The other texts are anonymous and, for the most part, would be set to music only by Nenna.
Even though the madrigals of this collection present a variety of ethos, covering a wide emotional palette, the pointer is clearly placed on the side of the joy of living, as evidenced by a series of pastorally inspired texts. Nenna gives pride of place to flowers and wild grasses, to tender green leaves, to young saplings. Thus the Petrarchan sonnet which opens with an apostrophe to the “joyful and happy flowers, and well-born grasses”, or the anonymous madrigals “Graceful grasses, green leaves and joyful flowers” and “Lilies, roses and violets” (Vagh’erbe verde frondi e lieti fiori and Gigli, rose e viole). Nature rejoices at the birth of the future Duke of Andria, who would live long enough to take his father’s succession and perpetuate the Carafa line, since he died in 1621, after having had six children.
Yet the dark side also surfaces here and there in the book, even if it is still only a harmless shadow, intended more to set off the light. The dissonances accumulate in D’ogni ben casso e privo, on an anonymous text: “For you, lady, I live, and under so hard a fate, it is no longer living, it is far worse than death.” It is nevertheless the darker vein that would triumph in Nenna’s later collections, as in the late Neapolitan madrigal as a whole under the leadership of the Prince of Venosa, Carlo Gesualdo. The history of style and the history of people echo each other here. In 1590, Fabrizio Carafa was murdered by Carlo Gesualdo. Fabrizio had begun an adulterous affair with Gesualdo’s wife, Maria d’Avalos. Caught in flagrante delicto, Gesualdo had them killed by mercenaries while witnessing the murder, a double homicide that threw the European courts into turmoil and would inspire a whole scandalous literature well into the seventeenth century. The Neapolitan tribunal, for its part, judging that the “cause is just”, quickly closed the case. As the Carafa family sought to take justice into their own hands, Gesualdo lived for several years under the threat of a vendetta, even on his own lands.
Nenna, for his part, eventually entered the service of his first protector’s murderer and worked at the court of Carlo Gesualdo between 1594 and 1599. The two composers then developed an astonishing stylistic symbiosis, setting the same verses to music, pushing the language of the polyphonic madrigal to its last limits by exploring the full pathetic expressiveness of dissonance and chromaticism. The times were no longer for celebration.
Another protagonist lived these tragic facts and stylistic metamorphoses at close hand: Giovanni de Macque. A leading figure of Neapolitan music, a virtuoso organist, master of the city’s most prestigious chapel, teacher to numerous disciples – including Giovanni Maria Trabacci – and a good family man, Macque lived at Gesualdo’s court in the second half of the 1580s. He left the prince’s service in 1590, a few months before his patron committed his double homicide. He probably guided Gesualdo at the beginning of his composing career, initiating him into the most advanced contrapuntal techniques. In 1586, Macque published three of the prince’s ricercares in his collection of Ricercate and canzoni francese, dedicated to Gesualdo – Macque’s Canzone IV was published for the first time in this volume. Macque would compose sumptuous madrigals, but he is better known today for his refined instrumental music, his ricercares of extremely sophisticated counterpoint and his experimental chromatic pieces with their “extravagant consonances”. Even if Macque probably composed them at the keyboard, they are intended for all kinds of instruments, and even, possibly, for voices. The consort of viols adopted for this disc makes all the parts of the polyphony vibrate in an unprecedented way, making us rediscover these classics of Neapolitan keyboard music in a new light.”