Stefano Rossetto - Music

Music

All of his surviving music is vocal, and includes madrigals and motets, some of which were probably intended for performance as intermedii, musical interludes between acts of plays.

Along with the other Medici composers, taking part in a trend of the time, he wrote gigantic polychoral compositions. One of the largest polychoral works ever composed, at least prior to modern times, was his huge 50-voice motet Consolamini popule meus. The date of the composition is unknown, but the manuscript is at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, suggesting he wrote it while in the service of the Bavarian court. Only a handful of larger compositions are known: Alessandro Striggio's colossal 40 and 60 voice Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, and the 17th century 53-voice Missa Salisburgensis attributed to Heinrich Ignaz Biber.

Rossetto also composed three books of madrigals, for four, five, and six voices, respectively (all published in Venice in 1560 and 1566), and an ambitious setting of the Lamento d'Olimpia, in seventeen parts, for from four to ten voices, which he published in Venice in 1567. (Florence, for all its opulence, lacked publishing houses, and most of the Medici composers published their works in Venice, a city with a long publishing history.) In addition to his secular music, he published a book of motets in Nuremberg in 1573, Novae quaedam sacrae cantiones, quas vulgo motetas vocant, for five and six voices.

In his madrigals he uses chromaticism creatively, and he liked to write both madrigals and motets in groups, as did the other Medici composers (such as Corteccia and Striggio). Much of his music is intended to be accompanied by instruments, another characteristic of Florentine polyphony of the period.