Alessandro Striggio - Works

Works

Striggio wrote both sacred and secular music, and all his surviving music is vocal, although sometimes with instrumental accompaniment. He published seven books of madrigals, in addition to two versions of his most famous composition, the madrigal comedy Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato et la caccia... ("The gossip of the women at the laundry").

The madrigal comedy, either invented by Striggio or made famous by him, was long considered to be a forerunner of opera, but contemporary musicological scholarship tends to see this as just one of many strands in late 16th century Italian music which adapt prevailing musical forms to dramatic presentation. In the madrigal comedy, there is no acting: the 15 individual madrigals in cicalamento tell a story, but entirely in words and music. Entertainments such as the madrigal comedy were not far different from other musical forms one could see at a contemporary intermedio.

One of his most impressive works, and one of the most impressive achievements in Renaissance polyphony, is his motet Ecce beatam lucem for 40 independent voices, which may have been performed in 1568 in Munich. There is some evidence that he may have had the music for either this piece or his 40/60 voice mass with him on his diplomatic visit to London in 1567, since Thomas Tallis seems to have been inspired and challenged by it, and shortly afterwards wrote his own 40-voice tour-de-force Spem in alium, commissioned by the Earl of Leicester for Queen Elizabeth. Unlike the setting by Tallis, Striggio specifically indicates for the voices to be doubled by instruments. In the Bavarian performance in 1568 of Striggio's motet the forces included eight flutes, eight violas, eight trombones, harpsichord and bass lute. The motet is a polychoral composition for four choirs, which include sixteen, ten, eight and six voices respectively, all spatially separated.

A work on a yet larger scale, and long reputed to be lost, is Striggio's mass composed in 40 parts, and which included a 60-voice setting of the final Agnus Dei. The work was recently unearthed by Berkeley musicologist Davitt Moroney and identified as a parody mass, Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, and received its first modern performance at the Royal Albert Hall during the London Proms on 17 July 2007 by the BBC Singers and The Tallis Scholars conducted by Moroney. This work was most likely composed in 1565/6, and carried by Striggio on a journey across Europe in late winter and spring 1567, for performances at Mantua, Munich and Paris. The first commercial recording of the Mass, by the British group I Fagiolini, was released in March 2011, and won a Gramophone Award, and a Diapason D'Or de L'Année A second recording followed in 2012 directed by Hervé Niquet and prepared by Dominique Visse.

Striggio was highly influential, as can be seen by the wide distribution of his music in Europe in the late 16th century. His influence was especially large in England; this may have been due in part to his 1567 visit, and also may have been related to the activities of Alfonso Ferrabosco, the Italian madrigalist who was resident in England for most of his life, and helped popularize the Italian style there.