Biagio Marini

Biagio Marini is widely recognized as one of the most important composers of the early seventeenth century. Although his instrumental works, many of which boast a highly virtuosic and experimental approach, have received more attention from scholars and performers than his vocal works, he was a prolific composer in a wide range of genres, both vocal and instrumental. Marini’s surviving oeuvre includes, among instrumental works, polyphonic canzonas, sonatas and canzonas in the so-called stile moderno, and instrumental dance pieces; and, among vocal works, strophic canzonettas, extended compositions in the stile recitativo, and concerted madrigals of great beauty and interest. With a career that brought him to numerous courts, churches, and academies in Italy and beyond, Marini’s long list of publications reflects a wide array of influences and suggests that he was himself highly influential during his own day. It is unfortunate that a large portion of Marini’s compositions are now lost. The new edition of his Opus 2, the Madrigali e symfonie (1618), edited by Aurelio Bianco and Sara Dieci, is thus of great importance. Since the basso continuo partbook is lost, and the other partbooks are scattered among libraries in London (canto I), Bologna (canto II), Kraków (basso), and Berkeley (basso), it has been difficult to assess the volume’s contents, and only a handful of pieces have been issued in modern edition. (Readers may wish to consult those pieces in the edition by Thomas D. Dunn, available freely from the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music; see Biagio Marini, Madrigali e symfonie, op. 2 (Selections), 2nd edn. (January 2005), www.sscm-wlscm.org/main-catalogue/ browse-by-composer/34-wlscm-no-3 (accessed 18 June 2017).) Bianco and Dieci make the bold and, in my view, commendable move of reconstructing the basso continuo part so that the entire volume is now accessible to both scholars and performers. They acknowledge that their reconstruction is tentative, and it is clearly labelled at the start of each piece with the editors’ names; however, it is obviously based on an intimate knowledge of early seventeenth-century harmony and practice. For some pieces, the surviving basso line provides a clear model for the creation of a basso seguente part; in others, the editors have had to create a basso continuo part with only a soprano line to guide them (on this distinction see pp. 78–9). In addition to the musical edition, description of sources, poetic texts, and critical notes, the editors provide fully an eighty-one-page introduction—really a short book, written in highly accessible Italian—synthesizing the literature on Marini’s biography and musical import and assessing the contents of this volume.

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