Alfonso Fontanelli - The complete MadrigalS

Alfonso Fontanelli (1557–1622) was a prominent musician and courtier in the Ferrarese court establishment during its great flowering in the last decades of the sixteenth century, where his colleagues included Luzzaschi, Wert, and Monteverdi. He went on to become and important figure in the musical worlds of Florence and Rome in the early seventeenth century. Fontanelli is consistently numbered among the most eminent composers of the time—in the first decade of the seventeenth century alone by the musicians Jacopo Peri, Giovanni Del Turco, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, Marco da Gagliano, and Adriano Banchieri. Such praise lasts at least until mid-century, as expressed by Marco Scacchi in 1649. Modern scholars since Alfred Einstein’s pioneering monograph of 1949 have agreed with the earlier assessment. The present edition will finally make this exquisite music (da Gagliano’s phrase) generally available to modern scholars and performers.

Einstein, in The Italian Madrigal, called Fontanelli “Gesualdo’s harmonious and well-balanced counterpart” and “perhaps more gifted” than any of the noblemen-composers of madrigals at the end of the century—that number includes Striggio, Gesualdo, and Del Turco. Unlike Gesualdo, however, Fontanelli was conflicted about exercising his musical gifts, worrying that it was an unseemly activity for a nobleman, and he seems to have renounced even anonymous publication once his career as a courtier and statesman was well-established. In any case, no compositions of his are known to survive from later than the Second Book of 1604, although he died in 1622.

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