CARISSIMI, GIACOMO. — Musician, born at Marino on 18 April 1605, died at Rome on 12 January 1674. Despite the fame he enjoyed in his own time, direct information and testimony concerning his life are scarce; his biography remains quite fragmentary, even after the researches of recent decades.
At eighteen he is found as a singer in the chapel of the cathedral of Tivoli (perhaps from 15 August 1623, the date of its rebuilding). He was subsequently chapel master at the cathedral of S. Rufino in Assisi, where he remained in the years 1628–29. In 1630 he moved to Rome to assume the office of chapel master at the church of S. Apollinare of the German College, with an annual salary of eighty scudi, plus board and lodging. The secure economic position thus attained by C. was further enhanced by the revenues procured for him, on the occasion of his receiving holy orders (March 1637), by his patron, Cardinal Colonna.
C.’s fame rapidly spread throughout Italy and abroad, as is eloquently attested by the invitations he received to assume the direction of the chapel of S. Marco in Venice, succeeding Claudio Monteverdi. The Archduke Leopoldo Guglielmo also sought to attract him into his service, through the agency of the Landgrave Federico d’Assia, a pupil and great admirer of C. Among C.’s numerous disciples, several foreigners stand out, such as the Frenchmen Michel Farinel and Marc Antoine Charpentier, and the Germans Johann Kaspar Kerl, Bernhard Christoph, and Johann Philipp Krieger; among the Italians, it cannot be ruled out that Marc’Antonio Cesti studied at his school. C. was buried in the same church of S. Apollinare. A portrait of him and the musical manuscripts were unfortunately lost.
Alongside Monteverdi and Frescobaldi, C. was one of the most ingenious artists of the Italian musical seventeenth century. The forms preferred by C. are those of the Latin oratorio and the sacred and secular cantata, in which the vocal expression of the new seventeenth-century style attained for the first time a perfection that Monteverdi, for his part, had achieved in musical drama and in song in the more strictly secular sense. But C. surpasses all the others through his assured, exemplary clarity of style, and for this reason he is perhaps greater, though less varied, than even Luigi Rossi and M. A. Cesti, who alongside him excelled in the melodious settings of seventeenth-century lyric poetry. C.’s cantata asserts and accentuates the desire to free melody from the limitations of declamation and effects a decisive separation from what would henceforth be defined as genuine “recitative.”
But C.’s genius was able to reveal itself in all its fullness in the oratorio on a Latin text, which he brought to a high degree of artistic excellence, in a certain sense never again equalled, through a kind of instinctive congeniality. His temperament, despite its inclination toward melodic effusion, wholly gathered into an intimate and fervent religiosity, unfolds
with a variety and depth of expression that even the finest cantatas perhaps do not allow one to glimpse. The dramatic picture is characterized by sober effectiveness and brings to the full seventeenth century an authentic aura of severe biblical grandeur, in which, nevertheless, the humanity of the characters stands out most clearly. Since the authors of the oratorio texts are unknown, they may have resulted from the collaboration of the Jesuit fathers of the College; but it cannot be ruled out that they were composed by C. himself, and if this were so, we would have a splendid example of a unified dramatic-musical conception. The choral sections bear witness to this grand and effective capacity for creative synthesis; they are among the most vigorous and genuine that Italian music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can claim. In certain celebrated examples, such as the battle in Iefte and the storm in Gionata, these are not external descriptive effects, but a concise, powerful dramatic evocation achieved with a rare simplicity of means. In the oratorios, C.’s recitative attains penetrating expressive results in its tendency toward an arioso movement, comparable only to that of Monteverdi; and this alone makes clear the value it assumes in the new dramatic-vocal expression of the seventeenth century. Through the ingenious variety of its musical figurations, the character usually stands out in C.’s oratorio with an evidence that is more often vigorous and robust, though at times inclined to receive accents of delicate, intimate lyricism; this vividness is inherent in the living concreteness of the vocal expression, and it is therefore readily understandable that the instrumental parts, scarcely indicated in the manuscripts, were arranged so as to preserve for the singing, whether solo or choral, its most genuine and complete prominence.
The oratorios, also called “histories,” that have come down to us are: Jonas, Iefte, Ezechias, Baltazar, Job, Abraham et Isaac, David et Ionathas, Historia divinis (Dives malus), Diluvium universale, Extremum iudicium, Iudicium Salomonis, Vir frugi et pater familias, Lucifer, the last without a chorus and in the form of a solo cantata. C. also composed other sacred music, including masses, motets, etc., and the Sacri concerti musicali (Mascardi, Rome 1675); he is also credited with an Ars cantandi, of which only a German translation exists, published in a Vermehrter Wegweiser (Koppmayer, Augsburg 1689, reprinted several times).