CARISSIMI, GIACOMO. - Musician, b. at Marino on 18 April 1605, d. at Rome on 12 Jan. 1674. Despite the fame he enjoyed in his own time, notices and direct testimonies about his life are scarce; the biography remains quite fragmentary, even after the research of recent decades.
At eighteen he is found as a singer in the chapel of the cathedral of Tivoli (perhaps from 15 Aug. 1623, the date of its reestablishment). He was then maestro di cappella at the cathedral of St. Rufino in Assisi, where he remained in the years 1628-29. In 1630 he moved to Rome to take up the office of maestro di cappella in the church of St. Apollinare of the Collegio Germanico, with an annual stipend of eighty scudi, plus board and lodging. The secure economic position thus attained by C. was further increased by the revenues procured for him, on the occasion of his receiving orders (March 1637), by his patron Cardinal Colonna.
C.'s fame spread rapidly in Italy and abroad, as is precious testimony to which are the invitations to assume the direction of the chapel of St. Mark in Venice, succeeding Claudio Monteverdi. Archduke Leopold William also sought to attract him into his service, availing himself of the good offices of Landgrave Frederick of Hesse, 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, Johann Philipp Krieger; while among the Italians it is not to be excluded that Marc'Antonio Cesti was a pupil of his school. C. was buried in the same church of St. Apollinare. A portrait of him and his musical manuscripts were unfortunately lost.
Alongside Monteverdi and Frescobaldi, C. is one of the most brilliant artists of the Italian musical seventeenth century. The forms C. preferred are those of the Latin oratorio and of the religious and secular cantata, in which the vocal expression of the new seventeenth-century style attains for the first time that perfection which Monteverdi, in his turn, had achieved in musical drama and in more properly secular song. But C. towers above all with a sure, exemplary clarity of style, and for this reason he proves perhaps greater, even if less varied, than Luigi Rossi and M. A. Cesti themselves, who alongside him excel in the melodious settings of seventeenth-century lyric poetry. C.'s cantata affirms and accentuates the desire to free melody from the limit of declamation and effects the resolute detachment from what will henceforth remain defined as true and proper "recitative."
But C.'s genius was able to show 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 equaled, through a kind of instinctive congeniality. His temperament, despite the inclination toward melodic effusion, wholly gathered into an intimate and fervent religiosity, unfolds with a variety and depth of expression that even the best cantatas perhaps do not let one glimpse. The dramatic picture is of a sober efficacy and brings into the full seventeenth century an authentic aura of severe biblical grandeur, in which nevertheless the humanity of the characters has its most evident relief. Since the authors of the oratorio texts are not known, it may be that they come from the collaboration of the Jesuit fathers of the College, but it is not to be excluded that they were composed by C. himself, and if this were so we would have a admirable example of a unified dramatic-musical conception. Of such a grandiose and effective faculty of creative synthesis the choral parts give testimony, among the most vigorous and genuine that Italian music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can count; in some celebrated examples, such as the battle in the Iefte, the storm in the Gionata, it is not a matter of external descriptive effects, but of a concise, powerful dramatic evocation obtained with a rare simplicity of means. In the oratorios C.'s recitative reaches penetrating expressive results in that tendency of his toward an arioso movement, which can be compared only to that of Monteverdi, and with this is said without further ado the value that it assumes in the new seventeenth-century dramatic-vocal expression. Through the brilliant variety of musical figurations, the character usually stands out in C.'s oratorio with an evidence more often vigorous and robust, sometimes inclined to welcome accents of delicate, intimate lyricism; such evidence is connatural with the living concreteness of vocal expression, and therefore it is well understood how the instrumental parts, scantily indicated in the manuscripts, were arranged in such a way as to preserve for the singing, soloistic or choral, its most genuine and complete relief.
The oratorios, also called "istorie," 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 latter without chorus in the form of a soloistic cantata. C. also composed other religious music, including masses, motets, etc., and the Sacri concerti musicali (Mascardi, Rome 1675); an Ars cantandi is also ascribed to him, of which only a German translation exists, published in a Vermehrter Wegweiser (Koppmayer, Augsburg 1689, reprinted several times).
Bibliography9 works
Luigi Ronga