Frescobaldi, Girolamo

FRESCOBALDI, GIROLAMO. - Organist and composer, b. in Ferrara, where he was baptized in the Cathedral on 9 September 1583, d. in Rome on 1 March 1643. A pupil of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, even as a young boy he displayed a precocious musical versatility, quickly mastering the technique of many instruments. In 1604, barely twenty years old, he was already enrolled in the Congregation of Musicians under the protection of St. Cecilia in Rome, as organist and singer. In the retinue of the archbishop of Rhodes, Guido Bentivoglio, created nuncio in Flanders by Paul V (1607), Frescobaldi made a journey through that region of high musical tradition, where his first printed work saw the light, the Primo libro dei madrigali (Antwerp 1608).

From a letter dated 29 July 1608 from Milan, it emerges that the composer was already in that city soliciting the printing of the Fantasie, which were then published in the course of the year. In May 1608, following the dismissal from the office of organist in the Cappella Giulia of Ercole Pasquini, Alessandro Costantini held the post as substitute for some time, but Frescobaldi was preferred to the latter, and he became, barely twenty-five years old, Vatican organist and remained in that office until the end of his life. Reports of the time tell of the degree of virtuosic excellence he attained on the instrument, of which he was to remain the unsurpassed Italian master also in musical composition: and his fame spread in a short time, not only in Italy but throughout all Europe. Besides exercising the office of Vatican organist, Frescobaldi was in the service of the house of Aldobrandini, perhaps in the employ of Card. Pietro (d. 1621), nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and, later, of the house of Barberini, by whom he was salaried as appears from the accounts running from 1636 to 1642. In 1644, through Paolo Facconi, singer of the pontifical Chapel, he was in negotiations with the duke of Mantua, in whose service he was for a short time the following year; but because of the lack of interest shown by the Duke toward him and the delay in observing the agreed conditions, by the beginning of May 1615 the musician had already returned to Rome. The only long interlude in his Roman activity occurred when Frescobaldi entered the service of Ferdinando II de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, who, staying in Rome in March 1628, had occasion to appreciate personally the exceptional prowess of the composer from Ferrara. Having obtained the consent of the Chapter of St. Peter's, Frescobaldi remained in Florence from 1628 to 1634; having returned to Rome, he continued his service at the Cappella Giulia, universally honored as a supreme artist. After ten days of illness Frescobaldi died in 1643 and was buried in the basilica of the SS. Apostoli.

The culmination of Frescobaldi's work is reached, after the admirable affirmations of the contrapuntal style of the Fantasie (1608) and the Ricercari e canzoni francesi (1615), in the first book of the Toccate e partite (1614), in the Capricci (1624), in the second book of the Toccate e partite (1627). Frescobaldi dissolves the abstract limits between the rigorously contrapuntal style and that of free, fanciful invention: he achieves the most unexpected unity through his unsurpassable faculty of "varying" the themes or subjects of his compositions. But, rather than of themes, in the toccatas it is more accurate to speak of images or intuitions of inner illuminations, musical tendencies, nuclei without fixed limits, which unfold in the depths and seek one another ceaselessly, in order to integrate themselves into a succession that in its unfolding states the necessary motives of their own development. Profoundly originating from feeling intuited in its most immediate purity, there pours forth a sense of poetry which, produced by this inner movement, is absolutely, solely musical.

Frescobaldi impressed upon almost every one of his works a character of such intimate and austere reflection, one might almost say of thoughtful contemplation, as to legitimize the recognition of the deepest motive of his art in a religious inspiration, even when the practical destination of the work was not explicit. But his last great organ work, the Fiori musicali of 1635, constitutes as it were a kind of crown of religious lyrics, in which the conventional liturgical obligation, transforming itself for him into a new intense artistic possibility, spontaneously leads the author to his most unified creation, despite the variety of forms (versets, ricercars, canzonas and brief toccatas for the elevation). Frescobaldi's profound mysticism expresses itself with accents of great sweetness and intense fervor.

Of the great composer from Ferrara there remain also some books of canzonas for various instruments with and without continuo, which reveal a lively melodic mobility, and, besides the already mentioned madrigals, a book of religious motets (1617) for one or more voices on a Latin text and the two books of Arte musicali (1630), written under the evident influence of the Florentine recitative style.

Frescobaldi's art exercised a great influence on the development of European organ art, also through pupils directly of the master, among whom special mention should be made, besides the distinguished Michelangelo Rossi, of Giacomo Freberger, who stayed in Rome for three and a half years with a subsidy from the imperial court of Vienna, and of Giovanni Gaspare Kerll. Also from the technical and structural point of view Frescobaldi was valued as a subtle and profound master of harmonic and chromatic audacities, of ingenious solutions to contrapuntal problems; his importance was capital in the history of the fugue, and G. S. Bach himself showed that he took up the teaching of the great Italian predecessor through a profound study, as is attested among other things by his transcription of the Fiori musicali.

Luigi Ronga