FRESCOBALDI, Girolamo. Organist and composer, b. at Ferrara, where he was baptized in the Cathedral on 9 Sept. 1583, d. at Rome on 1 March 1643. A pupil of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, he showed precocious musical versatility as a youth, soon 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. While accompanying the Archbishop of Rhodes, Guido Bentivoglio, whom Paul V had created (1607) nuncio to the Low Countries, F. made a journey to that region of high musical tradition; there appeared his first printed work, the First Book of Madrigals (Antwerp 1608).
From a letter dated 29 July 1608 from Milan, it appears that the composer was already in that city to expedite the printing of the Fantasias, which were then published later that year. In May 1608, following the dismissal of the only organist in the Cappella Giulia, Ercole Pasquini, Alessandro Costantini temporarily held the post, but F. was preferred to him, and at barely twenty-five became Vatican organist, a position he held until the end of his life. Contemporary accounts attest to the extraordinary virtuosity he achieved on the instrument, of which he remained the unsurpassed Italian master in both performance and composition; his fame spread quickly, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In addition to his duties as Vatican organist, F. served the Aldobrandini household, perhaps under Cardinal Pietro (d. 1621), nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and later the Barberini family, by whom he was salaried as is shown by accounts from 1636 to 1642. In 1614, through Paolo Facconi, a singer in the Papal Chapel, he entered into negotiations with the Duke of Mantua, whose service he entered briefly the following year; but owing to the Duke’s indifference and delay in fulfilling agreed terms, by early May 1615 the musician had already returned to Rome. The only long absence from his Roman activity occurred when F. entered the service of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who, while staying in Rome in March 1628, had occasion to appreciate personally the exceptional talent of the Ferrarese composer. With the consent of the Chapter of St Peter’s, F. remained in Florence from 1628 to 1634; returning to Rome, he continued his service in the Cappella Giulia, universally honored as a supreme artist. After ten days’ illness, F. died in 1643 and was buried in the basilica of the SS. Apostoli.
The summit of F.’s work is reached, after the strident, pointed sonorities of the Fantasias (1608) and the Ricercari and Canzoni francesi (1615), in the First Book of Toccatas and Partitas (1614), the Capriccios (1624), and the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas (1627). F. dissolved the abstract boundaries between rigorously contrapuntal style and that of free, extended invention; he achieved the most unexpected unity through his unsurpassed gift of variation in the themes or subjects of his compositions. But rather than themes, in the toccatas it is more fitting to speak of images or intuitions, of inner illuminations, musical tendencies, unbounded nuclei that unfold inwardly and seek one another endlessly, to integrate into a sequence that, as it unfolds, reveals the necessary motives of their own development. Deeply rooted in feeling intuited in its most immediate purity, a sense of poetry emanates, produced by this inner movement, which is absolutely, uniquely musical.
F. impressed upon almost every work a character of such intimate and austere reflection, one might almost say of thoughtful recollection, as to justify recognition of the deepest motive of his art in a practical experience of the opus. But his last great organ work, the Fiori musicali of 1635, constitutes something like a crown of sacred lyrics, in which the conventional liturgical obligation, transformed for him into a new and intense artistic possibility, spontaneously led the author to his most unified creation, despite the variety of forms (versets, ricercars, canzonas) and brief toccatas for the Elevation. The profound mysticism of Frescobaldi is expressed with accents of great sweetness and intense fervor.
Of the great Ferrarese composer there remain several books of canzonas for various instruments with and without thoroughbass, which reveal lively melodic mobility, and, besides the aforementioned madrigals, a book of sacred motets (1617) for one or more voices on Latin texts and two books of Arie musicali (1630), written under the evident influence of the Florentine recitative style.
Frescobaldian art exercised a great influence on the development of European organ art, also through the composer’s direct pupils, among whom should be especially remembered, besides the distinguished Michelangelo Rossi, Giacomo Froberger, who stayed in Rome for three and a half years with a stipend from the imperial court of Vienna, and Johann Caspar Kerll. Even from a technical and structural viewpoint, F. stands as a subtle and profound master of harmonic and chromatic daring, of ingenious solutions to contrapuntal problems; his importance was decisive in the history of the fugue, and J. S. Bach himself showed that he had absorbed the teaching of the great Italian predecessor through a profound study, as is evidenced, among other things, by his transcription of the Fiori musicali.