MARENZIO, LUCA. – Musician, born at Cocceglio (Brescia) ca. 1553, died in Rome on 22 August 1599. A pupil of Giovanni Cotino, maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Brescia, from 1586 to 1589 he was in Poland in the service of King Sigismund III, who held him in the highest esteem.
Upon returning to Italy, he stayed for some time in Florence with Ferdinando de' Medici; then he went to Rome (1591), where he was maestro di cappella, first to Cardinal d'Este and then to Cardinal Cintio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII. In 1595 he was appointed a singer in the Pontifical Musical Chapel; but after four years he died and was buried in the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina.
A highly prolific composer, much of his output has been lost; but there survive 9 books of madrigals for 5 voices (1580–89); 6 of madrigals for 6 voices (1582–91); 2 of madrigals for 4 and 6 voices (1588), in addition to spiritual madrigals for 5 voices (of which the first book was printed with the benefit of the privilege granted by Pope Gregory XVI) and 6 books of villanelle and arie alla napoletana for 3 voices. In 1589, for the marriage of Ferdinando de' Medici and Cristina di Lorena, he composed the music for the intermezzo Il combattimento di Apolline con il serpente, to a poetic text by O. Rinuccini: a complex of dramatic madrigals in vocal counterpoint.
Among M.’s sacred compositions are the Sacri Concentus for 5 and 7 voices, the antiphons for 6 voices, including the famous one for s. Cecilia: Dum aurora finem darei; and the motets for all the feasts of the ecclesiastical year, for several voices, among which Innocentes pro Christo infantes and Estee fortes in bello deserve mention.
M. was able to assimilate and rework with originality the innovations of the direct disciples of A. Willaert and to absorb, without renouncing his originally Venetian formation, the teachings of the Roman school, then illuminated by G. Pierluigi da Palestrina. His refined expressiveness and frank, impassioned lyricism led his contemporaries to give him the epithet “divine.” Of the madrigals, then held in great esteem, he may be regarded as one of the most illustrious practitioners; they are, in fact, full of grace, suffused with warmth and spontaneity; the madrigalisms that emerge in them are balanced and graceful; and they contain a chromaticism that lends polyphony a warm breath of lyricism. He himself states that he composed them “in a manner quite different from the past, having attended, both to the imitation of the words and to the propriety of the style, to a mournful gravity.”