LUCIO MARENZIO. - Musician, b. at Coccaglio (Brescia) c. 1553, d. at Rome 22 Aug. 1599. A pupil of Giovanni Cotino, maestro di cappella in the cathedral of Brescia, from 1586 to 1589 he was in Poland in the service of King Sigismund III, who held him in very high esteem.
On his return to Italy, he stayed for some time in Florence with Ferdinando de’ Medici; then came to Rome (1591), where he was maestro di cappella, first to Cardinal d’Este and then to Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII. In 1595 he was appointed singer in the Papal Chapel; but after four years he died and was buried in the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina.
A most prolific composer, much of his output has been lost; but nine books of madrigals for five voices (1580–89) survive; six books of madrigals for six voices (1582–91); two of madrigals for four and six voices (1588), besides spiritual madrigals for five voices (the first book printed with the privilege of Pope Gregory XIII) and six books of villanellas and Neapolitan-style arias for three voices. In 1589, for the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici to Christine of Lorraine, he composed the music for the intermezzo *Il combattimento di Apolline con il serpente*, on a poetic text by O. Rinuccini: a complex of dramatic madrigals in full vocal ensemble.
Of Marenzio’s sacred compositions there are the *Sacri Concentus* for five and seven voices, the six-voice antiphons, among which is famous that for St Cecilia: *Dum aurora finem daret*; the motets for all the feasts of the ecclesiastical year in multiple voices, among which are to be noted *Innocentes pro Christo infantes* and *Estote fortes in bello*.
Marenzio was able to assimilate and rework with originality the innovations of the direct pupils of A. Willaert and absorb, without renouncing his originally Venetian training, the teachings of the Roman school, then illumined by G. Pierluigi da Palestrina. The refined expressiveness and the frank, passionate singability earned him from his contemporaries the epithet of “divine.” Of the madrigals, then in high favour, he may be considered one of the most illustrious exponents; they are, indeed, full of grace, imbued with warmth and spontaneity; the madrigalisms that appear in them are balanced and graceful; and there is found a chromaticism that lends to the polyphony a warm breath of lyricism. He himself declared to have composed them “in a manner quite different from the past, having, both through the imitation of the words and through the propriety of style, aimed at a mournful gravity.”