Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto.(Review)

By John Walter Hill. (Oxford Monographs on Music.) Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. [Vol. 1 (text), xx, 453 p.; vol. 2 (music examples), xii, 458 p. ISBN 0-19-816613-3. $150.]

Interest in the patronage of music in Rome in the early baroque has not waned, nor has the appeal of archival anti manuscript research, despite the allure of new subfields and methods in the discipline. One of the newest studies to exploit hitherto untapped sources is John Walter Hill's two-volume Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. It joins recent key studies of patronage in cardinals' households: Frederick Hammond's Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage under Urban VII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Claudio Annibaldi's "II mecenate 'politico': Ancora sul patronato musicale del Cardinale Pietro Aldobrandini (ca. 1570-1621)" (Studi musicali 16 [1987]: 33-93; 17 [1988]: 101-78), Jean Lionnet's "The Borghese Family and Music during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century" (Music & Letters 74 [1993]: 519-29), and the fine earlier work on Montalto by James Chater and Hill (Chater, "Musical Patronage in Rome at the Turn of the Seventeenth Cen tury: The Case of Cardinal Montalto," Studi musicali 16 [1987]: 179-227; Hill, "Frescobaldi's Arie and the Musical Circle around Cardinal Montalto," in Frescobaldi Studies, ed. Alexander Silbiger [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987], 157-94).

In a little over two decades of research on Roman monody and opera, Hill has worked through an enormous number of sources. Among new materials finding a place in this book are dozens of letters by musicians, notarial documents, payment records, and manuscripts of poetry. But most significant of all, and at the heart of the inquiry, are ten manuscripts and eight prints preserving solo songs by, among other composers, Ottavio Catalani, Giuseppino Cenci, Stefano Landi, Ippolito Macchiavelli, Cesare Marotta, Orazio Michi, Giovanni Bernardino Nanino, Giovanni Domenico Puliasehi, and Raffaello Rontani. Hill makes a case for a web of relationships among these music sources and links portions of their contents to musicians and performances around Alessandro Peretti (1571-1623), created cardinal "of Montalto" by his great-uncle Pope Sixtus V. Some of the sources have not been previously discussed in print, making this a doubly valuable part of his contribution.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the contents of Cardinal Montalto's large library (reportedly some 1,682 items) had been scattered. What music he had owned was not known, apart from nine printed collections of songs bound together under a cover bearing a coat of arms of the family (p. 140). This was the lacuna Hill faced when he began to search for the lost repertory in extant sources. That undertaking, and Hill's work in pinpointing the music within Roman compositional activity, mark considerable progress in the field; the wealth of material presented, and the results, are likely to be sifted and revised for years to come, perhaps, among others, by the author himself.

This is a handsome book, enriched by nineteen plates and a generous quantity of music examples and useful tables. Two appendixes provide transcriptions of over one hundred letters and list the full contents of twenty music sources, with identification of the composers, poets, musical and poetic forms, and concordances. Volume 2 offers transcriptions of one hundred sixty-four works (and alternate versions of ten of these), as well as a number of counterpoint exercises by Nanino. Editorial intervention is minor: modern clefs, some barring, and silent correction of "obvious" errors (2: xi). Hill does not provide critical notes or translations for each composition. These omissions are minor, however, in light of the large body of Roman music to which scholars are now given access.

The book begins with consideration of the economic, political, and cultural strata of the world Cardinal Montalto inhabited. The introduction adopts something of an interactive approach: prices are shown for such commodities as shoes, rent, and musicians' wages (also converted to U.S. dollars), and readers are invited to calculate, via a given formula, prices for these commodities in other countries. Hill judges the cost of living in Montalto's Rome comparable to that in the United States in 1996, except for food. The tables contain a few inconsistencies. Six sheets of music paper would hardly have cost $20 (U.S.) in 1996 (1:xix, table 2), a likely typographical error; the reader is not informed here that "Paolo Cortesi's suggested income for cardinals: 12,000 scudi" and a "Papal commission's suggested income for cardinals: 6,000 scudi" (1:xx, table 3) date from the early sixteenth century, not from Cardinal Montalto's time. The first chapter traces the growth of the Peretti family wealth and details Montalto 's titles, income, residences, and art, as well as his expenditures and charitable outlay, including the annual sum of 12,000 scudi he gave Pope Paul V. Hill writes informatively about power struggles within the Roman curia, Montalto's political alliances, and the role cronyism played at almost every juncture.

Eight chapters follow on various musical topics. Chapter 2 considers Montalto's musician-clients. The reference in the book's title to "the circles around Cardinal Montalto" gives visual form to Hill's point of view that, in the hierarchical society in which Montalto operated, various groups of musician-clients were at different removes from their patron. Hill places (1) the household musicians within Montalto's innermost circle; (2) at a little more distance, the musicians of Montalto's titular church; (3) musicians lent him by other courts; (4) composers elsewhere who dedicated music to him; and (5) in the outermost circle, those musicians who indirectly benefited from his support of various religious institutions. The structural model is a practical one, though the association of cardinals with a broad spectrum of musicians is familiar and well-documented territory.