Renaissance music and musicians.(Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance)(Book review)

Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance. By Richard Wistreich. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2007. [xii, 332 p. ISBN-13: 9780754654148. $99.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

Until now Giulio Cesare Brancaccio has been a minor figure in music history. A bass singer in what is often thought of as an age of sopranos, who left no music of his own, he is a footnote to the history of the madrigal. Richard Wistreich's book may not thrust Brancaccio into the limelight. But in the course of this fascinating biography, Wistreich has made significant contributions not only to our understanding of the performance of sixteenth-century repertories, but to larger issues of the role of music in culture and, indeed, of culture in music. That the means to these ends turns out to be a real page-turner is a bonus we don't often get in musicology.

The book is organized in three parts and, although this results in a certain amount of repetition, the structure allows important themes to develop over the course of the book. The first part is a biographical overview, which rightly stresses Brancaccio's military career. Music peeks out from behind the scenes at several points in this narrative, but Wistreich leaves it undeveloped, choosing to stay on course with the series of military engagements that guided Brancaccio's movements. At first this struck me as perverse; I am reading this, after all, because I am interested in music. But the result is that Wistreich makes the important point, to be developed later in the book, that the aspects of Brancaccio's life that most interest us were for him side stories. This fundamental point is essential to an understanding of Brancaccio's biography; it is also a useful corrective to the music historian's understandable, but distorted, musico-centric point of view.

There emerges from this section a compelling and at times comical portrait of a man who was in equal parts blustering military bore and bumbling international man of mystery. Brancaccio seems to have had a gift for turning up without explanation in political hot spots, with the result that he was often suspected of high international intrigue when all he was guilty of was self importance. Yet Wistreich manages to paint a compassionate portrait of a man who--to the modern reader as apparently to many of his contemporaries--sometimes seems a laughable buffoon.

The account of Brancaccio's career is enriched throughout by reference to, and explication of, the contemporary cultural phenomena that impacted it. For example, an episode during his French period--an exchange of letters about an unfought duel--is illuminated by an excursus on the culture of the duel. These excurses help to form a "thick" description of Brancaccio as courtier.

When music does enter the picture in this first part the contextualization within his non-musical career often gives it a fresh perspective. An example is Wistreich's account of the strange episode of Brancaccio's visit to England, in 1554, to curry favour with Mary I and her new Spanish husband, Philip II. The episode is well known to music historians because the young Lassus was said to be among the party. But the documents relating to the visit have been read mostly through the lens of Lassus's biography. Viewing them from the perspective of this strange peripatetic character, with his wide network of connections, brings a new perspective to the episode. Wistreich refutes previous suggestions that the "page" in the documents might have been Luigi or Fabrizio Dentice, arguing that the page is most likely to have been Lassus himself, supporting his hypothesis with the evidence of contemporary definitions of the word.

Part 2 moves to music, with a study of Brancaccio the bass singer. This section takes on the thorny question of what the emerging virtuosos of the sixteenth century actually sang and how. Two periods in Brancaccio's life are significant here: his career in Naples, during the 1540s, when he traveled in the circles where the villanesca was taking root, and the later, better known period in the 1580s when he was a reluctant participant in the famous musica secreta of Alfonso II in Ferrara.