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During the exhibition, an unreleased CD with Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali
Music has occupied an important place in the life and fame of the Mantuan court and this aspect shows and catalogs give ample account of the exhibition and catalogs, where among other things the unpublished "Repertoire of musical instruments in the court of Mantua: 1486 - 1628" will be published, reconstructed by Paola Besutti on the basis of archival knowledge found so far.
During this event, the production of a compact disc, with a series of scherzi musicali, by Claudio Monteverdi, recorded during their recent performance in the Sala Manto at Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (direction C. Gallico) is also planned. Musical flowers grown in the "royal rooms", this is how Monteverdi himself loved to define his own fields grown and matured in the twenty years of service at the court of Mantua where, first as a viola player then as "music teacher" of Duke Vincenzo I , conceived his own masterpieces, first of all the Orpheus. This CD instead contains the taste and sound of the brilliant entertainments that characterized the music of Vincenzo's dukedom resounding in the halls "where one dances" and in that hall of the Mirror, mentioned by Monteverdi in his letters, and found recently.
In the field of music, it is essential to go back to the times of the Francesco II and Isabella d'Este's marquisate, to understand when the court of Mantua began to become a center open to other similar European realities, both in the sense of reception and in that of musical production.
Dwelling on Isabella's relationship with music today means having a clear vision of what the insurgent characters of this art were in the Renaissance and early modern age. The philosophical reflection on music, the value attributed to personal musical practice, the taste for musical objects, the collecting pleasure expressed in the search for poetic and musical repertoires and virtuosos able to interpret them, all this is embodied by her and by other women of the Este family ruling in Ferrara, Milan, Urbino. His vital passion for profane music with Italian text became the engine of a dense exchange of rhymes, lies, scherzi, strambotti, circulating in loose sheets and makeshift copies jotted down from memory, now no longer available, but at least in part handed down in content from the collections of secular music printed by the Venetian Ottaviano Petrucci (1504-1514). To find in the profane field a liveliness comparable to that of the Isabellian period, one will have to wait for the Vincenzo Gonzaga's duchy years since, in the male line, the rulers preceding him Francesco II, Federico II, Cardinal Ercole and above all Duke Guglielmo - they preferred sacred music. Francesco II founded the first stable musical team - active mainly in the chapel of S. Maria dei Votes in the cathedral of S. Pietro (1511) - and a high chapel equipped with the best virtuosos and instruments, while Cardinal Ercole, for a long time regent of the duchy, was responsible for the advent of the Flemish master Jachet da Mantoa in Mantua. From these years a first important collection of sacred music began to be formed, now partially recognizable, as an ancient nucleus in the extraordinary fund of the palatine church of Santa Barbara, a masterpiece by Guglielmo Gonzaga "lord of music". With Guglielmo, the teachings and choices of Hercules and the musical vocation of the duchy, manifested in the Isabella and Francesco II's years, found their most powerful interpreter indeed, in addition to being an excellent administrator and factor of the new organization of the architectural spaces of the court, he was also the promoter of one of the most autonomous programs of qualification of the state through a reform of music, liturgy and ceremonial that post-conciliar history remembers. His early and continuous application to music as a composer, combined with the almost maniacal commitment transfused in the construction of the architectural, liturgical and musical complex of the church of Santa Barbara had indelible effects on the musical history of the period. The fame of Mantua as the capital of music at the time of Guglielmo spread, and much more frequently than in the past the composers dedicated or sent their own music to the duke; it is then shown how the fame of the first choirmaster chosen for the church of Santa Barbara (1565), Giaches Wert, went beyond the Italian borders to the point of being a candidate 'in absentia', and apparently without his knowledge, by the emperor Maximilian II ( 1567) as his own choirmaster since the post is vacant.
While the duchy of Guglielmo, immortalized above all by the names of Wert and Palestrina, left indelible traces in the history of European sacred music, the subsequent government of Vincenzo became a sort of emblem of the application of vocal and instrumental music to all the components of spectacle and public or private entertainment, but nonetheless profane. This sensitivity, so different from the paternal one, had first matured during the long youthful stays at the court of Ferrara, where his sister Margherita Gonzaga (wife of Alfonso II d'Este from 1579) had favored the flowering of the court ballet and the rebirth of the "concert of the ladies". Subsequently, the increasingly close relations with the court of Florence (in 1584 Vincenzo married Eleonora de 'Medici) enriched this predisposition also with the taste for the more exquisitely Florentine component of solo singing with guitar accompaniment. The Mantuan service (from about 1598) of the noble composer, singer and guitar virtuoso Francesco Rasi, born in Arezzo, but Florentine by training, promoted many contacts with the Florentine environment and the recruitment of musicians, can be traced back to this rising inclination coming from that area, like the young castrato Giovan Battista Sacchl.
In this new perspective, more open to the different contributions, the characteristics of Mantuan musical life of the period must be read: from the flowering of the fresh three-part ballets by Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, to the idiomatic enhancement - by Monteverdi, by Salomone Rossi, of the Rubini brothers, Luigi Farina and Giovanni Battista Buonamente - of the lively instrumental virtuosity applied or not to dance and entertainment, up to the multiple solutions of collaboration between music and theater of actors, expressed in comedies, pastorals, tragedies, intermediates, street parties, tournaments. In this period also matured the peculiar Mantuan vocation for the dance, representative or simply for entertainment that Eleonora Gonzaga married to Emperor Ferdinand II of Habsburg (1621) will import into the court of Vienna together with all the "Italian things on the subject of recreation "well known to her in Mantua. During the Vincenzo's duchy the musical groups active in the court became at least five.
The imprint left by Ferdinando also on the music was profound. As in the domain of the figurative arts the tastes of Ferdinand (cardinal and then duke from 1613 to 1626 but with full powers only from 1616) were decidedly stretched towards the modernity then represented by Florence and Rome, so in the musical field his orientation towards the Florentine culture, consolidated in a period of formation (1604-1608) in the Medici city he favored the opening of the court of Mantua to the vocal and representative genres that were flourishing precisely in Florence at that time. His presence in Pisa during the preparations for the Orpheus and the feasts for the brother Francesco's wedding with Margherita di Savoia (1608) favored the intensification of contacts with the Medici court, specifically the arrival in Mantua of virtuosos such as On the other hand I was Gualberto Magli and the contralto Antonio Brandi... The bond with Marco da Gagliano, who was an intermediary, was then lasting. Ferdinando was the true proponent of the recitation of his Dafne in Mantua (carnival 1608) with the addition of his own arias, and with da Gagliano he shared his idea (1607) of founding a musical academy in Mantua on the model of the Florentine academy of Elevate.