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(b Parma, c1602–5; d Rome, 26 Jan
1662). Italian composer, singer and harpist.
1. Life.
Marazzoli was one of at least four children born to Dionisio and Flora
de' Marazzoli. He took holy orders and was presumably ordained priest
about 1625. At that time he received a benefice from Parma Cathedral,
but he had to forgo this on 27 February 1637 because of new permanent
duties at Rome. According to his autograph will, Marazzoli moved to Rome
in 1626. Perhaps he was taken there, in the company of Domenico
Mazzocchi, by Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini, who returned to Rome from
Parma on 7 November 1626. Some time afterwards Marazzoli entered the
service of Cardinal Antonio Barberini the younger. In 1631 Marazzoli,
together with such well-known musicians as Landi and Filippo Vitali,
accompanied the cardinal when he went as papal legate to Urbino.
Probably Marazzoli made other travels with Antonio Barberini, to Bologna
and Pinerolo between 1629 and 1630 and perhaps also to Avignon in 1633.
Minor legations made by Antonio Barberini from 1634 to 1637 were
directed to central Italy, and it is therefore possible that Marazzoli
paid a short visit to Parma at this time.
Early in 1637 Antonio Barberini became protector of French affairs at
Rome, where he remained until the Barberinis engaged in the War of
Castro in 1641. Marazzoli entered the cardinal's new household as
aiutante di camera in 1637, and the Barberini family secured for him a
post as tenor in the papal chapel on 23 May. He was later made a
bussolante by Pope Urban VIII. He had already, since 1634, held a
benefice at Antonio Barberini's basilica, S Maria Maggiore, which
continued until his death.
Not until 1639 did Marazzoli gain the position of a musico in the
household of Antonio Barberini, and it is therefore somewhat difficult
to trace his activities as a composer before this date. He did, however,
write the music for the comedy-ballet La pazzia d'Orlando for Carnival
1638 and the intermedi to Chi soffre speri for Carnival 1639, both
performed in the Barberini palace. From 1640 his compositional
activities moved from Rome to Ferrara (a bridgehead of the papal
dominions) and Venice. His opera L'Amore trionfante dello Sdegno
(L'Armida) was written to celebrate a wedding in February 1641 in
Ferrara, where Marazzoli is said to have stayed from July 1640 to March
1641. He apparently made a second trip to Ferrara in November 1641, when
he perhaps composed Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po, in which he aimed
to represent the military campaign of Taddeo Barberini and Luigi Mattei
at Castro in October 1641.
In order to defend the papal territories against Parma, Generalissimo
Taddeo Barberini, after the victorious Castro battle, moved with the
papal army to Ferrara, arriving on 5 January 1642. To celebrate the
event L'Armida was given in a second version on 11 January, directed, it
seems, by a colleague or pupil of Marazzoli, who had himself just gone
to Venice. According to Capponi (ES), Marazzoli was invited there to
revise Vitali's Narciso et Ecco for Carnival 1642. During the same
carnival Marazzoli's own opera Gli amori di Giasone e d'Isifile was
given at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo. He then returned speedily to
Ferrara to direct Le pretensioni in honour of the second arrival of
Taddeo Barberini on 4 March 1642.
Back in Rome by mid-1642, Marazzoli composed his allegorical opera Il
giuditio della ragione tra la Beltà e l'Affetto (Il Capriccio) on a text
by Francesco Buti, probably suggested by Cardinal Mazarin. The
performance, supervised by the Count of Marciano, took place in the
Palazzo Roberti during Carnival 1643. In November Marazzoli succeeded,
through the intervention of Antonio Barberini with the pope, in securing
leave of absence to travel to Paris, at Cardinal Mazarin's invitation,
with a company of Italian musicians including the singers Leonora Baroni
and Atto Melani. At the court of Anne of Austria in Paris he composed
chamber cantatas with which he delighted the queen, sometimes moving her
to tears. Il Capriccio was probably performed at the French court in
February 1645 with new ballets. When he returned to Rome in April 1645
Marazzoli found himself deprived of opportunities for opera because of
the Barberini family's exile in France (1645–53). He therefore took to
writing oratorios, including five Latin works almost certainly composed
for the Arciconfraternita del SS Crocifisso. Three extant Italian
oratorios may have been written for the Roman Filippini about 1650.
Possibly Marazzoli travelled to Genoa in 1649; his cantata A valicar di
Teti, ‘fatta per il passaggio della Regina di Spagna da Genova’, refers
to the Habsburg Princess Maria Anna, who sojourned in Genoa in mid-1649
on the way to her wedding with Philip IV of Spain.
1653 saw the return of Antonio Barberini to Rome and the reconciliation
of the Barberini and Pamphili families. For the marriage of Taddeo
Barberini's son Maffeo with Olimpia Giustiniani (a niece of Innocent X)
a new opera was commissioned from Marazzoli by Antonio Barberini.
Probably because he was short of time, Marazzoli invited Antonio Maria
Abbatini, with whom he had been on friendly terms ever since they had
served together at S Maria Maggiore, to collaborate with him, and their
opera Dal male il bene was given during Carnival 1654 at the Teatro
Barberini. Marazzoli assumed the role of principal composer for the new
Barberini opera series. For Carnival 1655 he composed Le armi e gli
amori, but the conclave to elect a new pope after the death of Innocent
X caused the production to be postponed. At Christmas 1655 Queen
Christina of Sweden arrived in Rome, and in her honour the Barberini
family presented Marazzoli's allegorical opera La Vita humana during
Carnival 1656 (Le armi e gli amori and Dal male il bene were also
performed during carnival). Marazzoli used the title of virtuoso da
camera to the queen, and it may be that he attended her during her
singing lessons with Loreto Vittori. Marazzoli was well known also as a
harp player. He possessed the famous gilded ‘Barberini harp’, now in the
Museo degli Strumenti Musicali, Rome, which was represented in a
painting by Giovanni Lanfranco.
According to Capponi (ES), Marazzoli wrote the prologue (to a libretto
by Francesco Buti) for a ballet by Lully, L'Amour malade, performed in
January 1657 in the Grande Salle of the Palais du Louvre, Paris. This
hypothesis has some probability, since in 1660 Marazzoli received from
the French ambassador in Rome a gift of 1000 livres for former services
not specified. Marazzoli remained at Rome and must have sent the score
to Paris, but it is also possible that some other composer, perhaps
Caproli or Cavalli, was entrusted with the commission. From April 1655
Marazzoli worked also for the new pope Alexander VII Chigi, who
commissioned festive cantatas for the Vatican, the Quirinal and Castel
Gandolfo (see illustration). In 1656 Marazzoli was appointed cameriere
extra by the pope, but the plague of 1656–7 and the years of poverty
that followed interrupted Roman musical activities until about 1660.
Antonio Barberini experienced a new surge of religious faith about this
time, and may have influenced the composer, who began to celebrate mass
personally. It is interesting that Marazzoli's will, drawn up about
1660, names Anna Giustiniani, his adoptive niece since 1650, several
members of the Barberini family, Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi and some
other friends, but neither Queen Christina of Sweden nor the Chigi
family. We know that the queen admired Carissimi and Abbatini (and,
later, musicians of a new generation), perhaps more than Marazzoli, and
this may have been true of the pope as well, after an initial period of
admiration.
During Mass in the Cappella Sistina on 25 January 1662 Marazzoli was
wounded in a serious accident; he died the next day.
2. Works.
Marazzoli's first important work for the theatre was La fiera di Farfa,
an intermedio to Chi soffre speri by Virgilio Mazzocchi, with a libretto
by Giulio Rospigliosi and sets by Lorenzo Bernini. This includes a
realistic market scene in which Marazzoli introduced street cries,
folksongs and dances. The writing for double chorus is on the whole
rather dense and heavily polyphonic in texture. Important also are
Marazzoli's last two operas, the allegorical La Vita humana, ovvero Il
trionfo della pietà and Le armi e gli amori (based on a Spanish play).
Recitative tends towards a secco character, but declamation is
relatively slow; cadences too often employ a descending three-note
cliché, and soliloquies tend to remain within the bounds of stylistic
convention, seldom containing moments of surprise. More expressive are
the brief sorrowful outbursts in recitative, broken up by rests and
enhanced by the harmonies. The arias show a wide variety of affects;
there are airy 4/4 canzonettas, highly virtuoso arias characterized by
long and difficult passages of fioritura, and slow arias in 3/2 metre.
This last type shows Marazzoli's talent for expressing feelings of
lamentation and sorrow, a talent justly acknowledged by his
contemporaries. Choruses (in La Vita humana) are characterized by
homophony and lively rhythms.
The five Latin oratorios show a considerable advance over La fiera di
Farfa in the technique of choral writing. Marazzoli's use of multiple
choirs (and instrumental groups) reveals the influence of north Italian
composers, including Monteverdi. The choruses in the oratorios are built
on the principle of structural contrast – much more than those of
Domenico Mazzocchi, for example, who still used older Venetian and Roman
techniques of polychorality. The choruses of Marazzoli are notable less
for their expression of affects than for their dramatic impact. The
recitatives show a slow and sometimes monotonous type of declamation
without word-repetition. In this they differ, for example, from the
expressive monody of Mazzocchi, but they do include occasional passages
of arioso. Of the three full-scale Italian oratorios, probably written
for the Roman Filippini about 1650, La Resurrezione is reflective in
tone, S Tomaso of the narrative-dramatic type. Recitative is more
extensive than in the Latin oratorios, and closed aria and ensemble
structures are introduced. Emphasis is placed on vocal virtuosity, even
(in the role of the apostle Peter) for the bass voice.
The 380 or so extant cantatas form the third important group of
Marazzoli's works. The generic term ‘cantata’ here embraces a wide
variety of vocal forms: recitative, lament, dialogue, canzone, aria,
sonetto and others. The ‘classical’ cantata structure of two arias each
preceded by recitative is also present. As well as the typical amorous
texts there are moralistic and sacred ones. Among Marazzoli's preferred
structures is the two-strophe aria with intercalare (vocal refrain),
also called couplet-refrain or rondo form. Strophic variations play an
important part in general. Recitative is mostly rather sober, sometimes
with diminutions at cadences. The cantatas written after about 1650 are
simpler in structure and fioritura. Some of them may have served a
didactic purpose, perhaps for the singing lessons of noblewomen such as
the Queen of Sweden or the Princess of Palestrina.
Marazzoli's instrumental music consists mainly of sinfonias for operas
and ballets. They are important in the intermedi of Chi soffre speri, in
Il Capriccio and in La Vita humana (although they do not appear in the
print of 1658). The dances are still much in the Renaissance manner of,
for example, Gastoldi. Interesting is a short instrumental sinfonia (in
A minor) to Erat quidem languidus, the first oratorio in a Lenten
series. Here the type of structural contrast found in the choral writing
is adapted to the possibilities of the available instruments. |
