(b Albano, late 1541 or 1542; d Florence, bur. 14 Nov 1612). Italian singer, lutenist and ?composer, husband of Vittoria Archilei. He was in the service in Rome of Cardinal Alessandro Sforza dei Conti di S Fiora, who died on 16 May 1581, after which he entered the service of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. The latter became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1587, and Archilei, with his wife, followed him to Florence, where he became a musician at court, with a salary of 18 scudi a month from 1 September 1588; his salary was reduced to 11 scudi on 30 November 1589 (though he continued to receive a monthly pension of 12 scudi granted for life by Cardinal Ferdinando in 1582). He participated in the spectacular intermedi marking Ferdinando’s wedding in 1589: he is known to have played one of two chitarroni accompanying his wife’s singing of the florid solo song ‘Dalle più alte sfere’ (ed. D.P. Walker, Musique des intermèdes de ‘La pellegrina’, Les fêtes du mariage de Ferdinand de Médicis et de Christine de Lorraine, Florence, 1589, i, Paris, 1963; original text ‘Dalle celesti sfere’) at the beginning of the first intermedio. In the publication of the music (1591) he is named as the composer of this song, but the official description of the event by Bastiano de’ Rossi (Florence, 1589, p.19) attributes it to Cavalieri. Archilei was paid up to and including August 1612 (there are no records for the following months). The Ferdinando Archilei who saw through the press Pomponio Nenna’s eighth book of five-part madrigals (1618) was one of his sons.
ES (‘Archilei, Vittoria’; E. Zanetti)
SolertiMBD
V. Giustiniani: Discorso sopra la musica de’ suoi tempi (MS, 1628, I-La, pr. in Solerti: Le origini del melodramma (Turin, 1903/R), 98–128); MSD, ix (1962), in Eng. trans. 63–80, esp. 70
R. Gandolfi: ‘La cappella musicale della corte di Toscana (1539–1859)’, RMI, xvi (1909), 506–30, esp. 508
F. Boyer: ‘Les Orsini et les musiciens d’Italie au début du XVIIe siècle’, Mélanges de philologie, d’histoire et de littérature offerts à Henri Hauvette (Paris, 1934), 301–10
C.V. Palisca: ‘Musical Asides in the Diplomatic Correspondence of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’, MQ, xlix (1963), 339–55, esp. 346
F. Hammond: ‘Musicians at the Medici Court in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, AnMc, no.14 (1974), 151–69, esp. 168
W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)
NIGEL FORTUNE/TIM CARTER