(b Savona, 8 June 1552; d Savona, 11 Oct 1638). Italian poet and librettist. He wrote an autobiography which gives a brief general statement about his life and works but few biographical details. He was educated at the Jesuit College in Rome until the age of 20, when he entered the service of Cardinal Cornaro. After being involved in a duel, he left Rome, and returned to his birthplace, where he spent the next decade pursuing his literary studies. He spent his later years in Florence (1595–1633) and Savona, enjoying the patronage of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Duke Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga I and Pope Urban VIII, all of whom he celebrated in his occasional verse. He also eulogized many of his contemporaries, among them Jacopo Corsi, Ottavio Rinuccini, Giulio Caccini and Torquato Tasso.
Although Chiabrera wrote in almost every literary genre of his day, his most important contribution was in the field of lyric and dramatic poetry intended for music. Influenced by the humanist theories of the Pléiade and by the strophic forms of the more popular vein of the Italian Renaissance, he experimented with the metrical patterns and simple strophic verse adapted by Ronsard from classical models, as well as with the varied stanza types of earlier Italian poets, such as Sannazaro, Serafino Aquilano, Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano. After publishing several collections of poetry (two books of Canzonette in 1591, Scherzi e canzonette morali and Maniere de' versi toscani in 1599) he was celebrated as a modern Pindar and as the creator of a new lyric style in Florence. The short, varied verses and novel, often symmetrical internal schemes of his canzonettas and scherzi (the latter a term he introduced) were natural aids to musical organization and attracted many song-writers in the early 17th century, such as Caccini, Peri, Monteverdi (the majority of the Scherzi musicali of 1607 are to Chiabrera's texts), Francesco Rasi, Stefano Landi and others. Although his theatrical works (L'Orzalesi, Il Geri and Il Bamberini) remained unpublished until 1826, they reveal an attitude of conscious reform aimed at greater simplicity and immediacy of appeal than the Petrarchist lyrics of his contemporaries.
A member of the Florentine Accademia degli Alterati, Chiabrera was also among the literary figures who frequented Corsi's salon in the 1590s and was one of the first poets to experiment with the new dramatic genre, the libretto. His Rapimento di Cefalo, set largely by Caccini, was the most spectacular event of the Florentine wedding celebrations of 1600. He visited Mantua in 1602 and 1605 and provided the prologue and intermedi to Guarini's L'idropica, presented during the Gonzaga court festivities in 1608. Also in that year, for the wedding of Cosimo II in Florence, he wrote a ‘canzona sopra il balletto a cavallo’ and two ‘favolette da rappresentarsi cantando’, one of which was probably Il pianto d'Orfeo. Other librettos from this period are Oritia and Il Polifemo geloso (both published only in 1615, with Il pianto), and La Galatea (1614, revised as Gli amori di Aci e Galatea and set by Santi Orlandi for a performance in Mantua in 1617). Probably somewhat later are Angelica in Ebuda (1615) and La vegghia [veglia] delle Grazie (or Il ballo delle Grazie), the latter produced in Florence in 1615 with music in part by Peri. Two other librettos, Amore sbandito and La pietà di Cosmo, are lost.
Chiabrera's influence on his contemporaries may be seen in the fact that certain formal features of Rinuccini's expanded Dafne libretto of 1608 and of Striggio's Orfeo resemble those in Polifemo and Galatea, particularly in the use of specific strophic forms and unifying choral structures. His experimentation with new formal schemes has been credited with inspiring some elements of Monteverdi's concertato designs as well as with fostering the musical separation between recitative and aria in the operas and chamber cantatas of the mid-17th century and with providing the basis for the psychological portrayal of their characters.
Il rapimento di Cefalo and seven other librettos are in Angelo Solerti's Gli albori del melodramma (Milan, 1904/R), iii; and there is an edition by Luigi Negri of his Canzonette, rime varie, dialoghi (Turin, 1952), and an Opere di Gabriello Chiabrera by Marcello Turchi (Turin, 1973, 2/1984).
F. Neri: Il Chiabrera e la Pleiade francese (Turin, 1920)
F.L. Mannucci: La lirica di G. Chiabrera: storia e caratteri (Naples, 1925)
E.N. Girardi: Esperienza e poesia di Gabriello Chiabrera (Milan, 1950)
C. Calcaterra: Poesia e canto: studi sulla poesia melica italiana e sulla favola per musica (Bologna, 1951)
A.M. Nagler: Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637 (New Haven, CT, 1964/R), 96–100
G. Getto: Barocco in prosa e in poesia (Milan, 1969), 123–62
S. Leopold: ‘“Quelle bazzicature poetiche, appellate ariette” Dichtungsformen in der frühen italienischen Oper (1600–1640)’, HJbMw, iii (1978), 101–41
B.R. Hanning: Of Poetry and Music's Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera (Ann Arbor, 1980)
S. Leopold: ‘Chiabrera und die Monodie: die Entwicklung der Arie’, Studi musicali, x (1981), 75–106
A. Sopart: ‘Claudio Monteverdis Scherzi musicali (1607) und ihre Beziehungen zum “Scherzo”-Begriff in der italienischen Barocklyrik’, AMw, xxxviii (1981), 227–34
G. Fusconi: Gabriello Chiabrera: iconografia e documenti (Genoa, 1988)
P.L. Cerisola: L'arte dello stile: poesia e letterarietà in Gabriello Chiabrera (Milan, 1990)
R.R. Holzer: Music and Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Rome (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1990)
M. Ossi: ‘Claudio Monteverdi's “Ordine novo, bello et gustevole”: The Canzonetta as Dramatic Module and Formal Archetype’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 261–304
W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)
La scelta della misura: Gabriello Chiabrera, l'altro fuoco del barocco italiano [Savona, 1988], ed. F. Bianchi and P. Russo (Genoa, 1993)
BARBARA R. HANNING