Corteccia, (Pier) Francesco

(b Florence, 27 July 1502; d Florence, 7 June 1571). Italian composer and organist. For several decades he dominated Florentine musical life as performer, composer, teacher and purveyor of music to his principal patron, the ruling duke Cosimo de’ Medici, to whom all of his major works, published and unpublished, were dedicated. In 1515 he was a choirboy at the Florentine Baptistry of S Giovanni, an indication that he was concurrently enrolled in the cathedral school of chant and grammar. He himself said in an autobiographical note from 1559 that he studied composition with Bernardo Pisano, master of the school from 1511 and maestro di cappella of the cathedral from 1512 to 1520. His tutor in keyboard was perhaps the cathedral organist, composer and teacher Bartolomeo degli Organi, active in Florence throughout his formative years.

Corteccia’s long and fruitful career began with a chaplaincy at the baptistry in 1527. He obtained a similar post in 1531 at the Medici church of S Lorenzo, where he was also briefly organist. Though his musical activities took him elsewhere, he lived at S Lorenzo for the rest of his life, rising through the chapter’s hierarchy to supernumerary canon (1550) and canon (1563), while holding several administrative offices such as chapter secretary, archivist and chamberlain. At the baptistry he served first as organist, 1535–9, and from January 1540 as master of the new chapel established there and at the cathedral under the aegis of Duke Cosimo, who a year earlier had commissioned from him the lion’s share of the music performed at festivities celebrating the duke’s marriage to Eleanor of Toledo. Though court records show that Corteccia was not officially employed by the Medici, in his publications he styled himself the duke’s maestro di cappella, a title also given to him in other records of the time. This was no doubt in reference both to his unofficial role in supplying the court with music for various occasions and to his official duties as master of the Florentine chapel, a post he held until his death in 1571.

Most, if not all, of Corteccia’s secular music was published under his supervision in three major madrigal collections. Book 1 for four voices, brought out by Scotto in 1544, was reissued by Gardane in 1547 in conjunction with publication of book 2 for four voices and the first book for five and six voices. Corteccia said that this last contained ‘all the rest of the pieces’ he had composed ‘in this genre’ up to that time, by which he meant that he had brought together works never before published, others already published under his name (such as those performed as intermedi in Antonio Landi’s comedy Il commodo, for the duke’s wedding in 1539), and rejected yet others that had been wrongly attributed to him. Some idea of the extent of the misattributions is evident in the first four books of Arcadelt’s four-voice madrigals (published 1539 and earlier), which contain seven works claimed by Corteccia. In the 1547 edition of book 1 for four voices, Corteccia corrected errors and omissions in the hastily assembled first edition, rearranged the order of contents, dropped one previously published piece and added seven new ones composed as intermedi for Francesco D’Ambra’s comedy Il furto of 1544. He continued to write secular music, now lost, until at least 1565, when he and Alessandro Striggio (i) each contributed three madrigals for performance as intermedi between the acts of D’Ambra’s La cofanaria, on the occasion of another Medici wedding.

Much of his sacred music, too, was composed in the early years of his career. This is evident from his remarks in the 1544 dedication of the first book of madrigals, when he wrote to the duke of his intention to send his responsories, Lamentations, motets and hymns to the printer and promised he would soon be making a gift of all of this music to him. Apart from the lost Lamentations, however, definitive versions of the responsories (in two volumes) and the motets (also in two volumes) did not appear until 1570 and 1571, when they were published by Gardane at Venice. He cited the lack of music printing facilities in Florence as the reason for the long delay in publication in his preface to the responsories, though he also hinted at financial difficulties and the barbs of unnamed critics. At the time of his death a revised version of 32 of his hymns, in the hand of his former pupil and chief copyist Michele Federighi, was ready for printing. But this remained in manuscript in I-Fl Palat.7, as did a number of other pieces, among them a group of anonymous propers in I-Fd n.46, also copied by Federighi, that are probably his. In the autobiographical note of 1559 Corteccia spoke particularly of two works, a St John Passion written in the style of Pisano (for S Giovanni, 1527), and a St Matthew Passion (for S Lorenzo, 1531). Anonymous settings of these works in I-Fd n.45 are undoubtedly the ones referred to by Corteccia.

In the dedicatory letter of the motet volumes Corteccia noted that he had been working on them for more than 30 years. Differing versions of a number of his sacred works in Florentine manuscripts bear him out and reveal that he returned to them time and again over the course of his career. Revisions were made for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons, and while many were slight, a few entailed significant rewriting. Simple changes, consisting of brief rhythmic substitutions or the addition of a few notes or chords, are evident in several responsories which required textual adjustments to conform to the post-Tridentine liturgy. But other modifications, whether necessitated by liturgical considerations or not, were made with an eye to refining and improving details of composition and of text placement and declamation that no longer met his own exacting standards. Simple changes are found in the hymns as well, although in several of these he also made major shifts that involved substituting newly composed stanzas for earlier ones. The hymns are all in alternatim style, in which polyphonic settings of even-numbered stanzas alternate with odd-numbered stanzas of the chant on which the polyphonic settings are based. Strict canon appears in several of these, though in general, as in his motets, Corteccia characteristically juxtaposes strict imitation and free counterpoint with occasional homophonic passages.

The madrigals, many composed at an early stage in the development of the form, show a firm grasp of the principles underlying the new genre and a sensitive approach to the nuances of text. At his best, as in the early Fammi pur guerr’Amor, set in a bright F mode, he composed music with attractive melodies unfolding within a slightly imitative texture and clearly directed harmonic progressions that aptly reflected the new sensibilities, and it is understandable why some of his works might have been mistaken for Arcadelt’s. His frequent use of formulaic declamation and an apparent reliance on a cantus-bassus compositional framework betray his grounding in the earlier frottola style, as do, in particular, two settings of ottava rima, S’io potessi voler and Io dico e dissi (text from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso), which feature repeated melodic reciting formulae in the top voice above ever-changing polyphony in the lower ones. Traditional compositional devices also appear, as, for example, canon in Perch’io veggio et mi spiace, and a melodic subject derived from vowels corresponding to solmization syllables in the top voice of Se vostr’occhi lucenti. In many other works he adopted the faster note values, nervous, choppy rhythms and abrupt textural changes typical of the style of black-note madrigals of the early 1540s. Black-note madrigals make up the bulk of his theatrical pieces for the intermedi. Though not without their complexities, like so many of his secular works, they are distinguished by frequent changes of pace and variety of texture, by motivic repetition within a given phrase, by strategically placed cadences that enhance the rhetoric of the text, and by a clearly articulated declamation essential to projecting words, especially on stage. As a rule, the theatre madrigals were conceived with instrumental accompaniment. A consort of viols is mentioned in connection with those of 1544, while, with one exception, those of 1539 call for various combinations of wind, string and keyboard instruments. Three of the latter, though composed for four or five parts, were sung by a solo voice with instrumental accompaniment in a kind of pseudo-monody, and in another, an instrumental rendition of the music preceded its performance by the full complement of voices with accompaniment. Corteccia’s choice of accompanying instruments shows both a sensitive approach to colour and an attempt to evoke the mood and meaning of the text, as in Vientene almo riposo, the last piece of the 1539 set, sung by the personification of Night to the accompaniment of four trombones – an unusual choice but one that got across the idea of farewell and closure. Many pieces give no explicit indication of their origins as theatrical or entertainment music, but these, too, must have been composed for intermedi, like the more famous ones for 1539, 1544 and 1565. Besides Giovanbattista Strozzi the elder and Ugolino Martelli, who furnished texts for the intermedi, he set poetry by Michelangelo, Petrarch, A.F. Grazzini (Il Lasca), Lorenzo Strozzi and Lorenzo the Magnificent, among others.

Corteccia was neither an important innovator nor an enormously prolific composer. But his talents led him to write in every genre of the time, and his knowledge and experience as choir director and supplier of theatrical music enabled him to compose good music, some of it very impressive indeed, that was as effective on stage as it was useful in church.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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O.G. Sonneck: ‘A Description of Alessandro Striggio and Francesco Corteccia’s Intermedii “Psyche and Amor”’, MA, iii (1911–12), 40–53; repr. in Miscellaneous Studies in the History of Music (New York, 1921), 269

F. Coradini: ‘Francesco Corteccia’, NA, xi (1934), 199–202

F. Ghisi: Feste musicali della Firenze medicea (1480–1589) (Florence, 1939/R)

G. Haydon: ‘The Dedication of Francesco Corteccia’s Hinnario’, JAMS, xiii (1960), 112–16

A.W. McKinley: Francesco Corteccia’s Music to Latin Texts (diss., U. of Michigan, 1963)

F.A. D’Accone: ‘Bernardo Pisano: an Introduction to his Life and Works’, MD, xvii (1963), 115–35

M. Fabbri: ‘La vita e l’ignota opera-prima di Francesco Corteccia’, Chigiana, xx,ii new ser. ii (1965), 185–217

H.W. Kaufmann: ‘Art for the Wedding of Cosimo de’ Medici and Eleonora of Toledo (1539)’, Paragone, no.243 (1970), 52–67

F.A. D’Accone: ‘The Musical Chapels at the Florentine Cathedral and Baptistry during the First Half of the 16th Century’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 1–50

D.A. Sutherland: ‘A Second Corteccia Manuscript in the Archives of Santa Maria del Fiore’, JAMS, xxv (1972), 79–85

H.M. Brown: Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: the Music for the Florentine Intermedii, MSD, xxx (1973)

F.W. Sternfeld: ‘Aspects of Italian Intermedi and Early Operas’, Convivium musicorum: Festschrift Wolfgang Boetticher, ed. H. Hüschen and D.-R. Moser (Berlin, 1974), 359–66

J. Haar: ‘A Sixteenth-Century Hexachord Composition’, JMT, xii (1975), 32–45

B. Mitchell: Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance: a Descriptive Bibliography of Triumphal Entries and Selected other Festivals for State Occasions (Florence, 1979), 50–54

J. Haar: ‘Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche’, L’Ariosto, la musica, i musicisti: quattro studii e sette madrigali ariosteschi, ed. M.A. Balsano (Florence, 1981), 41–3

F.A. D’Accone: ‘Updating the Style: Francesco Corteccia’s Revisions in his Responsories for Holy Week’, Music and Context: Essays for John M. Ward, ed. A. Dhu Shapiro (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 32–53

H.M. Brown: ‘Notes towards a History of Theatrical Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy: a Typology of Francesco Corteccia’s Madrigals’, The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of F.W. Sternfeld, ed. J. Caldwell, E. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford, 1990), 3–28

FRANK A. D’ACCONE