(It.).
A melodic-harmonic scheme used in the 16th and 17th centuries for singing poetry and for dances and instrumental variations. It belonged to the repertory of musical formulae, suitable for any text with a certain metrical form, on which Renaissance poet-singers improvised melodic embellishments to the accompaniment of an instrument (usually the lute or the viola da braccio). In Italy, where it achieved great popularity, the Ruggiero scheme was used to sing stanzas primarily in ottava rima, the metre of epic poetry. As Einstein suggested, the name itself probably derives from the first line of a famous stanza from Ariosto's Orlando furioso (‘Ruggier, qual sempre fui, tal esser voglio’, xliv.61). In spite of the wide diffusion of this melodic formula, our knowledge of its musical content appears irremediably fragmentary. Like many other arias for singing poetry, the Ruggiero was transmitted orally and therefore its history in the 16th century was essentially an unwritten one. The sources that do record pieces labelled ‘Ruggiero’ also record the variations inherent in any oral tradition. It is difficult to isolate a ‘Ruggiero melody’ because of the numerous variants; only the bass line has survived in a relatively stable form. The Aria di ruggiero most probably circulated as a discant tune (associated with a standard bass) whose ‘original’ can be postulated, embedded in the different versions of this aria that co-existed in the oral musical culture of the Renaissance.
Ex.1 shows a simple keyboard setting of the Ruggiero formula from an Italian manuscript of the early 17th century. The bass progression appears here in the form that became standard in the 17th century. Throughout its history, the Ruggiero melody, with or without its characteristic bass, retains some fundamental features: it is in the major mode (mostly G), in duple meter, and develops in four short-breathed phrases, the cadential articulation of which defines the progression I–V–V–I. It appears, with no title, as early as 1553 in Diego Ortiz's Trattado de glosas, together with other ‘Italian tenors’ that serve as a basis for viol variations. The formula is probably older than this, however, and may have originated in the vocal repertory of the early 16th century. Many of its distinctive features are discernible in a frottola published by Antico in 1520 (ex.2; a transcription in keyboard tablature had already appeared in 1517 in Antico's Frottole intabulate da sonare organi). In the extant sources the title ‘Ruggiero’ appears late in the century; it accompanies a number of instrumental settings transmitted in manuscripts from the end of the 16th century to the first decades of the 17th century, including GB-Cu Dd.4.23, Dd.5.20, Dd.14.24; GB-Lbl R.M.24.d.3; I-Bc Q34; and the Thysius Lutebook. Notwithstanding a few variants, each of these settings is clearly based on the bass progression used by Ortiz, and the discant parts also show unmistakable analogies with the Trattado de glossas. The same melodic profile is still recognizable in later collections that, significantly, report the Ruggiero tune without accompaniment: examples are the ‘rugier di Gio. Battista Francese’ in HR-Zaa I.a.44 (violin tablature) and two texted settings published in the laude books of Ignazio De Lazzeri (Laudi e canzoni, 1654) and Matteo Coferati (Corona de sacre canzoni, 1675, under the title Aria dell'Ortolano, o Ruggieri, o Donne me chiamano il maturo).
The identity of several pieces labelled ‘Ruggiero’ may at times be dramatically obscured by a number of details diverging from the version shown in ex.1. It seems, however, that local variants, especially in the context of an oral tradition, were less important than the overall structure, the harmonic goals and the rhythmic profile of the composition. Vincenzo Galilei's 1584 set of six lute variations (in I-Fn) illustrates well the extent to which the Ruggiero formula could undergo extensive transformations without loosing its identity (another set, attributed to the lutenist Santino Garsi and closely related to Galilei's appears in the Cavalcanti Lutebook, B-Br II 275). The melodic contour, but not the overall harmonic design, of the bass noticeably diverges from its 16th-century counterparts, and only in the fifth variation does it take on the form that was to become standard in the 17th century. Similarly, we have to wait until the fourth variation to detect a version of the Ruggiero tune similar to that of Ortiz or Coferati.
The ‘Rugier glosado de Antonio’ in Venegas de Henestrosa's Libro de cifra nueva (1557) and the ‘Ruger’ in GB-Lbl Roy.App.74 are unrelated to the formula given by Ortiz. The music of both recalls an arrangement for voice and vihuela by Valderrábano of Ariosto's famous text (Silva de sirenas, 1547). The same melody surfaces in several madrigals on Ariosto's stanzas. It was surely a favourite aria for singing ottave rime (Haar, 1981); but whether it ever circulated with the title ‘Ruggiero’ remains uncertain.
In the 17th century, with the development of the monodic style, the aria di ruggiero found its way into printed collections of vocal music, where it continued to serve as formula for strophically set texts. Solo songs and duets composed on the Ruggiero music may be found among the works of D'India (1609), Antonio Brunelli (1613), Dognazzi (1614), Cifra (1615, 1617, 1619), Puliti (1621), Rontani (1622), Ghizzolo (1623), G.B. Fossato (1628), Massenzio (1629), Annibale Gregori (1635) and Caspar Kittel (1638). The popularity of the Ruggiero is confirmed by its presence in many Italian guitar books as well as in an increasing number of instrumental variations written in this period: by Kapsberger (1604) for chitarrone; by Bargnani (1611), Brunelli (1614), Salamone Rossi (1623), Buonamente (1626), Frescobaldi (1634), Tarquinio Merula (1637), Kindermann (1653), Agostino Guerrieri (1673) and G.B. Vitali (c1680) for ensemble; by Macque (GB-Lbl Add.30491), Ercole Pasquini (I-TRc), Mayone (1603), Trabaci (1603), Frescobaldi (1615–16, 1624, 1634, 1637) and Bernardo Storace (1664) for keyboard. Anonymous sets also survive in several manuscripts from the first half of the 17th century (see Apfel, 1977, and Silbiger, 1980). Some settings for lute and for five-course guitar would seem to indicate that the Ruggiero was also used as a scheme for dance; it usually appears in pairs alternating duple and triple metre, such as ruggiero and ruggiero in tripla (Benedetto Sanseverino, 1622) or ruggieri and corrente di ruggieri (Giuseppe Rasponi, 1635 and I-Fn Magl.XIX.105).
MGG2 (J.M. Ward)
A. Einstein: ‘Die Aria di Ruggiero’, SIMG, xiii (1911–12), 444–54
A. Einstein: ‘Ancora sull’aria di Ruggiero’, RMI, xli (1937), 163–9
D. Plamenac: ‘An Unknown Violin Tablature of the Early 17th Century’, PAMS 1941, 144–57
H. Spohr: Studien zur italienischen Tanzkomposition um 1600 (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1956)
J.M. Ward: ‘Music for A Handefull of Pleasant Delites’, JAMS, x (1957), 170–73
C. Palisca: ‘Vicenzo Galilei and Some Links between “Pseudo-Monody” and Monody’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 344–60; repr. in Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994), 346–63
E. Apfel: Entwurf eines Verzeichnisses aller Ostinato-Stücke zu Grundlagen einer Geschichte der Satztechnik, iii: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Ostinato in der komponierten Mehrstimmigkeit (Saarbrücken, 1977), 243–53
A. Silbiger: Italian Manuscript Sources of 17th Century Keyboard Music (Ann Arbor, 1980), 39–44
J. Haar: ‘Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche’, L’Ariosto: la musica, i musicisti, ed. M.A. Balsano (Florence, 1981), 31–46
J. Haar: Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350–1600 (Berkeley, 1986), 76–99
S. Staiti: ‘La formula di discanto di Ruggiero’, Culture musicali, xii-xlv (1987–8), 47–79
GIUSEPPE GERBINO and ALEXANDER SILBIGER