(b Venice, 1583; d Venice, 31 March 1652). Italian librettist, poet and dramatist; Barbara Strozzi was his adopted (possibly illegitimate) daughter. He was himself the illegitimate (later legitimized) son of Roberto Strozzi, a Venetian banker and member of a prominent Florentine family, of which Piero Strozzi was an earlier member. He was educated in Venice and at the University of Pisa, where he graduated in law. He then moved to Rome, where he attained the rank of apostolic prothonotary and was instrumental in founding about 1608 the Accademia degli Ordinati. This literary circle, which met at the house of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Deti, was formed in opposition to the influential Accademia degli Umoristi. Strozzi later resigned from the position of prothonotary and left Rome, where he seems to have become a controversial figure. He worked for a time at Padua, where he wrote the tragedy Erotilla (Venice, 1615), and at Urbino, where he served the duke as ‘prefect of the bedchamber’. He finally returned to Venice, probably in the early 1620s, and spent most of the rest of his life there.
Strozzi was active in Venice in both literary and musical circles. In company with several of the early librettists of Venetian opera he was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti and shared the academy’s libertine philosophy. He himself founded two other academies at Venice. The first of these met at the house of Marquis Martinenghi Malpaga. The second – the Accademia degli Unisoni, founded in 1637 – met at Strozzi’s house and was devoted not only to the reading of academic discourses but also to musical performances in which Barbara Strozzi played a major role; the published papers of the academy – Veglie de’ Signori Unisoni (Venice, 1638) – are dedicated to her. Strozzi and his academy seem to have achieved some notoriety: both were attacked in an anonymous and strongly worded series of satires, dating from late 1637 or early 1638.
Strozzi’s literary output includes orations, plays, poetry and descriptions of Venetian ceremonial, several of which contain useful information on Venetian musical life. His published description of the memorial service for Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, held in Venice on 25 May 1621, contains references to a requiem mass composed for the occasion by Monteverdi (the music is lost); in the 12th canto of his heroic poem La Venetia edificata (Venice, 2/1626) he praised several Venetian musicians, among them Monteverdi and Alessandro Grandi (i); and his Le glorie della Signora Anna Renzi romana (Venice, 1644) contains biographical information about, and a critical appreciation of, the famous soprano (see Renzi, Anna).
Strozzi is best known, however, for his operatic librettos, which were set to music from the mid-1620s onwards. Little survives of the musical settings. His two earliest operatic collaborations were with Monteverdi. The five-act comic opera La finta pazza Licori (1627), developed from an existing dramatic dialogue in 1627 and intended for performance at Mantua, is known only from Monteverdi’s letters. Monteverdi wrote with enthusiasm about Strozzi’s text and about the problems of a musical depiction of madness. According to Tomlinson, however, he probably set no more than part of Act I before the project was abandoned. Their second collaboration, Proserpina rapita, was commissioned by the Venetian patrician Girolamo Mocenigo for the wedding of his daughter, and was first performed on 16 April 1630 in a room above Mocenigo’s apartments in the Palazzo Dandolo. The libretto survives, as does a brief description of the wedding banquet and performance (in A-Wn; see Zoppelli for a slightly varied description). A setting for three voices and continuo of a section of the text, ‘Come dolce hoggi l’auretta’, was published in a posthumous collection of Monteverdi’s Madrigali e canzonette (Venice, 1651). (Proserpina rapita was not, as has previously been asserted, reset by Francesco Sacrati in 1644.)
Strozzi was one of the most original, important and influential members of the small group of librettists involved in the creation of Venetian opera. Badoaro and Busenello were his friends. The latter contributed a laudatory ode for the publication of La Venetia edificata and also dedicated several poems to Strozzi. Another librettist, Paolo Vendramin, was a member of the Accademia degli Unisoni. Several of Strozzi’s librettos (all extant) were set for performance at the new public opera houses. His three-act Delia, o sia La Sera sposa del Sole (music by Francesco Manelli, now lost), conceived as a court opera, 1630–31, was first performed at the opening of the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo in 1639. It has been described as ‘the prototype of Venetian opera’. Even more important was La finta pazza (reprinted in Corte; not to be confused with La finta pazza Licori); it was first performed with music by Sacrati for the opening of the Teatro Novissimo on 14 January 1641 and was subsequently presented in several other Italian cities. A score of the opera used by the Febiarmonici, dating from no earlier than 1644, was discovered in the 1980s. The most notable revival of the opera took place in Paris in 1645, with stage designs by Giacomo Torelli and choreography by G.B. Balbi; for this, one of the earliest performances of Italian opera in Paris, some of the recitatives were replaced by spoken dialogue. La finta pazza was the first of a trilogy of librettos by Strozzi covering the period from the Trojan War to the founding of Rome. The other two were La finta savia and Il Romolo e ’l Remo. Of the music for La finta savia (Venice, Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo, 1643; music by Filiberto Laurenzi, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Battista Crivelli, Alessandro Leardini, Benedetto Ferrari and Vincenzo Tozzi), only the arias contributed by Laurenzi survive. The setting of Il Romolo e ’l Remo (Venice, Teatro SS di Giovanni e Paolo, 1645), attributed on uncertain grounds to Cavalli, is lost, but Cavalli’s score for Strozzi’s last libretto, Veremonda (performed Naples, 1652; Venice, probably 1653), survives. On the title-page of the libretto, which was a reworking of G.A. Cicognini’s Celio (Florence, 1646), Strozzi’s name appeared anagrammatically as Luigi Zorzisto.
A number of Strozzi’s smaller-scale texts were also set by Venetian composers. Here again Monteverdi was first in the field. His setting (now lost) of the sonnets I cinque fratelli was written in 1628 for performance at a banquet given by the Venetian Republic to honour a visit by Grand Duke Ferdinando of Tuscany and his brother Carlo de’ Medici. The earliest of Strozzi’s texts to survive with music, however, is the large-scale pastoral dialogue La Gelosia placata, of which Giovanni Rovetta included a setting in his first book of madrigals (Venice, 1629). The text, adapted from Act 3 scene i of Strozzi’s comedy Il natal di Amore: anacronismo (Venice, 4/1629), is cleverly constructed and is distinguished by its unusually energetic language; the musical setting foreshadows stylistic features of early Venetian opera and employs the genere concitato (texts and music in Whenham). Continuing his association with composers working in Venice, Strozzi contributed the texts for Nicolò Fontei’s first book of Bizzarrie poetiche poste in musica (Venice, 1635) and the majority of those for the second book (Venice, 1636). One of the texts set by Fontei in his 1635 book, Gira il nemico insidioso, was also set by Monteverdi and published in his eighth book of madrigals (Venice, 1638). The text of Laurenzi’s serenata Guerra non porta (in his Concerti et arie, Venice, 1641) is by Strozzi, and he also wrote the texts for Barbara Strozzi’s first book of madrigals (Venice, 1644). In her later volume, Cantate, ariette e duetti (Venice, 1651), she included her own settings of texts from the operas, La finta pazza and Il Romolo e ’l Remo.
Satire, e altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi (I-Vnm Cl.X, Cod.CXV = 7193; Vmc Miscellanea P.D.308 C/IX and Cod. Cic. 2999/18, inc.)
Il cannochiale per La finta pazza (Venice, 1641)
G.F. Loredano and M.Dandolo: ‘La contesa del canto, e delle lagrime’ [papers read at the Accademia degli Unisoni], in G.F. Loredano: Bizzarrie academiche (Venice, 1638), 182ff; Eng. trans. as Academical Discourses (London, 1664), 99ff
Feste theatrali per La finta pazza, drama del Sig.r Giulio Strozzi… et da Giacomo Torelli da Fano inventore (Paris, 1645)
G.B. Balbi: Balletti d’invenzione nella finta pazza (n.p., c1658)
Le glorie de gli Incogniti (Venice, 1647), 289ff
I.N. Erythraei [G.V. Rossi]: Pinacotheca imaginum illustrium doctrinae vel ingenii laude, virorum qui. auctore superstite, diem suum obierunt, iii (Amsterdam, 1648), 193ff
L. Crasso: Elogii d’huomini letterati (Venice, 1666)
P. Litta and others: Celebri famiglie italiane (Milan, 1819–99), iv: Strozzi family, table xix
A.S. Barbi: Un accademico mecenate e poeta, Giovan Battista Strozzi il giovane (Florence,1900)
H. Prunières: L’opéra italien en France avant Lulli (Paris, 1913/R)
A. Livingston: La vita veneziana nelle opere di Gian Francesco Busenello (Venice, 1913)
M. Maylender: Storia delle accademie d’Italia, iv (Bologna, 1926–30), 140–41; v, 396–7
G. Spini: Ricerca dei libertini (Rome, 1950, 2/1983)
A. della Corte: Drammi per musica dal Rinuccini allo Zeno (Turin, 1958)
W. Osthoff: Das dramatische Spätwerk Claudio Monteverdis (Tutzing, 1960), 60, 119
W. Osthoff: ‘Masque und Musik: die Gestaltwerdung der Oper in Venedig’, Castrum Peregrini, lxv (1964), 10–49
M.F. Robinson: Opera before Mozart (London, 1966, 3/1978)
H. MacAndrew: ‘Vouet’s Portrait of Giulio Strozzi and its Pendant by Tinelli of Nicolò Crasso’, Burlington Magazine, cix (1967), 266–71
P. Petrobelli: ‘Francecsco Manelli: documenti e osservazioni’, Chigiana, new ser., iv (1967), 43–66
T. Antonicek: ‘Zum 300. Todestag von Francesco Manelli’, ÖMz, xxiii (1968), 617–18
C. Sartori: ‘La prima diva della lirica italiana: Anna Renzi’, NRMI, ii (1968), 430–52
C. Sartori: ‘Un fantomatico compositore per un’opera che forse non era un’opera’,NRMI, v (1971), 788–98
W. Osthoff: ‘Filiberto Laurenzis Musik zu “La finta savia” im Zusammenhang der frühvenezianischen Oper’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 173–97
T. Walker: ‘Gli errori di “Minerva al tavolino”: osservazioni sulla cronologia delle prime opere veneziane’, ibid., 7–20
L. Bianconi and T.Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454
B. and C.L.Brancaforte, eds.: La primera traducción del ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’ por Giulio Strozzi (Ravenna, 1977)
C. Sartori: ‘Ancora della “Finta pazza” di Strozzi e Sacrati’, NRMI, xi (1977), 335–8
E. Rosand: ‘Barbara Strozzi, Virtuosissima cantatrice: the Composer's Voice’, JAMS, xxxi (1978), 241–81
J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)
G. Tomlinson: ‘Twice Bitten, Thrice Shy: Monteverdi's “finta” Finta Pazza’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 303–11
L. Zoppelli: ‘Il rapto perfetissimo: un'inedita testimonianza sulla “Proserpina” di Monteverdi’, Rassegna veneta di studi musicali, ii–iii (1986–7), 343–5
L. Bianconi and G.Pestelli, eds.: Storia dell’opera italiana, iv: Il sistema produttivo e le sue competenze (Turin, 1987)
E. Rosand: ‘The Opera Scenario 1638–1655: a Preliminary Survey’, In Cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta, ed. F. Della Seta and F. Piperno (Florence, 1989), 335–46
P. Fabbri: Il secolo cantante: per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento (Bologna, 1990)
E. Rosand: Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: the Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991)
B. Glixon: ‘Private Lives of Public Women: Prima Donnas in Seventeenth-Century Venice’, ML, lxxvi (1995), 509–31
S. Leopold: Al modo d’Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.26 (1995)
JOHN WHENHAM