Marchetto Cara
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Marchetto Cara
(b in or nr Verona, c 1470; d Mantua, ?1525). Italian composer, singer and lutenist. Having served the Mantuan court at least from 1494, he became maestro di cappella to Francesco and his son Federico Gonzaga in 1511 and was favoured by the duke and his wife, Isabella d′Este. Famous throughout northern Italy for his singing and playing, he was also, with Tromboncino, one of the two most important early 16th-century composers of frottolas, of which he wrote more than 100 (more published in anthologies); he favoured poems in barzelletta form and the basic texture consists of a simple harmonic pattern with passage-work added to the upper parts. His later works include madrigals in a more imitative style. He also wrote a three-voice Salve regina and seven laudi.
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Marchetto Cara
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Marchetto Cara
- Genres: Miscellaneous Music, Vocal Music
Biography
Marchetto Cara is generally recognized as one of the two most important composers of the pre-madrigal vocal form called the frottola. The other composer was Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and both had ties to the Mantuan Court where the frottola flourished in the early-16th century. Cara wrote more than 100 frottolas.Marchetto Cara was born in Verona around 1460. Little is known of his childhood, though he almost certainly served as a choirboy, and likely had instruction on the lute. His earliest surviving composition was a Salve Regina, probably dating to the early-1490s. Cara became a cleric around this time, but would leave the religious life in 1497 to pursue musical interests. The decision to change careers was hardly sudden: records show he was in the service of the Mantuan Court as early as 1494; and three years later, with the blessing of the Court, he served temporarily as a musician for Cardinal Giovanni Colonna.
At the Mantuan Court, Cara's duties early on may have been limited to singing and lute-playing for the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga and his wife Isabella d'Este, but he would become, probably shortly after 1497, the Marquis' personal musical adviser and performer, serving as composer, singer and lutenist. For a time Tromboncino provided similar services for Isabella, but he departed in 1505, leaving his duties to Cara.
In the early-1500s Cara traveled to other major Italian cities to sing and play lute for various royalty, his tour including Florence to perform for the Midici family (1602) and Venice to entertain Elisabetta of Urbino (1603).
Cara was apparently well-paid by the Gonzagas, since he had amassed substantial wealth by the time of his death in 1625. He must also have exerted considerable influence over them as well: in 1506, Cara's younger brother Benedetto, a priest, was jailed for an illicit affair with a woman, but Cara obtained early release for him and secured a post for Benedetto in the Court choir.
In 1509 Cara's wife, Giovanna Moreschi, also a singer in the Court, died. He remarried Barbara Leale shortly afterward. In 1511 Cara was appointed maestro di cappella and given charge of the choir at the San Pietro Cathedral. He also retained directorship of secular musical performances at the Court. It appears he held this post until his death in late-1625. ~ Robert Cummings, Rovi
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Marchetto Cara
Marchetto Cara (c. 1470 – probably 1525) was an Italian composer, lutenist and singer of the Renaissance. He was mainly active in Mantua, was well-connected with the Gonzaga and Medici families, and along with Bartolomeo Tromboncino, was well known as a composer of frottolas.
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Life
Next to nothing is known of his early life. By 1494 he was already employed by the Gonzaga court at Mantua, and he evidently stayed there, without interruption except for travel to sing in nearby cities, until his death. Among his duties were directing the singers both in the cathedral of S Pietro, and in the private estate of the Gonzaga family. As lovers and patrons of music, they employed numerous musicians, and Cara was chief among them: he wrote music for weddings, for state occasions, for intermedi, and for private entertainments, and in so doing created some of the most refined light music of the time. Along with Tromboncino, he was the most famous composer of frottole, and his compositions continued to be collected and published after his death.
Most likely he died in 1525, since his widow remarried in early 1526, and there was at the time a legal requirement for a widow to wait nine months prior to remarriage. When he died he was a wealthy man, owning two houses in the city and two large country estates: evidently the Gonzaga family paid him well.
Cara was famous not only as a composer, but as a singer and a lutenist. He sang at Mantua, for his employers, but also traveled throughout northern Italy, singing for the Medici, the Bembo family,the Bentivoglio family in Bologna, and other aristocrats in Verona, Venice, Padua, Pesaro, Cremona, as well as other cities. Baldassare Castiglione heard him sing, and wrote of him in his famous Book of the Courtier (Venice, 1528), in the same paragraph in which he praises Leonardo da Vinci:
- And no lesse doeth our Marchetto Cara move in his singinge, but with a more softe harmonye, that by a delectable waye and full of mourninge swetnesse maketh tender and perceth the mind, and sweetly imprinteth in it a passion full of great delite (translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561).
Works
Though predominantly a composer of frottolas, a light secular form and ancestor of the madrigal, he also wrote a few sacred pieces, including a three-voice Salve Regina (one of the Marian Antiphons) as well as seven laude spirituali. His frottolas are for the most part homophonic, with short passages of imitation only at the beginnings of phrases; they are catchy, singable, and often use dance-like rhythms. The poetry for most of his 100 frottolas is anonymous, though the authors of 16 poems have been identified. Most of the poems are in the form of the barzellette, but there are also strambotti, sonnets, capitoli and ode. Almost everything is in a verse-refrain format.
Some of his later frottolas are more serious in character, and foreshadow the development of the madrigal, which took place in the late 1520s and 1530s, right after his death.
Sources
- Article "Marchetto Cara", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
- Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
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Oxford Grove Music Encyclopedia
The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
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