The Music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani
Magnificat has already recorded almost all of the surviving music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. About half of what has been recorded was released on two CDs structured as liturgical reconstructions – Vespro della Beata Vergine and Messa Paschale. We have begun the process of editing and mastering the remaining unreleased tracks and will record the few remaining motets in 2010. All of Cozzolani’s music, including the works included on the earlier CDs, will be released in two double CDs over the next two years. Rather than wait for the physical CDs, we are offering all those who pre-order the CDs free digital downloads of each track as it is completed along with exclusive live recordings and the occasional alternate mix.
Of Cozzolani’s four publications, only two survive complete. Sadly, the one part book from her first publication of motets Primavera di fiori musicali (1640) that survived into the 20th Century was destroyed in 1945 along with the entire Berlin Singakademie library. We are more fortunate with her second publication Concerti sacri published in Venice in 1642 with a dedication to Prince Matthias de’ Medici. The collection includes 20 motets for 1-4 voices and continuo and a setting of the mass ordinary.
During the 1640s, Cozzolani was apparently at work on two very different projects. While the 1642 collection contained both solo motets and ensemble polyphony, the two genres were separated in her next two publications. The 1642 book seems to reflect rather different moments in her own development, some pieces being clearly more tied to the world of the 1620s than are others. On the other hand, the highly virtuosic and structurally extensive solo motets of 1648 seem far more cut from the same cloth, evidently some kind of reflection of the rise of solo singing at the moment of the Elevation at Mass or at some point in Vespers which must have taken place around 1640. In the case of her collection of solo motets Scherzi di Sacra Melodia … (1648), we still have the soprano part book, though the basso continuo part book has been lost. Over the past decade that Magnificat has been performing and recording Cozzolani’s music, there have been three previous programs on which we have performed motets from the Scherzi with newly “re-composed” continuo parts.
The large scale collection of Vespers music and motets, Salmi a Otto Voci Concertati, was published in Venice and inscribed to Alberto Badoer, the bishop of the small Venetian city of Crema not far from Milan. Badoer had fallen afoul of the Vatican, partially because of his independence from Roman decrees, a trait which would condemn him to a fifty-year tenure in his poor and isolated see. Some of the music in this volume seems to date from the 1649 Milanese visit of the new Queen of Spain, Maria Anna of Austria, and the fact that Cozzolani would choose such a relatively minor figure seems to show her seeking other points of support outside the traditional channels of Rome, Milan, and the Holy Roman Empire. Badoer, however, was by no means unmusical, as he had been the dedicatee of one of the more idiosyncratic editions of the 1640s, Giovanni Antonio Grossi’s Messa, e salmi bizarri (i.e. “witty”, almost Marinist psalms); Grossi himself would write motets for S. Radegonda’s singers, probably in the 1660s. As a whole, the dedications show her as cultivating various sides of her own world: the local bishop, noble patrons of singers, her Benedictine congregation, and sympathetic prelates in Milan’s musical – but not political – watershed.
The bipartite nature of the last collection is striking. The psalms, scored in the long tradition of eight-voice settings, are only intermittently in standard antiphonal double-choir format. Rather, they break their text up into separated verses, tied to an overall affect expressed in additive and repetitive gestures, with kaleidoscopically changing scorings generated by the local affect of the verse. The motets, on the other hand, are even longer than their counterparts in the 1642 volume, and mark a turn away from the practice of the earlier book by their lessened use of goal-directed bass lines which generate musical periods. In that sense, the motets of the books do seem to testify to Cozzolani’s development as a composer during the 1640’s, while the psalms seem to reflect different moments in the festal musical life of the house.
