Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

Inganno (ii)

(It.).

See Interrupted cadence.

Ingegneri [Ingegnieri, Ingignieri, Ingignero, Inzegneri], Marc’Antonio

(b Verona, 1535–6; d Cremona, 1 July 1592). Italian composer and instrumentalist. He was an important madrigalist and composer of sacred music in the north Italian tradition. He taught Monteverdi, in whose early music particularly his influence is strongly heard.

1. Life.

Ingegneri was born in Verona, the youngest child and only son of Innocenzo Ingegneri, a goldsmith, and Giulia Foscari. The civic register of May 1541 gives Marc’Antonio’s age as five years. Later documents show that the family lived in a house on Via Paradiso, in the parish of S Vitale. He became a choirboy at Verona Cathedral and was probably taught by Jacquet de Berchem and Giovanni Brevio; he may have remained at the cathedral long enough to be taught by Vincenzo Ruffo, who was appointed maestro di cappella in 1551. He later dedicated his first book of masses to the cathedral canons, referring to himself as ‘an alumnus of your teaching’. By 1557 his father had died and Ingegneri had left Verona for the environs of Padua and Venice, where he was employed as a ‘suonadoro di violino’ for processions of the Scuola Grande of S Marco.

No clear documentary evidence of Ingegneri’s activities in the first half of the 1560s has yet been discovered; however, he may have gone to Parma to study with Rore. In the dedication of a madrigal book 21 years after Rore’s death, Ingegneri recalled that he had been ‘on friendly terms with M. Cipriano, and talked to him, and personally received his tuition’. His claim is supported by the fact that three of his madrigals – Non mi toglia il ben mio, Chi vuol veder tutta raccolta and Spess’in parte del ciel – were misattributed to Rore and included in Le vive fiamme (RISM 1565¹⁸), a posthumous collection produced only three months after Rore’s death.

By 1566 Ingegneri had moved to Cremona, and was in receipt of a small stipend from the monastery of S Abbondio. The dedication of his Primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci, which survives only in a 1578 reprint, states that the book was his first publication and refers to his having already spent some years in the service of the dedicatee, Giovanni Gadio, the prevost of S Abbondio. Gadio died in 1569, providing a latest possible date for the dedication, which may in any case not have appeared in the first edition. There is substantial evidence that the book was altered in reprinting, and it may even have been first published before Ingegneri moved to Cremona.

On the title-page of his five-voice motets of 1576 he styled himself prefect of music at Cremona Cathedral (see illustration), though the cathedral account books provide clear evidence of this appointment only from 1578. Ingegneri is first referred to as maestro di cappella in an entry dated 14 January 1580, which recorded that he was to receive a special bonus payment in recognition of his hard work in preparing the music for the preceding Christmas season. Even before that date, although Ingegneri was only called ‘cantor’ and the choir his ‘fellow singers’, the wording of entries clearly indicates that he was already in charge. He seems to have been on the best of terms with the cathedral authorities, since he received special bonuses on more than one occasion over the years. In 1581 he married Margherita Soresina, a singer; they appear to have had no children. He bequeathed his entire estate, including the house in S Vitale, to his sister Prudentia. The house passed from family hands in 1622. Although he had settled in Cremona, throughout the last two decades of his life, Ingegneri maintained ongoing contact with benefactors and patrons elsewhere. This is shown particularly through the commissioning and dedications of his secular works; complete volumes of madrigals were dedicated to patrons in Vienna, Milan, Parma and Verona, and isolated works appeared in anthologies compiled in Verona, Venice, Milan, Brescia, Ferrara and Rome. As the most distinguished musician in Cremona, Ingegneri was in the position to foster the city’s most talented musicians; it is known that he tutored Claudio Monteverdi, but it is also likely that he taught Benedetto Pallavicino, Monteverdi’s eventual colleague and rival at Mantua. For nearly a decade, between 1576 and 1586, Ingegneri published only madrigals; but after the dissolution of the Cremonese Accademia degli Animosi in 1586, he appears to have lost interest in secular composition. He resumed the publication of sacred music, producing six more volumes before his death in 1592. He was a close friend of the reformist bishop Nicolò Sfondrato, later Pope Gregory XIV, to whom he dedicated no fewer than four books of sacred music over a period of 15 years.

2. Works.

Ingegneri’s music reveals that he was a highly competent polyphonist; his contemporary, Pietro Cerone, hailed him as a master of counterpoint, and attributed to him the invention of a number of devices including ‘double and inverted counterpoint at the 10th and 12th’. His sacred music catered admirably to the musical demands of the post-Tridentine church. Many of his motets, for example, are based on plainchant melodies which are occasionally used as strict cantus firmi, and his choice of texts shows a gradual inclination towards liturgical verse. Yet he seems not to have been greatly concerned with the intelligibility of the text, an issue that was prominent among reformers; this is by no means unusual, and may even reflect the prevailing attitude in Cremona. During Sfondrato’s bishopric no specific mention of music, or the principles by which it should be governed, appear in the otherwise exacting and detailed synodal decrees. Ingegneri favoured polyphonic textures in his motets, the most extreme example of which is the four-voice Noe noe, a double canon by inversion with two different resolutions of the canonic voices. The masses also show evidence of the increasing influence of Tridentine reform. The first book, published in 1573, contains four parody masses. The works are freely contrapuntal in the oltremontano style, perhaps revealing the influence of his teachers, Berchem and Rore. By contrast, the masses in the second book, published in 1587, are based entirely on liturgical or freely invented material, and make much fuller use of syllabic text-setting and homophonic textures. But this development in his musical treatment of text may not have been due solely to current religious thinking. Ingegneri’s later sacred works demonstrate the growing popular concern that musical settings should reflect the sense of the text. His responsories for Holy Week and their companion Lamentations correspond to Pietro Pontio’s advice to use slow-moving homophony, with occasional dissonance ‘to make the composition more lachrymose’. On the other hand, the celebratory book of polychoral motets, dedicated to Sfondrato upon his elevation to cardinal, was published for 7–12 or 16 voices, ‘together and separately adaptable for various concerted musical instruments’.

A full assessment of Ingegneri’s development as a madrigalist is hindered by the loss of his first book of five-voice madrigals and of the cantus part of the second. His later books, four from the 1580s and one posthumously published, all survive complete. The corpus spans over 20 years and reflects various influences that besieged secular composition during that period: the rise of the professional female performer, the development of instrumental playing, the humanist experiments of both French and Italian academies and the emergence of musical theatre. His madrigals show him to be a natural successor to Rore, and reveal an enduring fascination with the integration of coherent musical form with an intelligent and intelligible representation of the text. His means of expression make use of techniques which affect whole blocks of text and which may be juxtaposed in contrasting sections: chromaticism, metre, relative note values, texture and tessitura. The emphasis is always on illumination, rather than illustration, of the textual conceit: although he frequently uses madrigalisms, they always appear as part of the wider affective context. The musical structure is governed by the syntactical, not the formal, structure of the text and is generally articulated through cadential relationships, with both the pitch and the arrangement of the cadence determining its structural importance. However, the reiteration, development and transformation of thematic material as both a unifying technique and an expressive device is also a prominent feature of his style. And like Rore, Ingegneri explored the possibilities of representing the text through harmonic organization; in many of his works mode, deviation from the mode, and cadential relationships are used as text-expressive tools.

His textual choices are varied, including verse by Petrarch, Bembo, Ariosto, Parabosco, Casone, Tasso and Guarini. His settings of Tasso’s D’aria un tempo nodrimmi (1580) and Etienne de la Boetie’s Iay senty les deux maux (1580) were composed before the poems themselves were published, suggesting that he had access to manuscript copies of the texts. A significant number of madrigals using a female narrative voice, or eulogizing identifiable female singers, may indicate contact with performers such as Tarquinia Molza and Laura Peverara in the years before they were employed at Ferrara. Some of the madrigals either dedicated to or associated with the Farnese court at Parma and the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona are clearly intended to be part of theatrical displays, commenting on dance formations, narrating the descent of a deus ex machina or describing the distribution of performing forces of both voices and instruments.

Documentary evidence shows that by the 1580s Ingegneri had organized a mixed instrumental ensemble of strings and wind at the cathedral in Cremona. His only exclusively instrumental compositions are two ‘arie di canzon francese per sonare’ which appear at the end of his second four-voice book of madrigals; some of his madrigals may have been performed by mixed forces.

3. Influence.

Ingegneri’s success both during and after his lifetime is difficult to quantify. On one hand, both his books of four-voice madrigals were reprinted at least once, and his contributions to prestigious collective editions, such as Morsolino’s L’amorosa Ero (RISM 1588⁵), and two of the collections for Laura Peverara, the Ferrarese Il lauro secco (1582¹⁷) and the Veronese manuscript tribute (I-VEaf Ms.220), indicate that he was well regarded by the cultural élite. However, his five-voice madrigals were never reprinted, and only a few of his compositions appear in contemporary anthologies. Indeed, his most popular works owe their transmission throughout Europe at least partially to misattributions to Rore and Palestrina.

Ingegneri’s primary importance is as the teacher of Monteverdi, who acknowledged his debt on the title-pages of his first five publications. Many of the most striking and conspicuous devices in Monteverdi’s early books are also features of Ingegneri’s mature style, and in a number of instances Monteverdi either parodied his teacher’s work or borrowed thematic material for the setting of an unrelated text.

WORKS

Editions: Marc’Antonio Ingegneri: Opera omnia, ed. M. Caraci Vela, A. Delfino and M.T.R. Barezzani (Lucca, 1994–) [M]La musica in Cremona nella seconda metà del secolo XVI e i primordi dell’arte monteverdiana, ed. G. Cesari, IMi, vi (1939) [C]M.A. Ingegneri: 7 Madrigale, ed. B. Hudson, Cw, cxv (1974) [H]

all published in Venice

sacred vocal

Liber primus missarum, 5, 8vv (1573); M ser.1, i

Sacrarum cantionum … liber primus, 5vv (1576)

Sacrarum cantionum … liber primus, 4vv (1586)

Liber secundus missarum, 5vv (1587)

Responsoria hebdomadae sanctae, Benedictus, & improperia … & Miserere, 4, 6vv (1588); ed. L. Virgili (Rome, 1942)

Lamentationes Hieremiae, 4vv (1588); ed. G. Acciai (Milan, 1993)

Liber sacrarum cantionum, 7–10, 12, 16vv, insts (ad lib) (1589); 1 ed. in Musica sacra, xv (Berlin, 1874)

Sacrae cantiones … liber primus, 6vv (1591); M ser.1, v

Liber secundus hymnorum, 4vv (1606)

2 sacred works, 3, 5vv, 1586^1, 1591^13

[Liber primus hymnorum], 4vv, lost

secular

[Il primo libro de madrigali], 5, 8vv, lost

Il secondo libro de madrigali, 5vv (1572)

Il primo libro de madrigali, 4vv (?1570, lost; 2/1578); SCMad, xvi (1992)

Il secondo libro de madrigali … con due arie di canzon francese per sonare, 4vv (1579); SCMad, xvi (1993)

Il terzo libro de madrigali … con due canzoni francese, 5vv (1580); M ser.2, iii

Il quarto libro de madrigali, 5vv (1584); 13 in C

Il primo libro de madrigali, 6vv (1586); 1 in H

Il quinto libro de madrigali, 5vv (1587); 2 in H

Il sesto libro de madrigali, 5vv (1606)

10 madrigals, 4–8vv, 1577^7, 1579^2, 1582^5, 1583^12, 1586^1, 1588^17, 1590^11, 1594^6, 1595^5; 1 canzonetta, 1591^13

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

F.X. Haberl: ‘Marcantonio Ingegneri: eine bio-bibliographische Studie’, KJb, xiii (1898), 78–94

R. Casimiri: ‘I “XXVII Responsoria” di M.A. Ingegneri attribuiti a Giov. Pierluigi da Palestrina’, NA, iii (1926), 17–40

E. Dohrn: Marc’Antonio Ingegneri als Madrigalkomponist (Hanover, 1936)

D. Arnold: ‘Monteverdi and his Teachers’, The Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1968, 2/1985 as The New Monteverdi Companion), 91–10

A. Newcomb: ‘The Three Anthologies for Laura Peverara 1580–1583’, RIM, x (1975), 329–45

P. Fabbri: ‘Concordanze letterarie e divergenze musicali intorno ai Madrigali a cinque voci … Libro primo di Claudio Monteverdi’, Musica e filologia, ed. M. di Pasquale (Verona, 1983), 53–83

G. Watkins and T. La May: ‘Imitatio and Emulatio: Changing Concepts of Originality in the Madrigals of Gesualdo and Monteverdi in the 1590s’, Claudio Monteverdi: Festschrift Reinhold Hammerstein zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. L. Finscher (Laaber, 1986), 453–87

A. Vassalli: ‘Il Tasso in musica e la trasmissione dei testi: alcuni esempi’, Tasso, la musica, i musicisti, ed. M.A. Balsano and T. Walker (Florence, 1988), 45–90

M. Mangani: ‘Marcantonio Ingegneri nel quarto centenario della morte’, Rinascimento, ii (1992), 311–25

L. Paget: ‘The Madrigals of Marc’Antonio Ingegneri’, Musiek & Wetenschap, ii/2 (1992), 1–28

Marc’Antonio Ingegneri: Cremona 1992

L. Paget: The Madrigals of Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (diss., U. of London, 1995)

L. Paget: ‘Monteverdi as discepolo: Harmony, Rhetoric and Psalm-Tone Hierarchies in the Works of Ingegneri and Monteverdi’, JMR, xv (1995), 149–75

STEVEN LEDBETTER/LAURIE STRAS