; "Messa à 4")
| Chiara Margarita Cozzolani | ||||
 | Messa à 4 | SAAMs/Bc | or | SAAB/Bc |
Price: €17 or $17USD | ||||
Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602 - c.1677) was active in one of the most celebrated ensembles of women musicians in early modern Italy: that of the Benedictine nuns of the convent of Santa Radegonda, located across the street from Milan Cathedral. Born in Milan to a well-off family, Cozzolani professed her vows at the monastery in 1620, and later served several times as prioress and abbess. She published four editions of sacred works between 1640 and 1650, though unfortunately not all of them are extant. The music presented here is taken from her collection Concerti Sacri a Una, Due, Tre, et Quattro voci, Con Una Messa Quattro (Venice, 1642). It is dedicated to the Florentine prince Mathias de’ Medici, an important patron of singers and composers, who had very possibly heard the music at S. Radegonda in person during a visit to Milan in the winter of 1640-41.
The five movements of the Mass printed here (the Benedictus is lacking) are composed in a simpler style than many of Cozzolani’s other works, in particular her Vespers psalms for eight voices published in 1650. There is little to be found here of the virtuosic passaggi of the psalms. Instead, homophonic, declamatory settings alternate with duets and trios employing rhetorical devices to underline the text: sighing accenti on "crucifixus", falling fourths on "miserere", octave leaps illustrating "coeli et terra", seemingly endless repetitions to suggest "non erit finis", etc.) The result is restrained but elegant.
Cozzolani’s Mass presents a problem common to a great deal of the repertoire written by and for cloistered nuns: they contain parts for tenor and bass voices. Perhaps surprisingly, the bass voice itself does not present a problem: there is a great deal of evidence pointing to the practice of transporting the bass voice up an octave, where it easily falls into the range of an alto, while an instrument doubles the part at the written octave, and we have followed that practice here. (It should be pointed out that the bass part has a range of over 2 octaves and in fact ascends higher than the tenor, so a mezzo-soprano would probably better suit the part.) A more serious dilemma is created by the tenor: sung at pitch, it lies at times too low for a woman’s voice, but when transposed up the octave, it often rises above the soprano. In our women’s version, therefore, we have transposed the entire Mass up a minor third and left the tenor part in the original octave. As this results in a rather high tessitura for the soprano, the edition contains a detailed discussion of alternative strategies.