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"This Week in Classical Music: July 20, 2026.  Francesco Corteccia.  To think of it, it’s rather strange that Florence was never a musical center of Renaissance Italy.  It’s no surprise that Rome was the most important city, musically and in almost every other way.  But Ferrara was also very important, as were Mantua and Milan.  And so was Venice, of course.  Florence, on the other hand, which was uniquely rich in practically every other way – its painters, sculptors, architects, poets, writers, philosophers were the best, or among the best, in Italy – didn’t have a comparable music culture.  Things got better at the end of the 16th century, between the Renaissance and the Baroque, when opera was invented, and composers such as Jacopo Peri and Emilio de' Cavalieri worked on creating new musical idioms, but until that time, it was Francesco Corteccia who stood alone as the significant Florentine composer of the Renaissance.  He was born in Florence on July 27th of 1502.  He lived all his rather uneventful life in Florence.  All his work was dedicated to Duke (later, Grand Duke) Cosimo I de’ Medici, under whose patronage he worked most of his life.  Corteccia was a choirboy at the Baptistry (the one next to the Duomo), where he eventually became the chaplain.  He studied the organ at the Duomo and later worked there as maestro di capella.  He also held the same position at the Medici family’s church of San Lorenzo."

"Corteccia published three volumes of madrigals, his main secular output.  He also wrote several intermedi, the sung interludes between the acts of plays; these intermedi eventually evolved into opera.  The ones staged at the court were lavish, and the music was appropriately elaborate.  As all composers of the time, he also wrote church music: motets, two Passions (St. John and St. Matthew, as Bach did two centuries later), hymns, and other pieces.  We can hear two of Corteccia’s madrigals, Fammi pur guerr' amor (Make war on me, Love), here, and Io vorrei pur fuggir, crudel amore (I would truly want to flee, cruel love), here.  And from Corteccia’s church music, Tenebrae factae sunt (Darkness fell) (here), followed by Caligaverunt oculi mei (My eyes are darkened), here.  Corteccia died in Florence in 1571.  We don’t have Corteccia’s portrait, but show instead the famous portrait of his patron, Duke Cosimo I, which was painted by the Italian Mannerist painter Bronzino sometime around 1545.  Bronzino was born one year after Corteccia, in 1503, and died one year later, in 1572.  Mannerism isn’t in vogue these days, but Bronzino was a great painter."

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