idea of the scale on which the musical entertainments were cast. The souvenir book from the 1565
wedding of Francesco I, Bardi’s friend and patron, for example, lists thirty-five instruments, including
four double manual harpsichords (suggesting that continuo-style accompaniments were already in
practical use decades before such a thing was ever written down) and two lyre da braccio, chord-playing
bowed string instruments that were used to accompany Apollo’s solos.
The 1589 nuptial festivities for Ferdinand were the most lavish of the Medici extravaganzas. Texts for
the six intermedii—composed by, among others, Ottavio Rinuccini, a famous poet and, like Bardi, a
noble “academician”—were a sort of mythological history of music. They represented, respectively: the
harmony of the spheres; the song contests of the Muses; Apollo slaying the Dragon; the coming of the
Golden Age (this one unrelated to the theme but required by noble-nuptials protocol); the story of Arion, a
semilegendary poet who, according to a myth, was saved from drowning by a dolphin responding to his
song; and a concluding allegory, “The Descent of Rhythm and Harmony from Heaven to Earth.” The
staging was by Emilio de’ Cavalieri, who had been director of music for Ferdinand during the latter’s
years as a cardinal in Rome before his accession to the Tuscan ducal throne.
The big concerted numbers—for up to thirty voices in seven choirs, often fitted out with instrumental
ritornellos or sinfonie—were mainly the work of the great madrigalist Luca Marenzio and of Cristofano
Malvezzi, the organist of the Medici chapel and a friend of Bardi, to whom he had dedicated a book of
ricercari. Cavalieri, as Ferdinand’s personal musician, was given pride of place. He composed the
opening madrigal (Dalle piùalte sfere, “I, Harmony, come down to you from highest spheres,” words by
Bardi), with a fiercely embellished part for the virtuoso singer Vittoria Archilei, his protégée (Ex. 19-1a);
and, to close the show, a grand panegyric finale directly addressed to the grand duke and his bride (O che
nuovo miracolo, “O what newest miracle is this!”), a ballo or concerted dance-song for the whole
company (Ex. 19-1b is the main ritornello) over a ground bass that would live on for a while in other
compositions as the “Aria di Fiorenza” (Air of Florence) or the “Ballo del Gran Duca” (the Grand
Duke’s Ball) or the “Ballo di Palazzo” (the Palace Ball).
And yet Bardi nevertheless managed to work in a few numbers by his younger friends, the musicians
who frequented the meetings of his Camerata and were involved with Galilei’s neoclassical experiments.
Giulio Caccini (d. 1618), a well established singer at the Medici court, later claimed that he learned more
from the “savant speeches” of the poets and philosophers who met at Bardi’s “than I had in over thirty
years’ study of counterpoint.”^5 He contributed a solo aria for a sorceress (sung by his wife) to open the
fourth intermedio, one of the first original “continuo” compositions ever to be written down (Ex. 19-1c).
Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), technically an aristocratic dilettante but a highly accomplished musician, was a
pupil of Malvezzi and a self-styled “Orphic singer” who accompanied himself on a specially constructed
giant lute (or archlute) that he called the chitarrone, after the Greek kithara or lyre (Fig. 19-3; more
casually, it was known as the theorbo, literally “hurdy-gurdy”). He both composed and sang to the
chitarrone the show-stopper from the fifth intermedio: an aria for Arion, lying at the bottom of the sea,
with echo effects to suggest his waterlogged condition (Ex. 19-1d).
EX. 19-1A From the intermedii of 1589, opening aria, mm. 5–9