There is something particular, however, in the prolificacy of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, nearly all to the service of God and of the Church. We are in the fullness of Counter-Reformation religious fervour in the latter part of the 16^th century, this being a period which has marked in Italy a setback on the political and social level, but which has contributed much to the development of the figurative arts and music – above all in Rome.
Never as at that time was music used as a vehicle of moralising and spiritual edification. This counts for the complicated polyphonic weaves of Palestrina such as in the simple chord structure of the spiritual lauds, performed in different contexts from those of the exceptionally professional choirs of Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano and Saint Peter’s Basilica. A fundamental contribution is made to the genre by Giovanni Francesco Anerio (1567-1630), even if several lauds and spiritual hymns were anonymous and were widely circulated through printed collections such as those edited by Francisco Soto de Langa. A similar structure is also found in motets like Confitemini Domino by Alessandro Costantini, where the text always remains in the foreground. And yet also the most complicated polyphonic interweaving of the masses and of the motets of Palestrina are conducted within the hallmark of an ultimate balance, both in the use of dissonances and in conducting individual parts. In sheets such as Ego sum panis and Adoramus te we admire their melodic flow, the expert play of alternation between fullness and emptiness, the continuity obtained by avoiding the contemporaneous stay of voices on the same tone. Certainly, in Adoramus te, pertaining to the Palestrina’s adulthood, conducting the parts becomes shrewder, in a climate of extreme sound and expressive rarefaction which contemplates the recovery of chord annotations. However, Palestrina’s hand remains the same, to confirm the unmistakable stylistic characterisation of the so called “Roman school”.
There also worked at Rome Girolamo Frescobaldi, from Ferrara, even if in a chronological order (the first half of the 17^th century) and a compositive order (that of keyboard music) which are quite different from those of Palestrina. Otherwise the extravagance of harmonic and virtuoso inventions as well as the complexity of the annotations position the great man from Ferrara in a full Baroque environment. This is shown by the Seventh Toccata from the II Book, with his decidedly improvisational character, which could be compared with the severe nobility of the score sheets of the German lute player Kapsberger, who performed in Rome from 1610 up to his demise in 1661: a double witness of the complicated aesthetics of 17^th century music.

Luca Segalla