Girolamo Frescobaldi

Girolamo Frescobaldi was born in Ferrara in September 1583 into a comfortable family. Ferrara was then one of the most refined courts in Italy, ruled by the music-loving Este family. Young Girolamo studied there with Luzzasco Luzzaschi, court organist and composer of daring madrigals, who owned a rare instrument, the “archicembalo”, able to play intervals smaller than a semitone. Frescobaldi soon made a name as a prodigy organist and harpsichordist.

In 1598 Ferrara was absorbed into the Papal States and the Este court moved to Modena: the city’s musical life declined. Frescobaldi left for Rome, where in 1604 he joined the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and became organist of Santa Maria in Trastevere. In 1607 he accompanied the nuncio Guido Bentivoglio to Flanders, to Brussels, where he discovered the northern keyboard school. He published a book of madrigals in Antwerp.

Back in Rome he was appointed in 1608 organist of St Peter’s Basilica, the most prestigious post in Christendom. According to one account, no fewer than thirty thousand people crowded in to hear his first concert — surely an exaggeration, but it shows his fame. He held the post until his death, with a break of a few years. In 1613 he married Orsola del Pino, with whom he had five children.

Frescobaldi was above all a keyboard composer, for organ and harpsichord. In 1615 he published his first book of Toccate e partite, whose preface became famous: he asks performers not to play in strict time but freely, as one sings a modern madrigal, slowing down or speeding up according to the expression. His toccatas, made of virtuoso passages, strange dissonances and sudden changes of mood, are like written-out improvisations, full of fantasy.

He also wrote ricercars, canzonas, capriccios and sets of variations on well-known basses, such as the Cento partite sopra passacagli, where he virtuosically links passacaglias and chaconnes. He also composed vocal music, notably two books of Arie musicali (1630), as well as masses and motets. Between 1628 and 1634 he left Rome to become organist at the court of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici in Florence, before returning under the protection of the powerful Barberini family, that of Pope Urban VIII.

In 1635 he published the Fiori musicali (“Musical Flowers”), a collection of organ pieces for the Mass: toccatas for the Elevation, canzonas after the Epistle, ricercars for the Offertory. It is his most famous and influential work. More than a century later Johann Sebastian Bach made a complete manuscript copy of it in 1714 to study. Frescobaldi had many pupils, including the German Johann Jakob Froberger, who spread his style across northern Europe.

Frescobaldi died in Rome on 1 March 1643, a few months before Monteverdi, and was buried in the church of the Santi Apostoli. He is regarded as the greatest keyboard composer of the first half of the seventeenth century and one of the founders of modern organ music. Through Froberger and then Bach, his influence spread throughout the European keyboard tradition. His works are still played by organists and harpsichordists all over the world.