Donemus Webwinkel — Boschetti, Giovanni Boschetto

Giovanni Boschetto Boschetti (aka Hieronymus Boschetto da Viterbo) was an Italian composer of the early Baroque era.
He was born in Viterbo round 1570. Very little is known of his youth and education. He is presumed to have taken holy orders and even to have been a bishop, but some sources are contradictory on this.
His first book of madrigals (and, as far as we know, his only one) was printed in Rome by Giovanni Battista Robletti in 1613, and is the subject of this transcription.
It contains 18 madrigals for 5 voices, two of them being spiritual madrigals, i.e. sacred songs in a madrigalian style. It is remarkable for a bishop to have written secular music instead of sacred music, but Boschetto did.
Like so many of the Renaissance and Baroque composers of madrigals were inspired by the lyrics from the great Italian poets of the Renaissance like Pertrarca, Guarini and Tasso. To mention some of them: Monteverdi, S. Rossi, De Wert, Pallavicino, Conversi, Marenzio, Croce, Gastoldi, Del Mel and D’ India. They all used Guarini’s lyrics.
In five of his madrigals Boschetto used texts from the ‘pastoral tragicomedy’ Il pastor fido from Battista Guarini’s hand. This masterpiece of Guarini was written between 1580 and 1584. The pieces I refer to are the numbers 1, 5, 8, 9 & 10. The meaning of the lyrics in almost all madrigals is about love, unreachable, deceived, betrayed, disrupted etc.
In Guarini’s Il Pastor fido, Amarilli’s love is tainted by Mirtillo and she is brooding over a way to take revenge by marrying someone else. Although Guarini blames Destino (destiny) for her pain, this could not be used by Boschetto, because destiny, with its connotation of predestination - being a hot item in those days - was not allowed by Boschetto’s superiors. He solved this problem very aptly, showing his own capability of sensitive and expressive text setting. Texts from Il Pastor fido have been used in more than 500 madrigals in that era. The style of Boschetto’s music seems to be influenced by Monteverdi; especially in number 15 with dissonant sounds like in Monteverdi’s madrigals. The drama in number 9 is greatly inspired by Monteverdi.
The bass parts in these madrigals are sometimes rather low and can very well be replaced or doubled by wind instruments.
The madrigal book was dedicated to Abbott Sforza de Nobili, a son of a once important family in Milan in the 15th century.