Rovetta: Messa, e salmi concertati, Part 1

Giovanni Rovetta (ca. 1597–1668) is best known as Claudio Monteverdi’s successor as maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s in Venice. While sometimes overshadowed by his great predecessor, Rovetta was one of the most outstanding figures in Venetian musical life of the seventeenth century. His works include five large collections of sacred music (with Vesper psalms and Mass settings), four volumes of concertato motets, two books of concertato madrigals, two operas, and numerous other works in found in various printed anthologies and manuscripts. As such, his music offers almost the complete variety of vocal and instrumental genres and styles, both sacred and secular that were current in the Seicento. Rovetta’s Messa, e salmi concertati op. 4 (1639) is representative of his style. This collection contains the Mass that King Louis XIII of France commissioned in 1638 to celebrate the birth of his son Louis XIV, the future Sun King. The concertato mass and psalm settings in this collection illustrate the gradual stabilization of the experiments in compositional techniques and the expressive rendering of the text that are characteristic of the early Seicento. At the same time these compositions display Rovetta’s inventiveness in arriving at new formal solutions, his sensibility to the expressive demands of the text, and the fine balance the composer achieves between the compositional conventions of his time and his individual approach to the liturgical texts. The edition reproduces the entire collection of 1639: the concertato mass of 1638, twelve concertato settings of Vesper psalms for five to eight voices and two violins, and a Magnificat. Texts, translations, and commentary accompany each piece. In addition the introduction establishes a context for Rovetta’s collection in the second quarter of the Seicento and discusses in detail the composer’s individual style.