Naples had already been under Spanish rule for a century, governed by viceroys whose stay in the post was brief, and who couldn’t be considered as a stable means of artistic patronage. Musical patronage had been taken on by Neapolitan aristocrats, educated in the tastes of musical practice and who boasted about it. We need only recall the overwhelming musical passion of the Prince of Venosa, Carlo Gesualdo, who at the end of the 16th century had gathered together the main professional composers and musicians of Naples in symbolic competition with the noble aficionados of his circle. This situation resulted in an output of instrumental and vocal music (especially madrigals) characterized by an exaggerated taste for experimentalism and polyphonic solutions overflowing with affects which also recalled the influence of the court of Ferrara. The influence of Gesualdo’s preference for polyphonic experimentation could be felt in Naples for a long time, even after the Prince’s death, which took place in 1613. We are unaware as to whether Luigi Rossi went on to form part of Prince Gesualdo’s elite musical circle or not, but we do know that when he arrived in the city in 1586, Macque, his teacher, was one of its principal exponents. During the period in which Rossi lived in Naples, the fashion for experimentation transformed the city into one of the avant-garde centers of European music and was reflected in the musical editions of Trabaci (Macque’s successor as director of the Royal Chapel), Mayone and Salvatore for instruments such as the chromatic or enharmonic harpsichord, the double harp, the division viol and “viola consort”, instruments all present in Rossi’s manuscript, rigorously presented in four-part score notation, as were the Neapolitan editions of the time. The same London manuscript also contains a copy of a composition by Monteverdi, the famous Lamento di Arianna, a sign of Rossi’s early interest in accompanied monody and theatrical music which would later be revealed in the composer’s mature period.

Luigi Rossi was considered one of the most important Italian composers of the first half of the 17th century, together with Monteverdi and Frescobaldi

In Barberini Rome

Rossi left Naples prior to 1620 in order to serve the Borghese family in Rome, a post he held for close to 20 years. In the only surviving autograph letter I have been lucky enough to find in the Bentivoglio family archive in Ferrara, in January 1620 Rossi states that he was already in Rome at the service of cardinal Marc’Antonio Borghese. Rossi, admitted as a suonatore, was to a certain extent surrounded by musicians: in addition to his harpist brother, also called to serve his patron, Luigi encountered another harp virtuoso, the sister of another harpist in the service of the same cardinal, Costanza da Ponte, whom he would marry in 1626. The only visible sign of the presence of the harp in Luigi’s music is the bass part for the harp in the motet for three sopranos, violin and basso continuo O quis daret concentum (Ms. 24. F.4, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); notwithstanding, the instrument perfectly adapts itself to the realization of the basso continuo of all the arias and cantatas of the period, in accordance with a practice probably originating in Naples. It mustn’t be forgotten that the definitive improvement to the instrument, its transformation into a triple harp, had been made in Rome a few years earlier by a Neapolitan, Luigi Antonio Eustachio, the Pope’s secret chamberlain; and that the most famous virtuoso of the period, Orazio Michi “dall’arpa”, Luigi Rossi’s friend and companion, was also Neapolitan. .