Stefano Rossetto (also Rossetti) (

fl. ''Floruit'' ( ; usually abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for 'flourished') denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indic ...

1560–1580) was an

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

of the late

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

, born in

Nice Nice ( ; ) is a city in and the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative city limits, with a population of nearly one million Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

for the powerful

Medici The House of Medici ( , ; ) was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first consolidated power in the Republic of Florence under Cosimo de' Medici and his grandson Lorenzo "the Magnificent" during the first half of the 15th ...

family, and in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

Life

His life has not yet been thoroughly studied. The earliest information available shows that he may have lived and worked on

Chios Chios (; , traditionally known as Scio in English) is the fifth largest Greece, Greek list of islands of Greece, island, situated in the northern Aegean Sea, and the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, tenth largest island in the Medi ...

, an island in the Aegean, in the service of the Genoese Giustiniani family; the connection can be made from the dedication to one of his 1560 books of

madrigal A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and early Baroque (1580–1650) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the ...

s. In 1560 he assisted at the wedding of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy and Marguerite of Valois, which took place in

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

, where he served Ferdinando I de' Medici as a composer, alongside Alessandro Striggio, and Francesco Corteccia, whose career by then had begun to wane. By 1579 he was in the employ of either Albrecht V, or

William V William V may refer to: * William V, Duke of Aquitaine (969–1030) * William V of Montpellier (1075–1121) * William V, Marquess of Montferrat (1191) * William V, Count of Nevers (before 11751181) * William V, Duke of Jülich (1299–1361) * Will ...

(Albrecht died in 1579). The '' intermedio'' performed in Florence in 1583 alongside Fedini's play ''Le due Persile'' may have been his work. Connections between the Medici and Bavarian courts were close through the period, and composers often passed between them. Nothing certain is yet known of Rossetto's career after 1580.

Music

All of his surviving music is vocal, and includes madrigals and

motet In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the preeminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to the Eng ...

s, some of which were probably intended for performance as '' intermedii,'' musical interludes between acts of plays. Along with the other Medici composers, taking part in a trend of the time, he wrote gigantic polychoral compositions. One of the largest polychoral works ever composed, at least prior to modern times, was his huge 50-voice motet ''Consolamini popule meus''. The date of the composition is unknown, but the manuscript is at the

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in Munich, suggesting he wrote it while in the service of the Bavarian court. Only a handful of larger compositions are known: Alessandro Striggio's colossal 40 and 60 voice '' Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno'', and the 17th century 53-voice '' Missa Salisburgensis'' attributed to

Heinrich Ignaz Biber Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber correctly ''Biber von Bibern'' ( bapt. 12 August 1644, Stráž pod Ralskem – 3 May 1704, Salzburg) was a Bohemian-Austrian composer and violinist. Biber worked in Graz and Kroměříž before he illegally left ...

.Moroney, p. 5-7 Rossetto also composed three books of madrigals, for four, five, and six voices, respectively (all published in Venice in 1560 and 1566), and an ambitious setting of the ''Lamento d'Olimpia'', in seventeen parts, for from four to ten voices, which he published in Venice in 1567. (Florence, for all its opulence, lacked publishing houses, and most of the Medici composers published their works in Venice, a city with a long publishing history.) In addition to his secular music, he published a book of motets in Nuremberg in 1573, ''Novae quaedam sacrae cantiones, quas vulgo motetas vocant'', for five and six voices. In his madrigals he uses

chromaticism Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic scale, diatonic pitch (music), pitches and chord (music), chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. In simple terms, within each octave, diatonic music uses o ...

creatively, and he liked to write both madrigals and motets in groups, as did the other Medici composers (such as Corteccia and Striggio). Much of his music is intended to be accompanied by instruments, another characteristic of Florentine

polyphony Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice ( monophony) or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chord ...

of the period.

References and further reading

* James Haar: "Stefano Rossetto", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed May 14, 2007)
(subscription access)
* Gustave Reese, ''Music in the Renaissance''. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. * Davitt Moroney, "Alessandro Striggio's Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts". ''Journal of the American Musicological Society,'' Vol. 60 No. 1., pp. 1–69. Spring 2007. ISSN 0003-0139 *Stefano Rossetti, ''"Il lamento di Olimpia" and Other Madrigals from Four to Ten Voices'', ed. and reconstructed by James Chater. Madison, Wisc.: A-R Publications (forthcoming)

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rossetto, Stefano Italian Renaissance composers Italian male classical composers 16th-century births 16th-century deaths Musicians from Nice