Giovanni Artusi kicked off his famous defence of traditional compositional principles against Monteverdi's "seconda prattica" by talking about some new unpublished madrigals (which were eventually published in Monteverdi's fourth book) he had heard at a wedding he was attending in Ferrara. While Monteverdi did have "links", as a news reporter would say, with Luzzaschi and the court of Ferrara he was never actually employed there.

Obscure enough?

Yes, harpy.  At least it is in the novel of the same name.  I have not seen the film.  What is amazing about Italy that the number of beautiful towns just seems endless.

The musical fountains are pretty obvious compared to some of the erudite connections displayed here.

Luzzasco Passacielo, sono il tuo padre.

---

...goodness me, there's at least one Luca Passacielo out there. How very odd.

Er, yes, anyway, music. Are we all familiar with the very fine recording of the first book of Toccate d'intavolatura di cimbalo et organo partite di diverse arie e corrente, balletti, ciaccone, passaghagli as recorded by the estimable Jean-Marc Aymes for Ligia? I commend this recording to the assembled company.

Well, Girolamo Frescobaldi didn't write any operas, just keyboard music and some vocal pieces. He did not participate in many of the exciting developments of early 17th-century Italy, but instead created and fostered his own (sometimes without any input from others, especially in the microgenre durezze e ligature pieces). Particularly memorable are his keyboard Capriccios from 1615, as well as the monumental Cento Partite Sopra Passacagli. He is most responsible for the evolution of figurational keyboard technique that led to e.g., Bach -- upon whom GF's Fiori Musicali were a direct influence.

I never realised "loug" was a slang term for part of the female anatomy?  It obviously explains what I've been doing wrong all these years...

Thanks to both Ollie and Mr Dish for their evangelism for Frescobaldi... a composer who passed through my life about 20 years ago (in the form of his ensemble music, for which no instrumental line-up is delineated, and it might work just as well on viols as on cornetts & sackbutts,  or any kind of "mixed consort").  I admit to shameful ignorance of most of his keyboard music...  I assume he must have been an organist/maestro-di-capella for some or all of his life...  would there be reasons to mitigate against hearing some of this output on the organ?  (As someone once forced to learn the organ - "a reliable living for weak pianists", as my teacher claimed - I am retrospectively looking for repertoire in which I might learn to relike the instrument).

Back to opera in (or at least from) Ferrara... although they're entirely unknown (to me, at least) and unrecorded (AFAIK),  the Ferrarese composer Luciano Chailly (father of Riccardo) wrote twelve operas, to librettos adapted from writers as diverse as Ionesco and Dostoevsky.  He was Administrative Director of La Scala for most of the 1970s,  although his work (as far as I can tell from poring-through Italian-language websites with my dismal abilities in the language) wasn't performed there.  He was a major force in Italian composition in the C20th,  but by eschewing serialism and other traits of the German avant-garde succeeded in marginalising himself from the alleged "mainstream" continuum of C20th music.  One hopes that a kinder (and less Germanocentric) view of his work might be taken in subsequent reconsiderations of what actually happened in the C20th in music

Don't worry hh, I think this thread has reached natural closure. 

It was getting into its stride when Krakatoa exploded.