Bacchini [Bacchino],Giovanni Maria [Fra Teodoro del Carmine] Page 1 of 1

Bacchini [Bacchino], Giovanni Maria

[Fra Teodoro del Carmine]
(b Mantua; fl 1588–1607). Italian singer, composer and theorist. Canal
erroneously gave his first name as Girolamo. He was a Carmelite priest. While at
the Mantuan court, he wrote a treatise, De musica, now lost. In 1588 he
published a madrigal, Più che Diana, in Alfonso Preti’s L’amoroso caccia (RISM
158814), a collection consisting of compositions by Mantuan musicians primarily
associated with the church. He also published a book of masses, the Missarum
quinque et sex vocum, liber primus (Venice, 1589). In a letter dated 26 November
1594 to the vicar-general of the Carmelite order, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga
requested that Bacchini, a ‘musico castrato’, be exempt from wearing his monk’s
habit while singing in the court chamber. In 1594 he accompanied the duke to the
Reichstag in Regensburg and in the following year, along with Monteverdi, G.B.
Marinone, Serafino Terzi and other musicians from the Gonzaga court, took part
in the duke’s military expedition to southern Hungary. A Mantuan court secretary,
Fortunato Cardi, described musical performances directed by Monteverdi, in
which Bacchini took part, on the eve of the Battle of Visegrad. It has been
suggested that Bacchini sang the part of Euridice in the first performances of
Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607). The account books of the Mantuan court mention him
in 1595, 1598 and 1605.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BertolottiM
P. Canal: Della musica in Mantova (Venice, 1881/R)
V. Errante: ‘Forse che sì, forse che no’, Archivio storico lombardo, xlii (1915),
31–2
I. Fenlon: ‘Monteverdi’s Mantuan Orfeo: Some New Documentation’, EMc, xii
(1984), 163–72
PIERRE M. TAGMANN/IAIN FENLON

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