RORE, CIPRIANO DE

Renaissance composer famous for his madrigals; b. Low Countries (Mechlin or Antwerp), 1516; d. Parma, Italy, 1565. He studied with willaert in Venice, and his early madrigals (1542–44) already show unusual talent. By 1546 he was maestro in Ferrara at the court of Ercole II, succeeding vicentino. In 1561 he joined the court of Ottavio Farnese in Parma, and he remained there until his death, except for a brief stay in Venice as Willaert's successor at St. Mark's. His Masses are in traditional style; the motets mediate between this and the madrigals. He relied for texts on Petrarch (e.g., the Vergine bella ) but later turned to contemporary sonnet writers, such as Parabosco, Spira, and Molino. Despite the danger that such expressive poetry might dominate the music, compositional unity was artfully maintained. Stylistically he was influenced by Willaert; his own influence on Lasso, Monte, Palestrina, and even on Monteverdi was so great that he might safely be called the precursor of the seconda prattica.

Bibliography: Opera omnia, ed. b. meier, Corpus mensurablis musicae, ed. American Institute of Musicology v.14 (Rome 1959–). j. musiol, Cyprian de Rore (Breslau 1932). a. einstein, The Italian Madrigal, tr. a. h. krappe et al., 3 v. (Princeton 1949). a. pirro, Histoire de la musique (Paris 1940). a. h. johnson, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. f. blume (Kassel-Basel 1949–) 11:897–901. "The Masses of Cipriano de Rore," Journal of the American Musicological Society 6 (Boston 1953) 227–239. g. reese, Music in the Renaissance (rev. ed. New York 1959) 309, 329–. a. cambier, "Hoe de herkomst van Cypriaan de rore ontrafeld werd," Musica Antiqua 5 (1988) 124–29. a. h. johnson, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. s. sadie (New York 1980). s. lavia, Cipriano de Rore as Reader and as Read: A Literary-Musical Study of Madrigals from Rore's Later Collections (1557–1566) (Ph.D. diss. Princeton University, 1991). a. j. lloyd, Modal Representation in the Early Madrigals of Cipriano de Rore (Ph.D. diss. Royal Holloway College, University of London, 1996). j. owens, "The Milan Partbooks: Evidence of Cipriano de Rore's Compositional Process," Journal of the American Musicological Society 37 (1984) 270–98. d. m. randel, ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1996). j. steele, "Marenzio: From Mannerist to Expressionist," Miscellanea Musicologica 11 (1980),129–131.

[f. j. smith]