Massimo Troiano

While Massimo Troiano published four books of secular songs (in three collections—in 1567, 1568 and 1570), he is best known for having provided in his Dialoghi a vivid and colorful description of life in the Bavarian court and especially the lavish marriage ceremony for the Munich wedding of Duke Wilhelm V and Renée of Lorraine. Modern scholars consider Troiano to be an unreliable (since he was being paid to portray the court in the most positive terms), but useful witness. Troiano's Dialoghi was published in Munich in 1568, Venice in 1569 and appeared shortly thereafter in a Spanish translation. The book is the most complete description of how Orlande de Lassus produced and staged his musical performances, and contains accounts of both instrumental and vocal music. "The singers [serve] every morning at High Mass and at Vespers on Saturdays and the vigils of the feasts of obligation. The wind instruments are played on Sundays, and on feast days at Mass and at Vespers in company with the singers." Troiano also gives unusually detailed descriptions of how Mass was celebrated and which parts were sung polyphonically—all important information in reconstructing Renaissance performance practice. Troiano also left an account of the 1567 performance of the largest polyphonic composition of the Renaissance, the 40- and 60-voice Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno by Alessandro Striggio. Troiano's music was mostly in the light Neapolitan style of the canzon villanesca alla napoletana, sometimes called simply "canzonettas", three-part vocal compositions related to madrigals but more formulaic in character, although in Troiano's hands, along with his compatriot Giovanni Leonardo Primavera, they began to approach the artistic world of the madrigal. All of his books of canzonette he published in Venice, and they show aspects both of Neapolitan and contemporary Venetian style. Most of the verse he likely wrote himself, and he sometimes writes nostalgically of his native Naples, for which he longed.