Talk:Felice Anerio

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I'm taking this part out which was added today. It was from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which is a lovely and useful reference, but disastrously out of date for serious musicology.

Several masses and motets of his are printed in Proske's Musica Divina and other modern anthologies, and it is hardly too much to say that they are for the most part worthy of Palestrina himself.

The two Anerio brothers are probably the latest composers who handled 16th-century music as their mother-language; suffering neither from the temptation to indulge even in such mild neologisms as they might have learnt from the elder brother's master, Nanino, nor from the necessity of preserving their purity of style by a mortified negative asceticism. They wrote pure polyphony because they understood it and loved it, and hence their work lives, as neither the progressive work of their own day nor the reactionary work of their imitators could live. The 12-part Stabat Mater in the seventh volume of Palestrina's complete works has been by some authorities ascribed to Felice Anerio.

Here's what's wrong. For one thing, Proske's Musica Divina is 1854, hardly a "modern anthology," though he was a good editor and a good library ought to have this still. The music is indeed worthy of Palestrina, and sounds a lot like him, which is already in the article. The part about the "latest composers who handled 16th-century music as their mother-language" is just plain wrong; the "prima prattica" was the mother-language for hundreds of composers throughout the early 17th century. Consider Allegri as an example, if we stay in Rome, or dozens of Spaniards, who wrote in the style while much of Europe was reveling in the polychoral glories of the Venetian school and the monodic productions which began in Florence. And the comment about their work living as the progressive work of their own day could not--WHAT??? In 1911, someone could believe this maybe, but we know better now--what about Monteverdi? Gesualdo? Gabrieli? I'm sorry, to the unsigned author of the 1911 Anerio article, but it just ain't so. You're not getting a space on Wikipedia. Oh, and that 12-part Stabat Mater is no longer controversial--it's by Palestrina. Read about it in Grove (1980). Antandrus 02:55, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)