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Adrian Le Roy
Life Adrian Le Roy was a French lutenist, guitarist, composer, music publisher, and pedagogue, born around 1520 in Montreuil-sur-Mer to a wealthy family. With his cousin Robert Ballard, he founded the Parisian printing firm Le Roy & Ballard, which obtained a royal privilege to print music from Henry II in 1551 and was named “Imprimeur…
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Orlando di Lasso
Life Orlando di Lasso, also known as Orlande de Lassus, was a Franco-Flemish composer of the late Renaissance, born around 1532 in Mons in the County of Hainaut and died 14 June 1594 in Munich. After early years in Mantua, Naples, and Rome — where he briefly served as maestro di cappella of St. John…
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Jacopo Peri
Life Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer, singer, and instrumentalist born in 1561 in Rome or Florence and died in 1633 in Florence, credited with writing the first opera. Educated and employed within Florence’s Medici court and churches, he joined the circle of patron Jacopo Corsi, and together with poet Ottavio Rinuccini they created Dafne…
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René Mesangeau
Life René Mesangeau was a French lutenist and composer whose exact birth date is unknown; he died around January 1638 in Paris. In 1619 he settled definitively in France and married the daughter of the spinet maker Jean Jacquet, and in 1621 King Louis XIII appointed René Mesangeau Musicien ordinaire du Roi at the French…
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Hans Judenkünig
Life Hans Judenkünig was a German lutenist, lute maker, and composer of the Renaissance, born in Schwäbisch Gmünd sometime between 1445 and 1450 into a family originally from Württemberg. By 1518 he was recorded as a lutenist active around St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, working in the orbit of the University of Vienna. He is…
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William Byrd
Life William Byrd was an English composer born around 1543, probably in Lincolnshire, who died on 4 July 1623. He was appointed organist of Lincoln Cathedral in 1563 and by 1572 had joined the Chapel Royal in London, sharing organist duties with his teacher Thomas Tallis. Despite being a devout Roman Catholic during a period…
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Barbara Strozzi
Life Barbara Strozzi was a Venetian composer and singer, baptized in 1619 and buried in 1677 in Padua, celebrated as one of the most prolific and distinctive vocal composers of the middle Baroque. The likely illegitimate daughter of poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, who raised and promoted her, she studied composition with leading opera composer…
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Alessandro Piccinini
Life Alessandro Piccinini was an Italian lutenist and composer born in Bologna in 1566 into a musical family; his father, Leonardo Maria Piccinini, taught lute to Alessandro and his brothers Girolamo and Filippo. He held appointments at the Este court in Ferrara from 1582 to 1597 and later served Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, papal legate at…
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Vincenzo Capirola
Life Vincenzo Capirola was an Italian nobleman, lutenist, and composer of the High Renaissance, probably born in Brescia in 1474 and active there and in Venice, where he is documented in 1517. His music survives almost entirely in the lavishly illuminated Capirola Lutebook, compiled around 1517–1520 by his pupil Vitale, which preserves ricercars, dance forms,…
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John Dowland
Life John Dowland was an English composer, lutenist, and singer born in 1563, probably in Westminster, London, who died on 21 January 1626. After receiving a bachelor of music degree from Oxford in 1588, his conversion to Roman Catholicism cost him a hoped-for court post, prompting years of travel through European courts before he became…