In sí gran martire… A tonal experiment in Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato d’Atlante

The subject of the article is Scene 6 from Act III of Luigi Rossi’s musical drama Il Palazzo incantato d’Atlante (1642) to a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi. This particular scene is worthy of attention, because the composer has given it a thoroughly unique musical setting as compared to early Italian drammi per musica. It not only features more than one key signature sign — two sharps appear at the clefs — but also five sharps as accidentals in the music itself, thus using rare pitch material for late sixteenth and early seventeenth century output. The composer resorts to transposing the a-aeolian mode by a whole tone upwards, thus emphasizing b as finalis (not included in the canon of finales, even in the dodecachordal system), and likely purposefully choosing a rare key in late Renaissance and early Baroque music, one that carries a pointedly expressive sense. He simultaneously enriched — with such ‘sharpened key’ as background — the monologue’s pitch material, radically mining the tendency to the durus tonal sphere. In tandem, the phenomena appear here for the first time on the terrain of Italian dramma per musica. The reason for introducing this compositional solution was the content of Giulio Rospigliosi’s libretto, laden with nearly harsh words relating Lidia’s cruelty and Alceste’s suffering. This text also demanded an extraordinary musical setting.