The history of madrigal comedy is not only short, but not very rich either, as we know only about twenty compositions of this genre. It all began with the work of Orazio Vecchi Selva di varia ricreatione published in 1590. The last known work of this genre is Trattenimenti in villa (Pastoral Entertainments) by Adriano Banchieri, published in Venice only forty years later – in 1630. It is the latter piece that will be heard during the Forum Musicum, performed by the Ars Cantus ensemble under the direction of Artistic Director Tomasz Dobrzański.

What exactly is a madrigal comedy? In the most general sense, the term describes cycles of secular vocal compositions that are related to each other. Sometimes the subsequent parts of the cycle tell a story, but it also happens that only the same characters appear in them without a shared storyline; sometimes, it is even the case that the works have nothing in common except for the title of the whole. They often present uncomplicated pastoral themes. This is the case of Adriano Banchieri’s Trattenimenti in villa, a composition that transports the listener to the bucolic world of Arcadian shepherds.

Banchieri was a Benedictine monk, versatile musician, organist, composer, music theorist and poet, and one of the founders of the Bologna music society L'Accademia dei Floridi, where he was known under the pseudonym Il Disonante. Despite his service in the convent, he wrote many secular works in addition to sacred music. As the author of five madrigal comedies, he is considered a leading composer of this musical genre. The only purpose of Adriano Banchieri’s comedies was, as he himself wrote, “passing free time”. Opera music, dynamically developing in the first half of the 17th century, had a similar goal. It is the opera’s great success that made the madrigal comedy in the history of Italian music a short-lived phenomenon, rarely performed today.