Written in the wake of the 1647 revolt in Naples, ⏵︎ “Lamento di Marinetta, moglie di Massaniello” gives voice to a fictionalized widow of Masaniello, the fishmonger who briefly led the popular uprising against Spanish rule. The musical setting is anonymous in the manuscript. The poem was published posthumously under Francesco Melosio’s name in Poesie e prose; Dinko Fabris nevertheless questioned the attribution because of its Neapolitan dialect passages.
“Correa l’ottavo giorno” (Lamento di Marinetta, moglie di Massaniello).
Bologna, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, I-Bc, MS Q.47, ff. 87v–94v.
The manuscript source
The setting is preserved in Bologna, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, I-Bc, MS Q.47, ff. 87v–94v. The 252-folio manuscript is a substantial anthology of seventeenth-century vocal music and includes works associated with Marco Marazzoli, Giacomo Carissimi, Carlo Caproli, and others.
Poesie e prose del sig. dottor Francesco Melosio da Città della Pieve (1678).
Text and satire
Datable to 1647, the lament combines grief with political satire. Its opening turns Naples—the “faithful city”—into an overburdened horse kicking against new taxes. Marinetta moves through anger, calls for vengeance, and disillusionment, while Neapolitan inflections and verbal puns bring the upheaval into the language of the monologue. The version set to music also sharpens several anti-Spanish allusions found in the printed poem.
Head of a Screaming Man in Profile, known as a Portrait of Masaniello, c. 1640–43.
Musical design
The anonymous setting is comparatively restrained. Much of the text unfolds in syllabic recitative, with little melodic ornamentation. Repeated harmonic and melodic patterns, reciting tones, and slow-moving continuo writing intensify moments of stasis; passages in ottonari introduce a more clearly aria-like profile, and the closing lament draws on a descending minor tetrachord. A possible attribution of the music to Francesco Provenzale has been proposed, but it remains unconfirmed.
Punizione dei ladri al tempo di Masaniello, Micco Spadaro, c. 1647.
Historical context
The revolt began on 7 July 1647 in response to taxation and broader social tensions under Spanish rule. Masaniello’s political ascendancy lasted only a few days before his assassination on 16 July. By recasting these events through Marinetta’s grief, the poem turns a recent political crisis into a vivid dramatic monologue in which mourning, caricature, and criticism of Spanish rule coexist.
References
Bianconi, L. (1987). Music in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge University Press.
Fabris, D. (2017). Music in Seventeenth-Century Naples: Francesco Provenzale (1624–1704). Routledge.
Holzer, R. R. (1990). Music and Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Settings of the Canzonetta and Cantata Texts of Francesco Balducci, Domenico Benigni, Francesco Melosio, and Antonio Abati. University of Pennsylvania.
