Riccardo Pintus

Short presentation

After studying piano and composition at the conservatory of my hometown, Sassari (Italy), I obtained a Master’s degree in Musicology from the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Pavia (Cremona campus). I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Musicology, where my research focuses primarily on music analysis and philological issues in the Renaissance repertoire.

Research

The composition of polyphonic Requiems flourished in Italy from the 1560s onward, particularly among composers active in the Po Valley area. This phenomenon may be related to the cultural climate that followed the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which placed strong emphasis on the commemoration of the dead. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, more than one hundred polyphonic Requiems were published in Italy; the number is even higher if manuscript sources and lost works are also taken into account. These figures are striking, especially when compared with the preceding decades, during which polyphonic Requiems appear not to have been composed in Italy.

Despite its wide circulation, the post-Tridentine Italian Requiem has received relatively little scholarly attention, and no modern editions of this repertoire are currently available. The aim of my project is to fill this gap by addressing a number of questions that arise from this situation: What caused such a remarkable expansion of this repertoire? What relationship exists between these compositions and the liturgical reforms following the Council of Trent? How did composers set to music a liturgy as distinctive as that of the Mass for the Dead? And, most importantly, what is the relationship between the cultural and liturgical climate of late Renaissance Italy and the compositional techniques employed by composers?

In summary, this project brings together the cultural history of the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance and the artistic production of the same period, while also addressing important philological questions.