Salomone Rossi

Origins and early life

Salomone Rossi was born in Mantua around 1570 into an old Italian Jewish family, the de Rossi or Min ha-Adumim, and he never converted; he signed his printed music Salamone Rossi Hebreo, that is Salomone Rossi the Jew, and from 1606 the duke of Mantua exempted him from wearing the yellow badge imposed on the city's Jews.

Work and career

He served the Gonzaga court for about forty years from 1587, working alongside Monteverdi, and he lived in the Mantuan ghetto while composing for the ducal chapel and its theatre. His instrumental collections, published from 1607, are among the earliest printed sets of trio sonatas, and his writing for two violins and continuo helped fix a texture that would dominate European chamber music for a century. He published madrigals, sinfonias and dance movements, and his sister, known as Madama Europa, was a celebrated singer at the same court.

His most singular work is the Songs of Solomon of 1623, thirty-three settings of psalms, hymns and synagogue prayers in Hebrew for three to eight voices, the first polyphonic art music written for the synagogue, published with a defence of the practice by Rabbi Leon of Modena against traditionalist objections. He disappears from the records after the sack of Mantua by imperial troops in 1630, and his manuscripts were recovered in the nineteenth century, since when his Hebrew works have re-entered the repertoire.