Life and work

Vincenzo Albrici was born in Rome on 26 June 1631 to Domenico Albrici, who at the time was an alto singer in Capella Giulia in St Peter’s Church and from 1636 in Orvieto Cathedral. In 1641, Vincenzo enrolled at the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome as a boy soprano and pupil of Giacomo Carissimi. In 1646 he was employed as an organist by the college, and then from 1649 to 1651 by the Jesuits’ mother church, Chiesa del Gesù, where he served under Bonifacio Graziani.

In December 1652, Albrici travelled to Stockholm as a member of the Italian vocal and instrumental ensemble that had been recruited to the court of Queen Christina. The group comprised six castrati, a number of intact singers, musicians and a celebrated instrument builder, Girolamo Zenti. Albrici was the ensemble’s musical director and is designated in contemporary documents as the Italian hovkapellmästare (chief conductor of the royal court orchestra). As far as we can tell, the Italians were in attendance at court to perform Roman church music for Queen Christina; their recruitment had been effected through the Jesuit headquarters in Rome and is to be seen in the context of Christina’s plans to abdicate, convert to Catholicism and move to Rome. The ensemble also performed ‘Italian comedies’ for the Queen, possibly reworkings of so-called Jesuit dramas based on religious or moral themes. During Christina’s reign in Uppsala, from the autumn of 1653 to her abdication in May 1654, the ensemble were her court musicians. With the exception of the young Gustav Düben and a few other musicians who had also travelled to Uppsala to work together with the Italians, the Germano-Swedish court orchestra stayed in Stockholm. It was a musico-cultural exchange that would make a profound and lasting impact on Swedish court music, which during Düben’s time was shaped by Roman tastes and by the experiences and lessons gained from the collaboration.

While in Sweden Albrici composed a number of works, including the vocal concerto Fader wår (based on the Lord’s prayer), the first more advanced polyphonic work to Swedish words. Several other compositions, amongst them Laboravi clamans and a number of sinfonias in characteristically Roman style with improvised solo passages, can also be traced with relative certainty to his Stockholm years. The ensemble also brought with it printed or handwritten contemporary Roman music, much of which was kept by Gustav Düben. The material can now be found in the archives of Uppsala University Library, where it makes up the oldest part of the famed Düben collection.

Albrici left Sweden with Queen Christina in the summer of 1654. After a brief stop in Stuttgart, he arrived in Dresden in 1656, where he was made chief conductor at the court of Elector John George II of Saxony − interestingly he too a protestant ruler with Catholic proclivities. Albrici was attached to the Dresden court orchestra until the Elector’s death in 1680, with a few periods of leave in England, Rome and elsewhere. In 1681, he took up the position of organist in St Thomas Church in Leipzig, upon which he converted to Lutheranism. But the next year saw him back with the Catholics and working as an organist in Prague, where he remained until his death in 1690.

Albrici’s music

Albrici composed in a modern Roman style more reminiscent of Bonifacio Graziani, his colleague and superior at Il Gesù, than of his teacher Carissimi. Most of his oeuvre consists of vocal religious music. His melodic and rhythmic patterns are clear, singable and clearly steeped in the Roman aria tradition. This is particularly evident in his Fader wår, where he set the Swedish prose in a periodic, metric aria style. At the same time, he was an enthusiastic contrapuntalist with a firm grasp of voice leading and melodic lines. His harmonic touch is not particularly bold, but modern insofar as it is clearly tonal, at least in phrases and passages, and he often achieves expressive effects through the use of compelling voicing and melodic contrasts (e.g. in Cogita o homo). He uses uncommon transposition levels for his time, corresponding to keys such as A major, E-flat major and B minor. He was also one of the first to compose pure concerti with aria, a form that is usually regarded by genre scholars as an early forerunner of the German church cantata. Certain German elements informed his work during his time in Dresden, such as the use of consertante instruments in his vocal concertos.

His works enjoyed widespread popularity in northern Europe and garnered a great deal of respect. Albrici has to be considered the most internationally prominent composer active in Sweden, perhaps until Joseph Martin Kraus. Much of his music has been lost, with the largest extant archive being the Düben collection in Uppsala. Interestingly, most of these manuscripts do not date from Albrici’s time in Sweden, but were acquired by Düben through his contacts in Lübeck, Hamburg and Saxony.

Lars Berglund © 2015
Trans. Neil Betteridge