ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the training of a boy identified only as Baldassare. Singers who were capable of performing recitative were very difficult to obtain in Italy as late as the seventeenth century. Baldassare's training is described in letters because he was being prepared in Rome to sing in a set of intermedi to be produced in Ferrara by Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio. Bentivoglio was recruiting his singers from Rome for several reasons. Rome had the largest number of professional singers of any city in Italy because of the papal chapel, the city's many well-endowed churches, and the often lavish patronage of the curial cardinals resident there. Baldassare shows that although singers qualified to perform musica recitativa were in very short supply in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a boy could be trained from scratch in just a matter of months.
