Arie d’opera, ariette e canzonette veneziane di metà Seicento in un manoscritto della Biblioteca Comunale Planettiana di Jesi

Ms. Plan.415 from the Biblioteca Comunale Planettiana in Jesi, surveyed several years ago in the Collective Catalogue of the National Library Service (OPAC SBN) under the title "Arie e Danze", has recently returned to scholarly attention thanks to the publication of its description in Clori - Archivio della cantata italiana. The manuscript dates to around the middle of the 17th century. In addition to about forty dances for keyboard, Ms. Plan.415 includes a hundred strophic ariette and canzonette for solo voice (mainly for soprano and alto) and continuo; most of these are attributable to some of the leading musicians of the time such as Giacomo Carissimi, Niccolò Fontei, Giovanni Rovetta, Felice Sances, Barbara Strozzi, and they are based on verses by relevant poets, such as Benedetto Ferrari, Battista Guarini, and Giulio Strozzi. A handful of arie and canzonette directly come from collections of monodies or drammi per musica printed and produced in Venice between the 1640s and 1660s, and this shows a strong interest of the copyists in the vocal-dramatic production of that specific cultural and musical milieu. The manuscript is particularly interesting for scholars devoted to seventeenth-century opera, since it holds fragments of drammi per musica hitherto considered lost. These compositions will be analysed in this paper.