Girolamo Frescobaldi

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) was an Italian composer and organist whose keyboard works helped shape early Baroque musical style.

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Toccata: A free-form keyboard or instrumental work that often features improvisatory passages and contrasting sections. Frescobaldi’s toccatas make shifts of tempo and texture central to the form.
Tempo rubato: Expressive flexibility in the timing of musical phrases, with notes lengthened or shortened beyond strict meter. Frescobaldi’s prefaces invite performers to vary tempo according to musical expression.
Ferrara: A city in northern Italy that was a major courtly center during the Renaissance. Frescobaldi was born there and encountered a flourishing tradition of court music.
Fiori musicali: A 1635 collection of organ music by Frescobaldi, including pieces intended for Catholic liturgical services. It gathers his most sustained examples of organ music shaped for the Mass.
Johann Jakob Froberger: A seventeenth-century German composer and organist known for keyboard suites and contrapuntal works. Froberger studied with Frescobaldi and carried his keyboard style across Europe.
Fugue: A contrapuntal composition in which a subject is introduced and developed through interweaving voices. His ricercars and capriccios explore imitative counterpoint related to fugue.
Dissonance: A combination of tones perceived as unstable or tense within a musical context. Prepared and delayed resolutions give his keyboard lines their vocal-like expressiveness.
Rome: The capital of Italy and a historic center of Catholic religious and artistic life. His principal appointments and mature career were based in Rome.
Toccate e partite d'intavolatura: A collection of Frescobaldi’s keyboard toccatas and variation pieces, first published in 1615. Its successive editions reveal how he developed his signature keyboard forms.
Johann Sebastian Bach: A German Baroque composer and organist whose works became central to Western classical music. Bach studied and copied Frescobaldi’s music, including the collection Fiori musicali.