There is a paradox at the heart of the seventeenth-century musical dialogue: the genre that more than any other stages conflict — eros as war, war as eros, virtue against vice, the hesitant shepherdess against the ardent shepherd — is also the genre that most fears explicit theatricality. There is no stage, no gesture, no shared physical space: only the voices, the acoustic space that separates and joins them, the basso continuo serving as common ground beneath their skirmishes. All the eros of Antonio Farina’s Venere e Marte, all the abandoned anguish of Giovanni Cesare Netti’s Olimpia, all the theological-political fury of Giovanni Lorenzo Minei’s Vizio e Umiltà: everything must pass through the voice alone. Theatre becomes interiority, and interiority becomes music.

This is the territory that Glaux Records — at its second release after Aresi’s Canzonette 1727 — chooses to explore with Venere e Marte: Neapolitan dialogues of the late seventeenth century, all in world-premiere recordings, signed by three composer-priests who gravitated around the musical life of Naples between approximately 1660 and 1682. The context is that traced by the most recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Neapolitan music: a group of musicians — Farina, Minei, Netti, and the less documented Boerio — who specialised in cantatas and serenatas with violins, most likely on noble commission, almost all ordained priests, almost all active in sacred repertoire as well. The apparent contradiction between cassock and erotic text was, in the cultural climate of that pre-Scarlattian Naples, simply irrelevant: body and spirit had not yet undergone the Cartesian fracture, vice could seduce virtue in triple time without anyone finding scandal in it.

It is worth dwelling on this point, because it is the aesthetic premise of the entire programme. The musical Naples of the late seventeenth century is a complex and still partly unexplored reality, a territory situated precisely between the tradition of the dialogue and the rappresentativo madrigal of the early seventeenth century — Monteverdi, Sances, Strozzi — and the system of the cantata and serenata that Scarlatti would bring to full maturity in the following decade. The genealogy of the genre is long: from Monteverdi’s Tirsi e Clori, from Manelli’s Luciata, from the dialogues of Sances and from Barbara Strozzi’s Dialogo in partenza, one arrives through accumulation and transformation at these Neapolitan dialogues, which are not epigones but a living moment of a form in motion. These composer-priests are not minor figures waiting to be superseded: they are the moment at which a musical form elaborates itself, experiments with its own identity between recitative and closed aria, between drama and play, between allegory and sensuality. The fact that they are today almost unknown says something about the selectivity of musicological memory, not about their worth. The geographical precision also deserves noting: Netti and Minei were Apulian, and the first certain document of Farina’s professional activity comes from Venice. The label "Neapolitan" commonly applied to this group describes an environment and a season, not an origin.

Antonio Farina (fl. 1675) is the protagonist of the first part of the programme. We know little about him: that in 1674 he left his post as a singer in the Marciana chapel choir in Venice to move to Naples, that his output survives in a significant number of manuscripts distributed across various European collections, and that his Venere e Marte — designated explicitly as a "dialogo" in the sources, not as a cantata — represents a rare testimony to a form that in those very years was ceding ground to the all-embracing designation of cantata. Farina’s dialogue occupies the transitional moment between the primacy of recitative and the rise of the aria as the dominant structural unit: the recitatives are still present and carry genuine dramatic weight, but are traversed by lyrical flights of cavata that continuously push toward the closed form. The eroticism of the text is handled with that slightly oblique grace that is the hallmark of the genre: Cupid’s arrows, the darts of glances, the golden locks that imprison — all the conventional metaphorical arsenal of Baroque amorous poetry is used by Farina not as decorative surface but as load-bearing structure, and the composer responds with modulations to the minor at moments of greatest tension, insistent dissonances on the recurring "cor" and "core" of the text, small harmonic storms that always resolve into a sweetness of cadence.

It is worth pausing on a specific moment in Farina’s text: Venus’s opening, Gran dio delle battaglie, which addresses Mars — the god of war — in the very language of war to describe eros. The fiery bow is in Mars’s black eyebrows, the dart is in his gaze, the wound is in the heart. But Venus does not complain: she worships the wound, and declares that Love is her enemy — not because it hurts, but because it feels too good. It is a rhetorical torsion that Farina captures with precision: Mars’s response reverses the same schema, the god of battles declaring himself vanquished by a "pargoletto nume", the child Eros. The warrior surrenders to the very metaphor with which he was attacked. The overall effect is that of a music that knows exactly how much to reveal and how much to conceal: eros does not declare itself, it alludes, and in allusion finds its most convincing form. It is no minor detail that the score of Farina’s work was prepared for this recording by Mauro Borgioni himself: the baritone as philologist of his own repertoire, the interpreter who constructs his own part from the source. It is a practice that changes the relationship with the text in a subtle but real way.

The works attributed to Giovanni Cesare Netti (Putignano, 1649 – Naples, before 1686) carry the programme toward more complex expressive territories — with the caveat that for Filli e Pastore the attribution rests on a manuscript annotation in an unknown hand, and for Olimpia abbandonata on stylistic analysis. Netti was the most institutionally prominent figure of the group: in 1680 he was preferred over Francesco Provenzale — the layman, the acknowledged "great" of the local tradition — for the post of maestro di cappella of the Tesoro di San Gennaro, the most prestigious musical appointment in Naples at the time. The preference given to an ecclesiastic over Provenzale says something about the institutional dynamics of the era, but does not obscure the fact that Netti was a musician of genuine quality, capable of holding his own against anyone in the Neapolitan environment of those years.

His Olimpia abbandonata, a cantata for solo voice on an Ariostan text, is the longest and dramatically most ambitious piece in the programme: eight minutes of lament in which a woman abandoned on a rock writes to her betrayer a letter that becomes invective, prayer, curse, surrender. The text of Ariosto is adapted and condensed, but the dramaturgy is intact: one moves from narration in the third person to imprecation in the first, from weeping to fury, from fury to exhaustion. Netti sets the entire cantata in a style of mezz’aria — neither pure recitative nor closed aria — that keeps the emotional temperature constantly high without ever yielding to the convention of the self-contained number. The coloratura passages are not ornament: they are exasperation, they are the way in which the voice surpasses the limits of the word. Particularly effective is the moment when Olimpia, her fury spent, turns to the Furies of Erebus and to the winds in an escalation of tempestuous images — tempeste e fulmini, procelle e turbini — before yielding to exhaustion with a "lassa, mi manca il fiato" that has the quality of a physical as much as a dramatic collapse. And in the conclusion — that bitter prophecy in which Olimpia announces to Bireno that he will enjoy the same well-being he left to her, which is to say none — there is a dramatic terseness that few of Netti’s contemporaries would have been able to achieve.

Filli e Pastore is the pastoral and light pendant to the Olimpia: a carpe diem dialogue that eliminates recitative altogether and builds its arc on aria-duet-aria schemes with a refrain. The refrain itself — Seguane pur che può, scoprirmi io voglio — is a declaration of principle as much as a formal device: whatever may come, I will reveal myself. It returns three times, like a resolution that renews itself each time doubt reasserts its claim. The formal symmetry is deliberate and carries its own almost algebraic fascination: how does one resolve the problem of waiting, of timidity, of undeclared desire? Through repetition, through the refrain that returns each time the argument is exhausted, as if to say that the answer is always the same, and courage is the only variable.

Giovanni Lorenzo Minei (1651–1719), a priest of noble origins, is represented in the programme by two instrumental sinfonias and the great allegorical dialogue Vizio e Umiltà. The sinfonias — drawn from Hor ch’in morbide piume and Eccomi, o bella — are not mere interludes: they serve a precise dramaturgical function in the design of the programme, separating the erotic-mythological world of Farina and Netti from the allegorical-political territory of Vizio e Umiltà, and offering the listener an instrumental breathing space in which Minei’s character reveals itself before the voices enter. They are brief but not neutral pieces: their tone introduces a more austere register, almost a threshold.

Vizio e Umiltà is the most elaborate and historically layered work in the entire collection. The textual allusions suggest a precise political reading: Vice representing the French Gallicanism manifested in the Declaration of the Clergy of 1682, Humility embodying papal authority, and "Lodovico" being Louis XIV. If the interpretation is correct, we find ourselves before a dialogue that uses the forms of sacred-profane music to conduct ecclesiastical politics, something entirely normal in that environment of courts, chapels and patrons where the commissioner also set the agenda of contents. Musically, Vizio e Umiltà is the most virtuosistically demanding work in the programme: the opening scene of Vice — seven minutes of recitative, arioso and aria in which the character assembles his infernal forces — is a test of endurance and dramatic eloquence that few composers of the time could have sustained with equal coherence. Minei’s writing for the bass is traversed by a rhetorical energy that is almost theatrical: the long melismas on words of arrogance, the suspended cadences that mimic the waiting before battle, the transition toward the ternary tempo perfecto when Vice finally yields to the seduction of Humility — all of this reveals a composer who knows how to use form as argument, not merely as container. The entry of the soprano as Humility produces one of the most effective contrasts in the disc: the spare stile severo of her recitative and the metric stability of her arias oppose the exuberant lyricism and constantly shifting rhythms of Vice with a precision that is almost didactic — yet never sounds schematic, because Minei understands that virtue too, to be convincing, must have its own allure.

This exceptional repertoire, rare in both surviving sources and intrinsic quality, is served by a performance whose most immediately recognisable virtue is its clarity. I Musici del Gran Principe, the ensemble directed by Samuele Lastrucci — Matteo Saccà and Rossella Pugliano on violins, Giulia Gilio Giannetta on cello, Simone Vallerotonda on archlute and guitar, Dimitri Betti on harpsichord, with Tommaso Bassetti on harpsichord in Minei’s sinfonias — play with a timbral clarity that is not an absence of character but its most sober form: every line is distinct, every entry precise, the continuo breathes without overloading. Vallerotonda’s contribution is particularly valuable: the archlute brings to Farina’s duets a soft, enveloping timbral quality that smooths the contours without weighing down the texture, while in moments of greater dramatic intensity the guitar adds a dry, direct colour unavailable to the harpsichord alone. The recording, made at the Certosa di Firenze in November 2023, captures this balance faithfully, without artificial reverberation, with that acoustic transparency that allows one to hear the weave of the counterpoint. It is a sound that serves the voice without serving it obsequiously.

Valeria La Grotta brings to this programme the same qualities she had already displayed in her Scarlatti with the Quartetto Vanvitelli and in Aresi’s Canzonette 1727: a technical agility that does not exhibit itself but conceals itself in expressive utility, a care for phrasing that makes of every syllable a conscious decision. The voice does not insist: it suggests, it delineates, and in the moments when it expands — in the coloratura of the Olimpia, in the descriptive sensuality of Farina’s Venere e Marte — it does so with that naturalness which is the mark of singers who truly inhabit a text rather than illustrating it from outside. There is in her a rare quality in seventeenth-century repertoire: the capacity to make the ornamental seem necessary, to transform coloratura into narrative rather than display. In Olimpia abbandonata this quality manifests in its most complex form: the character traverses radically different emotional states within a few minutes, and La Grotta moves through them without fracture, with a continuity of line that is at once technical and interpretive. In the duets with Borgioni her presence is that of one who knows how to listen as well as how to sing: the dialogue works because both voices yield space.

Mauro Borgioni confirms in these dialogues a solidity that is never monotonous. His baritone voice, well centred and of naturally pleasing timbre, never forces the seventeenth-century writing toward nineteenth-century effects: it remains in the right zone of the repertoire, the one in which the weight of the low register does not crush the diction and the projection of the word retains its lightness. In Minei’s Vizio e Umiltà, where his character requires a range of resources spanning from bellicose arrogance to oblique seduction, Borgioni does not yield to the temptation of theatrical exaggeration: he maintains that Baroque measure by which vice is all the more seductive the less it declares itself. It is a demonstration of stylistic intelligence as much as vocal quality. In the duets with La Grotta, the dialectic between the two voices reveals a complementarity sought and found: the baritone does not accompany the soprano, he questions her, and the responses they construct together have the quality of a genuine conversation — not of a coordinated performance.

What remains at the end of the listening is the sense of a disc built with intelligence of conception as much as quality of execution. Venere e Marte is not merely a philological act — the first recording of these Neapolitan dialogues — but a coherent listening proposition: a sonic universe in which eros and theology, mythology and politics, lament and play hold together not by accumulation but through that deep logic which governs the musical culture of seventeenth-century Naples. Here body has not yet been separated from soul, and music can still afford to be at once voluptuousness and meditation. Farina, Netti and Minei knew this. La Grotta, Borgioni and Lastrucci remember it.