La tiorba encantada

Abstract

The sumptuous and sensuous sounds of the theorbo are one of the special delicacies of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theorbo was one of a series of innovations that saw the renaissance lute transformed beyond the wildest dreams of its earlier masters and makers. From the 1580s we learn of experiments taking in place in both France and Italy, musicians endeavouring to bring novelty to the renaissance lute, changes that would allow it to adapt to new sonorities and new ways of thinking about music. The theorbo was one of the products of these experiments, a lute that could compete with the harpsichord and that was to cast its own spell on the music of 17th-century I..