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Giovan Leonardo Primavera
(ca. 1540 - after 1585) Italy

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Composer

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Primavera was born in Barletta. By 1560 he was in Naples serving as musician in the hosehold of Fabrizio Gesualdo. Primavera remained in Naples for most of his life, though he appears to have been working further into the north of Italy, probably in and around Milan, Florence and Venice form about 1565 to 1578, and, around 1570, in Loreto.

The last known referencwe to Primavera comes in 1585 with the publication of his final book of madrigals. Primavera's 12 published collections, all issued in Venice, consist entirely of secular vocal music, and include seven books of madrigals, settings for poems and sonnetts by Petrarch, Tasso, Sanazzaro and others.

Undoubtedly his most famous piece during his lifetime and since was a madrigal, Nasce la gioja mia, based on an arguably homoerotic poem. This work, which first appeared in 1565, and was further immortalised as the theme for Palestrina's Missa Nasce la gioja mia, published in 1590.

His gretest claim for notoriety, instead, comes from his participation in an incident recorded in the corrispondence of Guido della Rovere, cardinal protector of the shrine of Loreto.

In March 1570, Rovere's governor in Loreto, Roberto Sassatelo, wrote to his master to report that, during a visit to the town by a party from Venice, one of their number, "a musician and composer called il Primavera", had slept in the same bed "and also did worse" with a choirboy from the local basilica.

The boy, Luigi Dalla Balla, probably about 16 at the time (Primavera vas in his mid- to late twenties), already had a record of sexual contact with men, and himself admitted to having been the passive partner in anal sex (thogh while he was asleep!) with Primavera, as well as with several others.

These included his music teacher, Luigi Fontino, a singer and canon of the Loreto basilica. Fontino, a priest, was duly convicted of sodomy, defrocked, handed over to the secular authorities and executed by decapitation. The boy, Dalla Balla, "Whipped and banned from the papal states" for his part in the crime, went on to make a small name for himself as a composer; two vocal pieces probably by him appear in collections of canzonette published in Venice in 1584 and 1587.

Primavera, however, escaped by sea (presumably back to Venice) and thus, apparently, avoided any penalty, despite Sassatelo's intention that he, too, be "given the punishment that such a scoundrel merits".

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001

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