Francesco Rovigo

Francesco Rovigo, also known as Franceschino, was an Italian organist and composer born around 1541 or 1542 and who died in Mantua on 7 October 1597. His career was spent almost entirely in the service of the courts of Mantua and Graz, in northern Italy and in the Habsburg dominions, which places him at the heart of the sacred and secular music of the last third of the sixteenth century.

His training included a stay in Venice around 1570, where he was supposed to study with Merulo and other masters. Three years later, his hymns, now lost, were sung in the ducal chapel of Santa Barbara in Mantua, the first documented evidence of his work as a composer. His name appears in the Mantuan court payrolls in 1577. In May 1582 he was appointed organist of the chapel of Archduke Charles II in Graz, a post that included the musical education of the archduke's children. According to the sources, the monthly salary of twenty-five florins was one of the reasons he remained in Graz, despite the efforts of the Mantuan court to win him back. William V of Bavaria also tried, without success, to secure his transfer to Munich.

After the archduke's death in 1590, he returned to Mantua to take up the post of organist at Santa Barbara. The following year he was commissioned, together with Wert, to provide the music for a planned performance of Guarini's Il pastor fido.

Most of his output is liturgical, although his madrigals enjoyed popularity and were included in several celebrated anthologies. His Missa dominicalis was published alongside other masses on the same Mantuan chants by Palestrina, Wert, Gastoldi, Contino and Alessandro Striggio. Zacconi praised him as both composer and organist, and Monteverdi mentioned him in two letters, one to stress his privileged position at court and another to point out that he was a very well-paid musician.