Lodovico Agostini (1534-1590) was an Italian composer, singer, priest, and scholar of the late Renaissance. He was a close associate of the Ferrara d'Este court, and one of the most skilled representatives of the progressive secular style which developed there at the end of the 16th century.
He was born in Ferrara, the illegitimate son of Agostino Agostini, a singer and priest of Ferrara mostly active in the 1540s. Lodovico may have studied for a time in Rome, based on the evidence of a madrigal published there, and he did become a priest. By 1572 he was singing in the chapel of Ferrara Cathedral, and by 1578 he was on the payroll of Duke Alfonso II d'Este, one of the most famous patrons of music of the late 16th century, and he remained in his service for the rest of his life.
In the 1580s he was a composition teacher to the Duke of Mantua, Guglielmo Gonzaga; Agostini dedicated a book of madrigals to him. Agostini was on good terms with many members of the aristocracy, as well as the famous poets Tasso and Guarini, and other musicians at the court, including Luzzasco Luzzaschi, the most famous of the Ferrarese madrigalists. While retaining his association with the intensely secular d'Este court, he also had a distinguished ecclesiastical career, eventually becoming a Monsignore and an apostolic prothonotary.
Ferrara, in the 1580s and 1590s, was one of the most musically advanced and sophisticated places in Europe. Under the patronage of Duke Alfonso II d'Este the court developed into a place of musical experimentation, with a group of virtuoso female singers (the concerto di donne) available to an equally virtuoso group of composers, who included Luzzaschi, Agostini, and in the 1590s, Carlo Gesualdo. They all wrote music for the enjoyment of a small group of connoisseurs, including the Duke himself. In this rarefied atmosphere an avant-garde style of music flourished, and Agostini was one of the most musically daring of the group.
Agostini was fond of musical enigmas, puzzles, surprises and double-entendres, and his many musical collections display this. He was also a composer of accompanied solo song; since many of the performers at the court were instrumentalists in addition to singers he wrote for both lute and viol as accompaniment to solo singers.
While no liturgical music by Agostini has survived (perhaps none was written), one of his last compositions is Le lagrime del peccatore, a setting of poems by Luigi Tansillo, a set of madrigali spirituali.
