Spirito l'Hoste da Reggio

Hoste da Reggio (also L'Hoste, L'Osto, Oste, and Bartolomeo Torresano) (c. 1520–1569) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Milan and elsewhere in northern Italy. He was well known for his madrigals, which were published in several collections in Venice.

He was from Reggio nell'Emilia, the son of an innkeeper. Little is known about him prior to 1540, but he received a good musical education. In 1540 he was in Milan, and during the 1540s he made the acquaintance of the nobility and the ecclesiastical powers there. The governor of Milan, Ferrante Gonzaga, hired him in the 1540s; the exact post is not known but may have involved overseeing the music at the church of Santa Maria della Scala. He stayed in the good graces of the Gonzaga family, but when the governor was deposed by the Duke of Alba in 1554 during the Italian War of 1551–1559 he lost his job.

In 1555 he acquired a prebend at S. Calimero, also in Milan, and three years later he attained the prestigious position of maestro di cappella (choir director, the highest musical post) at Milan Cathedral. In 1563 he resumed his previous duties at S. Calimero, staying there until 1567, when he left Milan for Bergamo, where he served as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore. He died there after only two years.

Unusually for Renaissance composers, a painting survives of him. It is anonymous, and in a private collection in Brescia: it shows him, dressed as a priest, holding open one of his books of madrigals.

After his death his name was sometimes named on reprints of his works as Spirito L'Hoste, though this name was not used in his life. This may be due to confusion with another composer, Gasparo Pratoneri, "Spirito da Reggio."

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