Monteverdi

Richard Wistreich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Claudio Monteverdi is now recognized as the towering figure of a critical transitional moment of Western music history: relentless innovator in every genre within chamber, church and theatre music; self-proclaimed leader of a 'new dispensation' between words and their musical expression; perhaps even 'Creator of Modern Music'. During recent years, as his arrestingly attractive music has been brought back to life in performance, so too have some of the most outstanding musicologists focussed intensely on Monteverdi as they worked through the 'big' questions in the historiography and hermeneutics of early Baroque music, including musical representation of language; compositional theory; social, institutional, cultural and gender history; performance practices and more. The 17 articles in this volume have been selected by Richard Wistreich to exemplify the best scholarship in English and because each, in retrospect, turns out to have been a ground-breaking contribution to one or more significant strands in Monteverdi studies.

Part I
Music, Text and Representation

[1]
Monteverdi’s Poetic Choices

Nino Pirrotta

To make up for the lack of background description of Monteverdi in his youth, we find some help in the printing of the composer’s Sacrae Cantiunculae. One clue is to be found in the diminutive used in the title (“Claudini Montisviridi”) and repeated in the dedication (“Claudinus Monsviridus”), an ostentation of that bit of Latin which could not have just been the work of a fifteen-year-old boy. Another indication is the disproportion between the exiguousness of the subject matter—little more than counterpoint exercises—and the evident affectation of the printing, which must have been paid for by someone, just as someone must have had to see to the printing expenses for Madrigali spirituali (1583) and Can-zonette (1584). What emerges is the picture of a lad made too serious and slightly too conscious of his own qualities by a vocal cluster of relations, friends, even benefactors perhaps, who already were flattering him with the prospects of a brilliant musical career. The fact that the future did confirm their hopes does not negate that their ambitions were, for the time being at least, premature. Such concerned interest must have been judged inopportune by no other than the man entrusted with the task of guiding and developing the talents of the young learner. The fact is that while Monteverdi never failed to proclaim himself a pupil of Marco Antonio Ingegnieri as long as the master was alive (and therefore even in the 1587 and 1590 books of madrigals), he never received in exchange that sign of approval that a teacher used to give a promising pupil, namely, including some composition by the pupil in one of his own publications.¹

So resolute and precocious an orientation toward a musical career, it seems, may have been the cause of a certain deficiency in Monteverdi’s literary education, which he must have later regretted when it came to replying to the criticism leveled at him by Giovanni Maria Artusi. What is certain is that the treatise on seconda pratica, said by Monteverdi to be ready and only waiting to be revised in 1605, was never published— neither at the time nor when he thought the matter over again in 1633, twenty years after the death of his opponent.² We need not speak of university studies: any university curriculum, whether directed toward theological studies and an ecclesiastical career or toward a legal or medical profession, would have represented an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy for a young musician. It was more suitable to concentrate one’s efforts, as did Monteverdi, on the practice of performance and the study of composition, so as to acquire a name in each of them. But even in Monteverdi’s chosen path there could have been, and perhaps there was not, an effort to methodically develop that first elementary foundation of culture that came to him from his family environment (he was the son of a distinguished Cremona physician) and from the studies of Latin grammar that had to be imparted, even in the Cathedral of Cremona, to the pueri cantores along with their musical studies. Monteverdi’s letters, so often notable for the acumen of their concepts and for what they reveal about the personality of the writer, are decidedly similar to spoken expression. This does not mean that Monteverdi was uncultured. The way in which he handled the texts chosen for his compositions often gives proof of uncommon penetration of their literary values and, what is more, his poetic choices indicate in each instance decided tastes and tend, more than the compositions of any other musician of his day, to reflect the phases and moods of current poetic production. But his is an episodic culture, irregular, nourished by an unquestionably keen intelligence, by the contacts he had in every phase of his life with persons of a high intellectual and cultural level, and probably by the constant habit of reading and reflection.

It is understandable that this clearness of orientation is not yet present in Monteverdi’s initial phase, both because it takes place in a more provincial milieu and because the young musician’s early choices must have been determined by musical motivations and suggestions before literary ones. Naturally enough, the texts of Canzonette a tre voci (1584) all remain anonymous, given the genre’s lack of literary pretensions; all that can be said, despite the fact that the collection is arranged as a mini-canzoniere, with a musical dedication (Qual si può dir, which embroiders on the name of the person to whom it is dedicated) and an envoi, is that more than half the texts are gathered from other collections of the same type and especially from Canzonette … Libro Primo a quattro voci (Venice, 1581) by Orazio Vecchi.³ Much more serious is that after close to a century of Monteverdi research, twelve out of nineteen of the texts in Madrigali a cinque voci… Libro Primo (1587) remain anonymous.

Even for these texts musical precedents can be traced. Marenzio had already used the texts of Ardo sì, ma non t’amo (Guarini), Questa ordì’l laccio (G. B. Strozzi), and A che tormi il ben mio.⁴ Ch’ami la vita mia and Tra mille fiamme appear in De Floridi Virtuosi d’Italia … Libro Primo (Venice, 1583), with music by Lelio Bertani and Orazio Vecchi, respectively. Baci soavi e cari (Guarini)⁵ and, once again, A che tormi il ben mio are found in the second and third volumes of the same series (Venice, 1585 and 1586) with music by Paolo Masnelli. La vaga pastorella appears in Secondo Libro di Madrigali A quattro voci (Venice, 1555) by Vincenzo Ruffo and, twelve years later, as a dialogue in Primo Libro de Madrigali a sei voci by Teodoro Riccio. With the exception of Marenzio, the composers from whom Monteverdi could obtain his texts all belonged to the Lombardo-Veneto circle centered around Brescia and Verona: Vincenzo Ruffo, who was Veronese and present in Verona from 1578 to 1580; Riccio, from Brescia and for a time maestro di cappella of that city; Masnelli, Veronese and organist first to the Bevilacqua counts and then to Guglielmo Gonzaga, later returning to Verona as organist of the Duomo and of the Accademia Filarmonica; Orazio Vecchi, present in Brescia in 1577 and then maestro di cappella of Salò, whose above-mentioned Canzonette are dedicated to Count Mario Bevilacqua of Verona; Bertani, maestro di cappella of Brescia.

Also from Verona was Ingegnieri, whose texts, however, Monteverdi respectfully avoided repeating. Exceptions are Ardo sì, ma non t’amo (Guarini) and Ardi e gela a tua voglia (Tasso), which Ingegnieri composed almost contemporaneously with his pupil and published in his Quinto Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1583; dedicated to the members of the Accademia Filarmonica). The texts, in this case, were quite well known, having already been used by Vecchi in Madrigali a sei voci Libro Primo (Venice, 1583) and by Masnelli in Primo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1586). Marenzio limited himself to using just the first text,⁶ which had served, however, as the given theme set to music by twenty-eight different composers in the collection Sdegnosi Ardori (Munich, 1585).

On the whole there are few texts that Monteverdi may have gotten from composers known to him and nearby; mostly he either must have drawn on some local poet or made use of one of the numerous collections of verse then in circulation. One such collection, Ghilranda [sic] dell’Aurora (Venice, 1608) appeared too late for Monteverdi to have used it, but it does enable us to identify Alberto Parma as author of the text Filli car a ed amata; it also contains, among many others, texts by Tasso, Guarini, Chiabrera, Marino and, among the minor authors to whom Monteverdi paid fleeting attention, Filippo Alberti, Girolamo Casoni, Livio Celiano, and G. B. Strozzi. Finally there appears as poet Count Marco Verità, Veronese, who could have been the author of several of the anonymous texts of Libro Primo, which is dedicated to him.⁷ Fumia la pastorella, the only madrigal of Libro Primo in three parts, is by Antonio Allegretti, a Florentine living in Rome during the first part of the sixteenth century and a friend of Caro; Monteverdi could have taken it from the collection by Dionigi Atanagi, De le Rime di Diversi Nobili Poeti Toscani… Libro Primo (Venice, 1565), which also contains Questa ordì il laccio by Strozzi, but both texts are found in a great many other collections. Monteverdi used the Allegretti text in such a way that the second part is a madrigal (or, if we prefer, an aria) by Fumia within the madrigal by Monteverdi; from Atanagi’s index of the collection one learns that Fumia was a certain Neapolitan gentlewoman, Madonna Eufemia, of whom a canzone, also by Allegretti, “praises the masterly and utterly sweet way of singing and playing”; Fumia was, then, in a sense a precursor of Adriana Basile, whom Monteverdi later met in Mantua, as, in another sense (for the order of narration-singing-narration), Allegretti’s text was a precursor of the Lamento della Ninfa in Monteverdi’s Ottavo Libro.

Always improperly quoted as Ch’io ami la mia vita, the first madrigal of Libro Primo has some typically Monteverdian features, yet I fail to see it as being “of almost programmatic significance, chosen to indicate the artistic tendency, the stylistic program of the entire book” or that “in every feature it shows the powerful influences of the canzonetta.”⁸ It begins with three voices as a canzonetta, whispering, in something between a trembling and joking manner, the name of the woman for whom it had deserved the prime position in the collection. It goes:

Ch’ami la vita mia, nel tuo bel nome
par che si legga ognora …

That you love my life, it seems,
can always be read in your beautiful name …

However, it seems that it ought to read: “Camilla, vita mia…” (“Camilla, my life…”). Already by the third line, “Ma tu voi pur ch’io mora” (“But you want me to die”), the intentional levity of the opening gives way to a different melodic style, and when the play on the name is repeated in the last line (“Ch’ami la morte e non la vita mia”), the secret (but not too secret) name is brought into focus by a sudden change in vocal orchestration, by the rests (sospiri) framing it, and by the repetition.⁹ On the whole, the overused contrast between life and death, between happiness and disappointment in love (whether of the twenty-year-old Monteverdi or of Count Verità), rendered with youthful carefreeness, succeeds in having an aria without strictly adhering to the model of the canzonetta. To place the discussion on a more general plane, it seems to me that the association of melodic spontaneity (aria) and the language of polyphony was a widespread aspiration of the time and not a personal goal of Monteverdi’s, and that the vogue of the canzonetta was not a cause but a symptom, no more important, for instance, than the rich harvest of madrigali ariosi.¹⁰ Libro Primo offers numerous other samples of arioso quality: for example, the insistence on the impassioned initial gesture of A che tormi il ben mio, or the near monody of Baci soavi e cari. This does not mean that Monteverdi does not try to associate more varied elements of polyphonism with melodic spontaneity: the rhythmic excitement and the unusual final cadence of Amor, per tua mercè, the changing harmonic colors of Poi che nel mio dolore, the play of contrasts and the final jubilati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I MUSIC, TEXT AND REPRESENTATION
• PART II THEORY AND GENRE
• PART III CRITICISM, ANALYSIS AND HISTORY
• PART IV INSTITUTIONAL, SOURCE AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES
• Name Index