Concerto Italiano & Rinaldo Alessandrini

The Many-Voiced Sorrows of Love

Italian Madrigals from Marenzio to Monteverdi

Michael Horst

In the second half of the 16th century, Italy was considered the musical lynchpin of Europe. The Italian courts between Milan and Florence, Mantua and Ferrara vied with the wealthy seafaring republic of Venice and the Papal Curia in Rome for the most sumptuous forms of cultural selfexpression. Anyone compiling a program of Italian madrigals today can take his pick from the cream of the crop, and it is no coincidence that almost all the composers whose music is heard in these two performances of Concerto Italiano worked in Mantua or Ferrara. The local ruling dynasties— the Gonzaga in Mantua and the Este in Ferrara—displayed considerable ambition in attracting poets, musicians, and philosophers of rank to their small-town residences.

Among them was Luca Marenzio, one of the three great names in the art of the Italian madrigal. The other two are Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo (the only one who does not appear in the present parade of masters). Marenzio frequently joined his Roman employer, Cardinal Luigi d’Este, at the court of his brother, the ruling Prince Alfonso d’Este, in Northern Italy. He was a very prolific composer: during his seven years in the employ of Luigi d’Este alone, Marenzio published four collections of fivepart madrigals and the first three books of six-part madrigals, as well as further compilations of villanelles and motets. More were to follow later, and all show him exploring the possibilities of vocal polyphony ever more radically. Marenzio quickly became a European celebrity. The triumph of music publishing—in 1501, the Venetian Ottaviano Petrucci had published the first book dedicated entirely to music—contributed significantly to the dissemination of his compositions. Unusually, his collected works were republished early, first in Antwerp and later in Nürnberg as well.

The four madrigals in this program are taken from different anthologies, allowing us to recognize both constants and developments in Marenzio’s oeuvre. One major constant is the subject matter: the joys and sorrows of love are illustrated in all their nuances. The dedication to his Catholic employer did not stop the composer from weaving various amorous allusions into his First Book of Madrigals of 1580: “Harsh traps, cruel snares, rasping chains, / Whilst I lament my lost love wretchedly, / Through night and day, at all hours and at every moment,” the narrator in Dolorosi martir laments. The title of the madrigal Cruda Amarilli already points out the “cruelty” of the beloved. And the only reason “green forests” (O verdi selve) with their trees and birds are invoked is that they may stop the pains of love.

Early on, Marenzio had been noted for the special quality of his madrigals. One of his contemporaries, Vincenzo Giustiniani, described him as a master of a style notable for its “melodies which are new and pleasing to the ear, with several simple figures, but without special artificiality.” From the beginning, Marenzio was intent on capturing a poem’s atmosphere in his music and to place special accents on moments of melancholy, grief, or lamenting. In his later madrigals, this is refined to an almost seismographic extent, as examples from the Sixth and Seventh Book of 1595 demonstrate. In O verdi selve, Marenzio also plays with a charming linguistic and musical echo effect: the word fortuna (fortune) is answered with una (one), concento (grief) becomes cento (hundred), and fornire (to bring) is transformed into ire (rage).

The madrigals of Giaches de Wert share their time and background with Marenzio’s, although Wert was almost a generation older than him. A native of Flanders, Wert worked in Rome and Milan before arriving in Mantua, where he was employed at the Gonzaga court for more than 30 years as a highly esteemed conductor and orchestra director (musical life in Mantua was further enhanced under Vincenzo Gonzaga from 1587 onwards). No fewer than 230 five-part madrigals were printed during Wert’s lifetime; his pre dilection for dramatic expressivity is combined with ever- new vocal challenges, all of which, however, aim to reflect the emotions of the text in music. The first of the madrigals heard tonight, Vezzosi augelli, is not about the pangs of love—rather, it sets a text from Torquato Tasso’s

La Gerusalemme liberata. The piece is a gentle hymn to nature in which birds and the airy breeze engage in a tender duet. With L’anima mia ferita and Fra le dorate chiome, we return to the familiar terrain of love’s sorrows. While the text for L’anima mia ferita was penned by the Duke himself, composers of the era were particularly fond of the works of two great masters of Renaissance poetry, Torquato Tasso and Giovanni Battista Guarini—especially since both of these poets were employed by the Este in Ferrara at the time. Tasso’s knightly epic of “liberated Jerusalem” of 1581 offers a plethora of characters, stories, and moods, even more than his shepherd’s play Aminta, which enjoyed a tremendous success, as did Guarini’s Il pastor fido, both of which became part of the canon of opera libretti set by many composers far into the mid- 18th century. Amidst an Arcadian idyll of murmuring brooks and cool meadows, nymphs and shepherds such as Amarilli and Dafne, Tirsi and Aminta enjoy their (apparently) innocent pastimes, with the god Amor sowing his usual mix of love and confusion. The supply of lissome verses ripe for musical setting seems infinite; several of them—including Cruda Amarilli and Quell’augellin che canta—ignited the imagination of composers many times.

One composer who remained rather in the shadow of his more famous colleagues was Pomponio Nenna. The dates and circumstances of his life are uncertain, but we do know that he was employed in Rome, where he is likely to have come into contact with the ruling dynasty of Ferrara, the Este. His close acquaintance with Carlo Gesualdo is also documented. It is a titillating detail that Nenna dedicated his First Book of Madrigals to the same Count Carafa who was the lover of Gesualdo’s wife and murdered by Gesualdo in 1590. Nenna produced no fewer than eight such compilations, and especially those works published after 1600 display an almost mannerist use of chromatics, which connects him to Gesualdo. In content, Nenna also walked in the Prince’s footsteps, as in the lament of the misunderstood lover in D’ogni ben casso e privo and in O gradite, o sprezzate, which oscillates between affection and disdain, reward and punishment. The “sparks of love” in the glowing eyes of the third madrigal, Amorose faville, on the other hand, offer a glimmer of hope.

Gesualdo also played an important role in the life of Luzzasco Luzzaschi. The work of this Ferrara native, who entered the service of the court early on, received a multitude of new impulses when Gesualdo arrived in Ferrara in 1594 to marry Eleonora d’Este. The exchange and competition with Gesualdo inspired Luzzaschi, who had previously been known mainly as an organist and harpsichordist, to experiment in new ways, notably beginning with his Fifth Book of Madrigals (1595). One typical feature are the chromatic garlands he winds around the word morirò (I will die) in the madrigal Lungi da te, cor mio. This very specific interpretation of individual words can be found many times—for example on the words pietà (pity) or crudele (cruel) in Itene mie querele, but equally in the two other works, both of which positively luxuriate in the torments of unhappy love. Luzzaschi’s compositional skills are also reflected in the great variety with which he combines polyphonic and homophonic sections in his works, changes tempi, and experiments with different combinations of the five voices.

A new generation enters the scene with Sigismondo d’India: the youngest composer of this program, he was born 15 years after Monteverdi—who still survived him by 15 years. He can be regarded as an artist embodying the transition between the music of the late Renaissance and the early Baroque era. Interestingly, d’India, the details of whose life before 1600 are extremely vague, later lived both in Florence and in Mantua, where he witnessed the new form of opera—then known as favola in musica, or “musical fable”—first-hand, straight from its creators Peri, Caccini, and Monteverdi. Another noteworthy fact is that this extremely productive and well-traveled composer wrote not only eight books of madrigals, but also several volumes of solo songs and duets, so-called musiche, in which he used the new form of monody, consisting of a vocal line accompanied by basso continuo. The two madrigals Quell’augellin che canta and Io mi son giovinetta, both from his Third Book of 1615, describe the sunny side of the shepherd’s idyll with musical means clearly reflecting the influence of Gesualdo and Monteverdi, while revealing the signs of new times in their use of an accompanying instrument and its treatment as an equal partner.

For the finale of its program, Concerto Italiano has chosen Claudio Monteverdi, the towering master of that era of transition, who composed magnificent works of both sacred and secular vocal music while also creating the operatic trio of L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea, the first milestones of the genre that to this day have lost none of their theatrical eminence. In his Fourth Book of Madrigals of 1603, he once again paid extensive homage to the master poet Guarini, but his musical language has changed: in the familiar Io mi son giovinetta, the onomatopoeic coloratura on words such as rido (laugh), canto (sing), or fuggi (flee) forms an entirely organic part of the flow of multiple voices. The second setting of a Guarini text, Quell’augellin che canta, also is marked by a more horizontal and instrumental manner of composing. In the latter, the image of a small bird in flight inspired music-making that is equally weightless.

This more linear way of writing, however, did nothing to diminish musical intensity, as seen in the first madrigal from the Fifth Book of 1605, Cruda Amarilli, which foregoes the exaggerated chromaticism of its predecessors but still eloquently conveys the lament about Amarilli’s coldness through subtle repetitions and darker sound colors. The penultimate madrigal in this book, E così a poco a poco, also indicates the idea of returning to a clearer and less elaborate musical idiom. The Monteverdi group is centered around the latest of the five madrigals, A Dio, Florida bella from the Sixth Book of 1614. Not only does it contain a mix of solo and choral passages; for the first time, there is also a basso continuo, a “continuous bass” line, enabling musicians to perform the madrigals “together with a harpsichord or other instruments”—as the title of the collection suggests. Incidentally, the Sixth Book opens with the Lamento d’Arianna, the famous lament of Ariadne that Monteverdi set twice, once as a solo aria and once as a madrigal. It is a moment that heralds a paradigm shift: the polyphonic madrigal had had its day, and the future belonged to new forms following new compositional rules.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag