THE LATER MADRIGAL

1
CHAPTER 28

• THE LATER MADRIGAL
• IN FERRARA AND MANTUA
• GESUALDO AND MONTEVERDI

2
VOGUE OF THE ITALIAN MADRIGAL

• More than a thousand individual collections, each
  containing about twenty madrigals, were published
  between 1530 and 1620. Some Italian madrigals
  were even printed with Italian texts outside of
  Italy, specifically in German-speaking lands,
  England, Denmark, and the Low Countries. Thus
  the madrigal became the first genre of Italian
  music to be exported around Europe, as opera and
  the concerto would be during the seventeenth
  century.

3
THE MADRIGAL IN FERRARA

• The northern Italian city-state of Ferrara was an
  important center for music throughout the
  Renaissance. During the sixteenth century two
  northerners, Adrian Willaert and Cipiano de Rore,
  and a native Italian, Nicola Vicentino, achieved
  prominence there as composers and, in Vicentinos
  case, as a music theorist as well. All three
  undertook far-reaching experiments in tonal
  harmony, tuning, and temperaments.

4

• The beginning of Cipriano de Rores motet Calami
  sonum ferentes demonstrates the type of tonal
  experiments in which the Ferrarese composers were
  engaged in the middle of the sixteenth century.
  When the bass enters with the chromatically
  rising line (mm. 8-10) it creates chords built on
  E, F F, G and A in immediate successiona
  harmonically daring sequence.

5

• Nicola Vicentino invented an instrument he called
  the arcicembalo which possess not two rows of
  keys, as on all other keyboards, but six. This
  allowed him to achieve slight microtonal
  differences between pitches and recreate the
  three genera of ancient Greek music. Such
  experiments were typical of the musical humanists
  of the Renaissance.

6
THE CONCERTO DELLE DONNE

• The concerto delle donne (ensemble of ladies)
  that appeared at the court of Ferrara in the last
  decades of the sixteenth century was the first
  specifically all-female vocal ensemble
  established at a court. The concerto consisted of
  three and sometimes four virtuosos who
  specialized in singing difficult madrigals
  sometimes a cappella, sometimes with the support
  of a male tenor or bass, and sometimes to their
  own instrumental accompaniment. The excellence
  of their singing impressed visitors and soon
  similar all-female vocal groups could be heard in
  Rome, Florence, and Mantua, as well as Ferrara.

7

• The beginning of Luzzasco Luzzaschis madrigal O
  docessze amarissime damore (O sweet bitterness
  of love). Luzzaschi (c1545-1607) was a composer
  resident in Ferrara from the 1560s onward. With
  its three demanding parts for soprano (and
  optional keyboard accompaniment), this madrigal
  was a vocal showcase for the concerto delle
  donne.

8
MUSICA SECRETA

• The concerto delle donne did not perform for the
  full court, but only for the ducal family and a
  very few important guests. The music for such
  concerts went by the name musica secreta (secret
  music). At other courts this progressive private
  music was called musica reservata (see Chapter
  24). The progressive compositions of Rore and
  Luzzaschi (see Slides 28.3 and 28.5), with their
  sometimes intense chromaticism and extremes of
  rhythmic values, are representative of the musica
  secreta performed at the court of Ferrara.

9
CARLO GESUALDO

• Carlo Gesualdo (1561-1613), murderer and
  megalomaniac, is one of the most bizarre
  characters in the history of music. A member of
  the nobility from the area of Naples, in 1590
  Gesualdo put to death his wife and her lover. He
  withdrew from the public eye and into a world of
  music, only to resurface during the years
  1594-1596 at the court of Ferrara. In all,
  Gesualdo published seven volumes of madrigals,
  and three of motets, as well as other religious
  works in Latin.

10
GESUALDOS MADRIGAL STYLE

• Gesualdos is among the most progressive, even
  radical, music of the late sixteenth century. He
  employs extreme chromaticism, disjunct textures,
  and widely disparate rhythmic values to create a
  type of madrigal that is unsettling, sometimes
  shocking. Gesualdos madrigals are not for the
  average, amateur singer, for they place great
  demands on the vocal skill and especially the ear
  of the performer who must enter with just the
  right pitch into a sea of dissonance or harmonic
  change. So progressive is the harmony in some of
  Gesualdos madrigals that they seem atonalto
  lack a clear tonal center.

11
MUSIC IN MANTUA ISABELLA DESTE

• Mantua was a Renaissance city-state in northern
  Italy roughly midway between Milan and Venice.
  During the sixteenth century it was ruled by the
  Gonzaga family, and the foremost artistic patron
  among them was Isabella dEste (1474-1539,
  marquise of Mantua). Isabella was very much a
  humanist. She studied classical Latin poetry,
  collected Greek and Roman sculpture, and
  commissioned paintings from Mantegna, Titan, and
  da Vinci. She also wrote poetry, sang, and
  played harpsichord, clavichord, lira da braccio,
  lute, viol, and vihuela de mano (Spanish guitar).

12
Isabella dEste in a portrait that she
commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci

• Isabella was a great patron of both musicians and
  artists.

13
CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI

• Among the musicians employed at the court of
  Mantua at the turn of the seventeenth century was
  Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Monteverdi is
  important in the history of music as a seminal
  practitioner of the late madrigal, as one of the
  first to compose operas, and as one of the
  leaders in the formation of a late-style madrigal
  called the concerted madrigal. He worked in
  Mantua from 1591-1613 and then in Venice from
  1613 until his death in 1643. In all, Monteverdi
  published nine books of madrigals, the first in
  1587 and the last, posthumously, in 1651.

14
THE ARTUSI-MONTEVERDI CONTROVERSY

• Giovanni Maria Artusi (c1540-1613) was a
  churchman and conservative music theorist. In a
  publication of 1600, Delle imperfettioni della
  moderna musica (On the Imperfections of Modern
  Music), he criticized Monteverdi for the
  mistakes and errors contained in his madrigal
  Cruda Amaralli. Monteverdi replied to Artusi in
  1605 and again in 1607, declaring these errors
  to be momentary diversions from commonplace
  contrapuntal practice necessitated by an
  especially vivid word or phrase of text.

15
THE SECONDA PRATICA

• Monteverdi said that the harmony (music) must be
  the servant of the wordsmusical considerations
  must take a back seat to the emotional content of
  the text. Monteverdi called this text-driven
  approach to music the seconda pratica. He
  distinguished it from the older, more
  conservative prima pratica, in which composers
  often followed the rules of counterpoint
  regardless of the text.

16

• The preface to the fifth book of madrigals by
  Claudio Monteverdi, in which the composer defends
  his text-driven approach to the madrigal,
  referring to it in capital letters as SECONDA
  PRATICA. Monteverdi places Cruda Amarilli as the
  first madrigal in the collection, something of an
  in your face response to the music theorist
  Artusi.

17
MONTEVERDIS CRUDA AMARILLA

• Although it had been written and performed many
  years earlier, Monteverdis five-voice Cruda
  Amarilla appeared in his fifth book of madrigals
  printed in 1605. The score shows that all of
  Monteverdis errors occur at particularly
  intense or biting words in the text.

18
Two passages from Monteverdis Cruda Amarilli

• In the first the soprano jumps in with a second
  against the bass on the words ahi lasso (ouch
  alas) and in the second the top three voices
  jump to a seventh above the bass on the word
  Aspido (wasp). Both such jumps violate the
  commonly accepted rules of Renaissance
  counterpoint.

19
THE LATE MADRIGAL A PROGENITOR OF OPERA

• The increasing intense, personal expression of
  the late madrigal, especially when it emphasized
  solo singing prefigured the appearance of the
  aria and recitative in seventeenth-century
  Baroque opera. Toward the end of the sixteenth
  century the progressive madrigal became so
  vocally demanding that professional singers were
  needed to perform it. This resulted in a
  separation between highly skilled, solo
  performers and a non-participating, generally
  aristocratic audience, a division that set the
  stage for early Baroque opera.