From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self 9780520951525

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From Madrigal to Opera

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

From Madrigal to Opera Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self 

Mauro Calcagno

U niversit y of Califor nia Pr ess Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Calcagno, Mauro P.   From madrigal to opera : Monteverdi's staging of the self / Mauro Calcagno.   p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-26768-8 (cloth : alk. paper)   isbn 978-0-520-95152-5 (ebook)   1. Monteverdi, Claudio, 1567–1643. Operas.  2. Monteverdi, Claudio, 1567–1643. Madrigals.  3. Petrarchism. I. Title.   ml410.m77c33 2012  82.0092—dc23 2011046515 Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

To Jamuna, con amore

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Con ten ts

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part One.  La Musica and Orfeo

9

1. Text, Context, Performance 15 Performing Nobility  •  Authorizing Performance  •  The Work of Opera

2. Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity 32 Prologues as Paratexts  •  “I am Music”  •  The Prologue of Orfeo as Performance  •  Dialogic Subjectivity  • Subject-Effects

3. Performing the Dialogic Self 57 Music’s Touch  • Echoes

Part Two.  Constructing the Narrator

71

4. From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A Rhetoric of Voice and Address 73 Voi ch’ascoltate  •  Appropriating the Self  • Lyric Modes  • Equivocality

5. In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal 101 Theatricality and Temporal Perspective  •  Diffracting the Self  •  Who is Speaking? From Soggetto to Dialogo  •  The Madrigal Book as Canzoniere

Part Three.  Staging the Self

189

6. Monteverdi, Narrator 191 From Narration to Focalization  •  Combattimento between Page and Stage

7. The Possibility of Opera 238 The Aesthetics of Nothing: Monteverdi, Marino, and the Incogniti  •  Focalization in Poppea

Epilogue: Subjectivity, Theatricality, Multimediality 263 Appendix 1: Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books 267 Appendix 2: Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: Text and Translation 271 Notes 277 Index 319

I l lustr at ions

F ig u r e s

1. Work, text, and performance in Monteverdi’s Orfeo  29 2. Diagram of the relationships between deictics and body movements  55 3. The performance space of Ronconi’s production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo  59 4. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: “Dal mio Permesso amato”  60 5. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: “Io la Musica son”  63 6. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Prologue: “Io su Cetera d’or”  65 7. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Act 3  67 8. Narrative interference in texted music  192 9. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): m. 10  232 10. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “a passi tardi e lenti”  233 11. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “Misero, di che godi?”  235 12. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “e se rubella in vita fu”  236 13. Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea (dir. Hampe): act 1, scene 1  257 M u s ica l E x ampl e s

1. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act 1, Nymph  45 2. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act 1, Orfeo  47 3. Monteverdi, Orfeo: Prologue, La Musica  61 4. Monteverdi, Selva morale: opening of O ciechi and Voi ch’ascoltate  84 5. Monteverdi, Selva morale: Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 27–29  85  

ix

x   Illustrations

6. Monteverdi, Selva morale: O ciechi, mm. 13–23, and Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 44–52  87 7. Wert, Voi ch’ascoltate, mm. 1–10 and 25–29  90 8. Verdelot, Quanto sia lieto il giorno, mm. 19–29  106 9. Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno, beginning  111 10. Arcadelt, Quando col dolce suono, mm. 30–41  113 11. Arcadelt, Chi potrà dir, mm. 20–29  117 12. Arcadelt, Ahimé dov’è il bel viso, mm. 24–30 and 37–42  119 13. Arcadelt, Quand’io penso al martire, mm. 37–56  124 14. Rore, Da le belle contrade, mm. 24–59  139 15. Marenzio, La bella man vi stringo, mm. 12–18  187 16. Monteverdi, Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, mm. 42–46 (harmonic interference)  217 17. Monteverdi, “Misero Alceo,” mm. 54–61 (textural interference)  219 18. Monteverdi, “A Dio, Florida bella,” mm. 35–42 (textural interferences)  221 19. Monteverdi, Qui rise, o Tirsi, mm. 49–61 (interferences)  225  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tab l e s

1. Adrian Willaert, “Occhi piangete,” from Musica nova (Venice, 1559): alternation of voices  135 2. Luca Marenzio, Settimo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1595): overview  162 3. Luca Marenzio, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1594): overview  172 4. Giaches de Wert, Ottavo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1586): overview  175 5. Luca Marenzio, Nono libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1599): overview  178 6. Text of Petrarch’s sestina “Mia benigna fortuna,” in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere), CCCXXXII  180 7. Text of Ottavio Rinuccini’s canzonetta “Non havea Febo ancora,” set to music by Monteverdi as Lamento della ninfa  204

Ack now l ed gm en ts

To my beloved parents, Elide and Mario Calcagno, I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude. To Ellen Rosand, my heartfelt thanks for her role in this project and much more. I am also grateful to John and Jehanara Samuel for their support during all the phases of the book. I am very grateful to Mary Francis, my wonderful editor at the University of California Press, for all of her patience, help, and advice along the way; to Bonnie Blackburn, from whom I had the privilege to receive precious comments on the manuscript; and to Rose Vekony and Eric Schmidt for their invaluable assistance. The two anonymous readers for the Press provided greatly stimulating feedback, from which the book much benefitted. While holding a teaching appointment at Harvard, I appreciated the many courtesies of Virginia Danielson and Sarah Adams as leaders of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library and of Isham Memorial Library, respectively. At Stony Brook University, besides the generous help of the staff of the Music Library, directed by Gisele Schierhorst, I have been fortunate since 2008 to experience the support of my colleagues in the Music Depart­ment, especially Sarah Fuller, Arthur Haas, Perry Goldstein, and David Lawton. For precious suggestions and discussions at various stages of the project, I am indebted to Jane Bernstein, Tim Carter, Paolo Cecchi, Jody Cranston, Beth and Jonathan Glixon, Wendy Heller, John W. Hill, Jeffrey Kurtzman, Thomas Lin, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Arnaldo Morelli, Margaret Murata, Alex Rehding, Federico Schneider, and Anne Stone. I also thank those colleagues who patiently waited years for me to bring this project to conclusion, thereby indirectly supporting it, above all Philippe Vendrix. Finally, I am grateful to Antonia Arconti of the Museo Bilotti in Rome for her help in obtaining the permission to reproduce the image on the dust jacket. xi

xii   Acknowledgments

I gladly acknowledge the support of the 2002 Fellowship Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, and of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University (directed by David Freedberg) in 2011–12. Finally, From Madrigal to Opera has also benefitted from the feedback I received when lecturing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2000), Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University (2004), Oxford University (2005), Harvard University (2007), Stony Brook University (2007), Yale University (2008), the City University of New York-Graduate Center (2009 and 2010), as well as at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (1999), the American Musicological Society (2000, 2002, and 2006), and the Renaissance Society of America (2007). This book could not have been conceived, developed, written, and brought to conclusion without my wife, Jamuna Samuel.

Introduction

From Madrigal to Opera examines how “selves” emerge and are perceived in two musical genres mastered by Claudio Monteverdi. In the early seventeenth century, the madrigal, which began flourishing in the 1520s in Florence, was in its final stage of development. Meanwhile, in the same Tuscan city ruled by the Medici family, the new genre of opera was dawning. Around that time, in the north Italian court of Mantua, a still-young Monteverdi was serving at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, before eventually moving to Venice, where he remained employed by the local government for the rest of his life. As we listen today to a vocal quintet performing Monteverdi’s madrigal Cruda Amarilli, as we watch a soprano impersonating La Musica and entering stage in his opera Orfeo, or experience the celebrated love duets of Nero and Poppaea in L’incoronazione di Poppea, our senses and intellect are powerfully drawn to the performers, to the music they sing, the characters they enact, and their stories. If this experience is in part like that of watching someone reading a Shakespeare sonnet, or a theater company staging one of his plays, it is also radically different. Why is the compound of words, music, and gesture characterizing Monteverdi’s madrigals and operas still so effective for today’s audiences? How do the agents involved in the creation and performance of texted music interact with one another? How does texted music tell stories (of gods, demigods, mortals) and what is the specific role of music and of the performer in this process? Finally, what did the shift from writing for the chamber to writing for the stage mean for musicians active at the beginning of the seventeenth century? What were the new issues that Monteverdi, for example, had to confront as a composer? In order to approach these questions, I explore in this book a cultural paradigm 1

2   Introduction

that initially developed outside of music: Petrarchism, the early modern literary movement modeled on Petrarch’s love poetry, which affected poets, musicians, and artists, but also publishers, readers, audiences, and beholders, both in Europe and beyond.1 In its musical guise Petrarchism provides a productive access point to the issues raised above, but especially to the one that underpins, in my view, the others—subjectivity. Since Petrarch’s view on the human subject indelibly marked the course of Western elite culture, it makes sense to assume that music too inflected it in its own ways, not uncoincidentally in conjunction with text, often by Petrarch himself. From Madrigal to Opera investigates music’s own contribution to Petrarchism, as a window on the issue of early modern subjectivity. But if this book does investigate Petrarchism in works by Monteverdi and his predecessors, its larger claim is that this paradigm is also inherent in today’s performances of madrigals and operas. Petrarchism is not only a cultural and historical phenomenon useful for understanding musical works as written artifacts, but it is also intrinsic to the way we experience them as performances. This has to do with the typically Petrarchan view of the self as inherently dialogic, with its potential of shifting identities and creating roles, which I discuss in their musico-theatrical aspects. Monteverdi’s works inflect this Petrarchan paradigm in ways that are consequential for our experience of opera as a genre. In this respect, discussions of performances—including operatic stagings—are as productive as those of scores for understanding the effectiveness of musical works, and they thus figure prominently in this book. In sum, rather than in distinctions between musical genres, I am interested in interactions among musico-poetic texts, their agents, and their performances, specifically in works by Monteverdi and his predecessors, as they inflect a particular view of the self originating with Petrarch. But whose self and what is “self”? The performer immediately comes to mind, that flesh-and-blood agent singing and impersonating a character, be it the abstract “lover,” “Orpheus,” or “Eurydice,” be it a solo or ensemble, with or without instruments or costumes. Performers deserve scholarly investigation both historically and in today’s reincarnations in concert halls, operatic stages, and recording media. The performer, however, is, and was, only a part of a network of agents involved in the creation and performance of musical works, among them patrons, composers, the dramatic characters, the listeners/viewers, and stage directors. On stage, the performer symbolically subsumes in herself all the other agents by projecting a self that is constantly shifting. The performer’s “I” works as a catalyst of such identity-shifting, and is as elusive and mobile as the fleeting performance before our eyes. This dynamic role of subjectivity, which I trace back to Petrarchism, is at the root of the early modern, as well as of our (post) modern, experience of opera performance. Monteverdi self-consciously capitalized on this subjective elusiveness and  

 

 



Introduction   3

mobility in his late madrigal books and in his three surviving operas (Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea). In the madrigals his experiments with the ways the self is constructed and performed represented the climax of a tradition rooted in the works of Philippe Verdelot, Jacques Arcadelt, Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Giaches de Wert, and Luca Marenzio, among others. These composers appropriated the voice of contemporaneous poets in the same way in which these poets appropriated that of Petrarch as their Model. Through this process of appropriation, the musicians themselves became narrators, and, in their works, they were able to represent selves as narrators and perceivers. These composers’ experiments with representing narrative roles in madrigals are precursors of Monteverdi’s staged works. From Madrigal to Opera—a title suggesting a conceptual passage, not a teleology of works or events—thus begins by discussing Orfeo as a paradigmatic work encapsulating the narrative strategies through which subjectivity is articulated in the madrigal. In addition, Orfeo also encapsulates narrative strategies typical of the genre of opera in general, thus bridging past and future. Its prologue, which is discussed throughout the book almost as a ritornello, represents the quintessential operatic act—the prologue to all opera, as it were. The madrigal embodies the possibility of opera in its staging subjectivity.2 In creating such a possibility the madrigal explored the boundaries between music and language in sophisticated ways that today require close inspection. From Madrigal to Opera abounds in analyses of text–music relationships, or close readings. Most of the analyses focus on text and texture as audible components of the listener’s experience of subjectivity. As a consequence, and not out of negligence, an important musical issue that has traditionally been prominent in madrigal studies, modality, is rarely dealt with, since it is less relevant to the general interpretive purpose of highlighting Petrarchan subjectivity.3 In the same analyses, the discussions of poetic texts underemphasize affects or allegorical concepts in order to focus on aspects that are equally or more tied to performance or discourse, as modern linguistics would term them.4 It is telling that, in the sixteenth century, some madrigals were performed within spoken plays; and it is equally telling that a particularly perceptive witness of those times such as Anton Francesco Doni could refer to madrigal performances with the words “to speak the madrigal” (dire il madrigale) rather than “to sing” it (cantarlo).5 The compound of music and poetic texts conveyed discursive meanings, each component contributing to semantic communication. Consequently, the exploration of the links between selves and performance in madrigals demands analyses of poetic texts that go beyond singling out affects and allegories to highlight those communicative and contextual meanings that are studied today in linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis.6 Music fully participated in the “age of conversation” that characterized early  

 

 

 

4   Introduction

modern Italy.7 In the sixteenth century, within a politically fragmented country that, self-reflexively, was engaged in a hot debate about which literary language to adopt (questione della lingua), a relentless activity of formalized speaking and listening in società took place in particularly productive contexts for the interaction of words and music: courts and academies.8 In these environments the contiguity between verbal and musical performances—for example, reading a poem aloud and then performing it as set to music—can be interpreted not only as a mere social obligation or a self-fashioning act;9 rather, that connection bespeaks deep-seated relationships between two modes of performance, delivering speech and making music. It is the same subject, the same body, that performs in both, whether it is poetry or texted music: a subject that performs to someone and is thus located in a dialogic, relational situation. This, I argue, is the Petrarchan subject, socialized in ways peculiar to early modern Italian elites and thus becoming a Petrarchist subject: a performative self, living in and through voice, via his or her own body, also through music.10 The much-cited seconda prattica—the compositional practice based on the aesthetic tenet that music is the “servant” of text—has its roots in this socio-discursive dimension. Tellingly, the word that Monteverdi used for “text” in defining the seconda prattica was not testo, a written, material artifact, but oratione—speech, performance, something through which a subject interacts with other subjects. This view of self as speaking and making music—or musicking, as Christopher Small put it—helps in defining also the what (besides the who) of the question about subjectivity as explored in From Madrigal to Opera.11 According to Jerrold Siegel, a broad notion of subjectivity encompasses three dimensions.12 The first involves the physical, bodily existence of individuals, what makes creatures palpable and gives them temperaments, including passions. The second dimension is the social, relational identity that makes us individuals involved in cultural and political interactions, also through language. Finally, the third dimension of self is that of reflexivity, through which we are able to hold a mirror to ourselves and the world. A communicative performance art such as music involves, I claim, all three dimensions in a particularly active and intriguing relationship. I thus analyze texted music and its performance according to “subject-effects” related to those three dimensions. These effects are heuristic categories aiming at interpreting musical works as dynamic processes: as performances involving the selves of a variety of agents (primarily the singers), rather than as static and passive “instantiations” or “representations” of selves in scores.13 In Part I of From Madrigal to Opera (“La Musica and Orfeo”) the purpose of investigating Monteverdi’s Orfeo is to establish contextual bases, critical tools, and a cross-disciplinary vocabulary for later use in the book. The tools and vocabulary are drawn from linguistics, phenomenology, narratology, and theater and film studies, as areas that allow bridging the gap between the worlds of  

 

 

 

 

 

 



Introduction   5

abstract text and live performance. Historically, the distinction text/performance made even less sense in early modern societies characterized, for music and theater, by patronage of performances more than of permanent products such as scores.14 In this respect, patronage of music was different from that of artworks such as paintings, sculptures, or buildings. Yet, as viewers/listeners encountered performances, they somehow replicated the situation of beholders of permanent artworks, experiencing the same emotional and intellectual journey, for example by absorbing mythological narratives. This shows that performance occupies a somewhat liminal, or in-between, status. I raise this issue at the outset of the book by briefly discussing a 1973 painting by Giorgio de Chirico representing the paradigmatic performer, Orpheus.15 This image not only introduces the themes of mythology and modernity but also offers a point of entry into the main “character” of the book, the performing self. In chapter 1 (“Text, Context, Performance”) I deal with the relationships between text, context, and performance in Orfeo according to the bifocal perspective characterizing the questions about agency and effectiveness raised at the beginning of this introduction, concerning both the then (the early modern period) and the now (our modern or postmodern times). I discuss, for example, the issue of performance both in its meaning for the Italian courts of the early seventeenth century and in its meaning today as a philosophical concept, as well as in its concrete implications for, say, a stage director producing Orfeo in an opera house. Through an analysis of the Prologue of this opera, chapter 2 (“Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity”) introduces the basic terminology about subjectivity used in the rest of the book, including concepts such as deixis, dialogic self, and subject-effects. In discussing a recent production of Orfeo, chapter 3 (“Performing the Dialogic Self”) provides a first application of these concepts in the life of performance. In Part II (“Constructing the Narrator”) I extrapolate backward from opera to identify fluctuating expressions of self created by the composer-as-poet in sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigals. This discourse on a flexible self emerges in the opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which I discuss in chapter 4 (“From Petrarch to Petrarchism: A Rhetoric of Voice and Address”) also in musical settings. Petrarch’s view of the self was appropriated, inflected, and socialized in late Renaissance literary Petrarchism, of which the madrigal was an epiphenomenon. I explore how representative figures of the literary side of Petrarchism practiced, and theorized about, what I call a “rhetoric of voice and address,” a way in which poets communicated to readers/listeners, which was then appropriated by musicians. In chapter 5 (“In Search of Voice: Musical Petrarchism in the SixteenthCentury Madrigal”) I investigate the musical side of Petrarchism in the madrigal before Monteverdi, from the micro-level of verbal resonances and emphasis on specific words to the macro-textual level of modeling print collections of poems

6   Introduction

and madrigals on the Canzoniere. I explore this range of possibilities from the point of view of creators, performers, and listeners, in works by Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert, Rore, Wert, and Marenzio, focusing on these composers’ appropriation of the voice of poets, as well as on the listeners’ perception of it. Through madrigal books, musicians created stories that effectively met the expectations of listeners who stored in their memories narrative patterns absorbed by reading poetry collections. These composers calibrated the relationships between narrator and characters in a variety of ways, assembling texts from disparate literary sources and even modifying them to suit their own purposes. In the case of Marenzio, this musician’s appropriation of Petrarch resulted in a coherent cultural “project” that spanned his entire career as madrigalist and climaxed in his last masterwork, Book IX a 5 (1599). This chapter (reader be warned!) is by far the longest in the book, forming a musical-historical counterpart to the more literary-oriented chapter 4 and a background to the treatment of Monteverdi’s authorial voice in the last two chapters. Part III then (“Staging the Self”) deals exclusively with Monteverdi, whose works are seen as the culmination of the Petrarchist process of progressive appropriation of the narrator’s voice described in chapter 5. In chapter 6 (“Monteverdi, Narrator”) I show how, on the one hand, the composer develops his voice as narrator to such a degree that in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda he transforms the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso into a multimedia, semi-staged piece. On the other hand, Monteverdi overcomes Petrarchism by creating full-fledged and flesh-and-blood characters well beyond the classic Petrarchan “lover.” In this process he adapts for his own purposes the poetics not only of Tasso but also of Giovan Battista Marino, the quintessential Baroque poet. The composer embraces, of Tasso, his ability to create characters and to calibrate narrative distance from them; of Marino, the multiplication of perspectives resulting from the poet’s capacity to create miniature poetic stories. Monteverdi’s “impulse to narrative,” 16 his creation of fictional worlds, is the result of madrigalistic and operatic techniques that I subsume under the term focalization, meaning perspective or point of view. Narrator and characters project a focalizing effect by acquiring a visual dimension through which they see, perceive, and experience the events of a story, making the audience aware of them. Instrumental music as well becomes a factor in this process. As a result, madrigal and opera become, in the hands of Monteverdi, multi-vocal and multi-focal, with the potential of being developed as multimedia artworks. Obviously, the performers are crucial to this process since they are the ones who directly affect the audience’s point of view, musically and visually. The singers’ use, for example, of pure voice as empty, non-verbal sounding music, which I trace back to the aesthetics of Marino (chapter 7, “The Possibility of Opera”), enables them to shift the audience’s perspective toward the narrative power of



Introduction   7

music per se, as well as toward themselves. Today, the opera director, by locating and moving the singers within the performance space, becomes yet another agent in the chain of appropriations inaugurated by the Petrarchist poets and the madrigalists; and in filmed productions, the video director becomes the last link of this chain. In the highly relativistic world of Poppea, characters such as Otho and the two soldiers provide a perspective on, respectively, Poppaea and Seneca. Thanks to the focalizing effect generated by these characters, but also depending on the choices of opera or video directors, the audience perceives the events of the opera in a particular way, absorbing a worldview conveyed by the performance and mediating it with its own. This multiplication of perspectives has characterized the genre of opera since then, up to today’s age of Regieoper. We then return to the larger questions of the interaction among the different agents in performance, its effectiveness, and our experience of it: in sum, the question of a self performing before an audience, before society, whether this subject is speaking or is performing music. On an anthropological level, this question emerged almost by necessity in a deeply fragmented, competitive, and multicultural society such as that of early modern Italy.17 In this context, fluctuations, rather than permanence, of identities and of generic boundaries were the norm. It is not by chance that the work of some of today’s most prominent visual artists, such as Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and Jeff Koons, draws frequent inspiration from the art we still call, after Burckhardt and Wölfflin, “Baroque.” 18 On the musical side, the revival in the last decades of operas by Handel and Cavalli, not to mention the increasingly more creative productions of Monteverdi’s works (some of them discussed in this volume), testify to the deep affinities between our world and that of the early modern period, between the now and the then. Perhaps it is not wholly surprising that, in listening to and watching today’s performances, the fictional worlds created by Monteverdi still feel so akin to ours, and that we continue to try to make sense of their effectiveness.

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Pa rt On e

La Musica and Orfeo

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

All opera is Orpheus. Adorno 1

Giorgio De Chirico’s 1973 Orfeo solitario dates from the last years of the artist’s life, evoking his long-standing connection with opera.2 Twenty-four years earlier de Chirico had created the settings for a production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo staged at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, one of the most prestigious European music festivals. For such a self-conscious artist—the champion of “metaphysical” painting and the painter of many enigmatic self-portraits—drawing on mythology allowed him to weave an intriguing network of references to art, reality, and the self. During the rehearsals of Orfeo de Chirico was photographed alone on the stage set he created for act 1.3 Most of this rehearsal photo is occupied by the set, which shows in the deep background, surrounded by bushes and trees, the façade of a Greek temple, to which a slightly inclining ramp leads. Stage right, the viewer can barely see the small, isolated figure of de Chirico, wearing a light jacket and tie, sitting at the foot of the ramp on what looks like the bench of a Greek amphitheater. His head resting on the back of his closed hand, the artist appears in a contemplative pose while enigmatically gazing stage left, as if he were a character on stage—indeed, like Orpheus. In de Chirico’s 1973 painting, Orpheus sits on a bench assuming a rhetorical posture as a half-mannequin whose chest is filled with puzzling objects, those miniature architectural and geometrical elements ubiquitous in the artist’s earlier works. The demigod silently “sings” with a background landscape evoking sunny Greece, de Chirico’s native land. Orpheus is alone on stage, like the painter in the rehearsal photo, the artist fully absorbed in his own performance, no loss or grief apparent, no audience listening in enchantment. Like many artists of late modernity, such as Jean Cocteau, de Chirico portrays  

 

 

11

12    La Musica and Orfeo  

Orpheus’s loneliness and narcissism as emblematic of the artist as such.4 In this light, the demigod’s journey to Hades to regain his spouse represents a process of self-knowledge. In early modernity this process was often exemplified through the parallel between the mythological narratives of Orpheus and Narcissus. For example, in the prologue of “The Otherness of Narcissus” (L’alterezza di Narciso, 1611) playwright Francesco Andreini refers to Orpheus as a character who learned that “nothing in the world / can be found to be eternal,” which is the same life lesson that Narcissus bitterly learned at his own expense.5 For Marsilio Ficino as well, Narcissus is rightly punished with death: his story, like that of Orpheus, teaches a moral lesson by exemplifying the risks of pursuing earthly beauty.6 During the Renaissance, the topic of self-knowledge, inherent in the Narcissus story, had not only ethical but also aesthetic implications, since it was thought to affect the process of art-making itself. In an effort to provide visual arts with the same legitimacy as literature, Leon Battista Alberti described Narcissus as the inventor of painting, emphasizing self-reflexivity.7 The pool in which the boy’s image is reflected, and the flower that he turns into after death, are the objects, in the former case, of Narcissus’s gaze, in the latter the gaze of any future observer. Both pool and flower become thus tropes for vision. Both deriving from the same body, pool and flower are metaphors for the mimetic surface of painting and its texture. In Alberti’s interpretation of Narcissus as the prototypical artist, the painter himself becomes embodied, literally, in his own art—as de Chirico is within his set for Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the rehearsal photograph discussed above. Alberti’s view of art betrays the influence of the celebrated version of the Narcissus myth in Metamorphoses (3.339–512), in which Ovid is less interested in the issue of self-love (today instead commonly associated with the word “narcissism”) than in that of the power of illusion, of which the boy is a victim through his own image. This power, for the Latin poet, is inherent in the meaning of art and spectacle.8 In early modern plays dealing with the myth of Narcissus, the focus falls mainly on his lover, Echo, since she offers artists an opportunity to emphasize the medium of voice in both its moral and aesthetic implications. Echo, however, appears less as a mythological character than as pure imago vocis. She is represented as an “oracle,” responding offstage to questions posed by characters who find themselves in identity crises, confronting life-changing decisions. One of these characters is the shepherd Silvio in Battista Guarini’s 1590 pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherd (Il pastor fido). This play was an influential literary model for the librettist of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Alessandro Striggio, who included a brief echo scene at the end of the opera. In act 4 of Guarini’s play Silvio’s dialogue with an echo displays his increased self-reflexivity.9 This aspect, however, was absent up to that point in the action of Il pastor fido (scene 8) since the shepherd was absorbed by hunting and oblivious to love—love traditionally  

 

 



La Musica and Orfeo    13

being thought of as conducive to true self-knowledge. In this respect the echo episode prepares the character’s full self-recognition, which occurs in the following scene, when Silvio mistakenly injures Dorinda (whom he had long been pursuing) and gradually falls in love with her, finally acknowledging his own feelings.10 In devising his echo scene in Orfeo, Striggio followed not only Guarini’s model but also the suggestion of theater theorist Angelo Ingegneri, who in his influential treatise on drama recommended the use of the echo “to loosen the intrigue, or to facilitate the resolution of the plot.” 11 Striggio, Guarini, and Ingegneri were all active in the neighboring courts of Mantua and Ferrara at various points in their careers, as was Monteverdi. Within this intellectual context it is significant that in Monteverdi’s Orfeo the nexus Orpheus–Narcissus–Echo surfaces at a crucial moment of the opera, when the issue of the protagonist’s self-knowledge is at stake. In act 5, after Orpheus fails to lead his beloved out of Hades, the protagonist’s actions and ethics are thrown into question. At the end of a powerful lament for the loss of his beloved, Orpheus engages in a conventional dialogue with Echo, which, as Daniel Chua writes, represents “the self-reflective moment of the opera.” 12 From the point of view of its position in the plot, the episode does not strictly follow the classic sources of the myth traditionally used in countless artistic and literary elaborations since antiquity, Virgil’s Georgics (4.453–527) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.1–85 and 11.1–86). In both Virgil and Ovid, Orpheus is brutally killed by the Bacchantes and his head floats down the river Hebrus, still lamenting Eurydice, the banks echoing her name. In Monteverdi’s opera, the echo scene effectively suspends the action by replacing, in Virgil, the comparison with the nightingale (4.511–15) and, in Ovid, the mythological stories of Pygmalion, Ganymede, and Myrra, narrated by Orpheus himself (10.86–end).13 In the echo scene of Monteverdi’s opera, it is not only the action but also the identity of the protagonist itself that is suspended. At this crucial moment the demigod is able to overcome his narcissism only on the condition that he face the acoustic mirror of himself, his “pure identity” confronting Echo’s “pure alterity.” 14 Having reached that crucial threshold, the plot may still take potentially diverging paths, including one leading Orpheus to the patent scorning of women and latent homosexuality—a component of the Narcissus story as well. The two surviving finales of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, as we shall see, branch “Y”-like from the protagonist’s identity crisis performed in the echo scene, strategically placed in a liminal position within the opera’s narrative trajectory. Issues regarding identity, already inherent in the myth, are a significant part of Monteverdi and Striggio’s construction of the character of Orpheus. In searching for his self through his performance on stage, the protagonist gradually becomes a subject in the modern sense: an agent whose self is inextricably tied to a dialogue with an “other,” as represented first by Eurydice, then by Echo, and finally  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14    La Musica and Orfeo  

by his father Apollo. This dialogic, relational aspect of Orpheus’s construction of his self must have appealed to de Chirico in painting his Solitary Orpheus on stage, so squarely facing the beholder. If it is true that, in a painting, “every painter depicts himself” (as Leonardo da Vinci once wrote), then, in a portrait, the beholder ultimately gazes at himself, as in front of de Chirico’s Orpheus. This can also be said, granted their differences, of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. In this part of From Madrigal to Opera—an extended theoretical prologue to the remaining two parts—I explore the discourse of and about the dialogic self articulated in a paradigmatic way in “the first authentic opera,” as Theodor W. Adorno terms Monteverdi’s masterwork.15 Interestingly, Adorno adopts the same qualifier “authentic” for operas such as Freischütz, Zauberflöte, and Trovatore, which he sees as closer to the “most particular element” of the genre. This theatrical element is revealed in singers’ costumes and gestures, and consists of “that aura of disguise, of miming, which attracts children to theater,” manifesting itself in cloak-and-dagger scenes.16 A similar childlike delight in dissimulation can be experienced by looking at de Chirico’s luminous painting of 1973. The artist composed it at the end of his life, looking back at his native land in a serene yet melancholic way, summarizing themes from his past work. Orpheus here stands for de Chirico in the same way as, in the rehearsal photo discussed above, de Chirico stands for Orpheus: image, self, and performance are associated with one another, presence implicating absence, as the present implicates the past. Despite their differences, both the de Chirico images and Monteverdi’s opera pose the question of the relationships between theatrical subjectivity and performance, a question that lies at the core of this book.  

 

1 

Text, Context, Performance

Within early seventeenth-century courtly entertainments and festivities, theatrical vocal music was no longer restricted to a mere framing device for a spoken play, as in sixteenth-century intermedi. In the new genre, la musica took center stage. But as a genre entering the crowded and competitive artistic arena of late Renaissance Italy, opera was, from the beginning, in need of articulating a discourse regarding its aesthetic and moral dignity, in order to fully sustain the comparison (paragone) with literature, theater, and visual arts. In the earliest operas, created and performed in the Italian courts of Florence and Mantua around 1600, the choice of mythological characters known for their musical prowess—Apollo and Orpheus—undoubtedly served a legitimizing purpose, justifying music as an art that could fully hold the stage for an entire performance, fulfilling Aristotelian requirements of verisimilitude.1 In addition to emphasizing ethical and aesthetic meanings implicit in the myths of Apollo and Orpheus, operatic plots capitalized on these two narratives also in order to highlight male progeny, since Apollo was thought of as Orpheus’s father. Such discourses, articulated through mythology, would have been perceived as conveying the values of the north Italian nobility that patronized the arts, including opera.2 Early operas—the texts they produced, the values they conveyed, their uses of literary and mythological sources, and the discourses they advanced about subjectivity—were inextricably linked to an early modern patronage system in which artworks functioned as symbols of nobility’s social rank. As Claudio Annibaldi observed in singling out Marco da Gagliano’s definition of opera as “a true princely spectacle” (spettacolo veramente da principi, in the preface to the published score of his 1608 Dafne), “few theatrical genres  

 

 

 

15

16    La Musica and Orfeo  

exemplify better than opera the anthropological norm according to which every social group elaborates its own sonorous countermarks.” 3 Nobility did so by producing not so much written documents such as scores, but sonorous events— performances—which “symbolized the rank of the patron through a musical style that had edifying, ceremonial or recreational aims.” 4 Performances were aimed at displaying the innate moral superiority of nobility, a superiority signified by elevated musical style and sheer magnificence in the productions, and that justified nobility’s social and political power. According to traditional views of early modern patronage, the first operas, like music and spectacles in general, were devised to celebrate the rulers as enlightened patrons and/or were aimed at increasing their political power. But, as important as these celebratory and practical functions were, they resulted less in a politicization of the aesthetic sphere than in an aestheticization of the political sphere, in particular, an aestheticization of the moral supremacy of nobility.5 As far as early opera is concerned, patronage issues provide a context that entangles with issues of text and performance. Preliminary to any investigation of performance is that of the “context of destination of a given musical event.” 6 In the texts related to a performance—scores and librettos—historians can find signs of their dependence on such a patronage context. Provided that, as Annibaldi claims, performances are events unfolding in time and thus were better suited than mere object-texts like scores and librettos to symbolize the social rank of patrons, what was the relationship between performances and texts? In this chapter I discuss Monteverdi’s Orfeo as a case study that illustrates characteristics unique to the genre of opera in its being constitutively both text and performance, and I raise the issue of subjectivity as being relevant to the nexus among text, context, and performance.  

 

 

 

Pe r fo r m i n g Nob i l i t y

The immediate sponsor of the first two operas in history, La Dafne (1598) and L’Euridice (1600), was a Florentine pro-Medici nobleman, Iacopo Corsi, who involved musicians Iacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini and poet Ottavio Rinuccini in these productions. In an effort to please Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici and maintain social and political influence at court, Corsi offered to stage the “nobile favola” Euridice as part of the nuptial festivities for Maria, the Grand Duke’s niece, and Henry IV of France.7 Seven years later, in Mantua, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and Prince Francesco sponsored an academy called the Invaghiti to stage Striggio and Monteverdi’s Orfeo during Carnival, when the preparations for Francesco’s wedding in the following year were underway.8 Since Duke Vin­ cenzo’s wife, Eleonora, was Maria de’ Medici’s sister, the couple was present at the 1600 festivities and even lent Mantuan artists. In relationship to these



Text, Context, Performance    17

performances, the scores and librettos of both Euridice and Orfeo were published, following a pattern inaugurated by the 1589 Florentine intermedi, staged during the nuptial festivities of the Grand Duke himself. The early Florentine and Mantuan operas were embedded in a larger “cycle” of festivals taking place in central and northern Italy, the result of a seemingly contradictory mix of artistic competition and collaboration between the Medicis and the Gonzagas.9 Beginning in Florence in 1565, the cycle climaxed in both Florence and Mantua in 1608. The earlier date marked the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici’s brother, the heir Prince Francesco, for which the festivities were organized by their father Cosimo I, the first Gran Duke of Tuscany. The year 1608 saw two related weddings: one in Mantua of Crown Prince Francesco Gonzaga (to Margherita of Savoy), organized by his father Duke Vincenzo; the other in Florence, of Crown Prince Cosimo II de’ Medici to Maria Magdalena, niece of the Habsburg emperor, organized by Gran Duke Ferdinando.10 This broad multi-decade cycle involved festivities themselves devised as minicycles spanning several days, the order, location, and public of the performances arranged hierarchically, according to the perceived importance of the works performed. In keeping with a strategy of alliances carefully pursued by both the Medicis and the Gonzagas and accomplished through dynastic marriages, festivals took place not only in Florence and Mantua but also in Turin (ruled by the Savoy family), Modena/Ferrara (Este family), and other Italian courts.11 The performances presented within this large cycle often involved the same or familyrelated artists, their works featuring similar uses of mythology.12 Negotiations between the courts to obtain and circulate artists involved the rulers themselves and often turned into complicated diplomatic affairs, revealing high stakes in matters of prestige. Documentation survives, for example, concerning the lavish 1608 Mantuan festivities for Prince Francesco’s wedding, showing that Florence’s generosity in lending its own artists to Mantua had to be restrained by the fact that a few months later the Medicis were to celebrate the wedding of their own crown prince. The aim of each of these competing families was “to do earlier, to do more, to do better than the others.” 13 Within this economy of “conspicuous consumption,” one of the main functions of the larger festivity cycle was to perform acts symbolizing the rank of the sponsoring dynasties. As a means of self-representation, the nobility patronized artists and organized spectacles—including operas—in which mythology was used to relate the “stage in the world” to “the world on the stage.” 14 In this context, however, opera was probably rather inconspicuous, relatively speaking.15 North Italian court festivals included an enormous wealth of performance genres bearing a variety of names similar to those used by Polonius to introduce “the best actors in the world”: tragedie, commedie, tragicommedie, drammi pastorali, etc. but also intermedi, balli, mascherate, tornei, barriere, battaglie navali. Performed  

 

18    La Musica and Orfeo  

indoors and outdoors, each having its own specific function and always featuring music, these spectacles were produced not only during weddings but also on the occasion of births, deaths, carnival, major religious feasts, and entrate of dignitaries. The nobility ensured that the memory of these ephemeral events was preserved through permanent, material products; for example, published descriptions known as descrizioni or compendi, often including the entire verbal texts of the productions. For opera, printed musical scores represented, as already mentioned, a further form of commemoration. Descrizioni and scores, however, not only documented events but also provided models on which other courts based their own festivities.16 We shall see that this double status as a descriptive and prescriptive text (the latter in more than one sense) is one of the distinctive features of the score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. The spectacular events staged during the late Renaissance festivity cycle taking place in northern Italy can be subsumed under the semantic umbrella of “performances,” a term initially employed by today’s scholars to cover contemporaneous artistic manifestations that do not easily fall into traditional genres.17 As Richard Schechner observes, the concept of performance encompasses four different realms of culture within societies: entertainment, education, ritual, and healing.18 All of these domains can in effect be ascribed to a work such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo. (As we shall see, by “work” I refer not only to the 1607 first performance, which was probably followed by one or two repeats, but also to the modified incarnation of it re-presented by the score published two years later.) I mentioned some of the aesthetic and ethical implications of the opera’s plot. “Ritualistic” is the fact that the 1607 performance occurred at a specific time, Carnival, the occasion celebrated by an all-male academy (the Invaghiti) in a room specifically intended for its gatherings, rather than in a regular theater.19 “Healing,” an aspect related to rituals, pertains to Orpheus’s transformation during the opera, his emotional Bildungsreise culminating in the overcoming of his identity crisis (as mentioned in the introduction to part I ). As in early modern societies in which boundaries between mythological and contemporary narratives were perceived as permeable when ascribed to nobility—particularly, as we shall see, in late Renaissance Mantua—Orpheus would have been seen as an allegory of the ruler, specifically Prince Francesco Gonzaga. Reflected in the demigod’s crisis, the audience witnessed the principe’s process of increased selfknowledge, a transformation mirroring his gradual assumption of power and implying his virtuous control of Nature and Passion, thoughtful observance of Law, and sensible use of Mercy. In this respect, Orfeo, like the Florentine and Mantuan operas performed during the broader festival cycle, represented not only mere entertainment but a “rite of passage” aimed at accomplishing a publicly displayed transformation of identity through performance.20 The fact that the producers, sponsors, audi 

 



Text, Context, Performance    19

ence, and performers of Orfeo belonged to an elite that identified itself in a work featuring a transformation and performed in a well-defined setting and at a specific time inscribes the work within those practices that both Schechner and Victor Turner call “performances.” Performances are characterized by both a “restored behaviour”—a “strip” of previous experience decontextualized and then recreated by performers—and by “liminal” situations—settings removed from ordinary activities, in which conventional structures are both challenged and reaffirmed.21 Orfeo, however, was not only intended by its patrons as a unique staged event destined for those few present at the premiere. Through the publication of libretto and score—publication intended in the sense of “being made public”—the work acquired the status of an ideal object, each time materializing and reiterating itself in the minds and ears of the libretto readers as well as in those of the performers of and listeners to the score.22 If the term “performance” is intended in one of its etymological meanings—as something that “awaits completion” (from the French word parfournir) and as therefore ab origine incomplete and unexecuted—these materializations can also be termed “performances.” Libretto and score are devised in fact not only to be completed, in the traditional sense, by reading, staging, and musical performance, but are also meant to prolong and enact the effectiveness of the symbolic values conveyed through the premiere. These include, in the early modern period, the self-representation of nobility accomplished through the display of the highest artistic—and, by association, moral—qualities. In the case of Orfeo, symbolic value was conveyed through the enactment of the “rite of passage” undergone by the protagonist of the opera, in a mise-en-scène of Prince Francesco’s process of increased self-knowledge, showing the acquisition of virtues considered natural to nobility. The elite academic members present at the premiere mirrored themselves in this process. The score, as the material reiteration of the values embodied in the performance, transferred this process into the public domain. For the early modern period, then, Schechner’s four realms of performance— entertainment, education, ritual, and healing—were complemented by a domain that can be called the self-representation of early modern nobility accomplished, in the case of Orfeo, through both the first performance and its printed iterations. In a work like Monteverdi’s, as well as in the early Florentine and Mantuan operas, the choice of mythological subjects and the ways in which their plots unfolded were not only functional to discourses concerning the subjective role of the artist or the aesthetic and ethical dignity of the performance medium, in competition with more established arts. Works were created also to articulate political discourses that functioned to represent nobility as a collective self, this too according to patterns presented by more established arts. Paintings such as “Cosimo de’ Medici as Orpheus” by Agnolo Bronzino (Philadelphia Museum of  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20    La Musica and Orfeo  

Art) or frescoes such as the stories of Orpheus and Psyche illustrated by Andrea Mantegna and Giulio Romano (Mantua, Ducal Palace and Palazzo Te, of which more later) used the same mythological narrative as the operas, for similar symbolizing purposes.23 In the operas, however, in contrast to the exclusively figurative works, converging symbolic actions originating from both artists and patrons conveyed meanings residing at the intersection of text and performance—opera being a two-stage art, like spoken theatre. In creating and sponsoring ephemeral operatic performances, artists and patrons were unaware of establishing a “canon” in the modern sense (they could not imagine today’s performances of Orfeo in contemporary opera houses). Yet both a drive to compete and a need to symbolize rank and power led to permanent products such as commemorative descriptions, printed libretti, and scores—all products that in turn facilitated the elevation of these works to the status of exempla. In being both permanent and ephemeral, both texts and performances, early operas such as Orfeo displayed a double mode of existence—a feature that, since then, has marked, at various times and in different degrees, the history of the genre.  

 

 

Au t ho r i z i n g Pe r fo r ma n ce

Monteverdi and Striggio’s Orfeo was first performed on February 24, 1607, in a private room of the Ducal Palace of Mantua at the time when Vincenzo Gonzaga was the Duke and his son and successor Francesco was about to marry. A correspondence survives between the Prince and his brother concerning the preparations for the premiere, informing us of a second performance on March 1st. From another letter, written by a courtier called Carlo Magni, we know that the room of the Ducal Palace in which the opera was performed was very narrow (angusta). The great novelty of the work will be, as Magni writes, that “all the interlocutors will speak musically” (tutti gli interlocutori parleranno musicalmente), a statement revealing that the ordinary expectation, in the context of the Mantuan festivities, would have been to attend a spoken play.24 The original libretto was handed to the audience at the premiere, its frontispiece reporting that the opera was to be performed within the academy of the Invaghiti under the auspices of its protector, the Duke himself. It was, of course, an all-male gathering and the cast of singers was also all male. There is no dedicatory letter.25 Compared to the libretto, the score presents (as we shall see) both some small but significant differences in the text underlay and, most importantly, a different finale. It was first published in Venice in 1609 and then reprinted there six years later with few and insignificant differences. The frontispiece bears a dedication not to Vincenzo but to Prince Francesco, who was about to become Duke in 1610



Text, Context, Performance    21

and who then fired Monteverdi two years later. Unlike the libretto, the score includes a dedicatory letter.26 Recent scholarship has reconsidered the status of dedicatory letters in early modern books, once regarded as merely flamboyant acts of homage. Together with frontispieces, title pages, and other prefatory material, dedicatory letters represent, in a book, one of its internal “paratexts.” 27 These are liminal, permeable thresholds working as crucial sites of intersubjective exchange between author and reader, and are thus crucial to any interpretation of the work itself. In a larger sense, paratexts are also the external documents related to a book, such as correspondence, publicity material, and various comments on the publication. Often, internal and external paratexts interact productively, as is the case with the dedication of the score of Orfeo, which mentions precisely the “narrow” space (angusta scena) that had been mentioned two years earlier in the private correspondence concerning the premiere.28 In the score, however, the narrowness of the private room contrasts with the “theater of the universe”: the private performance, held for an all-male elite, becomes a public event—a virtual public performance—by virtue of the publication of the score. With its publication as a score, Orfeo acquired a “second life,” allowing it to reach a larger audience. This changed its function as a work. The 1607 performance sponsored by the Invaghiti academy inscribed the work within what Giovan Domenico Ottonelli, in his 1652 classification of operas (comedie cantate), called “academic” operas, as opposed to the “princely” and the “mercenary.” 29 The author of the Orfeo libretto, Striggio, was one of the members of the Invaghiti academy as well as a powerful court official, on his way to ascending to the rank of personal segretario of Duke Vincenzo. Striggio’s double role as an academic and courtier parallels the equally double role played by the first performance and the score publication: through its purchasable score—a commercial product—Orfeo acquired a public function highlighted by its dedication to Francesco Gonzaga, with its mention of the “theater of the universe.” This newly acquired role of Orfeo was comparable to that of a “princely” opera, as was Euridice, staged at the Medici court and also published in score. “Princely” operas were not private “academic” exercises destined to the very few (or “mercenary” enterprises such as the Venetian operas that began to be performed from 1637) but were intended to perform an act of symbolization of the social rank of their patrons.30 The first performance of Orfeo, probably a surprising success among the usual spectacles of Carnival, could not achieve this symbolizing aim, which was instead carried by the subsequent publication—an act of publicizing still effective today through repeated performances. Since the function and meaning of the publication were different from those of the first performance, I find it unproductive to examine the 1609 score in search of traces of previous performances, as Nino Pirrotta and others have done.  

 

 

 

 

22    La Musica and Orfeo  

The etymological meaning of “performance” as “that which awaits completion” (mentioned above) can be extended to all the different and independent phases or incarnations of the work that is Orfeo, from the 1607 staging with the related libretto to the 1609 score; the meaning can also be extended, as we shall see, to today’s performances. Concerning the 1607 libretto and the 1609 score, the gap between (more) private and (more) public performance—clearly more of a difference in degrees than kind—is amplified and dramatized by the discrepancies between the finales, on which much ink has been spilled. The libretto of Monteverdi’s work, which attests to the first performance, remains closer to the literary sources of the myth by ending with the Bacchantes coming on stage to tear Orpheus’s body apart; this—the sparagmos—is the finale of Politian’s La favola d’Orfeo of 1480, the first secular play in Italian literature, also commissioned by the Gonzagas (the title is, significantly, identical to that of the Monteverdi libretto). The score of the opera, which the composer in his dedication letter addresses to Prince Francesco and to the “theater of the universe,” presents a “public” finale peculiar to it: Apollo, Orpheus’s father, descends on stage and, by elevating his son to heaven, saves him from his self-destructive and narcissistic desperation over the second loss of Eurydice.31 The two versions of Orpheus’s story transmitted by the sources of Monteverdi’s opera—the Dionysian and the Apollonian one—represent different uses of a myth that the Gonzagas had already appropriated in commissioning literary and figurative works in the century before the opera. Around the time of Politian’s Orfeo, Ludovico Gonzaga hired Andrea Mantegna to paint the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the married couple,” or Camera Picta) in the Mantuan Ducal Palace, today one of the most celebrated artistic monuments of the Renaissance. This room fulfilled both a public and a private function for Ludovico, since it worked as both audience chamber and bedroom. In three of the ceiling’s spandrels, Orpheus is shown as playing the lyre, charming Cerberus and a Fury, and finally dismembered in the brutal sparagmos. This last episode, corresponding, as said, to the Dionysian finale of Politian’s play and the opera’s libretto, is also depicted in an another small room of the Ducal Palace, the so-called Camerino d’Orfeo. The Gonzagas, however, owned another large residence in Mantua, Palazzo Te, located at the entrance of the city. A magnificent palace built in the 1520s by Federico both as a residence for his mistress and as a showcase of art to impress visiting dignitaries, it was a sort of “prologue” to the city. For the only larger wall of the Loggia of the Muses at the entrance of this palace, Federico asked painter Giulio Romano to depict the story of Orpheus by selecting two episodes, favoring the version of the myth transmitted by the local Mantuan celebrity, Virgil: Eurydice pursued by Aristaeus and Orpheus and the beasts. On the smaller walls of the Loggia, Giulio painted Apollo, Pegasus, and the fountain of the Hyppocrene  

 

 

 

 

 



Text, Context, Performance    23

and an Allegory of the Mantuan arts, completing the decorations on the loggia vault with stuccos representing the Muses, thus accomplishing an homogeneous iconographic result: Orpheus is the son of one of the Muses, whereas Aristaeus is the son of Apollo (who, however, might also represent Orpheus’s father, as mentioned). In addition, in a different and more private room of the same Palazzo called “Ovid’s Room” (Camera d’Ovidio), two other court painters included a frieze in which a panel shows Orpheus and Eurydice before Pluto and Proserpina. Well before Monteverdi’s Orfeo, these figurative works explore the many resonances of the Orpheus myth as a means of self-representation for the Gonzaga family. It is significant, in such a context, that the episode of the sparagmos is entirely missing from an open and largely public space such as Palazzo Te. There, in a state palace intended to impress visitors, Orpheus is shown in an Apollonian context. In the Duke’s residence, instead, the Dionysian sparagmos is included twice among the mythological narratives. In the Renaissance, the punishment inflicted on Orpheus by the Bacchantes through his dismemberment implied a condemnation of homosexuality and a positive emphasis on the value of marriage as a social institution crucial to the preservation of the noble class. It was thus appropriate that the sparagmos appears as an exemplum on the walls of a chamber—the Camera degli Sposi—intended to honor a noble married couple. It was similarly appropriate that it provide the finale of Politian’s play: either because the play was performed for a wedding festivity, or because it was staged during Carnival and intended as a quaestio amoris, an academic dispute on the danger of homosexual love.32 In the context of the 1607 Carnival, the Dionysian finale featuring the Bacchantes in Striggio’s Favola d’Orfeo would have been well received within a highly learned environment such as the academy of the Invaghiti (we can almost imagine an academic discussion about the nature of Love following the performance of the opera). This meaning, however, was irrelevant for a publication such as the 1609 score; hence its Apollonian finale. Using the new musical style of the heavily decorated duet, the score’s final vocal piece represented a musical apotheosis meant to showcase the splendor of the Gonzagas, fulfilling a more “public” function equivalent to that of the frescoes displayed in buildings such as Palazzo Te. As shown by both artworks—the opera and the frescoes—the Gonzagas’ power derived legitimacy from a heaven that was both pagan and, by implication, Christian.33 The Mantuan artworks based on the story of Orpheus were a public act blending mythology and art in order to symbolize the rank of the sponsoring dynasty through self-representation. A similar self-reflexive rhetoric, merging reality and mythological imagination, is displayed in a literary work entitled La Psiche, written by Ercole Udine, one of those highly cultivated Mantuan court officials of the intellectual caliber of Striggio.34 Udine was one of the founders of the Invaghiti  

 

 

 

24    La Musica and Orfeo  

academy and the ambassador to Venice in the years of Monteverdi’s service to the Gonzagas. La Psiche is dedicated to Vincenzo’s wife, Eleonora de’ Medici, and was published in Venice in 1599. It consists of a poetic rewriting of the myth of Psyche as narrated by Apuleius but with additions that are indirectly (but unambiguously) related to the actual world of the dedicatee and patron. In the first canto, for example, Venus is in pursuit of her son, Love, and travels all over Italy until she reaches Mantua, where she enters a magnificent building—evidently the Ducal Palace—to admire a large collection of female portraits, part of the then famous galleria assembled from all over Europe by Duke Vincenzo. Included there is a painting of Eleonora, which Udine describes at length. In the third canto, Psyche visits an enchanted palace which is easy to recognize as Palazzo Te. The Loggia delle Muse, which includes the fresco on Orpheus (see above), is described first. Then Psyche enters a large room and gazes at its frescoes, only to gradually realize that she is indeed becoming the beholder of her own story—the one depicted by Giulio Romano (in which Psyche was thought of as representing Federico Gonzaga’s mistress). Udine writes (canto III, ottava xvii, lines 5–8):  

 

 

 



5

E Psiche istessa ancora non sapea cosa [la novella] fosse, se ben mirava quella. Ma non sì tosto al fin ella pervenne de casi suoi, che ’l tutto le sovvenne.35

[5] And Psyche herself still did not know [6] what [the story] was, although she kept gazing at it. [7] But as soon as she came to realize [8] that it was her own, everything occurred to her.36

In the context of the Gonzagas’ patronage, the inner confusion, the gradual blurring of real and mythological times and places experienced by Psyche in Udine’s poem, was not merely part of a strategy to glorify patrons.37 It also represented a way of perceiving the self and the world, a way to which music gave voice, a few years after the publication of La Psiche, in works such as Orfeo, Arianna, and the Ballo delle Ingrate. In light of this blurring of myth and reality, it is likely that Prince Francesco was viewed, during the 1607 performance of Orfeo, as allegorized in the protagonist, rescued by his father, Duke Vincenzo, as Apollo.38 This interpretation was first proposed—or rather staged—in an epoch-making production directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Zurich Opernhaus in 1975.39 At the end of this staging the role of Apollo is sung by a character who, throughout the performance, had impersonated Duke Vin­ cenzo silently participating in the action. Support for this production’s claim to “authenticity” derives from the early modern habit of depicting noble rulers as mythological figures (for example, “Cosimo de’ Medici as Orpheus” by Bronzino,  

 



Text, Context, Performance    25

mentioned above) as well as of creating literary characters that stand for members of the nobility (for example, the shepherds standing for Ferrarese courtiers in Torquato Tasso’s play Aminta of 1573). Some of the dedications to Monteverdi’s publications hint at this blurring of roles. In the dedicatory letter of his Scherzi musicali of 1607, written by his brother Giulio Cesare, Prince Francesco is called “human God” (umano Dio).40 In the letter included in the Orfeo score, Francesco is depicted instead as a “benign star” (benigna stella) emanating rays (raggi) protecting the “birth” (nascimento) of the opera. The metaphor of the sun’s rays then powerfully reverberates in the imagery of the verbal text, for example, the famous aria Rosa del ciel (“Rose of heaven,” which critics have interpreted as referring to the emblem of the Invaghiti) and the final chorus È la virtute un raggio (“Virtue is a ray”). The finale of the opera, featuring, in the score, Apollo as the Sun God rescuing Orpheus, appears thus as a part of a rhetorical strategy consistently pursued over the course of the work.41 In the score, furthermore, the relationship between dedication letter and work proper—between paratext and text—is strengthened by another rhetorical device again related to the image of the sun. Early modern dedicatory letters using the image of the rays implicitly allude to the myth of Memnon, in which the rays at dawn miraculously cause the statue of the Greek hero to move its lips and speak. This serves the purpose of highlighting the role of the patron, vital to the writer in giving birth to his work. In the case of Orfeo, however, the metaphor tells readers and performers that Prince Francesco authorizes not only the score, intended as a material inscription, but also the voice originating from it; not only the voice of the author, intended in a figurative, narratological meaning, but the actual one(s) heard in performance, springing from the singers’ lips.42 The composer, that is, receives from the patron authorization to “speak.” But, in a further transfer of authority, it is he, the composer, who in turn authorizes the singers to perform, as his proxies. Any subsequent performance of Orfeo that since 1609 has adopted the score, or one of its versions, as its point of departure, has been, in a sense, authorized by Prince Francesco as well as by the dedicator, Monteverdi, through that initial act of publication (the Harnoncourt/Ponnelle performance manifests, if too overtly, this aspect). It is significant in this respect that, still in 1621, the commercial catalogue of the Venetian publisher Vincenti included among its items one that reads Orfeo del monteverde, under the rubric “music to be played and sung with chitarrone, theorbo, arpicordo, chitarra alla spagnola and other similar instruments,” thus appealing to a wide segment of the public beyond the elite present at the premiere.43 Buyers of the score could reconstruct in their minds aspects of the premiere thanks also to several performance indications in the past tense (to which Pirrotta first drew attention) such as “this song was concerted with the sound of all instruments” or “this Ballet was played with the sound of five viole  

 

26    La Musica and Orfeo  

da braccio etc.” 44 Obviously these indications were not aimed at prescribing how to play, stage, or sing. Their function was to perform, in the body itself of the work, the act of symbolization of the social rank of the patrons that the premiere, because of its limited audience and public resonance, could not produce. In the context of the competition between the Mantuan and Florentine dynasties outlined above, it is revealing that the score of Euridice—another performance meant to become even more “public” through published descrizioni, librettos, and scores—appeared in the Vincenti catalogue within the same rubric as Orfeo, blurring once again the categories of private, public, and commercial.45 The score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo would have informed buyers that the Mantuan performance outshone the Florentine one in, among other aspects, the stunning number of instruments used. The Gonzagas were constantly involved in purchasing instruments, often by Florentine makers, in the years of Orfeo.46 Their effort in this direction paralleled that for the acquisition of paintings and precious stones, and that for the production of major artistic events, such as those staged for the 1608 festivities: these efforts were aimed at symbolizing their social rank as patrons, so that, in this sense, one can speak today of “performance of nobility” through various artistic manifestations.47 Viewed in this light, questioning the accuracy of the list of instruments included in Monteverdi’s score vis-à-vis the music—as if the composer had actually been concerned about conveying his intentions—is off the mark, since the function of the list would have been mostly symbolic.48 An additional function of the list of instruments may have been to emphasize the intrinsic musical value of the score: if the Florentine opera featured more lavish staging, machinery, and costumes (thus gaining unrivalled visual appeal in line with the tradition of Medici festivities), Monteverdi’s opera compensated for this through sheer musical beauty and complexity. Thus, the mention in the dedication of a “narrow space,” with its implication of a lack of visual appeal, would not have been selfdenigrating but, rather, strategic. Today, by a coincidence of history, the quality of Monteverdi’s music for Orfeo, intended in its time as an emblem of the refined taste of the Gonzagas, turns out to meet our desire for intrinsically sophisticated musical works and the related value that is attributed to musical analysis and focused listening.49 This appears to be less true for Euridice.  

 

 

 

The Wo r k of Ope r a

To consider the published score of Orfeo as much a performance of the work as the 1607 premiere—the 1609 “public” performance on a continuum with the “private”—helps not only to readdress the issue of the relationship between score and libretto, but also to question the traditional categories of text and performance as related to that highly hybrid genre that is opera.50 The situation of the  

 



Text, Context, Performance    27

sources of Orfeo—an extraordinary one given the paucity of surviving opera scores from its century—raises issues similar to those faced by scholars of early modern European spoken theater: Is what we call “text”—e.g., the score Orfeo del monteverde mentioned above as the item of the Venetian publisher’s catalogue, or any of today’s published scores deriving from it—a repository of a meaning that is simply to be extrapolated in subsequent performances? Or does meaning reside (also) in performance itself? The fact that Monteverdi’s Orfeo was in primis a performance and then, in a second stage, a text—which amounts to an inversion of the usual route from publication to performance in, say, a madrigal book—shows that the alternative “text vs. performance” is deceptive.51 Crucial to the issue is the nature itself of the two entities: the Orfeo del monteverde (as found in the rubric of the Vincenti catalogue) as compared, for example, to the inscription reading Monteverdi: Orfeo as found, say, on a poster of a contemporary opera festival among the titles of the works to be performed. To bridge the conceptual gap between text and performance, Roland Barthes’s view in his From Work to Text that a text can be considered as a “field of play, activity, production, practice”—as a process in which signifiers freely interact—is helpful.52 Barthes’s dynamic view of the term “text” is pertinent to the specific nature of musical texts, in which signifiers seem to be all that there are, and the function of allowing silent reading is secondary compared to that of working as scripts for performances. Regarding performance, the Barthesian view of text, if extended toward something that does not pertain exclusively to a fixed material object, has the effect of “textualizing” performance as even more of a “field of play, activity, production, practice,” a field in which emphasis falls on the autonomous production of meaning. This aspect is highlighted by a number of studies of early modern theater which capitalize on the instability of printed texts and the relative semantic autonomy of performance, for example in works belonging to the Shakespearean canon.53 In assuming this view in relationship to the musical-verbal-scenic text that is opera, the boundaries between text and performance—between, for example, the Orfeo del monteverde and Monteverdi: Orfeo—become blurred. Where does the work itself—what is referred to by the words “Monteverdi’s Orfeo”—reside? Does it merely coincide with one or the other entity, or with a combination of them? The discrepancy between the first surviving sources of Orfeo—the libretto La favola d’Orfeo attesting to the premiere and the Orfeo del monteverde published later with a radically different finale—points to the inherent instability and fluidity of the operatic text ever since its first manifestation. Equally significant, in this respect, is the wide variety of performance possibilities that a score such as Monteverdi’s allows (a score that still, if compared to the mostly manuscript  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28    La Musica and Orfeo  

ones surviving from its century, presents an overabundance of information and a higher degree of fixity). Witness the enormous discrepancies among the different recordings of the opera all deemed “authentic,” such as those by René Jacobs, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner, and Gabriel Garrido; or those, extreme, between the stagings by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, in historical costumes, and Christopher Alden, in contemporary ones. In the videorecording of the Ponnelle production, for example, an anxiety to authorize performance as being historically informed reaches an almost absurd degree. While the introductory toccata is played and the public takes its seats in the Zurich Opernhaus, Ponnelle shows what appears to be, at a first glance, the title page of the original seventeenth-century score. On closer inspection, however, the score reveals itself to be a manufactured copy corresponding neither to the 1609 nor to the 1615 edition—an authentic “fake” that unintentionally validates the distinction first introduced by Nelson Goodman between allographic and autographic arts, which I discuss later.54 By assuming the dynamic view of the relationships between text and work outlined above, librettos and scores, but also performances, all emerge as producing, and not simply embodying, the work, which thus consists of more than the sum of its textual parts. The work, that is, corresponds to an abstract, ideal, ever-absent entity, what is verbally referred to, in the case at hand, as “Monte­ verdi’s Orfeo,” encompassing, but also exceeding, both Orfeo del monteverde and Monteverdi: Orfeo.55 In figure 1 P1 stands for the 1607 premiere of Orfeo, the initial manifestation of the work in conjunction with the libretto, L1. These two texts are followed chronologically by the first manifestation of the score, S1. In turn, L and S generate further texts, that is further versions N of both libretto and score as well as further performances, all re-presenting the work. In other words: the work, intended as an ideal entity, resides in the three texts (L, S, and P) and in all of their versions, which have equal epistemological relevance regardless of their chronological position (and can even be separated by centuries in the case of Orfeo), their relationships varying according to historical circumstances. The arrows in figure 1 indicate “performance” in the specific etymological meaning of the term discussed above (as “that which awaits completion”), thus with a meaning that differs from the traditional and literal one illustrated by “P.” In this respect, the work that is opera is never fully realized, since its textual versions indefinitely defer completion. Finally, a corollary to this view is that the relationship between work and performance is mediated by many other factors than libretto and score, for example, historical contingencies (such as censorship, theater space, language of the libretto, etc.), the persona and vocal qualities of the singers, settings, lightings—in sum, all of the elements of a performance that score and libretto do not explicitly prescribe.  

 



Text, Context, Performance    29

W = Work

L = Libretto

S = Score P = Performance

Text W

(L1) P1

S1, (L2)S2, (L3)S3 ... (LN)SN // (LX)SX

P2, P3, P4 ... PN // PX

W

Figure 1. Work, text, and performance in Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Adapted from Joseph Grigely, “The Textual Event,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 176.

It is significant that, in the case of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, performance and libretto are separated by two years from the publication of the score, which appears to be almost an afterthought, although, as discussed, a strategic one from the point of view of the patrons. As said, the score fulfilled a publicizing function, the effects of which persist today, when it still generates further performances. Nevertheless, operatic performances, according to the view outlined above, cannot be considered simply incarnations of scores, since they do not merely materialize the ever-absent work, but they indeed produce it—they are as much a “field of production” of meaning as is the score, to again use Barthes’s words. Consequently, the study of performance—of any performance (P1, 2, 3 etc.)—is relevant to interpreting the work, when this is intended “as a non-tangible idea represented by sequential series of texts, whether these texts are inscribed or performed.” 56 In this view, the study of contemporary operatic performances is as hermeneutically valid as the analysis of scores. At first, it might appear unrealistic to consider performance and score on an equal epistemological plane. A performance is an ephemeral and unrepeatable event, which lives through its unique materiality in a certain time and place. Although one can appreciate and make interpretive use of live recordings, nothing, we know, matches the experience of “being there” in the audience. When an opera fan speaks of “Callas’s Violetta” or “Domingo’s Otello,” she refers to the unique experience of hearing and seeing those famous singers performing in a certain place and time. A score, on the contrary, is a different artistic manifestation, a more permanent one. It is true that, unlike performances in their uniqueness, scores are objects that can assume many guises, and indeed the history of music editions often provides fascinating material to recapture a work’s reception. However, all versions of a score can be claimed to represent the same work, even if value judgments of them vary in time. One in fact can legitimately identify as “Monteverdi’s Orfeo” a facsimile of the 1609 edition, the Eulenburg “Urtext” version edited by Claudio Gallico, a performing edition with realized continuo  

 

 

30    La Musica and Orfeo  

parts (such as that by Denis Stevens), and the vocal score of the 1904 abridged and orchestrated version by Vincent D’Indy, with text in French. In discussing similar modes of artistic manifestation, Nelson Goodman and, after him, Gérard Genette, employ a useful distinction between “autographic” and “allographic” works of art—a distinction relevant to opera as a hybrid genre since its inception.57 Allographic arts consist of ideal objects for which it makes no sense to differentiate between an original and its copies, since both legitimately represent the work. This is the case of literary texts, for example a novel— all copies of Harry Potter have equal legitimacy to represent J. K. Rowling’s book, as any reader in the world enjoys exactly the same work, even in translation. Autographic arts instead consist of unique and unrepeatable acts represented by material objects. Paintings such as de Chirico’s Orfeo solitario are such works— any reproduction of this Orfeo undoubtedly represents a fake with respect to the original work shown at the Museo Bilotti in Rome. Interestingly, Genette places music performance in both “regimes,” as he calls them.58 On the one hand, performances (and, of course, scores) are manifestations of the musical work (which Genette, however, calls “text”) and music is, in this respect, an allographic art. On the other hand, a performance such as the legendary “Callas’s Violetta” is a unique and unrepeatable act, as is “Harnoncourt’s Orfeo,” meaning the 1975 Zurich event, to which the inscription Monteverdi: Orfeo on a poster advertising it would have referred. From this perspective, de Chirico’s Orfeo and Harnoncourt’s Orfeo belong to the same regime, the autographic one. This fact emphasizes the metadiscursive aspect of the painting and its congeniality with the topic, explicating, at least in part, its effectiveness. The view that performance partakes of both regimes—the allographic and the autographic—allows it to be seen as doubly productive. As an allographic art, performance is tied more to the work-as-text, thus to libretto and score (this situation is more prominent on the left-hand side of figure 1). As an autographic art, instead, performance is tied more to the work as generated by performance itself (this is more evident on the right-hand side of figure 1). The first regime places performance in a closer relationship with issues of intentionality—to a point that, in the case of Orfeo, the Harnoncourt–Ponelle production attempts, almost desperately, to recreate the premiere. The second regime instead involves issues of reception to a higher degree, as well as a more direct relationship with contemporaneity. Thus a staging of Orfeo such as Christopher Alden’s one premiered at Opera North (Leeds, UK) in February 2007 adopts modern costumes and takes place in the highly sexually charged atmosphere of a 1980s brothel-like salon. Operatic performances indeed exist within and thanks to a productive tension between, one the one hand, adherence to those “scripts” that are score and libretto, and, on the other, the real and imaginary worlds of the time itself in which the event takes place, which is manifested in the labor involved in the  

 

 

 

 

 

 



Text, Context, Performance    31

production and in its final result. In the case of the 1607 Mantuan performance of Orfeo that labor was symbolic, as we have seen, of the rank of the patron; even more so was, as I suggest, the later publication of the score. The two years that occurred between the events of the performance and the score publication symbolize the tension generated by them, propelling the subsequent history of opera. This tension between text and performance—to use terms that I have, however, attempted to deconstruct—informs the following two chapters, in which Orfeo is again my case study to investigate the issue of agency in texted-music performance. Agency cannot be identified only univocally by emphasizing exclusively the yet crucial role of nobility and patronage in the original production of Monteverdi’s first opera. Indeed, Orfeo presents a variety of possibilities—a true multi-vocality—which, however, is exhausted only in the life of performance. After having identified in prologues a particularly fruitful locus to deal with subjectivity, I introduce a theoretical framework for this concept that emerges out of a performance-oriented reading of passages from the opera, and I present further tools and vocabulary that are also put to use in parts II and III. Finally, in chapter 3 I use this conceptual apparatus to interpret a recent staging of Orfeo.  

 

 

 

2



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity

Prol o g ue s a s Pa r at e x t s

Between May 24 and June 8, 1608, Mantua was the site of an extraordinary series of daily performative events that placed the city on the European map as a major capital of spectacle, in what was perhaps the climax of the larger festivity cycle involving northern Italian courts at the turn of the century, briefly described in the previous chapter. The occasion was provided by the celebrations following the wedding of Prince Francesco Gonzaga, the dedicatee of Orfeo, to Margherita of Savoy, which had taken place in Turin in conjunction with that of the other daughter of the Duke of Savoy, Isabella, to Alfonso d’Este. The Gonzagas intended the Mantuan festivities to outshine those organized by the Savoy court. They did so by relying not only on local artistic forces, including Monteverdi (who composed the opera Arianna as well as the prologue for Battista Guarini’s play Idropica), but also on reinforcements from Florence, among them librettist Ottavio Rinuccini and musician Marco da Gagliano (tenor Francesco Rasi, who had sung the role of Orpheus the year before and had taken part in Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s Il Rapimento di Cefalo during the 1600 Florentine festivities, performed in both Arianna and Gagliano’s Dafne). Whereas the Turin court mainly distinguished itself in staging fancy ballets, and the Florentines specialized in marvelous stage machinery and scenography, the Mantuans prided themselves on two kinds of spectacle, the new genre of opera and the ancient art of mock naval battles (naumachias). The mock naval battle organized for the 1608 festivities took place on May 31st, three days after the performance of Rinuccini and Monteverdi’s Arianna, and 32



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    33

was accompanied by fireworks launched from a castle built for the occasion on a provisional island on the Mantuan lake. The opera and the battle took the place of honor among the feste, allegrezze e tornei (“festivities, cheerful events, and tournaments”) described in Federico Follino’s “Summary of the sumptuous festivities put on during the year 1608 in the city of Mantua,” one of those propaganda booklets of which the Florentines were specialists.1 As with Rinuccini, whose entire libretto is reproduced in the Compendio, Follino let the engineer of the naval spectacle, Gabriele Bertazzolo, speak for himself (a few months later, the Medici asked the Gonzaga to release him to work for the wedding of Prince Cosimo in Florence). Attached to Bertazzolo’s description there are two impressive drawings, which the reader needs to unfold from the book. One depicts the lake with the reenactment of the naval battle between Turks and Christians, with a castle built on an artificial island (Mantua and its surroundings are seen in the background). The other drawing shows “the chariot on which [the virtue of] Fortitude recited in the naval battle with triumphant fireworks” (these were set off from the castle). Bertazzolo writes that, soon after the married couple arrived at the bank of the lake at the tocco delle Trombe e Tamburi (probably the Toccata from Orfeo, an emblem of the Gonzagas), a character impersonating the virtue of Fortitude appeared on a heavily ornamented chariot surfing the lake on wheels. Pulled by six sea horses and featuring the coat of arms of the houses of Savoy, Gonzaga, and Medici, the multilevel chariot carried, besides the main character armed with shield and helmet and seated on a throne on high, a few sirens at the back holding torches, and thirteen musicians dressed in war costumes sitting on the front steps. Starting its journey from the artificial island and accompanied by seven illuminated ships, the chariot eventually reached the public on the bank. Fortitude stood up and recited the following lines to introduce the four-hour action to follow:







4

A Voi Prole celeste, cui già diede chi formò il Sol, frenar Cittadi e Regni, e degli antichi Heroi più eccelsi e degni sormontar il valor, e l’alta fede,

8

e a voi coppia real, cui hoggi scuopre di letizia Imeneo sì largo fiume, vengo Nunzia d’Honor altero Nume ch’i nomi de’ mortali eterna, e l’opre.

12

La Fortezza son io, quella ch’a Rodi de l’invitto Amadeo la destra e ’l core tra l’Ottomane schiere al’ultim’hore cinsi d’ardir, e di perpetue lodi. Hor ne cristalli suoi il Mincio brama ..............................

34    La Musica and Orfeo  

18



22

ecco nel verde sen, d’armati legni scorgo naval conflitto a varii segni, e nell’onde a ferir gente guerriera .............................. sorgente homai d’oscura notte Aurora . . . 2

[1] To you, heavenly progeny, to whom [2] the maker of the Sun conceded the power to hold cities and kingdoms, [3] and to exceed the merit and faith [4] of the greatest and worthiest ancient heroes? // [5] and to you, royal couple, [6] to whom Hymeneus reveals this wide river of happiness, [7] I come as messenger of honor and proud God [8] who makes the names and deeds of the mortals eternal.  // [9] I am Fortitude, the one who in Rhodes [10] girded the sword and heart of the invincible Amadeo [11] with courage and endless praises [12] when he was fighting the Ottoman armies in the last battle. // [13] Now in its crystals the river Mincio desires . . . // [18] here in its green breast, with armed ships [19] I see the naval battle in various guises [20] and in the waves to wound warlike people . . . // [22] Aurora now arises out of the dark night . . .

The form and function of these lines are equivalent to those recited or sung by other allegorical or mythological characters in prologues of Italian late Renaissance spoken plays as well as of early operas, such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo: strophes of quatrains made up of hendecasyllabic lines rhyming ABBA (Ovidian ode); an address to, as well as a praise of, the audience, in this case the noble families and the princely couple (lines 1 and 5); the use of verbs of motion occasionally mentioning the place from which the character arrives (line 7, vengo); a reference to the action about to unfold, including the reference to characters, time, and objects (lines 18–22); and a statement concerning the identity itself of the character reciting or singing the prologue (line 9, la Fortezza son io). In early modern spectacles, prologues such as that of Fortitude are strategically located in a liminal position with the function of facilitating, for both artists and audiences, their transition from real to fictional spaces and times, ushering them through a rite of passage.3 At the same time, an equally crucial transition, that from person to persona, takes place within the identity of the characters themselves, a threshold first crossed by the character introducing the action as a fictional mediator. With the aid of particularly striking visual devices (e.g., through elaborate machinery and costumes, often carefully described by contemporary reporters, as in the above case), the character in the Prologue accomplishes this task by addressing the real public, unlike the other characters present in the action to follow, who mostly address each other. If performances, as discussed in the previous chapter, are considered as texts, prologues belong to “paratexts” such as frontispieces, title pages, prefaces, and dedications. Such thresholds have two related functions, a dialogic and an authorizing one. They work (as said) as privileged sites of intersubjective dialogue  



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    35

between author and public, and they display processes of authorization involving power dynamics (e.g., between patron, publisher, and writer). The first function— the dialogic one—is even more prominent in those prologues in which the character on stage is an author himself, such as “Ovidio” in Rinuccini’s Dafne, or a genre, such as “Tragedia” in his Euridice. In the early modern period, the second function—the authorizing one—flows in both directions when applied to patrons and artists, given that the authority of patrons so often overshadows that of creators to such a point that, in prologues, the axis from author to public-as-patron can be said to short-circuit.4 This is shown by the prologue to the Mantuan naval battle, which does not establish any authority deriving from the engineer of the spectacle, Bertazzolo. Rather, authorization derives from the patrons mentioned in lines 1 and 5, the Savoy and the Gonzaga families, which Fortitude, as one of the moral virtues traditionally ascribed to nobility, makes sure to address from the start. A virtue addressing those who embody it enacts a split that in effect transforms such representation into a self-representation. As a result, a divided subjectivity is publicly exposed. Despite being created within the same all-pervasive patronage system, plays and operas certainly cannot be compared in artistic dignity to mock naval battles. In the prologues written by Rinuccini for the earliest operas, characters such as Ovid, Tragedy, or Apollo allude to elevated artistic creation through literary or mythological references. In creating for Monteverdi’s Orfeo a prologue sung by a character named La Musica, Striggio took yet another step, in perfect tune with the role that his patron, Duke Vincenzo, assigned to music as a symbol of his noble taste. In a self-reflexive way La Musica uses herself as both medium and mediator to usher artists and public through the rite of passage necessary for them to make the transition from the “stage in the world” to “the world on stage.” Through and throughout her performance she makes clear that in opera—as opposed to spoken theater—it is music that establishes the coordinates of person, time, and place necessary to stage action. It is she who, self-consciously and ubiquitously inscribed in the text, is in charge of the narrative.  

 

 

 

 

 

“ I am M u s ic ”

Entering the stage alone, La Musica’s very first words are about her provenance from off stage, and are followed by her address to the audience, in the present tense:5 Monteverdi, Orfeo, Prologue, strophe 1 (La Musica)

1

Dal mio Permesso amato a voi ne vegno, incliti eroi, sangue gentil di regi, di cui narra la fama eccelsi pregi, né giugne al ver perch’è troppo alto il segno.

36    La Musica and Orfeo   [1] From my beloved Permessus I come to you, / illustrious heroes, royal blood of kings, / of whom Fame tells glorious deeds,  / but cannot approach the truth, so high the aim.

La Musica’s fluidity and liminality are implied by her pointing out that she comes from elsewhere, indeed from water (the river Permessus). The ritornello music accompanying her entrance works as yet another liminal element creating a fictional space for her in which she can locate and identify herself as a bodysubject, one capable of emotions, specifically of love (dal mio Permesso amato). Her words, moreover, allow her to immediately establish a channel of communication between herself and the public: addressing “you” (a voi) La Musica pauses to elaborate on a conventional praise of the Gonzagas, which occupies the rest of the quatrain. By opening up and then consolidating a channel between the “I” and the “you,” La Musica establishes that axis of communication which, in staged performances, runs perpendicularly to the stage—from characters to public— operating in conjunction with the one running parallel to the stage whenever characters address one another—the two axes of theatricality that I term, respectively, presentational and representational. In this Prologue La Musica establishes the basic coordinates of music-­dramatic discourse, those of person, place, and time, the “I, here, and now” essential to theatrical performance.6 She does so by adding force—or, to borrow from the terminology of speech-act theory, “illocutionary force”—to the communication flowing along the presentational axis. Such musical force is the added component that made the genre of opera, from its beginning, both a fascinating and problematic artistic manifestation. This is attested by the polemics about the lack of verisimilitude of characters singing continuously on stage; or, in the case of Orfeo, by the sense of wonder conveyed by that Mantuan courtier who wrote just before the premiere that “all the interlocutors will speak musically,” thus acknowledging the shift in the horizon of expectations of his contemporaries. In early opera, music enhances theatricality in a great variety of ways. For example, as far as monodic style is concerned, the spectrum of possibilities could range from cantar recitando (closer to presentational mode) to recitar cantando (more representational, or rappresentativo), according to Nino Pirrotta’s terminology (the former meaning “to sing while reciting,” the latter “to recite while singing”).7 Canzonetta-style pieces would definitely be located on the presentational side. A ballet or a choir would naturally address the public in a more presentational mode than, say, a dialogue among shepherds or an invocation to a god (although Monteverdi, as we shall see, is quick to blur this line). Finally, shifts in key areas are theatrically employed to differentiate the two modes—presentational and representational—from each other. In the first two acts of Orfeo, for example, Monteverdi uses the keys of G and g for presentational  

 

 

 

 

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    37

pieces.8 In act 1, G/g is used in the choral parts Vieni Imeneo and Lasciate i monti, in the madrigal-style section featuring the shepherds’ song Alcun non sia, and in the choir Ecco Orfeo with the final sinfonia; in act 2, in the canzonetta-style sections from Orpheus’s Ecco pur ch’a voi ritorno to Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi, in the sinfonia after the departure of the Messenger followed by the choir of the shepherds, and in the sinfonia II. The composer, in contrast, prefers the keys of d, a, F, and C for representational sections, that is, for those that are closer to situations typical of theatrical speech. These are, in act 1, the shepherd’s description of the wedding day and his invitation to sing (In questo lieto giorno), the nymph’s invocation Muse, honor di Parnaso, the shepherd’s renewed invitation to sing (Ma tu, gentil) and the one to proceed to the temple (Ma s’il nostro gioir); in act 2, the long section after Vi ricorda featuring the arrival of the Messenger, until her departure, and the powerful interjection of Ahi caso acerbo, which is in the “representational” key of a, although recurring within the “presentational” key of g in the Finale. In both acts, significantly, Orpheus’s great arias Rosa del ciel and Tu se’ morta dramatically stand out from the preceding and following sections, tonally speaking: both arias shift from the key of g (presentational) to that of d (representational) by the end of the piece, when action (i.e., representation) needs to resume. In conclusion, in Orfeo the choice of keys is determined less by the psychological state of the characters than by the function that these characters fulfill on stage according to whom they address, that is, according to the theatrical situation.9 In performance, moreover, changes of theatrical mode are not exclusively prescribed by the score: performers themselves create new meanings and effects by shifting the axis from representational to presentational in passages in which they directly address the public, and this can vary from performance to performance.10 The Orfeo prologue establishes dramatic coordinates by introducing the presentational mode, using the style that would have been termed, in Monteverdi’s time, aria, the one more closely associated with the mechanics of oral performance. The musical keys, however, are those that in the first two acts are used in a more representational way (d and a) and thus point, as the character does, to the action to come. Since music is constantly present throughout the opera as a constitutive feature of the genre, the presentational axis is, in any case, permanently active. This attests to the equally permanent trace left in the performance by the composer, by his “voice,” to use a narratological term.11 As explained by Luca Zoppelli, the opera composer cannot in effect “retreat” or conceal himself “behind” the voices of the characters, as the playwright does according to the classic Aristotelian distinction between mimesis and diegesis, the former characterizing spoken drama, the latter epic poems.12 In opera, precisely because of music, the diegetic element persists and cannot be set apart to let the mimetic one

38    La Musica and Orfeo  

fully characterize the genre, as is the case in musical intermedi alternating with spoken plays (a case in which the presentational and the representational modes are separated). This permanent aesthetic presence of the composer links opera to the epic and narrative genres, and is the feature that most distinguishes opera from spoken drama. In Orfeo La Musica immediately establishes that she is the narrator in charge of both axes; she makes all the difference in the new art form, if compared to spoken drama. This is evident, as we shall see, in the rest of the Prologue, but also in Monteverdi’s use of La Musica’s “own” ritornello—the one associated with her, which returns during the only two set changes in the opera (between acts 2 and 3, and 4 and 5) to reaffirm the role of the musical medium in conditioning the visual one.13 But lest we are tempted to see exclusively the composer-as-author behind La Musica’s presentational role, once again opera, the hybrid genre par excellence, is quick to deconstruct traditional categories, since this mode is the one that highlights, at the same time, the role of the performer, as in the oral tradition to which arias belong. This productive tension between composer and performer, as to which is the agent in charge of the two modes, emerges in all its implications in Orpheus’s Possente spirto in act 3, addressed to Charon:  

Monteverdi, Orfeo, act 3, “Possente Spirto” (Orpheus)

1

Possente spirto e formidabil nume, senza cui far passaggio a l’altra riva alma da corpo sciolta in van presume,



2

non viv’io no, che poi di vita è priva mia cara sposa, il cor non è più meco, e senza cor com’esser può ch’io viva?



3

A lei volt’ho il cammin per l’aër cieco, a l’inferno non già, ch’ovunque stassi tanta bellezza il paradiso ha seco.



4

Orfeo son io che d’Euridice i passi seguo per queste tenebrose arene, ove già mai per uom mortal non vassi.



5

O de le luci mie luci serene s’un vostro sguardo può tornarmi in vita, ahi, chi nega il conforto a le mie pene?



6 Sol tu, nobile dio, puoi darmi aita, né temer dèi che sopra un’aurea cetra sol di corde soavi armo le dita contra cui rigida alma invan s’impetra.



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    39 [1] O powerful spirit, and formidable god, / without whom no soul, freed from the body, / can presume to gain passage to the other bank, // [2] I am no longer living, no, since my dear spouse / is deprived of life, my own heart is no longer with me /  and without a heart, how can it be that I still live? // [3] To her I have made my way through the dark air / but not to hell, since wherever there is / such beauty as hers, there is paradise, also. // [4] I am Orpheus, who follows in the footsteps of Eurydice / across these gloom-ridden sands, / where never mortal man has gone before. // [5] O serene light of my eyes, / if one look of yours can restore life to me,  /  ah, who can deny comfort to my suffering? // [6] You alone, O noble god, can give me aid,  / neither should you fear me, since my fingers are armed / with nothing more than the sweet strings of a golden lyre, / against which the harshest soul in vain hardens his heart.

In this aria the “controversy” between composer and performer is solved by Monteverdi through a magnificent compromise. Orpheus addresses, on the one hand, Charon, whom he wants to persuade to let him cross the Styx. But on the other hand, since Possente spirto is the protagonist’s musical showpiece in the opera, he must address also the public, whom he, as a singer, intends to persuade as well, although for a different purpose (hence the choice of G as a presentational key). Caught in this rhetorical dilemma, Monteverdi writes two versions of the aria in the score, demanding that the singer choose either one or the other (Orfeo . . . canta una sola delle due parti). The first version, unadorned, is written in the stile rappresentativo typical of, say, Peri, that is, in recitar cantando style: its words can be clearly understood by Charon, this style offering more opportunities for the singer to complement his performance with gestures. The other version instead is closer to Caccinian cantar recitando style: it is heavily embellished, matching in vocal virtuosity the elaborate passaggi played in alternation by the instruments.14 It is not by chance that in today’s performances we never hear the first version, the representational one (unornamented). Charon in fact is not persuaded by Possente spirto and indeed falls asleep after the aria. To sing the unadorned version would represent for Orpheus a failure, in mimetic terms. It is more effective for him to address the public in a diegetic mode by performing his crowdpleasing aria. The first two strophes of the text, accordingly, are dominated first by the address to Charon’s “spirto,” then, from strophe 2 on, by a persistent emphasis on first-person singular pronouns and possessive determiners (non vivo io . . . mia cara sposa . . . il cor non è più meco . . . ch’io viva . . . Orfeo son io). This is interrupted in strophe 3 by a reference to the “she” (lei) of Eurydice, a shift that, however, does not change the musical style of the piece. Orpheus, caught in his glorious embellishments, could very well continue to speak about himself, Eurydice being merely his alter ego. A more crucial shift in address occurs in strophe 5, when Orpheus apostro-

40    La Musica and Orfeo  

phizes Euridyce’s luci (“eyes”). This shift, in contrast to the previous one, has deep musical and theatrical implications. At this point in the music the bass pattern stops and Orpheus gradually switches back to representational, mimetic mode, leaving behind all ornamentation; until the instruments, instead of alternating with him, accompany Orpheus in a direct address to Charon for the final strophe: “You alone, O noble God, can give me aid,” to which Charon briefly replies, courteously but unmoved, by resuming the melodic pattern he had used before the aria, perhaps already falling sleep. At the climactic point of his performance, before repossessing the action, Orpheus sings his most powerful assertion of subjectivity: Orfeo son io (“I am Orpheus,” strophe 4), words that echo those used by La Musica to introduce herself in the prologue (“I am Music”): Monteverdi, Orfeo, Prologue, strophes 2 – 5 (La Musica)  







2 Io la Musica son, ch’a i dolci accenti so far tranquillo ogni turbato core, et or di nobil ira, et or d’amore posso infiammar le più gelate menti. 3 Io su Cetera d’or cantando soglio mortal orecchio lusingar talora, e in guisa tal de l’armonia sonora de le rote del ciel più l’alme invoglio. 4

Quinci a dirvi d’Orfeo desio mi sprona, d’Orfeo che trasse al suo cantar le fere, e servo fe’ l’inferno a sue preghiere, gloria immortal di Pindo e d’Elicona.

5

Or mentre i canti alterno, or lieti, or mesti, non si mova augellin fra queste piante, né s’oda in queste rive onda sonante, et ogni auretta in suo camin s’arresti.



[2] I am Music, who with sweet sounds / can soothe all troubled hearts, / and now with noble anger, now with love, / can inflame the most frozen minds. [3] I, singing to a golden lyre, am accustomed / to sometimes delight the mortal ear, / and in such a manner of the sonorous harmony / of the heavenly circles I inspire the soul. [4] From here I am urged to tell you of Orpheus, / of Orpheus who subdued the wild beasts with his song, / and made Hades submit to his pleas, / immortal glory of Pindus and Helicon. [5] Now, as my songs are in turn both happy and sad, / let no bird move within these trees, / nor any wave sound against these shores, / and let every breath of wind be stilled in its path.



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    41

In strophes 2 and 3 La Musica defines her own identity in terms of ideological assumptions typical of premodern times, such as the power of affections and the harmony of the spheres. Strophe 4, however, features a significant change revealed by the only two verbs in the Prologue that are placed in the past tense: “subdued” and “made” (trasse and fe’, lines 2 and 3). These verbs, however, are carefully introduced only after the presentational axis is reaffirmed in the first line through the use of present tense and of the first and second personal pronouns (dirvi / mi sprona). This change of tense, significantly preceded by the verb “to say,” signals la Musica’s highlighting of her narrative role. She not only shows or points to herself, the public, or the stage, she not only is able to make statements or comments, but she is able to narrate, to tell stories, such as that of Orpheus. Since Orpheus is, in the myth, both musician and narrator—in Ovid, he narrates the stories of Pygmalion, Ganymede, and Myrra (10.86–end)—La Musica is indeed telling her own story, in effect deconstructing, in the act of performing her self, the duality of telling vs. showing. La Musica’s establishment of her self as both the commentator and the narrator emerges through those meanings that are especially prominent in performance. These are today referred to, in a variety of disciplines, as discourse meanings.15 In textual analysis, meaning can be intended in two senses. In the traditional sense, it is made up of the references that the text makes to ideas, affects, and objects— for example: the emotional and ethical power of music in strophe 2, the music of the spheres in strophe 3, the plot of the opera in strophe 4, and its stage settings in the fifth and last strophe. This is the meaning that is usually investigated in discussing texted music. Meaning, however, can also be interpreted as shifting from the referential to the concurrent pragmatic-semantic dimension, that is, to the textual level of enunciation, the level most relevant to performance.16 In the case of the Orfeo Prologue, pragmatic or discourse meanings are even more pertinent since the text spontaneously comes to inhabit the event of the performance at the very moment in which La Musica—music—actually sings. In this respect Monteverdi’s musical setting enables communicative strategies that are already inherent in the verbal text, performance eliding the gap between itself and the text in which it is, in part, encoded. The very first word of strophes 2 and 3, “I” (io), has an extraordinary communicative power, in two senses. On the one hand, it represents, on paper (the libretto and the score), a trace, an index pointed toward a character that is only virtually present. From the linguistic point of view the word io is an empty sign that can be “filled” only with knowledge of the person to whom it corresponds, in this case La Musica.17 In the reality of performance, moreover, this io is “filled” with the body of the performer, who transforms the empty sign from a virtual into a concrete entity, generating what I term a presence effect.18 On the other  

 

 

 

 

 

42    La Musica and Orfeo  

hand, the act of singing “I” results in a musical utterance that points to itself. It is a self-reflexive act with respect to musical discourse, generating what I term a self-reflexive effect. Since it is Music who sings, the effect of her singing io is also that of a mise en abyme. This double function of the io-as-sung—to generate both a bodily presence and a self-reflexive act—qualifies this event as an act of enunciation according to the terminology used in today’s semiologicallyoriented studies of verbal and visual discourses.19 Music’s power, in this view, is not simply that of moving affects or reflecting celestial harmonies, but consists also of her appropriation of discoursive features of verbal and visual languages, features that have their foundation in the performer-as-subject. The two effects just discussed—the presence and the self-reflexive effects—can thus be termed subject-effects (to which the section concluding this chapter is devoted). By being sung by a character named La Musica in the process of establishing herself as a dramatis persona, the Orfeo prologue blurs the distinction between text and performance, explored in the previous chapter (from a different perspective). The prologue defines itself as a work (opus) through the very act of performance, in so doing defining, in turn, the genre it introduces, opera. In this light, Adorno’s definition of Orfeo as the “first authentic opera” (see the introduction to part I) appears even more to the point. Monteverdi and Striggio created the archetypical music drama by beginning it with a self-commentary on music performance, an act that still lies at the conceptual basis of the contemporary idea of “musical dramaturgy” in opera studies. As Carl Dahlhaus explains it, the underlying assumption of studying musical dramaturgy is that, in opera, “music is the primary factor that constitutes the work of art (opus) and that constitutes it as drama.” 20 Monteverdi (and Striggio) could not have agreed more.  

 

 

 

The Prol o g ue of M o n t e v e r di ’ s O rfeo a s   Pe r fo r ma n ce

A large spectrum of meanings, both verbal and musical, emerges from the Orfeo Prologue when it is approached not only as a “setting” of a text simply reflecting affects, concepts, and ideas, but as an act of verbal and musical enunciation, as a verbal-musical utterance—in sum, as performance. Both discursive and referential meanings are in fact conveyed by those accenti (strophe 2) through which La Musica is able to exercise her power and move the affects of her listeners. Discourse meanings—those on which I mostly focus here and in the rest of this book—emerge in communicative situations resembling those of ordinary language, such as staged performances, in which contextual factors encoded in speech come into play (as opposed to meanings emerging in texts meant exclusively to be read silently). In these situations words such as “I,” “today,” and “there” have the function of situating the speaker’s utterance in a specific time  

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    43

and place. They appear as semantically “empty” words that are totally dependent on the context of the utterance. They do not characterize or qualify someone or something, but point to a person, a time, or a place, firmly anchoring speech in context. Since the 1930s, when linguist Karl Bühler studied these words in depth, they have been given a variety of names—“shifters” by Roman Jakobson, “indexicals” by Charles S. Pierce, “embrayeurs” by Emile Benveniste—the most common term being “deictics,” from the Greek word meaning “to show,” “to point out.” 21 Bühler observed that pointing—an act frequently seen on the operatic stage— is the first and fundamental gesture that connects body and mind to the external world, an act that is embodied in human voice through deixis. This is especially true regarding the first personal pronoun, which by virtue of its self-referentiality has, as Bühler claims, a distinctive Klangcharakter. When, for example, somebody knocks on the door and says “it is I,” or “it’s me,” it is easy to identify her by her voice alone, without any need of her mentioning her name. Through deixis, voice and identity become inextricably bound. In the first strophe of the Orfeo prologue La Musica, as we have seen, points first to herself and then to the public (this can be observed in performances when the singer places her hand on her chest and then gestures toward the public). To do so she uses the personal type of deixis, words such as mio and voi, “mine” and “you.” In the next two strophes La Musica emphasizes even more her own subjectivity by beginning them with the personal deictic word “I,” io (notice that in Italian, contrary to English, personal pronouns are not grammatically necessary in a sentence, thus their use is all the more emphatic). The fourth and fifth strophes open with the words quinci and hora, meaning “from here” and “now,” exemplifying two other types of deixis: the spatial deixis (“here”) and the temporal one (“now”). Personal, temporal and spatial deixis are the most common categories used by linguists, who also ascribe deictic meaning to verbs of motion, such as “to come” and “to go.” In this respect, the first line of the prologue presents a very dense compound as far as deictic meaning is concerned. A final type of deixis—one important, as observed above, in defining subjectivity—consists of shifts of tense, for example from present to past (as in strophe 4), which signals a shift from description to narration, and as such has been much discussed in narratological theories. How does a musical setting convey deictic meanings? The Orfeo Prologue presents a solution (one of many) that is ideal for the crucial role that a performer must play in this liminal, transitional part of the opera. Monteverdi’s adoption of a quasi-strophic setting acknowledges, but does not adhere to, the convention that, in opera, singers and not composers are entrusted with the task of creating prologues in performance. In early modern Italy, aria was, as mentioned, the term that would have been used to identify improvised formulas used by singers to set strophes of an equal number of lines featuring the same rhyme scheme. Most settings of operatic prologues, such as those by Peri and Caccini of Ottavio  

 

 

 

 

 

44    La Musica and Orfeo  

Rinuccini’s Euridice, appear in the score as setting only one strophe, the text of the other stanzas printed below it and meant to be sung on the same aria formula, varied each time according to localized meanings. In the setting of the Orfeo Prologue, the quasi-ostinato bass assumes the unifying function of delimiting five distinct music-discoursive “blocks,” each marked by a single deictic word at the start of the strophe (mio, io, io, quinci, and ora). In the setting of the first half of each strophe’s first line, these five words are isolated and emphasized by the long note placed on each of them, by the initial declamatory character of the melody, and by the stable harmony. In the same way that deictics firmly anchor speech to context in the text, Monteverdi anchors the setting of each strophe both to a stable musical beginning and to a solid bass foundation—indeed any singer improvising to the accompaniment of an instrument probably would have done instinctually more or less the same thing. It is in the rest of the setting, however, that the individual voice of the composer is better heard (although, again, it might have echoed that of singers, including the one performing at the premiere, Giovanni Gualberto Magli). After the first half-line, the verbal content of the five strophes has more to do, as mentioned, with referential meaning, the one prevalent, for example, in words set through so-called “madrigalisms.” These words, consisting of names and adjectives, have a different communicative function than deictic ones. In his theory of language as utterance, Bühler accordingly assigned them to an altogether different conceptual sphere, which he called the “symbolic field,” as opposed to the “deictic field,” defining them as “naming words.” The symbolic field consists of the abstract and conceptual grasping of the world and its naming. One can analyze a text or a speech according to Bühler’s distinction by identifying either deictic or naming words. Indeed this strategy, as shown throughout this book, is effective in analyzing texts set to music. Bühler’s distinction is exemplified in our prologue by the symmetrical musical organization internal to each strophe. After the first half-line, the focus of the setting is no longer, as at the beginning of each strophe, the establishment of the theatrical-musical situation through pointing words carrying deictic meaning. Emphasis shifts instead to the musical representation of the symbolic meaning conveyed by naming words (names and adjectives); in other words, the musical setting conveys, mainly through the melody (as opposed to the “anchoring” strophic bass), no longer what words show but what they say—i.e., symbolic, not deictic meaning. Thus, for example, in the setting of the second strophe the quality of tranquillo (“quiet”) musically contrasts with that of ira (“wrath”) and of gelate (“frozen”), while in the third strophe the armonia sonora (“sonorous harmony”) of the third line is emphasized. Finally, the musical rests in the fifth strophe evoke the Arcadian setting to which the words refer. By highlighting both pointing and naming words—successively (through mel 

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    45

Example 1. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo (Venice, 1609), act 1, Nymph.

Ninfa

b. c.

 &b c Œ œ œ œ

œ

? c b



œ œ.

j œ 

Œ œ 







SiaIilvo-stro can - to al





no - stro suon

con - cor



U

w

-

de

U w

ody) as well as simultaneously (through the bass line)—Monteverdi’s strophic setting of the Prologue adheres to the discursive arrangement of the five stanzas—or, to use an early modern terminology, to their rhetorical dispositio. That Monteverdi was particularly sensitive to the double semantic nature of the text—to deictic and symbolic meanings—is shown by the pattern emerging from his own modifications to the libretto. These modifications reveal that the composer’s well-known concern for effective theatrical communication found a productive outlet not only through the musical imitation of affects, as conveyed by symbolic words, but also through the equal care that he devoted to the treatment of deictic words. In the Prologue, for example, Monteverdi changes the text of the third line of strophe 3 e in guisa tal de l’harmonia sonora (“and in such a manner of the sonorous harmony”) into a smoother e in questa guisa a l’armonia sonora (“and in this manner to the sonorous harmony”), replacing the word tal with the more effective deictic word questa. In act 1, the line that ends the Nymph’s speech addressing the Muses: col vóstro suón, nostr’ármonía s’accórde (spoken accents are marked) becomes in the setting: sia il vóstro cánto al nóstro suón concórde (thus from: “with your sound, our harmony accords” to: “let your song concord with our sound”). The change of accent and the elimination of the caesura between suon and nostr’armonia (see the comma) have the effect of highlighting the two deictics “your” and “our” (that is, vostro and nostro: note that in the libretto line only vostro bears an accent). Also, Monteverdi’s change further emphasizes the sound /o/ by replacing armonía with suón soon before the final word of the line (concórde), which is accented on the same vowel /o/, indeed reiterating it twice (the main accents in the libretto line: o o a i o become in Monteverdi’s modification: o a o o o). In turn, these textual modifications allow the composer to build a sequential passage (example 1: a'–bâ'–c''–d'' / d'–e'–f'–g') by which the opposition between vostro and nostro is mirrored; in setting this revised line Monteverdi disregards the synalœphe canto^al (-to and al being set by the two notes d'' and d') so that the division marks the beginning of the second musical unit (al nostro suon concorde). The rhythmic differentiation between the settings of vostro and nostro within the two melodically symmetrical sequential units, and the detachment of the two final words characterized by the /o/ sound, add variety to this  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46    La Musica and Orfeo  

line’s setting. It is not coincidental that these strategies are deployed in lines that thematize music.22 Monteverdi is eager to create parallel musical structures whenever the text offers the opportunity, for example in the first aria sung by Orpheus, Rosa del ciel (act 1), in which deictics play an important role in orienting the musical setting. In praise of Eurydice, Orpheus sings the lines Se tanti cori avessi / quanti occhi ha ’l ciel eterno (“If I had as many hearts as the eternal sky has eyes [i.e., stars]”) and then adapts the same music to the words: e quante chiome / han questi colli ameni il verde maggio (“and as these pleasant hills have leaves in the green month of May”). For this second syntactical unit Striggio, however, had provided the composer with the words: e quante chiome / sogliono i colli aver l’aprile e ’l maggio (“and as hills have leaves in April and May”). For Monteverdi, however, the “hills” were, concretely, “these hills,” those around Orpheus, up there on the stage (whether or not they appeared as sets). Hence he changed Striggio’s text. The musician, that is, was more interested in deictic meaning—in offering an opportunity for the singer to make a gesture and point at the hills—than in the symbolic meaning conveyed by naming words such as “April” and “May,” which must have sounded to him unsuited to be set to music conceived for the stage. Rosa del ciel famously starts with an invocation to the sun, a reference to the Mantuan Academy of the Invaghiti and a reiteration of the Platonic theme running through the opera, related to the Gonzagas’ patronage (see previous chapter). But soon after the invocation, Orpheus shifts his gaze from upward (to the sky) to downward, toward Eurydice, who evidently has either entered stage during the invocation or has been silently present from the beginning of the act, since she is nowhere mentioned or addressed before. As soon as the music moves from the key of g to that of B-flat, Striggio offers an opportunity for a musical parallelism that Monteverdi quickly exploits: the musical phrase setting the lines Fu ben felice il giorno, / mio ben, che pria ti vidi (“It was truly a happy day, / my love, when I first saw you”) is followed by the one, slightly varied, on: e più felice l’hora,  / che per te sospirai (“and happier still the hour / when I sighed for you”). Monteverdi emphasizes the words mio ben (“my love”) and per te (“for you”), highlighting them through the “foreign” note C á, the first time in the melody (c á ''), the second one in the bass (c á), in a chiasmic relationship, each time pausing on them. In the setting of the next line: poi ch’al mio sospirar tu sospirasti (“since at my sighs you sighed”), we breathe with Orpheus as he “corrects” the c á '' into cà'', pausing on the word tu (“you”) before cadencing on d' (example 2). Monteverdi similarly emphasizes deictics in other passages of Orfeo through melodic and rhythmic underlining. Word repetition—a device rarely used by composers in recitative but one that Monteverdi uses extensively in his late operas to emphasize deictics—is significantly reserved in Orfeo to only two passages,  

 

 

 

Example 2

Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    47

Example 2. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo (Venice, 1609), act 1, Orfeo (from “Rosa del ciel”). Orfeo

Vb cŒ œ

b. c.

?b c Œ œ

œ . œr œ . œr œ J J

j j œ œ œ. Nœ #œ

œ . r j # œr J œ œ. 

Fu ben fe - li - ceIil gior - no Mio ben

Vb 

di.

E



V b #



ra - i



più

œ

œ

fe - li - ce l’ho - ra

œ

che pria



œ. œ . r J R Jœ œ œ

Œ œ

?  b

?b w

œ

œ



ti vi -



 j j œ œ œ

Che per te



j œ ‰ œj . œr

so - spi -

#

‰ # œj œj œj œ . œj n œ ‰ Jœ œ ‰ N œr œr  w

Poi ch’al mio so - spi - rar

œ œ

tu



so - spi - ra - sti







both crucial from the dramatic point of view: Orpheus’s lament “Tu se’ morta” in act 2, and his powerful invocation “Rendetemi il mio ben” in act 3. In both cases, word repetition achieves the result not only of underscoring an intensified emotional state by conveying symbolic and affective meanings, but also of emphasizing the protagonist’s subjectivity by communicating deictic meaning. In Tu se’ morta the lines of Striggio’s text Tu se’ morta mia vita, ed io respiro? Tu se’, tu se’ pur ita per mai più non tornare, ed io rimango? (You are dead, my life, and do I still breathe?  / you are, you are gone from me /  never to return, and yet do I remain here?)

become in Monteverdi’s version Tu se’ morta [se’ morta] mia vita ed io respiro? Tu se’ da me partita [se’ da me partita] per mai più [mai più] non tornare, ed io rimango?23

48    La Musica and Orfeo  

Striggio’s version includes three second-person deictics (tu) and three first-person deictics (mia and, twice, io). Monteverdi instead shifts the dramatic and psychological focus to Orpheus’s subjectivity by adding two instances of da me and eliminating one instance of tu. Furthermore, the repetition of se’ morta and mai più points to the fact that, for Orpheus, his identity is inextricably linked to a temporal dimension—one tragically defined by Eurydice’s death.  

Di a l o g ic Subjec t i v i t y

In Orpheus’s Tu se’ morta the “you” of Eurydice is physically absent, a situation that Bühler suggestively defines as deixis am phantasma, in contrast to demonstratio ad oculos, in which the “you” is face to face with the “I.” Even in the absence of a physical addressee, the piece exemplifies a particular dimension of subjectivity highlighted by the use of deictics: that of a dialogic subjectivity anchored to a specific space and time, to a specific situation occurring in the “here” and “now” of performance. As we shall see by again discussing Tu se’ morta, this dimension of subjectivity can also be extended to the relationship of the work with the past, relating the “now” with the “then.” In dialogic subjectivity, self and other are not abstract concepts, but concrete instances of the “I” and “you” emerging in the reality of speech and song—that is, in the reality of performance. In this respect, because of the proximity of speech and song in early opera, which maintained close links to spoken theater, the boundaries between self and other could be explored by musicians such as Monteverdi in unique ways.24 The composer embraced Vincenzo Galilei’s invitation to learn from theater actors, and Iacopo Peri’s “imitating in song a person speaking” (imitar col canto chi parla).25 As known, Monteverdi invoked a seconda prattica in which music follows the text, or, as he put it, harmonia is the servant of oratione.26 Oratione is, rhetorically, the text-as-performed—speech—not the text in the sense of a written product to then be “set” to music (as would be, for example, a Goethe poem set in a Schubert lied). Oratione is ab origine music, its layout on paper being only a derivative format devised for practical purposes. In early opera, music, by appropriating discursive features of oratione, became able to effectively communicate subjectivity on stage. This late Renaissance subjectivity, however, was from the start relational, dialogic, because oral-verbal language itself is inherently so.27 Subjectivity became the condition of possibility for the musical-verbal communication occurring both among characters on stage and between characters and public. Indeed, the creation of a “public” as a listening subject was a by-product of this dialogic process.28 As highlighted with unprecedented clarity by linguist Emile Benveniste, subjectivity and language implicate one another. Benveniste’s account of this relation 

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    49

ship has been enormously influential not only in linguistics but also in fields as varied as literary criticism, art history, theater, and film studies. I briefly recapitulate Benveniste’s main points as relevant to our topic, before returning to the main case study.29 Subjectivity, on the one hand, is the essential condition for language since it is “the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject.’ ” “Language is possible”—Benveniste continues—“only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse.” On the other hand, language, Benveniste claims, is the “possibility of subjectivity,” this last being in this respect “the emergence into being of a fundamental property of language.” As the linguist writes in an influential statement: “ ‘ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’ . . . It is in and through language that the speaker constitutes himself as a subject,” so that “the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.” This last point is particularly relevant since it implies that it is in the practice of language—i.e., in discourse— that the making of subjectivity can be best observed. Texted music performance offers in this respect a privileged point of observation, if texts are considered from the point of view adopted by linguistic pragmatics, the discipline that studies discourse and has developed Benveniste’s intuitions. Subjectivity emerges, for Benveniste, through three specific markers. The first and most important markers are personal pronouns, among which “I” is the most important since it “refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that . . . has only momentary reference” since “the reality to which it refers is the reality of discourse.” “I” and “you” are mutually implicated and need to be distinguished from “he”: “ ‘person’ belongs only to I/you and is lacking in he.” The second markers of subjectivity consist of other classes of pronouns, demonstrative adverbs and adjectives. They are “indicators of deixis” that “organize the spatial and temporal relationships around the subject taken as a referent.” Words such as: this, that, now, yesterday, the year before, here, there, etc. are all defined “only with respect to instances of discourse in which they occur, that is, in dependence upon the ‘I’ which is proclaimed in discourse.” Finally, subjectivity emerges in language through expressions of temporality, in which the “present” is “the coincidence of the event described with the instance of discourse that describes it.” This, for example, emerges in shifts of verb tenses, like the one discussed above in strophe 4 of the Prologue. Benveniste’s anchoring of subjectivity to time—a connection made explicit in philosophy since Augustine but brought by the French linguist into a fully intersubjective context—allows the exploration of multiple dimensions of dialogue. In drama and in texted musical works, these dimensions can be extended to include the relationship between earlier and later works and characters. In staged performances, actors and characters live immersed both within a represented time  

 

 

 

 

 

50    La Musica and Orfeo  

(that of the plot) and within the time of the representation itself (the time of the performance). Drawing from Benveniste’s view of time and subjectivity, it can be claimed, however, that characters are also implicated in the intertextual relationships that the individual work establishes with other works situated in the present and in the past, at the levels of both text and performance. In this way, the “I” and “you” of the characters enter into a relationship with the present and the past of the work in which they perform. This relationship with the past is theorized in the Renaissance under the umbrella-concept of imitation. This term is often intended today as a mere transfer of one text into another text—hypotext and hypertext, to use Gérard Genette’s terminology.30 Imitation, however, involves much more than a relationship between texts along the axis of time: it also involves a relationship between two subjects—one’s appropriation of another—whether the subject is the author or the character of the work. This view implies a subject who is able to entertain such a dialogue with the “other” located in the past, as well as a belief that dialogue is an essential condition for any creative act—a fundamental tenet of late Renais­sance discourses.31 Through their dialogic nature, dramatic (and musicdramatic) works bring this subjective element even more into the foreground. The libretto of Orfeo, as scholars have gradually discovered, is saturated with intertextuality, thus with the type of dialogic subjectivity just described.32 In the first three lines of Tu se’ morta for example (discussed earlier), Orpheus not only performs his own self in relationship with an (absent) other, whom he addresses in that very moment and in the present tense (a performance that in the rest of the piece unfolds the demigod’s transformation from contemplation of his own sorrows to resolution to take action). The protagonist also echoes, thus relating himself to, at least three passages from previous dramatic works. He shares with two of them a similar dramatic situation, and—this is relevant to my argument— a similar use of first- and second-person deictic words to convey it. The first reference present in the first three lines of Tu se’ morta is to Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice, the 1600 libretto set to music by Iacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. Toward the end of this opera, the choir of nymphs and shepherds rejoices at the release of Eurydice from Hell by singing the words: Tu se’, tu se’ pur quella /  ch’in queste braccia accolta / lasciasti il tuo bel velo alma disciolta (You are, you are that one / who, gathered in these arms,  / left your beautiful veil, released soul); to these words Eurydice replies by reiterating another deictic word: Quella, quella son io, per cui piangeste (that one, that one I am, for whom you wept). This reference must be seen within that competitive Mantuan-Florentine context outlined in the previous chapter, and parallels other cross-references in both music and text of the two operas, much discussed by scholars.33 The second reference in Tu’ se morta inscribes Orfeo in the tradition of pastoral tragicomedy exemplified by Guarini’s Il pastor fido, and does so by relating  

 

 

 

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    51

Orpheus to Mirtillo. The Guarinian shepherd opens act 3 with an address to Spring, which, however, he quickly turns, in Petrarchan guise, into one to the absent beloved Amarilli:

1 4

10

O primavera, gioventù dell’anno .............................. tu torni ben, ma teco non tornano i sereni e fortunati dì de le mie gioie; tu torni ben, tu torni, ma teco altro non torna che del perduto mio caro tesoro la rimembranza misera e dolente.

[1] O Springtime, youth of the year . . . [4] you return indeed, but with you [5] do not return the bright [6] and lucky days of my joys; [7] you return indeed, you return, [8] but with you also returns [9] my dear lost treasure’s [10] memory, sad and sorrowful.34

This passage is echoed also in the only other moment of the opera in which deictic words are prominently repeated by Orpheus, “Rendetemi il mio ben,” in act 3. The third reference that Orpheus makes in singing the first three lines of Tu se’ morta is to a controversial and violent tragedy, Sperone Speroni’s La Canace (1546), a work written in a free alternation of seven- and eleven-syllable lines that was unusual for the genre in its own time, but was then imitated by many poets, including Torquato Tasso in Aminta, Guarini in Il pastor fido, and Rinuccini in his librettos. In scene 23 of La Canace, the tragic and melancholic character Macareo is about to commit suicide after having had a child by his sister Canace, who was killed as a punishment by their father Eolo. In this crucial moment of decision-making—the outcome of which is the opposite of Orpheus’s—Macareo makes heavy use of deictic repetition, a feature that is part of what a modern critic calls “melic dissolution of the tragic situation” in Speroni’s tragedy.35 Macareo shares with Orpheus his wish for death expressed through a rhetorical question conveying contempt for his own life: O crudel Macareo, ancora vivi? / Ancora ardito sei di respirare / duro più che diamante? (O cruel Macareo, are you still alive? / Are you still so bold to breath / harder than a diamond?). This poignant and influential passage inspired Tasso to write both Tancredi’s sorrowful reaction to Clorinda’s death in La Gerusalemme liberata and King Torrismondo’s equally passionate response in the 1587 tragedy by the same name, this time for having sexually violated the woman who will turn out to be his sister (both siblings commit suicide).36 Tasso’s dedication of Re Torrismondo to Vincenzo Gonzaga must have played a role in Striggio’s decision to allude to it (via Speroni) in Tu se’ morta. Even more significantly, again in act 2 of the  

 

52    La Musica and Orfeo  

opera, Striggio lifts an entire line from Tasso’s tragedy: qual suon dolente il lieto dì perturba? (what sorrowful sound disturbs this happy day?) sings one of the shepherds, referring to the Messenger announcing Eurydice’s death.37 (This line might be taken as emblematic of Monteverdi’s sensitivity to the more sonorous features of dramatic texts.) Within this specific Mantuan artistic lineage, then, librettist and musician aligned Orfeo, both as an opera and as a character, with renowned literary ancestors from which the new genre could derive its legitimization, as well as with characters with whom the protagonist shared an equally tragic situation. Furthermore, in referring to La Canace, Striggio and Monteverdi allude to a heated polemic that concerned its author, who was attacked for straying from Aristotelian standards because his tragedy lacked the ethical element of catharsis. Speroni replied to his critics that the aim of tragedy should be less the teaching of morality than “muovere gli affetti” (move the affections), that is, less an ethical than an aesthetic purpose.38 After this dispute, Tasso, in the prose dialogue La Cavalletta, showed concern precisely for the balance between the two aspects discussed by Speroni—the ethical and the aesthetic one—condemning literary and musical works that, in his opinion, did not pursue it.39 Tasso, moreover, in his dedication of Re Torrismondo to the young Vincenzo Gonzaga, again insisted on balancing ethical and aesthetic concerns by claiming that “tragedy, as some people believe, is a very serious composition (gravissimo componimento). However,” Tasso continued, “as it [i.e., tragedy] appears to others, it is also a most pathetic (affettuosissimo) composition, most suitable for the young ones whom it seems to prefer as spectators.” 40 By addressing Orfeo to the young Prince Francesco—Vincenzo’s son—Striggio and Monteverdi struck the balance that for Tasso was desirable for tragedies between exemplifying morality and moving the affections. Music thus, elevated to such high standards, appeared to be capable of serving oratione in both its ethical and affective implications.  

 

 

 

Subjec t-E ffec t s

In the prologue of Orfeo, the presence of the personal deictic “I” in strophes 2 and 3 as well as the shift of tense from present to past in strophe 4 signal three related effects in performance, which I termed subject-effects to emphasize the performative aspect of the connection between subjectivity and deixis (see above, pp. 41–42). I introduced the first two effects—the self-reflexive and the presence effect—in discussing the ways in which the sung word io communicates body and discourse, representing an act of enunciation that blurs distinctions between text and performance. In the rest of this chapter I introduce a third effect, the narrative one. Finally, in chapter 6 I return to the Orfeo prologue by discuss 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    53

ing the fourth effect, the focalizing effect, which is tied to staged action and is thus quintessentially operatic. That all four effects are displayed in the prologue of Monteverdi’s first opera—as sung by La Musica—tells of its extraordinary semantic density, as if it were a prologue to all opera—the first “authentic” prologue, to again use Adorno’s terminology (introduction to part I). The self-reflexive effect, as discussed, consists of an act of self-reference with respect to discourse itself, whether it is verbal or verbal-musical. This act conveys the meaning of “I” as a marker of enunciation, as a referent of discourse. In this sense subjectivity is, to use Benveniste’s words, the “condition for language.” By singing io in the Prologue of Orfeo La Musica refers to, and establishes, herself as the condition of possibility for the characters and for the work to follow. This aspect of enunciation is discussed in other verbal-visual media often in connection with deixis (either linguistically present or implied), e.g., in film, in the use of direct visual address to the camera, mirrors, frame-within-the-frame, and film-within-the-film.41 Another example, this time from the figurative arts, is the self-representation at the service of symbolic activities discussed by Louis Marin in his Portaits of the King regarding images and mottoes associated with King Louis XIV (e.g., “L’état, c’est moi”).42 Opera features a self-reflexive effect when characters perform music on stage, creating music-within-the-music, music deictically pointing to itself through “phenomenal” as opposed to “noumenal” song, in Carolyn Abbate’s definition.43 The second subject-effect—which I call presence effect—is discussed by Bühler, as seen when he emphasizes the “emptiness” of the deictic “I,” as well as by Ben­ veniste, when he claims that language is “the possibility of subjectivity.” “I,” in this respect, is an “empty word” awaiting, so to speak, to be filled with a voice, with a body: it is an absence deferring to a presence, which it both implies and generates through an act of embodiment or completion. This act is alluded to by the etymological meaning of the word “performance” as “that which brings to completion.” The effect of this fulfilling the “promise” potentially embodied by the first-person deictic, intended as a referee of discourse, is that of establishing the subject at the center of a system of personal, temporal, and spatial coordinates. Bühler calls this center the “Ego-hic-nunc origo” of the deictic field and graphically represents it as the center of a circle intersected by two perpendicular lines.44 This positioning of the subject at the origin, together with the “here” and “now,” emerges in concrete human interaction, since in intersubjective exchanges the “I” involves the presence of a body—in opera, the singer’s body—and consequently a voice. A case of this embodied “I” is that studied by Marin, who observes that during the eucharist of the Catholic mass the priest utters the deictically dense sentence “this is my body,” commemorating Christ’s words during the Last Supper.45 Finally, subjectivity and deixis are connected in a third way, which generates  

 

 

 

 

 

 

54    La Musica and Orfeo  

what I term a narrative effect. Through this effect the self is subjected to the external conditioning of time change, to a sequence of events, to a change from a “before” to an “after,” hence the term narrative implying the telling of a story. The Bühlerian notion of a deictic center can in fact be related to present time, thus to the present tense of verbs. In referring to it, the past and future tenses accomplish a shift in the same way as the “then” and the “tomorrow” shift from the “now,” situating themselves in a position that is further from the center, as shown in figure 2: the body of the speaker is situated at the center of the deictic field and deictic words are related to actions in time. Whenever a text first presents a string of verbs in the present tense, as in strophes 1–3 of the Prologue of Orfeo, and then a verb in the past tense is introduced, as in strophe 4, there occurs a shift from discussing (or commenting) to narrating. This shift is described by Benveniste as one from discourse to histoire, by Harald Weinrich as one from besprechen to erzählen, and by John Lyons as one from experiential to historic mode.46 Whatever name scholars give to this shift, they agree that, as Lyons puts it, “the non-narrative category is more subjective in various respects than the category of narration.” 47 The speaker-as-subject (in opera, the singer-as-subject) uses this shift of orientation to accomplish a narrative effect, which I further explore in chapter 6 in conjunction with the focalizing effect. As conveyed through the self-reflexive, the presence, and the narrative effects, subjectivity is—I stress this again—inherently dialogic. The “I” constantly implies a “you,” whether the latter is physically present (e.g., in the passages from Orfeo discussed above: the voi in the Prologue and the tu sol in Orpheus’s address to Charon) or absent (e.g., the tu of Tu se’ morta). Benveniste emphasizes this dialogic aspect in claiming that “I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is the condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as I.” 48 A consequence of Benveniste’s emphasis on “I” and “you” as reversible entities is that the “I,” which for Bühler is situated at the center of the deictic field, is not only that of the speaker alone, since both partners are involved in communication. In cases such as rhetorical appellations and military orders—or, for example, a letter in which I write “I will come and see you in New York” as opposed to, simply, “I will go to New York”—the point of origin of the deictic field switches from the “I” to the “you,” provisionally reverting to the “I.” 49 This accomplishes a shift in the deictic orientation of texts towards either the addresser, the addressee, or the third person.50 Inspired by linguists in their studies of deixis, scholars of the most varied disciplines investigate today the issue of deictic orientation as denoting subjectivity or point of view, for example in the anthropological analysis of cultural communication, in narratology, in cognitive studies, and in the exploration of how various media communicate meanings, such as in film, art, and theater.51 In these  

 

 

 

 



Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity    55 PAST

PRESENT his, her, he, she, it, they, them

his, her, he, she, it, they, them

I, me, my, mine, our, we, us

DISTANT there, that, then, yesterday

expression of past action

FUTURE

his, her, he, she, it, they, them

DISTANT there, that, tomorrow

here, this, now, today

expression of future action

his, her, he, she, it, they, them

Figure 2. Diagram of the relationships between deictics and body movements (arrows indicate “distal” and “proximal” movements). Adapted from Ray Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 123. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

contexts the dialogic aspect of the self is often emphasized in its more material connection to body, voice, and performance. In a pioneering study of kinesics called Movement and Body Language Ray Birdwhistell situated the Bühlerian “I-here-now” at the center of a graph (see again figure 2).52 The center represents the body of the speaker who gestures either towards himself (proximal movement) or away (distal movement). The graph effectively relates gestures with deixis and verbal tenses. As theater scholar Keir Elam observes, Birdwhistell’s view is relevant to an understanding of actors’ movements on stage, since deictic words are among the most characteristic elements of dramatic discourse: “the ‘I’ of the dramatis persona and the ‘here and now’ of the dramatic communicative context are related to the actor’s body and the stage context through the indicative gesture accompanying the utterance.” 53 Elam’s observation can be extended to performed texted music.

56    La Musica and Orfeo  

The nexus between language and body, speech and gesture, is certainly more complex than a simple mirroring between deictic expressions and movements. Still, conceptually, the primacy of deictic gestures is undeniable, as simply observing early childhood behavior attests. The importance of deixis for the sense of one’s own body is emphasized by Kaja Silverman in her discussion of the “proprioceptive ego,” which was first characterized by psychoanalyst Henry Wallon in a 1935 study of infants as “the apprehension on the part of the subject of his or her ‘ownness’.” 54 Silverman observes that, in Wallon’s association of proprioceptivity with postural function, “proprioceptivity can be understood as that egoic component to which concepts like ‘here,’ ‘there,’ and ‘my’ are keyed,” it being “intimately bound up with the body’s sensation of occupying a point in space.” 55 In her essay “Space Inc.,” Mieke Bal comments on Silverman’s notion of proprioceptivity by observing that “by placing deixis ‘within’ or ‘on’ or ‘at’ the body,” Silverman’s represents an effective extension of Benveniste’s notion of subjectivity in language.56 Silverman not only reaffirms deixis as the essence of language but, Bal observes, she also goes beyond language by including in the concept of proprioceptivity the muscular system and the space around the body, the space to which the body is “keyed in.” This expansion of Benveniste’s language-based subjectivity opens up, in Bal’s view, a possibility for a “bodily and spatially grounded semiotics.” 57 This methodology, for Bal, can be fruitful in analyzing visual, literary, and, I would add, musical domains. But rather than excluding, as Bal claims, “the reductive detour to language,” 58 I see the methodology as fully embracing language and being further expanded toward phenomenological views of the subject (as I discuss in the next chapter). The relationship between language and the subject-as-body is especially relevant in approaching those works of the early modern period in which music is considered the “servant” of oratione (that is, speech) and the subject/singer operates in a defined and defining space. Early opera presents an ideal case study to test a methodology involving language-based subjectivity. On the operatic stage, language is tied to gesture and its limits are often stretched toward pure, corporeal voice (see chapter 7, “The Aesthetics of Nothing”). Personal, spatial, and temporal deixis, together with the related subject-effects, anchor the singing subject to the action and to the other characters, projecting subjectivity across the stage. This is, however, true only in the life of performance, and to performance the next chapter is therefore exclusively devoted.

3



Performing the Dialogic Self

M u s ic ’ s Touch

As seen in the previous chapter, the self-reflexive and the presence effects are generated by the body and voice of the singer-as-subject. Generally speaking, a subject, as a body, is characterized by feelings: in the first place, the feeling of being situated in space and time, then the feelings generated by senses (such as touch), and finally the emotional ones, such as love. At the beginning of the prologue of Orfeo La Musica sings the words “From my beloved Permessus” (Dal mio Permesso amato), situating herself on stage, pointing to herself as a body in the present time, and expressing her emotional attachment to her point of origin (the river Permessus). Her body, however, relates itself immediately to other bodies: “I come to you” (a voi ne vegno), she continues, establishing an I–you dialogic relationship with the audience. In a performative situation such as that of opera, the public, true, does not exchange roles with the singers and there is no complete reversibility between the “I” and the “you” with respect to conversational turn-taking, the paradigmatic situation of enunciation. However, even in this situation, as Walter J. Ong observes, the relationship between speaker (in our case, singer) and hearer (or listener) is more complex than it appears at first. The speaker, Ong claims, echoes the words within himself and follows his own thought, as though he were another person—a singer does so even more by performing what he learns from a notation written, precisely, by another person. Conversely, the hearer too repeats within himself the words that he hears, understanding them as though he were two individuals: in a “double and interlocking dialectic . . . the speaker listens  

 

57

58    La Musica and Orfeo  

while the hearer speaks” (my italics).1 The I–you relationship is, in this respect, reversible, the last quoted sentence by Ong corresponding to the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus. On stage, such a reversible relationship occurs not only between characters and public, that is, on the presentational axis, but also whenever one character addresses another on the representational axis (see chapter 2, “I am Music”). We listen to singers while mentally echoing their words with our inner voice. Singers engaged in a musical dialogue on stage do the same while waiting for their turn to begin their part; moreover, they listen to themselves in the act of singing. In Luca Ronconi’s production of Orfeo for the 1998 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, two characters are present on stage during the Prologue: La Musica, as prescribed by text and music, but also Orpheus, who is silent.2 Blindfolded, the main character anticipates his entrance in act 1 by already sitting at a table on which a lyre is placed, quietly listening to La Musica. The two characters’ locations embody the discourse on self and performance that this production advances. The typical operatic situation characterized by performers on the traditional stage vs. audience listening in the orchestra seats—thus the very notion of a presentational and a representational axis of performance—is questioned by Ronconi.3 The audience sits only in the boxes of the small and intimate Italianate-style Teatro Goldoni, whereas the orchestra space, emptied of seats, is fully employed by the singers, dancers, and props during the performance. Separating orchestra and traditional stage space, the musicians’ pit becomes part of the action, taking on a new meaning (figure 3).4 It is from the musicians’ pit that La Musica emerges, her back toward the traditional stage space, slowly walking toward the entrance opposite the stage, from which the public traditionally accesses the orchestra seats. There Orpheus, blindfolded and facing La Musica and the traditional stage space, sits at one of the wooden tables that in figure 3 appear at the center of the orchestra space. At the beginning of the prologue, then, the entire orchestra space, emptied of all the seats, stands between the two characters.5 La Musica, sung by the soprano Cecilia Gasdia dressed in white, sets herself up to sing the first strophe of the Prologue by reaching a small podium, emphasizing the very act of performance and generating the subject-effect I termed in the previous chapter self-reflexive. By standing on the podium as the locus of performativity, she—a character named “music”—refers to herself as a performing musician. By simply singing about herself, La Musica actively refers to her self though an act of enunciation. In Ronconi’s staging the self-reflexive effect is reached through a specific positioning and use of the body of the singer within the performance space. In this production La Musica makes full use of carefully coordinated body movements while singing the five strophes of the Prologue. She performs them  

 

 

 

 



Performing the Dialogic Self    59

Figure 3. The performance space of Luca Ronconi’s production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, March 10–21, 1998. Design by Margherita Palli (original in color). Courtesy of the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino—Fondazione.  

 

by situating herself at the symmetrical center of the performance space (which includes traditional stage space, orchestra pit, and the orchestra space). In doing so, La Musica places herself at the center of the system of personal, spatial, and temporal coordinates that Bühler calls the deictic field, the “Ego-hic-nunc origo” of the subjective orientation. This model, as discussed in the previous chapter, is expanded by Birdwhistell by relating deictics with body movements (see again figure 2). By using body movements and by singing the first personal pronoun (io), La Musica projects toward the audience her embodied “I-as-sung,” generating a presence effect. In sum, in the Prologue two subject-effects—the selfreflexive and the presence one—are generated by the language and body of the singer in the life of performance.  

 

60    La Musica and Orfeo  

Figure 4. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, production by Luca Ronconi. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, March 10–21, 1998. Prologue: “Dal mio Permesso amato” (La Musica: Cecilia Gasdia). Courtesy of the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino—Fondazione.  

 

In Ronconi’s production La Musica begins the first line of text by raising her right arm (figure 4). In performing the first line (“From my beloved Permessus I come to you,” Dal mio Permesso amato a voi ne vegno) La Musica conveys the deictic shift between “my” and “you” (mio and voi) through the downward movement of her right arm, addressing the public with both arms, the palms of her hands turned upward.6 This last is her main posture, to which she will return at crucial moments during the Prologue as a visual ritornello. The first gesture (raising the right arm) stresses the beginning of the musical-textual segment on the repeated high note d'' (example 3), at the same time that it emphasizes the meaning of “my.” The second gesture (lowering one arm and raising the other to address the audience with open arms) accompanies the contour of the musical phrase downward from d'' to a', at the same time that it mirrors the shift between “my” and “you.” La Musica’s gestures have thus two simultaneous functions: they accompany the melodic contour of the musical speech but they also point to referents mentioned in verbal speech and physically present, namely, the singer (“my”) and the audience (“you”). The two movements are related to musical discourse in the same way as, in everyday speech communication, gestures relate to the intonation and meaning of verbal discourse. In this respect they work as ideational mark-

Example 3

Performing the Dialogic Self    61

Example 3. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo (Venice, 1609), Prologue, La Musica (beginning of first strophe). La Musica

b. c.

. & c Ó Œ œ  Jœ Jœ œJ Rœ  ?c w

Dal mio

w



Œ œ œ œ bw

 Per-mes-soIa - ma - to

w

a voi ne



œ œ

w

ve -

gno,

w

w

ers, by referring to the speech process and marking intonation. In their other function, the “pointing” one, they do not depict but evoke the referents—first the singer herself, then the audience—through a deictic gesture.7 Yet these gestures, if considered in relationship to the space in which the performer is situated, are also iconic: La Musica is located in a central position within the performance space, just behind the conductor in the orchestra pit, and the movements of her body and of her arms parallel the main coordinates of tridimensional space—she first walks perpendicularly to the stage and the pit, to then point upward and to her sides. In sum, far from performing local gestural madrigalisms, La Musica’s movements enhance at various levels—ideational, deictic, and iconic—both the semantic density of the crucial first line of the text she sings and the musical density resulting from her outlining the tetrachord d''–c''–bâ'–a'. While the sung text defines the main dramatic coordinates, the melodic motion, together with the bass descending from d to A, defines the tonal focus of the Prologue, D minor, one of the main key areas in the opera. Both the body and the voice of the singer impersonating “Music” do so by performing the quintessential presentational act of the genre of opera: a character addressing an audience, through words and music, in a theatrical space. In continuing to address the “you” as the “illustrious heroes” (incliti eroi) in line 2, La Musica adds emphasis by turning her upper body left, toward the theater boxes. In the televised production the subordinate sentence of the third line (di cui narra la fama . . . ) is underlined through a close-up of the camera at the moment in which the singer again turns, this time to the right, toward the audience. Finally, La Musica sings the fourth line, completing, so to speak, the circle by returning to her main posture, the open arms position of the beginning: first, with palms down, then with palms up, to mirror the spatial deictic shift upward at the word “high” (alto) of the text. Only on the very last note of the final musical phrase does she again turn her palms down, thus shifting quickly from a deictic to an ideational gesture, to mark the musical cadence on b'–a', setting the word se-gno (meaning “target”).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

62    La Musica and Orfeo  

In performing the first strophe La Musica thus defines, through her voice and body, both herself and the entire performance space, consisting of the performers’ and the audience space (the former including, as mentioned, traditional stage space, musicians’ pit, and orchestra space, the latter only the theater boxes). The main coordinates of space—up and down, left and right—are signified by La Musica’s gestures at corresponding passages of the verbal text. Her defining the coordinates of dramatic action continues in the performance of the following strophes through emphasis on personal, temporal, and spatial deictics. This strategy enables the gradual transition from singer’s persona (“Cecilia Gasdia”) to character (“La Musica”) and, for the audience, the parallel transformation in perception from real to fictional times and places. Taking advantage of the ritornello music, La Musica then traverses the orchestra space to reach Orpheus, who is dressed in the opposite achromatic color, black, as her reversible “other.” Standing behind him, thus facing the stage, she sings the line emblematic of her subjectivity, “Io la Musica son” (figure 5). La Musica here produces a presence effect, her body being located “in front of us,” bringing forth an “effect of tangibility” that is in “constant movement.” 8 The perfectly symmetrical alignment of La Musica and Orpheus at the crucial point in which the former sings “I am Music” facilitates the release of the presence effect. Presence is projected through the central, symmetrical position of La Musica with respect to the entire performance space—she in effect becomes the visual double of the conductor in the pit, standing on the opposite side of the orchestra space. At the same time a self-reflexive effect is conveyed by visually embedding Orpheus’s body within that of La Musica; Orpheus’s lyre is aligned with them as well, in an intermediate color, as an object with which the split subject, as we shall see, engages in a relationship of both intimacy and separation. In the text, the deictic function of the beginning of each strophe’s first line leaves room, in the following lines, for symbolic meanings. In strophe 2, the description of the power of music in moving the “frozen minds” (gelate menti) is symbolic. At the words “who with sweet sounds” (ch’ai dolci accenti) La Musica circles around Orpheus and walks away from him, the camera following her until he disappears from the frame for the rest of the performance of the strophe. For the return to deictic meaning in strophe 3, La Musica, again using the ritornello music, returns to the position she occupied at the beginning of strophe 2. In the performance of strophe 3, which is the central one of the Prologue, La Musica not only continues to project deictic and symbolic meanings (the former for the first line, the latter for the remaining ones) but she also takes a further and crucial step in advancing the discourse on the dialogic self articulated by Ronconi. In performing the first two strophes, La Musica emphasized the sense of sight, through body movements that had carefully calibrated the relationship of distance and proximity between her and Orpheus. This emphasis on sight is signi 

 

 



Performing the Dialogic Self    63

Figure 5. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, production by Luca Ronconi. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, March 10–21, 1998. Prologue: “Io la Musica son” (La Musica and Orfeo: Cecilia Gasdia and Roberto Scaltriti). Courtesy of the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino—Fondazione.  

 

fied by the blindfolded Orpheus, who is seen by La Musica without being able to reciprocate her gaze (music, after all, cannot be seen). The relationship between visibility and invisibility, of course crucial to the mythological plot of the action of Orfeo, is thus embodied on stage as a split, and is proposed by Ronconi as one of the central themes of his production. But at the moment in which, in strophe 3, La Musica sings about her power by referring to her lyre as her own instrument—however, also Orpheus’s instrument—it is clear that her identity is as symbolically close to that of Orpheus as it can be: her physical proximity to him is no longer sufficient, as is no longer sufficient the split embodied by the two characters signified by the relationship between visibility and invisibility, between the subject who sees (i.e., her) and the one who, unable to see, can only be seen (him). This relationship between seeing and being seen—central, for example, to the myth of Narcissus—is at the core of a discourse on the senses that opera articulates in a unique way, as Ronconi shows in his production. As for the senses of hearing, Ong reminds us (see above) that the activities of singing and listening are mutually related, as I sing while I listen, and I listen (to myself) as I sing—two elements being involved in each case, in a chiasmic, reversible relationship. Both seeing and hearing are situated in a body that, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty dis 

 

 

 

 

64    La Musica and Orfeo  

cussed in The Visible and the Invisible, is constitutively both sentient and sensible, both active and passive in its relationship to the outside world.9 For MerleauPonty, this double, reversible nature of the body and its perception is nowhere more apparent than in the sense of touch, which relates the body to the outside world in a continuum in which objects become living “flesh,” erasing traditional distinctions between subject and objects (as they are portrayed in Descartes’s philosophy). The experience, for example, of smoothness and ruvidity, writes Merleau-Ponty, is akin to that of one’s own hand touching the other one, an experience in which both touching and being touched are present at the same time, the touching hand becoming the touched one. This reversible, chiasmic situation between the touching and the touched speaks, for Merleau-Ponty, of our own being-in-the-world, and is akin to the situation featured by other senses, such as, for sight, the perception of visibility and invisibility.10 Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body as both sentient and sensible is relevant to Ronconi’s interpretation of the relationships between La Musica and Orpheus in his staging of the Prologue of Orfeo. In performing strophe 3, La Musica approaches Orpheus from behind for the second time, and, for the first time, while the instrumental ritornello ends, she touches him by placing her hand on his hand, lying on the smooth table’s surface (figure 6). It is at this point that La Musica sings the words “I, singing on the golden lyre, am accustomed” (Io su Cetera d’or cantando soglio), reiterating her own subjectivity after having previously sung, as we remember, the words “I am Music” (Io la Musica son). Now, however, she can fully accomplish the most powerful combination of subjecteffects by also using the sense of touch. Indeed, in this moment the distinction between the two subject-effects discussed above—the self-reflexive and the presence effect—ultimately collapses, as does the distinction between the subject touched and the one touching, and, most importantly, the distinction between self and other. In a further, meaningful gesture, while singing the setting of the second line referring to the experience of listening (“to sometimes delight the mortal ear,” mortal orecchio lusingar talora), La Musica places Orpheus’s hand on the lyre. The line she has just sung (“I, singing on the golden lyre, Io su Cetera d’or cantando) becomes then the sentence that Orpheus, as a listener, echoes in his mind in the act of touching the lyre. “The speaker listens while the hearer speaks,” as Ong describes this reversible situation. Through touch, the object—the lyre—becomes an extension of the subjects, Orpheus and La Musica, as if it were “living flesh.” Now Orpheus is in touch with the lyre, with music. He will divorce himself from it very soon, however, since at the end of the Prologue La Musica takes it away from him to place it on the podium.11 Orpheus will never regain his instrument, despite his mentioning it in the text, as when in act 1 he is invited by a shepherd to sing “at the sound of the famous lyre” and then sings “Rosa del ciel” without it; the same  

 

 

 



Performing the Dialogic Self    65

Figure 6. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, production by Luca Ronconi. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, March 10–21, 1998. Prologue : “Io su Cetera d’or” (La Musica and Orfeo: Cecilia Gasdia and Roberto Scaltriti). Courtesy of the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino—Fondazione.  

 

in “Possente spirto” (act 3), “Qual honor sia degno” (act 4), and in the echo scene in act 5. The reversible, chiasmic relationship between La Musica and Orpheus, between self and other, is accomplished through performance in that crucial threshold of the opera that is the Prologue. This liminal locus works as a paratext and thus is a privileged site of intersubjective exchange between author and public (see chapter 2). In operatic performance, the exchange takes place, however, also between performers/director and audience, since text and performance both convey, auto­ nomously, their own meanings (see chapter 1). As noted, the Prologue displays two powerful assertions of subjectivity, starting with the word Io, sung in the first lines of strophes 2 and 3, the latter being the central one. Another equally powerful assertion of subjectivity is located in the aria Possente spirto (see text and translation in chapter 2), in the third of five acts, when Orpheus starts the fourth strophe by singing Orfeo son io (literally, “Orpheus am I”). These words stand in a chiasmic relationship with the words Io la Musica son (“I Music am”) sung by La Musica in strophe 2 of the Prologue. In the text, then, the identification of La Musica with Orpheus is fully accomplished through the chiasmus, as when we turn the pages of the score or the libretto to notice it. In performance, however, this would unfold as a much longer temporal process occurring be-

66    La Musica and Orfeo  

tween two distant parts of the opera, Prologue and act 3. Ronconi thus anticipates this dialectical relationship by showing in the Prologue a silent Orpheus both distant from, and intimate with, La Musica, who is singing (of) her own self: these two characters relate to each other in a chiasmic, reversible situation, as are the words about their own subjectivities that they sing at two crucial times in the opera, Prologue and act 3. Although in watching the Ronconi production it seems almost natural to see Orpheus on stage with La Musica during the Prologue, this is not, as we know, what is prescribed by the text. Ronconi thus accomplishes a textualization of performance, demonstrating its autonomy as generator of meaning (see again figure 1, in chapter 1). In the two singers’ bodies the audience witnesses the drama unfolding between self and other, and mirrors itself in them, Narcissus-like, in a chiasmic relationship: the audience, that is, sings as it listens, and sees as it is unseen. This reversible, mirroring relationship between work and spectator—the very essence of spectacle as Ovid intended it in his version of the myth of Narcissus (see introduction to part 1)—is not unlike the one that de Chirico generated in his Solitary Orpheus. The prototypical performer is depicted by de Chirico almost in front, and not behind, the curtain, thus in a liminal position.12 He is singing yet silent (without a mouth), visible yet invisible (without an audience), seeing yet blind (without real eyes). Orpheus is nonetheless unquestionably addressing the beholder, who cannot fail to engage in a dialogue, to ultimately identify himself with him.  

 

E choe s

Ronconi’s masterful use of space in his production of Orfeo complements his discourse about the self discussed above, as can be seen especially in his stagings of Possente spirto in act 3 and of the Echo scene in act 5. With the Prologue, these two scenes form the symmetrical pillars of the work (leaving out the two alternative and equally unsatisfying endings). In Ronconi’s staging of these two scenes, dramatic meanings and effects are gained not only through the gestures and movements of the singers but through their positioning within the performance space. The stage setting for acts 1, 2, and 5 (see again figure 3) features, in the back, terraces (as in a Greek theater) looking out on a meadow that reaches the front stage and the pit, and, for this production, was actually of real grass. Three cypresses in the back remind the viewer that death is the ever-present feature of both worlds, the pastoral and the Underworld. In act 1, when Eurydice first enters, Orpheus stands on the “real” stage. She is dressed as a bride (in white, like La Musica) and enters slowly in an almost processional way from where the public normally gains access to the orchestra space and where Orpheus was sit-



Performing the Dialogic Self    67

Figure 7. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, production by Luca Ronconi. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, March 10–21, 1998: act 3. From front to back: Euridice (Cecilia Gasdia) on a bed; Caronte (Mario Luperi) and a spirit on a mobile platform symbolizing a boat (orchestra space flooded with water); the conductor (René Jacobs) in the pit; Orfeo (Roberto Scaltriti) on stage. Courtesy of the Teatro Maggio Musicale Fiorentino— Fondazione.  

 

ting in the Prologue. The two characters are thus initially at the furthest possible remove from each other, like La Musica and Orpheus in the Prologue, and, like there, the theme of vision is reiterated, with its gradual progression from distance to intimacy. Orpheus and Eurydice come together to touch their hands only at the end of act 1, just before they both exit, to marry. For acts 3 and 4 Ronconi floods the entire orchestra space with real water (forty thousand liters, according to journalistic reports!). Figure 7 shows Eurydice’s majestic deathbed, covered with bright white sheets, placed where Orpheus was sitting in the Prologue and where she first entered. She lies on it for acts 3 and 4, leaving it briefly only for Orpheus’s failed rescue, to immediately return to it. In the back, the illustration shows Charon navigating his boat before the musicians’ pit, parallel to the stage, whereas Orpheus, standing on the real stage, sings the aria Possente spirto. He follows Charon’s boat but slightly unsynchronized. Only for the crucial words Orfeo son io (I am Orpheus) do Orpheus and Charon come together, facing each other at center stage and aligning themselves with the con-

68    La Musica and Orfeo  

ductor in the pit. Visual alignment, as in the parallel passage of the Prologue (see again figure 5), facilitates the release of the presence effect. In act 5, after he has lost Eurydice for the second time, Orpheus moves on stage and questions Echo in a passage during which, as discussed in the introduction to part I, he experiences an identity crisis, fashioning himself as Narcissus. Echo replies from the furthest possible point of origin of sound, the box institutionally reserved, in the theater, for authorities, situated above the spot where Eurydice’s bed was during the previous two acts (above the entrance opposite the stage, from which the public traditionally accesses the orchestra seats). Orpheus kneels, as he did when he was in front of Euridice’s bed before his attempt to rescue her. In the staging of the echo scene, self and other, sound and vision are divorced and juxtaposed in a dramatic way. This parallels the split observed in the Prologue, when La Musica touches Orpheus only when she sings the words “I, singing on a golden lyre” (see again figure 6). No self—Ronconi seems to say—exists without an other, no voice can be without other voices. The drama of self and other is the drama of Orpheus, who, in alternating distance with proximity, loses touch, literally, with the other, whether it is La Musica, Eurydice, or Echo, untouchable by definition.13 And even Apollo, Orpheus’s Oedipal other, cannot fully rescue him: they sing their duet standing, the son in the orchestra space, the father in the box institutionally reserved for authorities, appropriately located just above him. Only Music, then, has the power of symbolizing an impossible physical contact: allegorically in the Prologue—being it sung by the character named “Music”—and literally at the end of the opera—as the apotheosis of music in the modern-style highly decorated duet between Apollo and Orpheus. Ronconi portrays the protagonist as being essentially alone, and when he sings, even if he addresses a character, he is characterized as singing to an audience, by performing either from the traditional stage space (the symbol of the institutionalized distance from the public) or from the small movable podium where initially La Musica begins her performance (on it Orpheus stands when he loses Eurydice for the second time in act 4). The self-reflexive and the presence effects coexist in these crucial moments: the first by constantly unfolding a never completed dialogue between self and other (meeting the definition of “performance” itself as “that which awaits completion”), the second by reminding the viewer of traditional performative situations in which voice and body “fill” the ever absent “I” of the character. The dialogic subjectivity dramatized by Ronconi in his staging of Orfeo lies at the root of the conception of the self explored by artists, including Monteverdi, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in Italy. This conception made it possible to devise and enable the idea of a character singing on stage, and that of a story that relies on music as the primary factor for its unfolding. In  

 

 

 

 



Performing the Dialogic Self    69

part II, I trace the main intellectual premise of the discourse on the self articulated in Orfeo back to the intellectual and artistic phenomenon of Petrarchism during the sixteenth century. I deal with the madrigal as the genre in which music-narrative agents and other narrative strategies emerge and are developed. In part III, I return to Orfeo by reexamining both the Prologue and Possente spirto in light of the preceding exploration of narrative agents and strategies. I extend this investigation to Monteverdi’s madrigals from Book III (1592) to Book VIII (1638), expanding it to the cultural context of the post-Petrarchist movement often called Marinism (from the poet Giovan Battista Marino). I finally return to a discussion of today’s stagings of Monteverdi’s works by focusing on Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and L’incoronazione di Poppea.

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Pa rt T wo

Constructing the Narrator

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4

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From Petrarch to Petrarchism A Rhetoric of Voice and Address

In part I, using the example of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, I argued that singing the word “I” is the foundational act of musical enunciation of the singer-as-subject. In the rest of the book I investigate some conditions of possibility for the historical manifestation of this type of language- and body-based subjectivity at the end of the Renaissance. In particular, I explore one condition that I deem necessary, although not sufficient, for the existence of opera as a hybrid genre: the musicians’ trust in the narrative function of music in conjunction with words, especially their communicative or pragmatic meanings—said otherwise, the establishment of the composer as narrator. This trust is the condition that enables, for example, a singer to impersonate a character named “Music” and to sing the words “I am Music,” becoming herself a proxy for the narrator. The textual “I” is located at the intersection between the individual voice of the composer—as both author and narrator—and the voice and body of the performer-character. Opera, in this respect, is an equivocal genre, in the literal sense of equi-vocal.1 It problematizes, to a much higher degree than spoken theater, the relationships between the voice of the author and the textual voices of the performers inscribed in libretto and score—voices mediated, in performance, by the physical ones of the singer-characters.2 The conditions for this fruitful equivocality developed in late Renaissance Italy within the discourse of Petrarchism. This intellectual and artistic movement permeated the cultural practices of the cultivated class, which considered texted music as part of the expression of its identity as nobility.3 In his lyric poetry, Petrarch highly problematized the relationships between author, narrator, and character.4 His move in this direction was not only consequential for Renaissance Petrarchist poets, but it also provided an opportunity for com 

 

 

 

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posers to develop, through a powerful combination of text and music, the ability to become themselves narrators and to create characters. It is with Petrarch, then, that my discussion of subjectivity ought to begin. Voi ch ’ascoltate

The opening sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (henceforth RVF I) features an extensive use of personal deixis to advance a discourse on a divided subjectivity that has since been central to modern Western conceptions of the self, especially within the social and cultural context of Renaissance Petrarchism.5 Located at the beginning of the lyric sequence, RVF I plays a crucial role in establishing the poet’s self as both the narrator and the character in the remaining 365 poems of the collection: Petrarch, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, I Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore 4 quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono

8

del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, non che perdono.

11

Ma ben veggio or sì come al popolo tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;

14

et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è il frutto, e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.

[1] You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound [2] of those sighs with which I nourished my heart [3] during my first youthful error [4] when I was in part another man from what I now am // [5] for the varied style in which I weep and reason [6] between vain hopes and vain sorrow, [7] where there is anyone who, through its trials, knows love [8] I hope to find pity as well as forgiveness. // [9] But now I see well how of the crowd [10] the talk I have become for a long time, for which often [11] I am ashamed of myself within me; // [12] and of my raving, shame is the fruit [13] and repentance, and the clear knowledge [14] that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream.

As noted by commentators since the Renaissance, readers may find themselves confused by the opening of RVF I, featuring, right from the start, the second plural personal pronoun “you” (voi).6 These readers—indeed, listeners  



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    75

(Voi ch’ascoltate)—would expect the word voi to function as the grammatical subject of the sentence. But this expectation is derailed since the subject of the long and convoluted grammatical period encompassing the two quatrains of the sonnet turns out to be the “I” of the poet. The confusing effect of the grammatical period (rhetorically, an anacoluthon) is not clarified until the end of the second quatrain, when the verb spero (“I hope”) appears, governing the main clause: “I hope to find pity and forgiveness” (line 8). In this line the tension set up by the initial “you” is finally discharged. Yet this release occurs on a subject that is not fully affirmed. The word spero implies, but is not explicitly associated with, the first-person pronoun io (“I”): line 8 does not read io spero trovar, but simply spero trovar (note that, in the Italian language, as mentioned earlier, personal pronouns are not needed to make up a sentence, so their appearance is all the more significant). The first-person pronoun does, however, appear three times, but before the verb spero, within the subordinate sentences of line 2 (ond’io), 4 (ch’i’  ), and 5 (in ch’io). In a further reversion and derailment of expectations, the object of the verb “I hope”—i.e., the “varied style”—precedes it in line 5, instead of following it (as it would be in: “I hope to find for the varied style . . .”). Readers are again indirectly invoked in line 7 through the words “anyone who, through its trials, knows love.” This “anyone” (chi) is no longer the generic “you” of line 1 but is constructed as highly sympathetic with the poet, since it shares the same pains of love. Compared to the initial voi, the “you” implied in the “anyone” of line 7 is reshaped and brought closer to the point of view of the poet. Petrarch’s “I” therefore gradually displaces the “you” of the readers. When the readers reach line 8, from the seemingly strong position at the beginning of the poem they find themselves gradually absorbed into the “I” of the poet, sinking with him, as it were, into the vortex of the subordinate sentences embedded in one another and preceding the main clause (“you who hear . . . with which . . . when I was . . . from what I am . . . in which I weep . . . where there is . . . who understands”). This process of absorption of the “you” into the “I” operates also at a level of sheer sound. The poet’s sighs (sospiri) are the signs of love and pain jotted down as verses and resulting, in turn, in “sound” (suono, line 1). But the word suono in line 1 rhymes with sono (“am”) in line 4, which reads “when I was in part another man from what I now am.” In this line the poet tells readers that he—not unlike them—is a mutable, reshapable subject, indeed no longer the same man as in the past (although only “in part”). His very being (sono) is related with sound (suono), and literally so: the vowel /o/ of the initial Voi resonates through the syllables of the words ascoltate, suono, sospiri, core, and errore; whereas the /i/ of io in line 2 reverberates through the words nudriva, mio, primo, and giovenile.7 Musically, then, the “you” and the “I” appear to be different sides of the same self, engaged in an inner, sonorous dialogue with itself.  

 

 

 

 

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Sound and meaning are implicated strongly also in ways that emphasize dialogic subjectivity (see chapter 2). The word io (“I”), as we have seen, appears in both lines 2 (ond’io) and 5 (in ch’io). In both cases the word io falls on the sixth syllable of the eleven-syllable line, and is thus emphasized by a strong accent (in line 2: di—quei—so—spi—ri_on—d’ío; in line 5: del—va—rio—sti—le_in— ch’ío). Syntactically, however, the two clauses to which these two ios belong (line 2: “with which I nourished my heart . . . ,” and line 5: “for the varied style in which I weep . . .”) depend, respectively, on the words preceding in line 1: “You who hear,” and on the words following in line 8: “I hope to find pity . . . ,” the main clause of the period. The result is that the self, whose sound, as we have seen, reverberates through the poem, is pulled from both sides, stretched between the “you” and the “I.” The boundaries between addresser (“I”) and addressee (“you”), subject and object, become ambiguous.8 Petrarch’s self-reflexive attitude is emblematized by the hammering repetition of four first-person deictics in line 11, almost shattering his self into fragments: “I am ashamed of myself within me” (di me medesmo meco mi vergogno).9 Here the poetic subject reverses itself into the object—thus into the “you”—of his own shame (vergogna). In the same way, the subject reverts itself first, in line 8, into the object of pity and forgiveness (“I hope to find pity and forgiveness”) and then, in lines 9–10, into the “talk of the crowd” (favola per altri, literally: “fable for others,” these last yet a different reshaping of the “you”). Also in the rest of the Canzoniere the “I” of the poet constantly refers to, but also reverts itself into, other subjects—the “you”s—who thus become the specular refractions of the self.10 In RVF I these “others” are the generic “listeners,” the crowd that talks about him, and those who understand love as the poet does, or feel pity for him. In the following poems, in addition, the “you”s are, more specifically, the beloved Laura, Love, Death, God, and a variety of addressees, including nature as a metonym for the poet’s soul, as well as, predictably, himself. As William J. Kennedy points out by adopting the terminology of classical rhetoric, Petrarch offers posterity a model for both an ethos and a pathos, that is: an ethos reflecting the most intimate contradictions of the speaker/poet (and surfacing in the logos of poetry through antithesis and oxymorons); and a pathos affectively relating the self to readers and addressees. This double movement—inward (toward the “I”) and outward (toward the “you”)—characterizes the poetry of both Petrarch and his Renaissance imitators. As we shall see below, composers setting poems in music often interpreted texts according to this alternating orientation toward the “I” and the “you”—what I call, following Kennedy, a rhetoric of voice and address—conveying the shift through musical means. A final feature of RVF I is worth mentioning since, as we shall see, it too influenced composers, specifically in their capacity to view themselves as compositori in the same way as their poet colleagues—who, in the Renaissance, all modeled  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    77

themselves on Petrarch. When Petrarch writes the words “I was another man from what I now am” (line 4), he in effect inaugurates a further metamorphosis of himself, this time on the temporal axis: the poet-subject of the Canzoniere is also the object of his own narration of the past, the past belonging to that “other man” who experienced “vain hopes and vain sorrow” (line 6). The sighs (sospiri) thus originate from a past when the poet was subjected to love, in a state of sin. Now, however, he claims to repent and be ashamed of that past, since he finally sees (veggio) and clearly knows (conoscer chiaramente) the truth. Yet, RVF I, which is chronologically the last poem Petrarch writes, invites readers to share precisely these past sighs as collected into the remaining 365 poems. In light of RVF I, then, these poem-sighs make up a story narrated retrospectively as a flashback—a story, as Adelia Noferi writes, “told in the present but viewed as past.” Petrarch highlights a split between, on the one hand, the subject who tells the story and, on the other, the subject/object of that story, a split between auctor and agens.11 Thanks to the proemial sonnets (and RVF I in particular), the author who “speaks” enters in an inevitable contradiction with the author who “views” the story from the point of view of RVF I. This last is a point of view that Petrarch added later, when he repents, projecting it on a self that was indeed writing the poems before, when he was still a sinner.12 The roles of “viewer” and “speaker” are therefore divorced and the gap is irremediable—this split having consequences, as we shall see, for both the literature and the music of the Renaissance. Still, the two narrative roles converge, textually, into the same “I,” the poet. As a result, compared to, say, a traditional autobiography in which the narrator writes his story all at once, in Petrarch’s “scattered rhymes” the “I” as narrator-character is even more distinct from the “I” as the narrator holding the point of view (hereafter I call “character” the former and “narrator” the latter; in part III both assume the role of “focalizers”).13 This distinction affects the reader of the entire Canzoniere. For example, in Io amai sempre, et amo forte ancora (“I’ve always loved, and I love deeply still,” RVF LXXXV, the text set by Adrian Willaert to open his collection Musica nova; see below, chapter 5) the first-person pronoun encompasses two distinct agents, the one who loved and then one who still loves. Sixteenth-century Petrarchism, as we shall see, exploits precisely this ambiguity, the poet replacing Petrarch as the narrator, and the composer, in turn, finding his own voice by appropriating the role of the poet. The two roles emerge with clarity in Petrarch’s own prose work in dialogic form entitled Secretum, in which “Franciscus” (Petrarch’s Christian name) is the name of the character engaged in a dense exchange with “Augustinus,” i.e., St. Augustine. “Franciscus” and “Augustinus” represent two sides of the same self—the narrator “Petrarch”—so that the dialogue can be read in effect as a dual-voice monologue. In the Canzoniere, instead, narrator and character are conflated within the same poetic persona, one emerging in the text through the  

 

 

 

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same personal pronoun: io. RVF I highlights a gap within this “I” that the reader can no longer neglect in the following poems. The Canzoniere becomes the result of the narrator’s point of view about himself and his life—a story “told in the present” (“now,” or, line 9) but “viewed as past” (“was,” fui, line 10). The result is to transform the book into a double narrative of the self.14 Critics highlight that Petrarch’s portrayal of his split self in the Canzoniere is a reinterpretation of Dante’s one in his autobiographical Vita Nova. But whereas Dante formally splits auctor and agens into alternating sections of his narrative— by making the former speak in prose and the latter in poetry—Petrarch conflates them into the single poetic “I” typical of the lyric genre. Linguistically, the word “I” (io) is a deictic expression that works as a semantically “empty” signifier that can be “filled in” in a variety of ways depending on context (see chapter 2). In the Canzoniere, narrator and character work like two empty “slots” signified by the same word “I.” Initially, this “I” is “filled in” by the reader through a piece of information that is external to the text proper. That is, readers know that it is “Petrarch” who actually wrote RVF I and thus occupies the “slot” auctor. But by highlighting the split between auctor and agens Petrarch leaves open for posterity the possibility of installing into this “I” a different auctor, a different narrator, one resembling the original one—him—but still maintaining the agens as an alter ego: that character “Franciscus,” whom Petrarch shaped in such a powerful way that it became the very model of the lover, that is, the character whose “I” is characterized by an endlessly unfulfilled desire toward a “you.” In the Renaissance the possibility of “replacing” or impersonating Petrarch as the narrator, thus of “becoming” him, was exploited by Petrarchist poets, as we shall see. The “slot” of the narrator became crowded, so to speak, with a great number of authors, all aspiring to imitate the Model. Still, the main character of the narrated stories remained basically the same, as identical words expressed his feelings and actions. Petrarchism was, as Amedeo Quondam effectively defines it, a “linguistic system based on repetition.” 15 Poet Gaspara Stampa, for example, begins her poetry collection with a sonnet whose opening line reads: “Voi, ch’ascoltate in queste meste rime” (“You, who hear in these sad rhymes”) and then continues by heavily borrowing from other lines of RVF I.16 The reader is thus confronted immediately with the question: Who is speaking? Clearly, the process of verbal imitation that lies at the roots of Petrarchism is, at the same time, one of impersonation, resulting in the presence of two simultaneous voices, Stampa’s and Petrarch’s, engaged on the page in a dialogue over time—a dialogue that would perhaps be better described in terms of simultaneous polyphony. In Stampa’s case (as in that of many women poets of the late Renaissance) the constitutive emptiness and ambiguity of the word “I” allows even a differently gendered narrator to position herself as the auctor and appropriate Petrarch’s voice.17 This process of appropriation, as we shall see, also opens up an opportunity—a  

 

 

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    79

space—for a different “composer” of “sounds”—the musician—to replace the slot “Petrarch” as the narrator. The question “Who is speaking?” was one that Petrarch self-consciously passed on to the tradition of Western culture, to any “composer” putting together words that are themselves already sound.18 In late Renaissance Italy the language used by Petrarch to communicate his divided and diffracted self—unified by the “I” of his own persona, in and through writing—generated a wide spectrum of poetic variations, becoming a near exclusive model for poetry making. This imitation of Petrarch as the Model made poets into Petrarchisti, as Niccolò Franco called them in a 1539 satyrical booklet published in Venice by Antonio Gardano (the publisher who in the same year printed Jacob Arcadelt’s First Book of madrigals for four voices). Through language, however, what was passed on, and adapted by, the Petrarchisti was also a poetics of the self—the one sketchily discussed above.19 In this process, Petrarchan poetics influenced not only poetry but also other arts, including music, and affected the way in which artists and poets produced and transmitted their works, portraying themselves in them.  

 

 

 

 

 

A ppropr i at i n g t he Se l f

In the late Renaissance the introductory sonnet became a crucial element of poetry books, often sharing the autobiographical and self-reflexive qualities of the Model—Petrarch’s RVF I. Opening sonnets borrowed from RVF I its emphasis on the “I–you” polarization, on the difference between a “then” and a “now,” but also on the material itself that poetry is made of (in Petrarch, the “rhymes,” rime, and “sighs,” sospiri). The proemial sonnet worked as both the prelude and the synthesis of the poetry book, providing the reader, who is addressed directly, with a context for the story to follow—its where, when, and why. Critics of the Canzoniere include among the poems making up the “prologue” of the lyric sequence also the three poems following the first one. All of these proemial poems (RVF I–IV) share the use of the past tense, typical of narratives, instead of the present tense, typical of the lyric genre. Thus, when in RVF VI the present tense first prominently appears (Sì traviato è ’l folle mio desio, “So far astray is my mad desire”) and sets in motion Petrarch’s narrative of desire for Laura, the reader is made aware that the character speaking is that “other man” mentioned in line 4 of RVF I, not the one who invites the readers to listen to him in line 1 (this shift accomplishes what I term “narrative effect” in chapter 2). The Canzoniere’s proemial sonnets, in sum, solicit the reader to experience the collection as a sequence, to read the poems not only in themselves, as isolated fragments, but as part of a whole, of a book. What, after Romanticism, is still often thought of as an intrinsic characteristic of a lyric poem—to be an isolated fragment dominated by a lyric “I” expressing itself in the “present” time—does not entirely fit Petrarch’s conception of his poems, and indeed much early mod 

 

 

 

 

 

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ern poetry. Petrarch arranged his “fragments” as a sequence featuring some of the elements today often attributed only to the narratives present in novels.20 In the late Renaissance the idea that Petrarch’s Canzoniere truly reflects the narrative of the poet’s life drove a famous commentator on Petrarch, Alessandro Vellutello, to rearrange the poems in a different sequence and to divide them into three parts, not two as in the original. In this way Vellutello upheld the Poet as the Model to be imitated not only for his style (imitatio stili) but also for his life (imitatio vitae).21 If it is true that Vellutello imposed his own narrative on Petrarch’s lyric sequence, it is significant, however, that he still felt obliged to maintain at least the first four “proemial” poems in their original position, although reordered as 1 3 2 4. The idea that a poetry book, in order to be, precisely, a “book,” needs a strong exordium featuring the self-reflexive characteristics described above—a polarization between an “I” and a “you” and between a “then” and a “now,” and an emphasis on sound materiality—carried over into that hybrid artifact that was the madrigal book. Viewed as an object featuring words, the madrigal book could have been read as a text, almost as a poetry collection (a canzoniere); viewed instead as a script, and used as such, it generated musical performances of texted and/or non-texted music, with or without instruments. The two functions were not mutually exclusive and they indeed merged within the memory of performers and listeners (see chapter 5 for the canzoniere as a mental script). The fact that the madrigal book was, in most cases, a gift offered by a dedicator to a dedicatee—a transaction, however, that publishing made public, thus witnessed by a third party (the “world” of the readers/performers)—emphasized the dual nature of the object. Glancing at the table of contents, the dedicatee could recall in his or her mind at least the best-known poetic texts, to then re-experience them diffracted, as it were, through the settings at the moment of the performance or listening. This last thus amounted to a complex cognitive experience that also worked as a process of self-knowledge, to the extent that the poems had already been internalized, as was no doubt the case with those of Petrarch. In his last three madrigal books, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 6, Monteverdi showed awareness of the tradition of the book as a “book.” He assembled the madrigals in his Books VI–VIII by highlighting, as other composers had done before him, the proemial function of the opening pieces. With a similar mindset, he placed a setting of RVF I as the second of the forty pieces making up his collection Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1641), which includes only Latin texts except for the opening five pieces setting Italian texts (two “madrigali morali,” one madrigal, and two “canzonette morali”).22 These five pieces form a self-enclosed unit comprising a prologue of sorts, which displays the self-reflexive aspect typical of paratextual elements (as discussed in chapter 2 for prologues). This self-reflexive aspect emerges at its best in light of another  

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    81

paratextual element present in the print of the collection, the dedicatory letter. From Venice, where he had been employed since 1613, the elderly composer dedicates the Selva to a personality belonging to his distant past, Empress Eleonora Gonzaga, the widow of Ferdinand II of Austria (Habsburg) and the daughter of Duke Vincenzo, Monteverdi’s patron during his Mantuan years: Having begun to consecrate my reverent servitude to the glories of the Most Serene House of Gonzaga when the Most Serene Lord Duke Vincenzo (of happy memory), father of Your Sacred Majesty, was pleased to receive the results of my service, which in my green age I sought with all diligence and with my talent for music to show love to him for the space of twenty-two continuous years, the interposition of space and time has not been able to eclipse the slightest ray of my regard, so that the honors received, from your Most Serene predecessors as from Your Majesty, will never be covered in oblivion, but rather I have always on occasion been courteously revived by them until this my mature age. Whence I have dared to publish this Selva morale, e spirituale, dedicating it to Your Majesty.23

The retrospective, autobiographical attitude displayed by this dedication, written by Monteverdi at the “mature age” of seventy-three, resonates with the two texts by Petrarch that open the collection: O ciechi (“O you of no sight!”)—an excerpt from the Triumphus mortis (1:82–100)—followed by, as said, RVF I, Voi ch’ascoltate.24 The original Petrarch text from which Monteverdi draws for O ciechi reads:  

 

 

Petrarch, Triumphus mortis (Triumph of Death), 1:82 – 100  

U’ sono or le richezza? u’ son gli onori? e le gemme e gli scettri e le corone, 84 e le mitre e i purpurei colori? Miser chi speme in cosa mortal pone (ma chi non ve la pone?) e se si trova 87 a la fine ingannato, è ben ragione. O ciechi, il tanto affaticar che giova? Tutti tornate a la gran madre antica, 90 e ’l vostro nome a pena si ritrova. Pur de le mill’è un’utile fatica, che non sian tutte vanità palesi? 93 Chi intende a’ vostri studii, sì m’el dica. Che vale a soggiogar gli altrui paesi e tributarie far le genti strane 96 co gli animi al suo danno sempre accesi? Dopo le imprese perigliose e vane, e col sangue acquistar terre e tesoro, 99 vie più dolce si trova l’acqua e ’l pane, e ’l legno e ’l vetro, che le gemme e l’oro.

82   Constructing the Narrator   [82] Where are those riches now? Where are those honors? [83] And those diadems, sceptres, and crowns? [84] And those mitres with their purple hues? // [85] Wretched is he who places his trust in mortal things. [86] (Yet who does not?) And if he find himself [87] deluded at last, it is but just. // [88] O you of no sight! What good does it do to toil so? [89] You will all return to our great ancient Mother, [90] and even your fame will scarcely survive you. // [91] Even though the toils of a thousand men seem useful, [92], aren’t they all plain vanities? [93] If anyone understands your studies, then let him tell me. // [94] Is it worth it to conquer other lands [95] and make their foreign people tributary, [96] and their souls always ready to harm? // [97] After perilous and vain enterprises, [98] and lands and treasures won with blood, [99] you will find bread and water far more sweet, // [100] and wood and glass better than gems and gold.

But Monteverdi rearranges Petrarch’s lines (besides making minor modifications to the text). The setting starts with lines 88–100 and then continues with lines 82–85, suppressing 86 and 87. As highlighted by Nino Pirrotta, the text selected by Monteverdi for O ciechi shares a common topic with that of Voi ch’ascoltate (the setting of which immediately follows O ciechi in the Selva): that of vanitas rerum.25 In the former case, this topic is related to political power and thus the text can be interpreted, in the Selva, as referring to the addressee, the dedicatee Eleonora Gonzaga. In the latter case, “vanity” can be referred to the addresser, the composer himself, given the poem’s autobiographical and confessional qualities. Monteverdi’s juxtaposition of the two texts by Petrarch in the Selva has the effect of blurring the boundaries between public and private personas. As Pirrotta observes, the “plain vanities” of line 92 in O ciechi mirror the “vain hopes and vain sorrow” of line 6 in Voi ch’ascoltate.26 Equally important as the common topic is the fact that the two texts share a similar rhetorical strategy, through their parallel way of both presenting their authorial voice and addressing the reader. As with RVF I, the excerpt from the Triumphi (“O you of no sight!”) features the poet speaking in his own voice and addressing the “you” of the readers; but the “you” in Voi ch’ascoltate identifies the generic listeners, whereas in O ciechi it corresponds to the earth’s rulers. That Monteverdi intended to highlight these parallels between the first two pieces of his collection is suggested by the fact that he carefully singled out the Triumphus excerpt from a part of the work that Renaissance commentators called a narrative “digression,” one starting in line 73 and concluding in line 102 of the original text. The composer used most of the text of the digression, corresponding to lines 82–100 in Petrarch. But he also rearranged it, as mentioned, so that lines 82–85 appear after lines 88–100, and lines 86 and 87 were suppressed. In the digression Petrarch no longer quotes words from Laura, who in the preceding lines engages in a dialogue with Death before dying. It is now the poet himself who, after describing, just before the excerpt set by Monteverdi,  

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    83

the “naked, miserable, and begging” souls of “pontiffs, rulers, and emperors,” erupts into the rhetorical questions of lines 82–84 followed by the invective of line 85 (“Where are those riches now? . . . Wretched is he who places his trust in mortal things.”) Monteverdi moves these lines to the end of his piece, which starts instead with the words corresponding to line 88, also uttered by the poet: “Oh you of no sight! What good does it do to toil so?” The rhetoric of voice and address employed by Monteverdi in the first two pieces is anticipated by the dedicatory letter to Eleonora Gonzaga, a letter which, by virtue of this common feature, rises to the level of “text” (according to that more “textual” function of the “book,” mentioned above). In it, as we have seen, the composer speaks in his own voice and constructs his own self in the eyes of both readers and dedicatee as the grateful servant of Eleonora. This rhetorical strategy continues in the two proemial pieces by appropriating Petrarch’s voice in its purest, unmediated form. In O ciechi the poet/composer addresses both rulers (thus also Eleonora herself) and listeners. This shared “you” dominates the first three lines of the setting (88–100, “Oh you of no sight! . . .”), an apostrophe followed by the rhetorical question of lines 91–92. This finally leads to a shift of focus toward the poet’s persona: “[93] If anyone understands your studies, then let him tell me” (my emphasis). A parallel rhetorical strategy is found, as discussed above, in RVF I, the next piece set in the Selva. There, however, it takes Petrarch eight lines—not six as in the Triumphi excerpt—to accomplish the shift from the “you” of the generic listeners (“You who hear in scattered rhymes,” an apostrophe symmetrical to the “O you of no sight!”) to the “I” of the poet (line 8: “I hope to find pity as well as forgiveness”). These discursive parallels are rhetorically enhanced by Monteverdi’s musical setting. By using the same tonal focus of C, the composer distinguishes the two opening settings from the remaining three of the “prologue” of the Selva. Also, both pieces are scored for two concertato violins and a continuo accompanying five voices: in the first piece, two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass, whereas in the second, a soprano, three tenors, and a bass. In both settings the composer powerfully highlights the initial apostrophe with unusual musical means. In the first one, the beginning O ciechi actually becomes O ciechi, ciechi, the sopranos reaching a high g'' (the apex in the piece) through a melisma; this gesture is then repeated insistently throughout the piece as a ritornello, interspersed in the text between lines 90 and 91 and then, again, three times at the end, before each of the final repetitions of “Where are . . . ?” (lines 82–84; example 4a). In Voi ch’ascoltate the setting of the opening invocation—first ascending on a broken C major chord and then descending stepwise in a way strikingly similar to O ciechi, ciechi—is fragmented and refracted among the three tenors, then echoed by the two violins (example 4b).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 4 a Example 4. Claudio Monteverdi, Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1641). a. Beginning of O ciechi, il tanto affaticar che giova? Soprano I Soprano II

j œœ J

œ . œ  & c œ. œ O

Alto Tenor

cie - chi cie - chiIil tan - toIaf-fa - ti - car

che gio - va

 Example & c Œ4 b

j j r r œœ œ œ œ J Jœ œ œ R R

œœ œœ œ œ

Violin I Violin II

?c

j r œœ . . œœ œœ œœ ~~ J R che gio - va

j œœ œœj œ J J œ

& c  ..

r r œœ œœ R R

cie - chi cie - chiIil tan - toIaf- fa - ti - car

O

b. c.

j j r r œœ œœ œœ œœ J J R R

j œœ œ J œ

.

œ œ œ

r r œ œ œ œ R R

j œ . œœr œ œ ~~ œ. R œ œ J

œœ

œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ . œ œ .

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ.

b. Beginning of Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. Tenor I

Vc  Ó Voi

Tenor II

Tenor III

Violin I Violin II

b. c.

Vc

∑

Vc

∑

&c

∑

?c  Ó

 Ó

voi

 Ó

Voi

œ

œ œ ~~

œ œ œ.œ œ J J JR

∑

œ œ œ œ œ œ J J J J

∑

∑

voi ch’a-scol-ta-te

j j œ œ œ œ ∑

œ

œ

∑

Voi ch’a-scol - ta - te

Ó

œœ œœ ~~

œ œ œ œ J J

voi ch’a-scol - ta - te

œ

∑ ∑



œ

œœ

œ

œ œ J J Jœ Jœ œJ . œR œ a-scol-ta-teIin ri - me

a-scol-ta-teIin ri - me

œœ œœ œ œ œ œ.œ œ

œ œ œœ œ

œ œ

∑ œ œ œœ œ

Example 5

From Petrarch to Petrarchism    85

Example 5. Claudio Monteverdi, Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1641): Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, mm. 27–29.  

œ œ œ œ Vc ‰J J J

œ j J œ œ

‰ œj œ

. V c ‰ Jœ Jœ œJ œJ # œR œJ œj œ

‰ jœ œ

27

Tenor I

‰ œ œJ J

œ œ œ œ J J J

œ

Quan - d'e-raIinpar - te al - tr'Ihuom al - tr'Ihuom al - tr'Ihuom di quel ch'io so - no

Tenor II

Tenor III

Violin I Violin II

b. c.

Vc

Quan - d'e-raIin par-te

?c œ

‰ œj œ

‰ œj œj

Œ

al-tr'Ihuom

œ

œ

œ

‰ Jœ œ

œ

œ

j j j œ œ œ œ

œ

al - tr'Ihuom di quel ch'io so - no

j œ Œ ‰ œœ œ J

j ‰ œœ œœ J

∑ œ

œ Jœ œJ Jœ . œ œJ J R

al - tr'Ihuom al - tr'Ihuom al - tr'Ihuom di quel ch'io so - no

∑

&c

j ‰ œj œ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

Monteverdi destructures Petrarch’s text in a setting that makes singers almost stutter (| = rest): Voi | voi | voi ch’ascoltate | ascoltate in rime | in rime sparse in rime sparse il suono | di quei | di quei | di quei di quei sospir | di quei sospir ond’io nutriva ond’io nutriva | nutriva il core | in sul mio primo giovenil errore | quand’era in parte | quand’era in parte altr’huom altr’huom altr’huom | altr’huom di quel ch’io sono.

The diffracted and polyphonic self of Petrarch—the multiple dimensions of the poet’s dialogic subjectivity—could not have found a more suitable musical appropriation and projection. In the life of performance the Petrarchan identity of suono and sono (the rhyming words of lines 1 and 4 in RVF I) finds spatial and temporal embodiment. In the setting of the word altr’huom (“another man,” mm. 27–29), tossed back and forth between the tenors while an angular bass descends through the circle of fifths, the “other” is shown as the refracted image of an equally diffracted “self” (example 5). This stunning verbal and musical fragmentation highlights the materiality of sound, advancing a discourse on a self that is not a merely abstract entity but one actually performed. In this context, the long melisma on the word sparse (mm. 7–10) and the halting repetition of the  

 

 

 

86   Constructing the Narrator  

deictic word quei in the setting of quei sospiri (“those sighs,” mm. 12–17) are not only mere vestiges of the tradition of “madrigalisms” but also references to the material itself of which both poetry and music consist in performance—the very physical “sound of those sighs,” il suono di quei sospiri. Finally, both settings of O ciechi and Voi ch’ascoltate similarly highlight, through texture and key changes, the rhetorical shift from the opening “you” of the listeners to the “I” of the poet’s persona. In both cases the voice of the third tenor sings in complete isolation at the point in which the “I” of the poet fully emerges in the text, that is, in lines 91–93 of O ciechi and in line 8 of Voi ch’ascoltate (examples 6a and b). In O ciechi the solo tenor shifts from a tutti section in C to one in a, doubled by the bass line. In Voi ch’ascoltate the individual voice, again doubled by the bass and texturally in stark contrast with the preceding tutti section in C, explores sharper sonorities (B and E). But this crucial line (8) is given much more weight since the tenor repeats its words with the same “stutter” that was heard at the beginning:  

 

 

spero | spero trovar pietà | spero trovar pietà | nonché perdono

The tutti then absorbs the tenor voice for a last repeat of line 8 in its integrity, finally cadencing again on C. The listeners, who were first addressed as the voi at the beginning of the setting (but still as fragmented and “stuttering”), now fully merge into one individual and cohesive collective identity, the “I” of the poet-composer. Monteverdi, that is, musically accomplishes the same laborious process of absorption of the “you” into the “I” occurring in the first eight lines of Petrarch’s poem: from the fragmentation and tension of the spiraling subordinate sentences of lines 1–7 to the temporary unity and release provided by the main clause of line 8. One might indeed wonder if this absorption of the “you” into the “I” reflects Monteverdi’s laborious appropriation of Petrarch’s voice in a metadiscursive way. The tortuous path toward progressive clarification occurring in the first eight lines of RVF I replicates in nuce the tormented process that the poet lays out for the reader in the 366 poems of the Canzoniere. Petrarch’s poetics of the self develops through a lifelong journey from the darkness of sin to the light of redemption, culminating in the final peroratio, the Song to the Lady Virgin (RVF CCCLXVI). Accordingly, Monteverdi’s imitation of Petrarch reaches beyond the small-scale level just discussed. By fully appropriating the poet’s voice, the composer manages to construct the entire Selva—not only its beginning—as his own autobiographical narrative, one already anticipated, as we have seen, in the dedicatory letter.27 Similarly to the Canzoniere, the final piece of the Selva consists of a true palinody, this word intended in the etymological sense of pálin and ōdé (“again” and “song”). The last piece is that operatic Lamento d’Arianna, which more than  

 

 

Example 6a Example 6. Monteverdi, Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1641). a. O ciechi, il tanto affaticar j che j giova? mm.j 13–23.j 13

Tenor

Vc Œ 

13

Vc &c

Tenor Violin I Violin II

&c ?c

Violin I Violin II b. c.

?c

b. c.

œ œ j j Œ Pur  deœ leœ  deœœ leœœ Œ Pur Œ  œœ œœ  œ œ Œ  œ œ Œ

j j V œ œj œ œj œ œ vaj- ni - tàj pa- le - si Example V œ œj œ6œjbœ œ œ œ -leœ - siœ Example œœ & vaœœ -niœ -tàœ6paœœ #b œ œ & œœ œ œ œœ # œœ œœ ?œ œ œ œ œ œ

#œ œ ‰ œ œ mil - le vaj u # œ œ ‰ œj œ œœ - leœœ ‰ vaœœ uœœ mil Jj œœ œœ ‰ œœ œœ # œ œ ‰ Jœ œ J #œ œ ‰ œ œ J

 

jj j j j œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ j - j tij- lej faj- ti - caj Che œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ faœœ - tiœœ - caœœ Che œœ -œ tiœœ - le œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ

Ó œ œ œœ œ œ œ - œdeœIi voœ -stri Ó Ch’in œ -ten œ œœ - œœdeœœIi voœœ -stri # œœ -ten Ó Ch’in œœ Ó # œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œœ œ œ Ó œ œ œœ œ œ ?œ œ œ œ œ œ Ó œ

18

b. Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse œil suono, œ œmm. œ 44–52. Tenor

Tenor Violin I Violin II Violin I Violin II b. c. b. c.

Spe - ro Vc œ œ Ó œœ - roœœ Ó & c #Spe œ œ & c #œ œ Ó ?c œ œ Ó ?c œ œ Ó

48

V w

48

V w & #tàww tà

& # ww ? w ? w

œ

Ó

Ó

Ó

Ó

Ó

Ó

œ œ œ



 non 

non

  

   sian  non    

œ



che

w



per



w

di -

w di w -# 



tut - te

 - te tut  





  

 ~~

 ~~ ca  ~~

- ca -

w #  w

 ~~  ~~  ~~

w

œ

-

  œ œ per che œ œ œ œ œ œ    

 



j j œ œ œ œ spe - rojtroj- var pie œ œ œ œ œ j spe œœ - roœœ tro œœ .. pie œœœœ -var Jj œœ œœ œœ œœ .. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ

 

44



non sian

œ. œ œ œ J stu œ . -diœ sìœ m’el Jj œ œstu. -diœ s윜 m’el œ . œ œœ Jj œ . œ œœ œœ œ .. œ œ Jœ œ œ J œ. œ œ œ J

œ w J J spe œ - roœ tro œ -var œ pie œ - tàw J J œœ - roœœ tro œ œœ - # # tàww œ -var œœ . pie spe J œœ œœ œ œœ . œ œœ # # ww œ œ œ œ œ J w

Vc œ œ Ó



œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ 

18

44



w

do

œ œ œ œ

-

w do w # w #  w w

w

w

no no ww

ww w w

88   Constructing the Narrator  

thirty years earlier had made the composer so popular in Mantua and beyond, and was then again performed in a 1640 revival of the opera in Venice. In the Selva Monteverdi turns it into a homage to the Lady Virgin, by translating the original libretto text into a Planctus Mariae (Pianto della Madonna sopra il Lamento d’Arianna, a voce sola). Through this spiritual contrafactum, Monteverdi reinterprets—literally: contra factum, “against” his “accomplishment”—his own past as vanitas, at the same time that he offers it both to the dedicatee and to God.28  

 

•

•

•

•

•

Monteverdi’s appropriation of Petrarch’s voice operates on two levels, a micro­ textual and a macrotextual one. Rhetorical and semantic features of the Model are imitated not only at the level of the individual poem but also at the larger one of the lyric sequence. This last—the Canzoniere—is organized as a “book” featuring an exordium with a proemial function and a final peroratio representing the climax of a narrative journey. From the musical point of view, in the above discussion I emphasize two aspects, one concerning the relationship between composer and poet, the other the relationship between composer and text, both aspects having reverberations on performance. The first aspect consists of the composer’s appropriation of the poet’s voice, a feature of Renaissance imitation also discussed above in chapter 2, as, however, limited to poets and their characters. My point is that, through texted music, a late Renaissance composer such as Monteverdi fashioned himself precisely as a poet, rather than simply being himself a “reader” or “exegete” of poetic texts through music.29 In this respect, the composer becomes more of an orator appropriating another voice in order to deliver it, rather than someone interpreting or explaining written texts and producing another (although the two roles are not mutually exclusive). This appropriation is a crucial aspect of Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, if the harmonia/oratione duality is considered from the point of view of author’s agency, rather than of textual features. It is perhaps not coincidental that Monteverdi uses the term oratione, linked to the spoken word (oratione deriving from oris, “mouth”), rather than any other term linked to writing (e.g., testo, deriving from textere, i.e. “weaving,” thus something to be touched). The second, related aspect, concerning modes of address, consists of the composer’s imitation, through texture and key changes, of shifts in the poetic text from an orientation toward the reader/listener to one toward the poet’s persona, and vice versa. These shifts, during which, at the moment of performance, the textual “I” coincides with the singer’s own “I,” are exemplified by the first eight lines of RVF I and the first six of O ciechi as set to music by Monteverdi. These two narrative aspects—appropriation of poetic voice and mode of address—are related in that they both pertain to the issue of subjectivity and performance. In the remainder of this section I examine the latter aspect—mode  

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    89

of address—in connection with settings of RVF I other than Monteverdi’s. Then in the rest of the chapter I discuss both aspects—voice and address—from a literary point of view. In “Lyric Modes” I focus on the work of the Petrarchist theorist Antonio Minturno, and in “Equivocality” on a theatrical prologue featuring the character “Petrarch.” This discussion of Petrarchist works develops the one of RVF I, providing further historical and theoretical background for the textual musical analysis of parts II and III. In this context chapter 5 presents case studies of composers’ uses of voice and address in sixteenth-century madrigals. It is within this repertoire that the two narrative aspects found a fertile ground for experimentation, on which Monteverdi later capitalized in his madrigals and operas.  

 

•

•

•

 

•

•

Monteverdi’s use of the concertato texture in Voi ch’ascoltate certainly allowed him greater freedom and variety compared to an a cappella madrigal setting (or even to the canzonetta-style setting of the remaining madrigals in the Selva). The fragmented texture and the stuttering declamation of the text at the beginning of his setting of RVF I (see example 4b) do not convey a sense of a collective, unified “you.” To perceive a sense of communality the listener has to wait until the homophonically declaimed tutti setting of lines 5–7. Through a typical Monteverdian contrast, the setting of these lines highlights even more the return to the stuttering declamation of line 8 (see example 6b), in which texture is no longer fragmented, coalescing instead around the individual voice of the tenor, doubled by the bass. Finally, as I have shown, the declaimed repetition of line 8 joins “I” and “you” in collective homophony. In the setting of the first two quatrains of RVF I Monteverdi thus juxtaposes a fragmented “I” with a unified “you,” to then bring them together and show them as two faces of the same coin, effectively solving the textual challenge discussed in the previous chapter: that of a “you” that only apparently dominates the first seven lines of Petrarch’s sonnet since the first-person pronoun repeatedly surfaces in the subordinate sentences leading to the main clause of line 8. Previous madrigal composers setting RVF I also faced this challenge. Like Monteverdi, Giaches de Wert placed RVF I as the second setting of his heavily Petrarchan Book II a 5 (1561) and began it on a triad built on C, as Monteverdi would.30 Contrary to the later composer, Wert uses the kind of exordium that theorist Gallus Dressler calls plenum as opposed to nudum (example 7a).31 As Bernhard Meier observed, Wert’s madrigal is written in transposed mode 6 (C plagal), but the composer immediately challenged its stability through a clausula peregrina on d located at the end of the setting of the first line (mm. 5–6). The cadential shift up a whole tone, Meier noted, has the effect of contrasting the voi and the io, polarizing them around the pitches D and C (compare mm. 6 and 10).  

 

Example 7. Giaches Example 7 a de Wert, Madrigali del fiore a cinque voci, libro secondo (Venice, 1561): Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. a. Mm. 1–10.  

&C w

C

Voi

&C w

A

Voi

&C w

Q

Voi

&C w

T

6

&

œ

œ œ 

.

œ

œ œ 

.

œ

œ œ 

.

œ

œ œ 

œ

ch’a - scol - ta - teIin ri

-

ch’a - scol - ta - teIin ri

-

ch’a - scol - ta - teIin ri

-

œ

œ

œ

me spar - s’il suo -

œ



œ



œ



me spar

-

-

me spar

œ

œ œ  aœ 

-

-

s’il

suo

œ









-

suo -

s’il

œ

no

-

-

ch’a - scol - ta - teIin ri

-

me spar

-

s’il

suo - no

Voi

ch’a - scol - ta - teIin ri

-

me spar

-

s’il

suo -

.

 no

Œ œ

Di

œ œ 

œ

œ

quei

‰œ œ œ J

so - spi - ri

& 

Œ #œ aœ

‰ œj œ œ

& #

Œ

‰ jœ œ œ

no

& Ó

? 

no

Di

quei

œ

œ

Di

œ œ

Di quei

Œ œ

Di

quei

so - spi - ri

‰ j œ œ œ

so - spi - ri

quei

‰ Jœ œ œ

so - spi - ri



on -d’io nu - dri

-

‰ œj œ œ œ œ on -d’io nu - dri

-

œ œ œ 

‰ œj œ œ œ œ

on - d’io

nu - dri -va’l co

on -d’io nu - dri

-

-

-

œ œ

~~

œ 



~~

œ 

œ

~~

Œ

~~



~~

on -d’io nu - dri - va’l co

j ‰œ œ œ œ œ





œ

‰ Jœ œ œ œ œ œ 

‰ j œ œ œ

so - spi - ri

œ

-

re

va’l co - re

va’l co - re

-

œ



re



-



Voi

?C w

B

.

va’l co - re

Example 7b

From Petrarch to Petrarchism    91

example 7 (continued) b. Mm. 25–29.  

œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œj œj   œ œ œ J J J JJ

&c œ

C

25

Fra

le va - ne spe-ran - z’e’l van do - lo - re,

jj j j j œ œ œ œj# œ œ œ a œ œj œj  w

&c œ

A

le va-ne spe-ran - z’e’l van do- lo - re

Fra

Fra

?c œ



[– no]

B

-

∑

-

-

re

Ó Œœ

O –

le va -ne spe-ran - z’e’l van do- lo - re Fra le va - ne spe - ran-z’e’l van do - lo - re

&c œ

T

-

 #

j j j j jj j j j j œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œj œj  œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œj  

&c œ

Q

do - lo

œœ

[– gio] - no

∑

∑

Ó

∑

Œ

j j j j j j œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ   Fra le va - ne spe - ran-z’e’l van do - lo - re . Œ œ . œJ œ œJ Jœ œ œJ Jœ Jœ  

Fra le va - ne spe - ran-z’e’lvan do - lo - re

This rhetorical oscillation is carried over in the setting of lines 3 and 4. Whereas the setting of line 3 remains on c, at the moment in which the end of the line overlaps with the beginning of the next the harmony shifts to an A major chord: the words “Quand’era in part altr’huom” in the quinto (soon imitated by the cantus) feature a modal commixture with mode 2 (through emphasis on the repercussion re–fa, d–f). At the end of the line, however, C is reestablished as the tonal focus.32 The setting of the next two lines (5–6) engages in the kind of textural shifts of which Wert was a master, each line repeated by breaking the lower and upper voices respectively into 4 vs. 4 and 3 vs. 3. During the second repetition, however, the cantus breaks away from the rest of the group, getting out of step with the lower voices and repeating the word dolore (sorrow) in long notes while quinto, tenor, and basso set the repeated line (example 7b). At this point, the cohesiveness of the texture begins to shake, each voice declaiming the text at its own pace until, after a weak cadence on D minor, the lower four voices come together for the setting of the crucial line 8 (spero trovar pietà non che perdono). By now, the soprano line has acquired even more individuality, pausing and lagging behind all the other voices to declaim the half-line spero trovar pietà on a plaintive descending tetrachord d''–c'–bâ'–a', imitating the quinto. In turn, the quinto takes back the tetrachord movement and passes it on to the tenor for a final statement, the first half of the piece concluding on a perfect cadence on the triads of D and g.  

 

 

 

 

 

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The solutions offered by Monteverdi and Wert for setting the first two quatrains of RVF I, dominated by the pronouns voi and io, show the importance for madrigalists of highlighting such oscillations in poetic texts. Segmentations according to what I termed in chapter 2 shifting “deictic orientations” emphasize the aspect of verbal texts geared toward enunciation, or performance. Through the personal type of deictics, the physical presence of performers and audiences is inscribed in the text itself, producing, in performance, subject-effects (see again chapter 2). Modes of enunciation influence compositional and performance choices as much as an emphasis on affective content. The sensitivity of composers to this rhetoric of address, and that of performers in bringing it out, can greatly contribute to music’s effectiveness on audiences. Ly r ic M ode s

The question “who is speaking” and the related issue of agency have their roots in Renaissance literary theory, which in this respect foreshadows today’s critical approaches. Shifting voices and poetic narratives were identified in Petrarch’s works, which were presented as models for contemporaneous poets also by highlighting what today are called modes of enunciation. Composers appropriated the voice of poets, who, in turn, imitated the Model (Petrarch). Readings of poems that highlight the modalities of this appropriation are thus useful for interpreting musical settings. In the Renaissance, few literary theorists deal extensively with the genre of lyric poetry and with the issue of the poet’s voice. Following Aristotle, treatises on poetics devote much more space to the dramatic and the epic genres as characterized by imitation. But in his Arte poetica (Naples, 1564) the prelate and poet Antonio Sebastiano Minturno interprets this tradition in an original way by expanding the concept of imitation to cover, besides drama and epic, also the lyric. He calls this genre melica or lirica, in opposition to the epica and scenica, defining it as “an imitation of actions that are either grave and honorable or pleasant and cheerful, dealing with a comprehensive subject of certain greatness; this imitation,” Minturno continues, “is accomplished in a pleasing way through poetic verses that are not simple or plain, and that are accompanied by music and dance.” Minturno then shifts his focus to agency: “poetic verses either simply narrate, or introduce another [voice] to speak, or use one or the other mode, in order to please and be [morally] useful.” 33 Expanding on Pietro Bembo’s observations in his Prose della volgar lingua, Minturno emphasizes the musical value of words and rhymes, using as his model Petrarch as the “head and source” (capo e fonte) of lyric poetry.34 Minturno’s main contribution to the theory of poetry consists in his extension to the lyric genre of all the attributes that Aristotle assigned to epic and tragedy:



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    93

favola (plot), affetti (affections), sentimenti (feeling), parole (words), and canto (songs). It is remarkable that he includes plot, since it is the most problematic category to transpose into the lyric genre. He attributes to lyric a narrative mode, poetry belonging, as it does for classic rhetoricians, to the genus enarrativum. In this respect Minturno follows a Platonic tradition that today has become foreign to us, as we are more familiar with rigid distinctions between lyric, epic, and dramatic genres. For Plato (Republic 393a and c) all poetic genres are indeed narrative. In some genres, the writer speaks in his own person, and thus they are simply and purely narrative; in others, Plato says, the writer reports a discourse as if it were by another person, thus these genres are characterized by imitation. Plato expands on this distinction in Republic 393b–c, which Minturno paraphrases and conflates with Aristotele’s between mimesis and diegesis in Poetics 1447 a–1448b.35 In this way Minturno is able to focus on three types of agencies: the poet who narrates, the poet who imitates, and the mixed mode. In the first mode, the poet “keeps his own person” and does not transfer himself into others. This mode is typical of lyric poetry and is used, he says, in Petrarch’s canzoni and sonetti. In the second mode the poet “sets aside his own person” (depone la sua persona) and borrows (or wears) another person’s clothes, as is typical of the tragic and comic genres. The poet does not “speak” but introduces others to speak for the entire poem. The third mode—the mixed one—is that of epic poetry. However, in this genre Minturno includes those poems that present both indirect and direct speech, such as Petrarch’s Triumphs or Dante’s Divine Comedy. More than in genres, then, Minturno is interested in modes of enunciation that can be detected in a variety of texts. In the third book of his treatise, which he devotes to lyric poetry alone, Minturno observes that whereas Aristotle places the dithyramb (the Greek genre associated with lyric poetry) under the banner of imitation, Plato instead attributes to it “pure narration.” Minturno’s solution for lyric poetry is to have it both ways, exemplifying the mix through, of course, Petrarch. Interestingly, however, he selects only poems from the Canzoniere. For example, in RVF III (“Era il giorno, ch’al Sol si scoloraro,” “It was the day, whose rays were fading”), the poet, he says, simply narrates. But in RVF VIII (“A pié de colli, ove la bella vesta,” “At the foot of the hill, where beauty’s garment”) he introduces others to speak, namely some doves (the reader needs to know this fact in advance, reading the poem as if it were in quotation marks). The most interesting case, however, is the mixed mode, such as that of RVF CCCLX, the canzone “Quell’antico mio dolce empio Signore” (“That ancient sweet cruel lord of mine”). In this poem the poet goes through an alternation between keeping his own “clothes” and setting them aside to wear those of another agent, including himself. The poet, Minturno explains, first narrates, then introduces himself by accusing Love, saying “Madonna, il manco piede /   

 

 

 

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giovenetto pos’io nel costui regno” (“ ‘My lady, I set foot when young in this kingdom’,” lines 9–10); he takes up narration with “Il mio avversario con agre rampogne / comincia:” (“My adversary with sharp reproaches begins:” 76–77); he borrows (or wears) the clothes of Love by saying immediately after: “ ‘O Donna, intendi l’altra parte,’ ” (“ ‘O Lady, hear the other side,’ ” 77), then narrates with “Al fin ambo conversi al giusto seggio” (“At last both speak to the Judge’s chair,” 150); finally, in the last four lines he alternates between the two modes. Then, even when the poet “keeps” his own person, and thus, properly speaking, narrates, he nevertheless imitates. Minturno’s reading of Petrarch’s poetry blurs today’s accepted distinctions among lyric, epic, and dramatic genres by encompassing within the lyric genre all modes of enunciation, in a continuum ranging from the pole of maximum diegesis (narration) to that of maximum mimesis (imitation).36 Within this spectrum of possibilities, at the pole of pure diegesis, the poet “keeps his own person” and “simply narrates”; at a minimum degree of mimesis, which I will henceforth characterize as mimesis effect,37 the poet “sets his person aside” and “wears” another character’s “dress,” including his own; finally, at a maximum degree of mimesis—as in theater—the poet entirely disappears behind characters. The role of the narrator’s voice in relationship to the characters is central to Minturno’s view. For him the main textual marker for the differences in narrative levels is the shift from indirect to direct speech, although it is not a strictly necessary requirement, as he shows through the poem spoken in its entirety by the doves (RVF VIII). Minturno’s approach to the issue of the variable distance between narrator and character according to modes of enunciation presents similarities to that adopted by today’s scholars of narratives. Despite having initially relegated narrativity to the exclusive domain of novels, many narratologists have later investigated these relationships in poetry, drama, film, and opera.38 Their approach facilitates discussion of musical or musical-dramatic settings of texts as varied as lyric poetry, epic poems, spoken plays, and librettos, from the point of view of the relationship between the composer as narrator and the characters to whom he gives life. In this context, the performer, as the mediator par excellence, participates in both types of agencies (narrator and character). As we have seen in chapter 2, this exchange of roles is implicit in Monteverdi’s Prologue of Orfeo, in which a character named Music becomes, in effect, the narrator of the action to come. This is why this prologue provides a foundation for any discourse on musical narrativity—the prologue to all opera, as we noted. Minturno’s observations on the role of the narrator in Petrarch’s poetry are relevant also to the other related issue discussed in this chapter, that of mode of address, or deictic orientation. In Petrarch’s poems, Minturno claims, there can actually be two persons speaking, the poet himself and the lover:  

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    95 When the Poet speaks to others, it seems that he sets aside the person of the Poet, or that he borrows (or wears) another, because in Petrarch we can perceive two persons: one is that of the Poet when he narrates; the other is that of the Lover, when he addresses his words to Madonna Laura (this last is the case in “Quando io muovo i sospir a chiamar voi” [RVF V]) or when he speaks to another person, as in the canzoni “Italia mia” [RVF CXXVIII] and “Chiare fresche e dolci acque” [RVF CXXVI], and in the sonnet “Sennucio io vo, che sappi, in qual maniera” [RVF CXII].39

The exchange of roles between poet and lover represents a way for the poet, in addition to the shift from indirect to direct speech, to “set aside his person and borrow (or wear) another one”—one who, however, can still coincide with himself, as typical of lyric poetry. Minturno traces this rhetorical strategy back to ancient Greek choral lyric, when the poet takes on the person of the choir and vice versa. Thanks to this dramatization of lyric poetry, Minturno distinguishes between the poet as narrator-character of his own story (as poeta) and the poet as, simply, a character (as amante). The difference is that the latter is less introspective since he directly addresses the beloved or other addressees. His words would thus be located further to the right side of the diegetic–mimetic spectrum outlined above, thus accomplishing a mimetic effect. Again, as in the case of the shift from direct to indirect speech, Minturno’s distinction between poeta and amante resonates with those of today’s critics emphasizing modes of enunciation.40 In his study on modes in ancient and modern poetry, W. R. Johnson, for example, proposes a tripartite classification based on the use of pronouns, which are crucial to modes of enunciation.41 Johnson’s classification, as Margaret Murata has shown, is useful in discussing texts set to music.42 Johnson calls “I” poems those lyric texts that T. S. Eliot termed as “meditative poems.” In “I” poems “the poet talks to himself or to no one in particular or, sometimes, calls on, apostrophizes, inanimate or nonhuman entities, abstractions, or the dead.” In the second type of poems, “the poet addresses . . . his own thoughts and feelings to another person,” who becomes a mediator between author and readers/listeners (RVF I comes immediately to mind). These are called “I–you” poems by Johnson, who considers the pronominal patterning I–You “to be the classic form for lyric solo, or, as the Greek came to call it, monody.” Finally, the third category includes poems in dialogue form, dramatic monologues, narrative poems in ballad style, and works like Ovid’s “Letters of Heroines,” in which “the poet disappears entirely and is content to present a voice or voices or a story without intervening in that presentation directly.” This last type would be located more on the mimetic than the diegetic side of the narrative spectrum, according to Minturno. Johnson’s categories do not entirely match those of Minturno, but in both  

 

 

 

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authors the modes of enunciation play a substantial role. In my analyses in chapters 5 and 6 I adapt Minturno’s categories to Johnson’s terminology. I consider “I” poems those in which the poet does not address anyone, thus keeping his own persona (Minturno’s poeta, the more diegetic type). “I–you” poems are instead those in which the poet uses indirect speech to address both human and nonhuman entities (such as Love), “setting aside his own persona and borrowing (or wearing) another one,” in Minturno’s words (poet as amante). Finally, a third category, sliding more toward the mimetic pole, includes poems having a mimetic effect: dialogues, poems featuring direct speech, and those uttered by a character (the poet almost “disappears,” according to both Minturno and Johnson). In this last category I also include Johnson’s narrative poems in ballad style as well as poems in which there is a predominantly deictic orientation toward the third person, thus also moralizing texts. Obviously, Johnson’s three categories are not mutually exclusive but a matter of degree and emphasis, since they can be found within individual poems as different levels of narration (e.g., the poet first talks to himself and then addresses his lover, as Minturno shows). In addition, within each poem, changes in deictic orientation work a bit like key modulations in music, by shifting from and toward the speaker as its deictic center and focus. Finally, as we shall see in the next chapter, the context and use of a poem are relevant to its location on the diegesis–mimesis axis. An I–you poem can be, in effect, a noi–voi poem, shifting from singular to plural, if it is intended to be recited or sung by, say, nymphs or shepherds on stage and directly addressed to an audience—this last a voi that is not the singular one of, say, a madonna. Clearly this theatricalization shifts the text de facto to the very end of the mimetic pole of the spectrum. Similarly, poems that, as text, appear to be “I” poems but are clearly uttered by a character, or by a group (a “we”), shift toward the mimetic pole as well. Finally, one last aspect of Minturno’s narrativization of the lyric genre is worth mentioning, the large-scale dimension, since it is relevant to poems set to music within collections like madrigal books (see in chapter 5 “The Madrigal Book as Canzoniere”). Each individual poem, Minturno claims, ought to start with a Principio followed by a Narrazione, as does, on an even larger scale, a lyric sequence.43 Minturno provides a prototypical example of the latter case, not surprisingly that of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which is organized, according to him, into a Proemio corresponding to the first sonnet, followed by a Narrazione starting from the second or third poem, and concluding with an Uscita (exit) featuring the final Canzone to the Lady Virgin. This is the aspect of Petrarch’s lyric sequence that I above called macrotextual. Minturno’s categories help us interpret Petrarch’s poems as well as those by his sixteenth-century followers. This body of poetry made up the bulk of the texts that was set to music during the late Renaissance in a number of madrigalistic  

 

 

 

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    97

settings estimated to be in the range of fifty or sixty thousand.44 The categories embody the rationale of Petrarchist poetry as a process of imitation of the Model. But they also provide a useful way to read their poems by highlighting their narrative and discursive aspects. Minturno’s distinction between narrator and character reinterprets that between auctor and agens (Franciscus) discussed above (p. 78) regarding Petrarch. Renaissance Petrarchist poets, including Minturno himself, variously occupied the “slot” of the narrator but maintained as virtually identical to “Franciscus” the slot of the character. They replicated the narratives acted out by Petrarch-the-lover within individual poems, lyric sequences, and also, as we shall see, pastoral plays. Furthermore, Minturno’s reading of Petrarch’s poems highlights their more discursive features, in this respect anticipating that of later critics (such as Johnson): their mode of address, the shifts between direct and indirect speech, and the position and function of a poem within a larger collection. These are all features that composers took into account in their musical settings. E qu i voca l i t y

By making creative use of Aristotelian and Platonic concepts, Minturno identified the question of the narrator’s voice as central to Petrarch’s poetics, the answer to which has the potential of transcending genres, or even artistic forms. Poems and plays present, under this view, productive intersections and permeable boundaries. Since the first opera librettos such as Striggio’s Orfeo were, as known, strongly influenced by pastoral plays in their language, plots, and ideologies, it is relevant for our purposes to further investigate these genre-related boundaries as well as the suitability to music of the narrative categories outlined above, particularly regarding agency. The issue of multiple agencies will be central in examining madrigals that are more “theatrical,” as we shall see in chapter 5 by considering music in spoken plays. Perhaps Minturno would have been amused to read the prologue of a 1598 pastoral play entitled La fida ninfa, by one Francesco Contarini, in which the character speaking is none other than the ghost of Petrarch himself: You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound / of those sighs, with which I already nourished my heart, / when at the shade of those beautiful leaves / of a green laurel I poured out my sorrows / when I was completely another man from what I am now.45

These lines are followed, through a mix of quotations from Petrarch’s Canzoniere and original lines, by others in which the character justifies the rather bizarre setting of the play: Arquadia, a mix of Arquà (the town where the poet died) and Arcadia. After the usual praise of the patron, “Petrarch” then invites the Muses

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to inspire poets to create characters of pastoral plays through the imitation of his own poetry. Despite its awkwardness, Contarini’s use of Petrarch as a character introducing his pastoral play highlights important features of contemporary pastoral plays.46 Such plays elaborated on the Petrarchan literary canon on both the microtextual and macrotextual level: in the former case, by adopting Petrarch’s language in the lines of those characters who express their love pains, in ways similar to the character that Minturno called “the lover”; in the latter case, by readapting the large-scale “plot” of the Canzoniere to their plays, in ways similar to those that were later inherited by opera. The latter aspect is evident, for example, in pastoral plays such as Battista Guarini’s tragicomedy Il pastor fido, one of the most influential works in the early modern European literary tradition, and one from which musicians often drew texts to set to music, starting even before it went to press in 1590.47 Whereas in Petrarch the lover is tragically hopeless—the lyric “I” delving into his own contradictions and paradoxes—the shepherd-lover featured in pastoral plays, after an initial indulgence in his failures, definitely pursues happiness and eventually finds it in joyous and morally legitimate Love, usually a wedding. As today’s critics observe, if in pastoral plays the Petrarchan lyric ‘I’ “is objectivized in characters and in dramatic situations,” nonetheless the happy end highlights “all the uselessness of any sacrifice that is not crowned by a final and triumphant reciprocal love.” 48 Thus, in act 1 of Guarini’s Pastor fido, the shepherd Mirtillo first fashions himself as the Petrarchan suffering lover in a passage that Monteverdi selected to open his fifth book of madrigals (Cruda Amarilli). Yet in the rest of the play the same character does not “attempt to sublimate his desire in order to ensure a Platonic continuation of his love,” but he “continues to aggressively pursue his beloved,” Amarilli, until their final wedding.49 As we shall see, this large-scale happy-end narrative is not dissimilar to that implied by those madrigal books in which the arrangement of the pieces in the collection suggests that love sufferings and setbacks are eventually “overcome” in the final piece, often a joyous musical dialogue featuring added voices. That in a madrigal collection the narrative is obviously a nonlinear one and that the pieces can of course be performed individually, in groups, or indeed in any sequence, does not detract from the fact that these collections, as object-books and gifts, present a fabula consisting of imaginary actors experiencing the pains of Love and eventually overcoming them, whether spiritually or in a more earthly way. In such madrigal books, the intent of not only delectare (to please) but also docere (to teach) about Love is similar to that of Guarini’s Pastor fido, in which the happy end also served, as is known, counter-reformistic religious aims. The role of Petrarch in Contarini’s prologue, however, can also be examined from another angle. The presence of the character “Petrarca” suggests that  

 



From Petrarch to Petrarchism    99

the author-narrator of the play is authorized to “speak” by the master authornarrator, Petrarch; he, however, is such in a different genre, the lyric one, as is made clear by the opening of the Prologue citing RVF I. Contarini’s prologue can thus be compared to those poetic “centoni” of Petrarch’s lines, or to those poems called in persona di Petrarca, in which the merging of the character “Franciscus” with the narrator “Petrarca” is almost fully accomplished, the later poet maintaining his identity as author but “setting aside” his role as both narrator and character. In Contarini’s play, however, Minturno’s assimilation of poetry to mimesis is shortcircuited at the moment in which the narrator fully merges with a staged character, instead of distancing himself from it: the poet “sets aside his own persona,” as Minturno would have said, at the same time that he maintains it, the mimetic and the diegetic levels being conflated. The narrator therefore emerges perhaps in his fullest power, on stage, to authorize the rest of the play. From the narrative point of view, this situation is similar, although not identical, to that of La Musica in the Prologue of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. In the opera the allegorical character stands for (although is not identical to) the composer himself, who, similarly to Contarini’s “Petrarca,” becomes the master narrator authorizing the entire work, musically, textually, and visually (as discussed in chapter 2). In this respect, Monteverdi can be said to stage a process of appropriation of the theatrical voice by the musical voice—his own. This exchange of voices—this equivocality—is indeed typical of theatrical prologues, regardless of music. In his Theory and Analysis of Drama Manfred Pfister discusses what is commonly considered the lack of a narrator in dramatic texts as opposed to narrative ones.50 Pfister proposes, at first, two kinds of compensatory effects by which drama takes up the communicative function of the narrator. The first kind consists of non-verbal codes and channels, including music. The second type consists of “transfers of narrative functions,” for example, verbal passages in which characters inform spectators about the action. Pfister also discusses at length a long list of Brecht-inspired “epic structures,” a “repertoire” of “techniques” that make the narrative aspect even more relevant to drama: “prologues and epilogues, choruses and songs, montage, banners, film projections, conférencier figures, asides, and the exposure of theatrical machinery to the audience.” These elements, which can in effect be called diegetic, are often emphasized by many of today’s opera directors in the tradition of Regieoper, precisely in order to highlight their own role as narrators. Although Pfister terms the agent responsible for these “epic” elements as the “author,” rather than the “narrator,” there is no substantial difference between them in terms of their communicative function.51 Studies on narrativity and drama further highlight the relevance of narrative theory. Manfred Jahn proposes perhaps the largest theoretical framework through which drama can be interpreted as a narrative form.52 Illustrating the  

 

 

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way in which drama communicates between author and audience, he introduces three levels, each involving an addresser and an addressee.53 In the level of nonfictional communication the author addresses the audience; in that of fictional mediation, which includes Pfister’s epic drama, the narrator engages fictional addressees (or narratees); finally, at the level of fictional action the characters communicate with each other, on stage. Jahn’s studies and those of other drama scholars54 parallel those of opera scholars who deal with the intersections between music and narrative, mostly for nineteenth- and twentieth-century operas.55 In fact, the earliest operas, such as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, present narrative elements with extraordinary self-awareness, at the level that Jahn calls fictional mediation. These elements first developed in the genre of the madrigal, which provided composers and performers with an opportunity to experiment with them.

5

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In Search of Voice Musical Petrarchism in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal

The aspects of narrativity discussed in chapter 4 as pertaining to voice and address—including their location on the theoretical spectrum ranging from a maximum of diegesis to a maximum of mimesis—can be observed in sixteenthcentury madrigal settings of two kinds of texts, the poems by Petrarch and the Petrarchists on the one hand, and dialogic and theatrical texts on the other. Both provided an opportunity for composers to find and develop their own voice not only as authors but also as narrators. Composers adopted different musical techniques according not only to the affects and images displayed in the texts but also to their enunciative modes. In this way they appropriated both the verbal text and the voice of its author on a variety of semantic levels, including pragmatic and communicative aspects. As a result, composers were able to empower performers to become in effect flesh-and-blood characters, not only mere conveyors of “readings” or “exegeses.” In chapters 5 and 6 I discuss madrigals and madrigal books by focusing on enunciative factors at different levels. As far as the large-scale level is concerned, these factors vary according to whether the verbal text belongs to a spoken play or is a self-standing individual poem, and, in the latter case, to whether the text is in dialogue or in traditional poetic form; enunciative factors also depend on the position of the setting within a collection. As far as the more local level is concerned, enunciative factors emerge through particular segmentations and manipulations of the text by individual voices, and through shifts both in deictic orientation (see chapters 2 and 4) and from indirect to direct speech (and vice versa). In all of these communicative situations, both the composer’s and the performer’s voices—those saying “I,” literally or figuratively—are problematized  

 

 

 

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in such a way that they emerge more overtly (audibly), exploiting their full narrative potential.1 In this chapter I discuss in roughly chronological order individual madrigals and madrigal books by some of Monteverdi’s predecessors: Philippe Verdelot, Jacob Arcadelt, Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Giaches de Wert, and Luca Marenzio. These composers modeled their roles as narrative agents on Petrarch, and set the stage for Monteverdi in fully exercising his own control as narrator in his madrigals and operas. Although my focus is on narrative features emerging from textual and musical analyses of madrigals and madrigal books, the related socio-cultural context of production and reception also figures prominently. Theat r ica l i t y a n d Tempo r a l Pe r s pec t i v e

In a late essay, Howard Mayer Brown discussed the output of Florentine early madrigalist Francesco Corteccia and attempted to identify those pieces that might have been performed as intermedi during plays.2 This task, Brown admitted, is mainly a matter of context and social usage. Examining only the musical aspects of the madrigals, or the formal features of the poetic texts, would not be useful to separate the theatrical pieces from those meant for other occasions, such as private entertainment and state events. An analysis of the meaning of the poetic texts, however, provided Brown with some clues to identify about thirty “theatrical” madrigals out of the 108 attributed to Corteccia. They include: poems about stars and astrology, or which might have been sung by Orpheus; poems of moralistic tone (against worldiness and sin, advocating industriousness, warning of the transience of life or beauty, etc.); poems dealing with mythological figures; finally, poems praising or condemning Love abstractly, not in the first person. If considered from the point of view of their mode of address (see chapter 4, “Lyric Modes”), only one among Brown’s theatrical poems set by Corteccia (Questo io tesseva et quelle) falls into the category described by Johnson as “I” poems, in which the poet does not address anyone, as opposed to I–you poems and mimetic poems. The texts of three of these theatrical madrigals display a collective “we” without mentioning or implying an addressee (Poscia che ’l fier amor, Quanto sicuri e lieti, and Vener del terzo ciel). The remaining theatrical texts can be split between I–you poems (15) and the category identified above as leaning toward the mimetic pole (11). In this latter case, the majority of texts displays a moralizing tone and a “third person” orientation, whereas only one poem appears to be clearly uttered by a character and, finally, another is merely descriptive. Only two of the “I–you” type of poems feature personal pronouns in the singular form (io–tu), whereas, among the remaining poems, some are strongly oriented toward tu or voi to the point of completely eliding the first person (5 and 3 poems respectively), one features an io–voi situation, and others present the first  

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    103

person plural either with a tu (1) or a voi (3) as an interlocutor. In conclusion, it is clear that, as expected, theatricality emerges in texts that are located more on the mimetic rather than the diegetic pole of the narrative spectrum, with modes of address basically excluding “I” poems. Characteristics similar to the majority of the theatrical texts set by Corteccia are found in four madrigals published in Jacob Arcadelt’s Book III a 4 (1539).3 The fact that Corteccia’s and Arcadelt’s theatrical madrigals appear within madrigal books that could be sung with no connection to the stage confirms Brown’s observation that context and social usage are of the essence. The possible destination of the pieces can shift from a public to a more private one, especially in settings of “I–you” poems. H. Colin Slim shows that the literary text of one of Philippe Verdelot’s published theatrical madrigals, Quante lagrime, oimé, quanti sospiri, which was presumably conceived as a coro di donne for Ludovico Martelli’s tragedy La Tullia, shows a significant difference from that presented in a version of the setting preserved in a manuscript. In the underlaid text of the only surviving manuscript part, the word noi in the literary text is modified into io, thus changing the subject of the love suffering from “we” to “I.” 4 This implies a possible private use of the madrigal, since the text is thereby changed into a love poem of the I–you type. The published setting, which survives in all four parts, preserves instead the plural “we” of the literary text. When this plural “we” changes, twice, into the singular person to emphasize the contrast between noi/voi and io/me, the musical texture accordingly changes from four to three voices—a musical device that, as we shall see, Arcadelt uses as a personal mannerism.5 As the presence of a setting for a tragedy shows, Verdelot and the first madrigalists operated in a context that saw a revival of theatrical genres modeled on classical Roman and Greek sources. This revival, in which Niccolò Machiavelli participated with his comedies and which saw translations of Greek and Latin plays and performances of works modeled on them, occurred in Florence in the years between 1512 and 1530. These are the same years during which the madrigal first developed in the Tuscan city. The lively intellectual context of Florence included accademie such as the Orti Oricellari and compagnie such as that of La Cazzuola, to which both Verdelot and Machiavelli might have belonged.6 While producing theatrical works, literati gathering in these circles, such as Martelli, Alessandro de’ Pazzi, Luigi Alamanni, Lorenzo Strozzi, Iacopo Nardi, and Giovanni Rucellai, all wrote Petrarchist lyric poetry and participated in the heated discussions taking place among Italian intellectuals about the vexed issue of the type of Italian language to be used in literary works (questione della lingua). These were the same poets and members of Florentine accademie and compagnie who provided many of the texts for the newborn genre of the madrigal. In writing poetry, plays, and treatises on language, they were motivated by a distinct brand of local fiorentinismo having strong political overtones, which per 

 

 

104   Constructing the Narrator  

ceived itself as proudly autonomous from other practices and theories in the rest of the country—for example, those promulgated by the Venetian Pietro Bembo, which eventually became normative all over Italy from the 1530s. The presence among the patrons of early madrigals of Republican exiles (fuoriusciti) such as the Strozzi brothers seems to confirm that similar inclinations also nurtured the madrigal. However, any causal connection needs to be excluded, given the highly fluctuating political context of the first thirty years of the century in Florence, alternating between Medici and Republican governments.7 The context briefly sketched above is relevant to situate the madrigal as a communicative, discursive genre. To sing a madrigal within a play was an activity contiguous with the performance of a spoken text, and thus the relationships between the two successive performance moments are relevant. Also, if the texts of the non-theatrical madrigals presumably made an implicit statement about the questione della lingua, so did the settings. In their discussions about language, Florentine authors such as Martelli claimed that poetry needed to be modeled on spoken language and not, as Pietro Bembo and others maintained, on the written output of poets belonging to the distant past, such as Petrarch. Martelli himself, who was a sophisticated Petrarchista (but not a Bembista), wrote his tragedy La Tullia in free hendecasyllabic lines to approach the prose-like quality of spoken language, a similar aim being pursued by other poets like de’ Pazzi in their plays.8 Machiavelli wrote comedies in Italian prose aiming at the same classical level of those by Plautus and Terentius. The madrigal too elevated vernacular language through the use of elaborate four-to-six-part polyphony—the musical texture used to set Latin texts. It is significant, in this context, that contemporary descriptions of madrigal performances often use the expression dire il madrigale instead of cantare il madrigale.9 The texts of Philippe Verdelot’s madrigals sung during a 1525 Florentine performance of Machiavelli’s five-act comedy La Clizia show textual features similar to those discussed for Corteccia’s and Arcadelt’s theatrical madrigals. Verdelot’s madrigals were indeed the first polyphonic pieces to be interspersed between the acts of a comedy. Quanto sia lieto il giorno was sung before the Prologue and thus was the first madrigalistic piece to take the place of a monodic song in introducing a play.10 Two among the other five settings survive, Chi non fa prova, Amore (before act 2) and Sì suave è lo inganno (before act 5), the texts of which appear in the same 1533 publication that includes Martelli’s Tullia. These two canzoni were used later by Machiavelli for a performance of his other comedy, La Mandragola. All six settings for La Clizia were sung by the same four singers, among whom was a lover of Machiavelli, the singer and courtesan called La Barbera (Barbera Salutati). The plot of La Clizia, modeled on Plautus’s Casina, deals with the infatuation of an old man for a young girl; for Machiavelli this has autobiographical resonances, as the name of the protagonist Nicomaco suggests.  

 



In Search of Voice    105

In the performance of the canzone before the Prologue La Barbera impersonated the ninfa singing among the three pastori celebrating the “ancient matters”: Quanto sia lieto il giorno, nel qual le cose antiche sono hor da noi dimostre et celebrate; si vede, perché intorno 5 tutte le genti amiche si sono in questa parte ragunate. Noi che la nostra etate nei boschi e nelle selve consumiamo, venuti ancor qui siamo 10 io Ninfa e noi Pastori e giam cantand’insieme i nostri amori. [1] How happy is the day [2] in which ancient matters [3] are now by us revealed and celebrated; [4] one can see it, because from every side [5] all the friendly people [6] are gathered here. [7] We, who spend our years [8] in the woods and the forests, [9] have come here, [10] I, Nymph, and we, Shepherds, [11] now singing together about our loves.

In the setting of line 10—io Ninfa e noi Pastori—Verdelot has Barbera make, in Nino Pirrotta’s words, a “gracious bow,” which is then taken up by the three shepherds (example 8).11 Pirrotta vividly captures the physicality of a gesture projected by the isolation of one voice followed by the homophonic section setting lines 7–9, and notes the effortless musical transitions between different textures, according to shifts in textual meaning. The second strophe is set to the same music as the first, the last three lines referring back to it:  

 

 



20

e partiremci poi io Ninfa e voi Pastori e torneremci ai nostri antichi amori.

[20] and we will then leave [21] I, Nymph, and we, Shepherds [22] and we will go back to our old loves.

The individualization of the characters through the singling out of deictic words remains for the setting of both lines 10 and 21. And the final cross-imitative runs of eighth notes setting the words of line 11 in the first strophe, which outline in descending stepwise motion a chain of fifths, remains for the setting of line 22 in the second strophe, for words that convey identical deictic meaning through the common words nostri and amori. This communal aspect of the “we,” within which the “I”s of the single voices are nevertheless still individualized, is precisely the mark of the new genre of the madrigal, a form that, however, is traditionally through-composed. By sticking to

Example 8 106   Constructing the Narrator   Example 8. Philippe Verdelot, Primo libro di madrigali (Venice, 1537): Quanto sia lieto il giorno, mm. 19–29.  

Noi che la no - straIe - ta - te

19

C A

& b Œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ



Noi che la no - straIe - ta - te

T B



con - su -

Nei bo - schiIe nel - le

sel - ve

con -su -

 

 

sel - ve



con -su -

Nei bo - schiIe nel - le

sel - ve

con -su -



-

nu - tiIan - cor qui

sia - mo,

-

mia -mo

Ve

-

nu - tiIan -cor qui

sia - mo,

-

mia - mo

mia - mo

∑

27

&b œ œ  -

sto

?  b

sto

Ve

-

ri

nu - tiIan -cor qui

sia - mo,

Œ œœ

œœ

œ N œœ œ

 Ó

 œ œÓ œ Œ

Ó

œœ œœ œœ Œ

e noi Pa e noi Pa -

 

e noi Pa -

E giam can - tan - d’in - sie -

-

- me

œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ . J œ œ

œ œ

E giam can - tan - d’in - sie - me

œ œ

E giam can - tan - d’in - sie

ri



sia - mo,

-

sto - ri -

Ve - nu -tiIan - cor qui



Œ

œ œ

œœ

œ œ

œœ œ œ

Io Nym - pha

œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ Œ œ œ 

Œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ

œœ œœ

œ œ œ œ

Ve

? b œ œ 



Nei bo - schiIe nel - le

mia - mo

& b œ œ 



œœ œœ

œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ

Noi che la no - straIe - ta - te

23

sel - ve

Œ œœ œœ œœ



Noi che la no - straIe - ta - te

œ œ ? b Œ œ œœ œœ œ œœ

Nei bo - schiIe nel - le

œ œ

 œ

-

i

me

 œ œœ œœ

E giam can - tan - d’in - sie - me

no -  

i j œ. œ œ œœ œ i

a more traditional strophic setting, Verdelot manages to strike a balance between old and new musical forms. The effect is that of a metadiscourse regarding music as a temporal art. This metadiscourse, as we shall see, transcends the level of music to invade a larger ideological sphere, appropriately so in a paratextual element such as the Prologue, the privileged locus of intersubjective exchange. In the settings from La Clizia the composer’s voice steps in within a larger narrative framework, perfectly fitting into its new guise. Verdelot, that is, was given by Machiavelli a unique opportunity—a first—to lend a single, unified voice—his own—to his play’s framing elements, those in which his voice as the  

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    107

narrator could be more overtly heard by the audience. It is probably not coincidental that this intersubjective exchange partially involved Machiavelli as a fleshand-blood author hiring for the occasion his own lover, La Barbera. In a sense, the poet can be said to play into the equivocality of roles—the public and the personal—occasioned by his relying upon a different narrator, one not himself (for the term equivocality, see above, chapter 4). In this respect it is also significant that Verdelot’s narrating voice was probably perceived as such, since it appears, in literary form, many years later as belonging to the character Verdelotto in a 1552 work by Anton Francesco Doni in dialogue form entitled I marmi (The marbles). There the composer becomes himself a narrator, telling two short favole or novelle (one of which is set in France, the composer’s native land) while engaging in a conversation on the steps (marmi) of the Florence cathedral with some plebei and with a female singer known to Machiavelli, nicknamed La Zinzera.12 Machiavelli’s insertion of polyphonic music between the acts raises an issue that Pirrotta first discussed in depth, that of music’s function as mediating element between the audience and the fiction represented on stage. The pastoral characters singing the intermedi of La Clizia (and later of La Mandragola) are timeless and removed from reality if contrasted with the more realistic ones featured in the comedies (realistic to the point of being autobiographical, as we have seen). The unrealism of the framing element “seems to have been intended to ease the transition from the present, to which both spectators and spectacle were bound, to the fictitious time in which the action on stage was supposed to take place.” 13 As is known, the discrepancy between the time of the action and the time of the performance was the crux of Renaissance discussions around the observance of the Aristotelian rule of temporal unity in theatre, which prescribed the time of the action to unfold between sunrise and sunset. Since the time of the performance could not exceed four or five hours, the audience was given the illusion of a time compression through the interruptions between acts.14 Music stepped in to supplement the audience’s imagination of the passing of time, compensating for the gap between narrated time and time of the narration by providing a temporal perspective (in Pirrotta’s terms). In this way, music played a crucial cognitive function for the audience.15 Machiavelli entrusted the new polyphonic form of the madrigal with providing such frame and perspective. All of his texts for intermedi feature temporal markers, such as the “night” and the “hours” addressed in the canzone between the fourth and fifth acts of La Mandragola:16  

 



Oh dolce notte, oh sante ore notturne e quiete ch’i disïosi amanti accompagnate, in voi s’adunan tante

108   Constructing the Narrator  

5 9

letizie, onde voi siete sole cagion di far l’alme beate ......................... voi fate, o felici ore, ogni gelato petto arder d’amore.

[1] O sweet night, O blessed [2] nocturnal and still hours [3] which brings together the ardent lovers, [4] in you so many [5] delights are joined, that you are [6] the only cause of bliss to their souls . . . [9] you, o happy hours, make [10] every frozen breast glow with love.

The repeated voi in lines 4 and 9, addressed not to the audience but to the hours, works as a displaced rhetorical address, facilitating the temporal transition in the audience’s minds. Before the Prologue of La Clizia, as we have seen, Quanto sia lieto il giorno evokes the good ancient times of Arcadia. In the first strophe (see text above) the nymph and the shepherds first celebrate in imitative fashion the happy time (lieto giorno) of the present action. This is followed, in line 3, by homophonic texture for the address to the “you” of the audience (or the actors?),17 stressing prosodically the temporal deictic “now” (hor). Lines 4–6, including the reference to the “friendly people” (genti amiche) and the deictic reference to audience space (questa parte), use the same music as lines 1–3, the shift in texture culminating in the cadential tutti on the word ragunate (“reunited”). The rest of the first strophe (lines 7–11) emphasizes the collective self-reference noi by using verbal and spatial deictics (venuti . . . qui) and the present tense (consumiamo . . . siam . . . giam), pointing to the very act of singing (cantand’insieme) and, as discussed above, individualizing the singer-characters through the words io and noi (thus La Barbera/ninfa as well). Through its emphasis on deictic orientation by means of texture, Verdelot’s setting of the first strophe activates two subject-effects (see above, chapter 2): a self-reflexive effect—i.e., an act of self-reference with respect to musical discourse itself—and a presence effect, i.e., a projection of the embodiment in performance of personal deictics. The setting of the second strophe adds to these a third, narrative effect by shifting the verb tenses from the present to the future (faren, partirenci, tornerenci): the singing group announces that it will stay around for the duration of the play and part company with songs and sweet harmony, to finally depart at the end to return to the pastoral world. By pointing forward in time, the four singers effectively project a narrative arch over the entire play, one running from the past to the future via the present time of performance. The textual and musical emphasis on various deictic shifts—personal, spatial, temporal, and verbal—facilitates for the audience not only a shift in temporal perspective but also one to a different storyworld, i.e., to the fictional environ 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    109

ment in which the play is going to take place. What is at stake is, in the words of a contemporary scholar of narratology, the “ability to transport interpreters [in this case, the audience] from the here and now of face-to-face interaction, or the space-time coordinates of an encounter with a . . . narrative, to the here and now that constitutes the deictic center of the world being told about.” 18 In Machiavelli’s Clizia, the first spoken words of the Prologue make clear that the sung words of the preceding canzona were not mere amusement but themselves part of the author’s larger worldview about the past, the comedy having a pedagogical value for the audience: “If the same men reappeared in the world in the same way as do events, not a hundred years would go by that we would find ourselves together once again doing the same things as now.” 19 This statement about the cyclical aspect of time has been investigated by Machiavelli scholars in its philosophical implications, reaching back to St. Augustine. It is followed in the Prologue by the parallel between the events of the play and those that occurred in ancient Greece and were staged in Plautus’s Casina. The audience is thus made aware of the relationship between Machiavelli and Plautus. But the larger point is that this imitatio is only a part of the more complex relationship between past and present times, involving also the ethical dimension. As the art of time, music was perceived by Machiavelli as an essential part of this larger, ideological discourse. Before being expressed in the Prologue, the audience could find Machiavelli’s humanistic message suggested in the relationship between the new musical genre of the madrigal—clothed by Verdelot in the guise of a traditional strophic form—and the classicizing meaning of the words sung on stage by present-time singers—clothed as the timeless characters of Greek Arcadia.  

 

 

Di ff r ac t i n g t he Se l f

Jacob Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno, the composer’s most famous madrigal, begins somewhat unconventionally.20 Written for four voices, only three of them sing at the outset of the piece (example 9): Il bianco e dolce cigno cantando more, et io piangendo giungo al fin del viver mio. Strana e diversa sorte, 5 ch’ei more sconsolato, et io moro beato, morte, che nel morire m’empie di gioia tutto e di desire; se nel morir altro dolor non sento, 10 di mille morti il dì sarei contento.

110   Constructing the Narrator   [1] The white and gentle swan [2] sings as it dies, and I, [3] weeping, come to the end of my life. [4] Odd and unusual fate, [5] that he should die disconsolate [6] while I die happy, [7] a death that in dying [8] fills me with joy and desire; [9] if in dying I feel no other pain, [10] I would be content to die a thousand times a day.21

In the setting of the initial three lines, first the upper three voices alone present the first line and the beginning of the second one, cadencing on F. Then the bass joins them on the words et io; finally all four voices, shifting the harmony towards the flat direction (m. 6), bring both the second and third lines to conclude, again, on an F cadence. The bass, thus, does not sing the first main clause of the poem—he merely listens to it. The main effect of his deferred entry is to highlight the word io, the first personal pronoun rhyming with the possessive mio, in this way gently marking the distinction between the weeping subject (the protagonist of the poem) and the singing swan. The perception of this distinction is reinforced by the change of texture and harmony, as well as by the shift in the melodic contour of the canto part, revolving first above f', then below it. The bass personifies the poem’s protagonist, who is silent for the first clause (dominated by the swan’s singing), but “steps forward” for the second clause, singing the word io (and then mio). But is it possible to indeed distinguish between the poet/protagonist and the swan as if they were two different entities, related as “subject” is to “object,” “self” to “other”? The answer is negative if one assumes, first, that the protagonist is represented by the bass part, and, second, that the swan in this poem works as a trope for the singer himself—as the nightingale does in other literary contexts. If the singer’s “I” stands for that of the swan—i.e., if the “self” is replicated in the “other”—the setting of the poem suggests that no “self” exists without “other,” no voice is without other voices. At the very moment in which the bass/protagonist sings the personal pronoun io, his subjectivity is, in effect, doubly emphasized, because the word “I” points both toward himself and toward the swan. In that moment, in addition, the distinction between singer/protagonist and swan also collapses: as the poem says, both their destinies must converge in death, their “end” (fine) coinciding with the same F cadence. For the bass/protagonist the moment of self-reflection coincides with the onset of his gradual dissolution— identity and temporality inextricably linked together. The apparently stable, dialogic self that I initially posited by distinguishing between the protagonist and the swan becomes (when these two entities are fused with the “I” of the bass) both a fragmented and an illusory self. Retrospectively, the function of the musical rests in the bass part is to encode this fictional self. By simply choosing to set this poem to music, and by beginning the madrigal with a deferred entry of the bass on the word io, Arcadelt transforms it into a discourse on singing, subjectivity, and temporality.22 As we shall see, other  

 

 

 

 

Example 9

In Search of Voice    111

Example 9. Jacob Arcadelt, Primo libro di madrigali a 4 (Venice, 1539): Il bianco e dolce cigno, beginning. C

&b C 

Il

A

Vb C 

Il

T

B

Vb C  ? C b

Il



bian

-



bian

-



-

bian

∑

œ œ œ œ

coIe dol - ce

ci

coIe dol - ce

ci

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

coIe dol - ce

&b œ œ 

b

b Vb œ œ

 A

io Pian - gen - do

Vb œ œ 

io Pian - gen

? b œ œ b

io Pian -gen

œ œ

-

- do

-

-



do

A

do

Œ œ

œ œ 

gno Can - tan - do mo

œ. œ œ œ œ

œœ

j œ. œ œ œ

œ œ 

ci

gno Can - tan - do

-

-

∑



Aœ

œ



œ

giun - goIal fin



œ





œ



giun - goIal fin

giun - goIal fin

del

del

œ

œ 

œ

œ 

œ

œ

del



del

vi - ver

œ 





-

re

Ó

-

vi - ver mi

j j œ œ 



et

et

vi - ver mi

œ

Œ œ

re

∑

œ

giun - goIal fin

œ

-



mo - re

gno Can - tan - do mo

∑

6

io Pian -gen



vi - ver mi

-

œ



et



o

~~



~~



~~

o

mi - o

-

et



o

~~

madrigals by Arcadelt feature passages in which the bass withdraws for a segment of the text, to then rejoin the upper voices at the moment in which the first personal (or possessive) pronoun appears. This is a feature of Arcadelt’s settings that is absent from the “theatrical” madrigals by him and by other composers (as they were discussed above in this chapter) and thus it appears to be reserved for more introspective poetry. Although used by other contemporary madrigalists, Arcadelt employs this mannerism more often and with more consistency.23 Commenting on Il bianco e dolce cigno I assumed, simplistically, that the word io in measure 6 refers to one specific singer, the bass, and that he represents

112   Constructing the Narrator  

the protagonist of the poem. But Arcadelt’s gesture of emphasizing subjectivity through textural devices causes a conflation, a merging of the persona of the composer—the musical narrator—with the persona of the poet, the literary narrator, via the protagonist/character of the poem, coalescing into the actual singer at the moment in which he sings the word io. The result of joining an act of self-reference with one that conflates multiple agencies within the singer’s body is the release, in performance, of both a self-reflexive and a presence effect (see chapter 2: “Subject-Effects”). As in his Il bianco e dolce cigno the text of Arcadelt’s madrigal Quando col dolce suono thematizes music. Its subject is the protagonist’s experience of listening to the singer Polissena Pecorina:  



 

Quando col dolce suono s’accordon dolcissime parole ch’escon fra le bianche perle e i bei rubini, meravigliando dico: hor come sono 5 venuto in ciel, che si dappresso il sol rimiro et odo accenti alti e divini. O spirti pellegrini, s’udeste Pulisena direste ben d’udir doppia sirena. 10 Io che veduta l’ho, vi giura ch’ella è più che il sol assai lucente e bella.24 [1] When with the sweet sound [2] the sweetest words join together [3] coming out between white pearls and fine rubies, [4] I marvel and say: how now I have [5] come to reach heaven, and my sun so close [6] I see and I hear high and divine words. [7] Oh wandering spirits, [8] if you had heard Pulisena [9] you would well say that you heard two sirens. [10] I, who I have seen her, swear to you that she [11] is more beautiful and radiant than the sun.

In lines 1 to 6 the poet speaks in the first person singular, shifting in line 4 to direct speech and quoting his own ecstatic words (hor come sono . . . ). To highlight this moment, the setting turns distinctively homophonic and, as James Haar notes, the words meravigliando dico (“I marvel and say”) are set apart from the rest of the following speech.25 Imitation, however, soon returns, and at the end of line 5 an increase in rhythmic activity reflects the emotional turmoil felt by the subject in approaching his “sun.” Haar appropriately selects this passage of Quando col dolce suono to challenge the opinion that early madrigals are “a lineby-line affair” and that verbal meaning is still not highlighted until later in the genre’s history. His view can be further refined by examining the setting of lines 7 to 10 of the poem (example 10). To set the words O spirti pellegrini, Arcadelt uses imitative entries instead of an expected chordal declamation (see mm. 30–3).  

Example 10

In Search of Voice    113

Example 10. Jacob Arcadelt, Primo libro di madrigali a 4 (Venice, 1539): Quando col dolce suono, mm. 30–41.  

& C œ œ . œj œ Œ 

30

C

[O] spir - ti

A

 VC œ –ni,

T

B

O

?C 

Œ

–ni,

-

spir

spir - ti



–ni,

o

pel - le - gri

œ . œJ 

spir

-

œ œ œ. œ œ J O

spir - ti pel

-

Œ œ œ œ œœ 

ti pel - le - gri - ni,

œ œœœœ œ j œœ . œ

O

VC 

œ œ œ œ œ . œj 

œ

-

S’u - de-ste Pu-li - se -

œ œœ œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ

œ 

ni,

S’u - de-ste Pu-li - se-na Di-

œ œ œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ  œ ti pel - le - gri - ni,

œ œ 

-

le - gri

-

œ. œ œ œ  J -

-

j & œ œ œ . œJ œ . œ œ . œj œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 

36

na Di - re - ste ben d’u - dir

V

dop-pia si - re

-

œ. œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ. œœ œ œ  J J J

re - ste ben, di - re - ste ben d’u - dir

œ œ

S’u - de-ste Pu-li - se - na Di-

ni,

Ó

∑

~~ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

na. Io che ve - du - ta l’ho

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 

dop - pia si - re - na. Io che ve - du - ta l’ho

j V œ . Jœ œ . œ œ œ œ œ 

œ œ œ œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ ~~

?

∑

re - ste ben d’u - dir dop - pia si - re - na dop - pia si - re-na.

∑

∑

∑

Io che ve - du - ta l’ho



Io

œ œ bœ œ 

che ve - du - ta l’ho

According to Haar, in this case the composer does not quite take into account the shift in address from first person singular in line 6 to second person plural in line 7. But the shift in deictic orientation is highlighted, in my view, through the thinning of the texture in measures 34 to 39, a very audible effect. At this point, the bass drops out and listens to the upper voices singing both lines 8 and 9. The tighter texture, causing a softer dynamic, sharpens the listener’s attention: we become, in a sense, the bass (and vice versa). This strategy of facilitating the identification of the listener with the performer

114   Constructing the Narrator  

is similar to that employed by Florentine “mannerist” painters contemporaneous with Arcadelt, such as Andrea del Sarto and Iacopo Pontormo, who aimed at involving the beholder in the subject of their paintings through specific connecting devices. The “listening” role of the silent bass replicates that of the real listeners of the madrigal, thus involving them more in the performance, as it is for viewers of a play through the dramatic device of the play-within-the-play.26 In the terminology I will adopt in part III, the absent bass in lines 8–9 of Quando col dolce suono has a “focalizing” function, as does that of the audience, through him.27 Its dropping out has the effect of highlighting the name of the singer Pulisena, who becomes the focalized agent, as if a beam of light were projected over her in the imagination of the listener. Indeed lines 8–9 are the poem’s climax and it is not surprising that Arcadelt uses particular effects (or subject-effects, in my terminology) to highlight them. Earlier, in lines 3–6, the poem mostly emphasizes the subject’s visual experience. But in lines 8 and 9 the verb “udire” (to listen to) appears twice, and the evocation of the sense of hearing prevails over that of sight. It does so at the beginning of the poem too: lines 1 and 2 are, in Haar’s words, a “motto for the art of the madrigal,” referring to the harmony of words and music. To reinforce the shared meaning of lines 1–2 and 8–9—i.e., their common emphasis on sound—Arcadelt establishes a motivic parallelism between the melodic contour of the canto in measures 34–37 and that of the imitative entries of the four voices in measures 5–8, that is, with the setting of line 2, which features three repeated quarter notes followed by a leap of a fourth in three of the voices and descending stepwise motion. Lines 8 and 9 are thus set apart from the previous lines through two different musical means: change of texture and motivic parallelism. In contrast to the previous lines, dealing mainly with the subject’s visual sensations, these lines deal exclusively with the sense of hearing. Music can be said to both illuminate and transcend the contingent meaning of the poem—the protagonist’s reaction to the performance of Polissena Pecorina—by producing a larger discourse concerning the senses of hearing and sight considered as such, as being those involved in the experience of listening to any musical performance. We must wonder, however, who, if not the protagonist, is the “subject” of the two highlighted senses, the agent speaking behind them. The answer comes in measure 40: the bass joins the upper voices but anticipates them in starting line 10 earlier (io che veduta l’ho), thus entering, as in Il bianco e dolce cigno, at the moment in which the first-person pronoun appears in the text.28 Here, full, low texture, chordal movement, and the change of harmony in the flat direction, caused by the stepwise descent to Bâ in the bass, all signal the return to the emphasis on the subject’s visual sensations, embodied in the bass part. This emphasis on sight, we remember, also dominated lines 3–6 of the poem,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    115

lines featuring the first person singular (indeed, the protagonist quotes himself in direct speech). Thus, in this setting, emphasis is placed in alternation on the two senses: lines 1–2 and 8–9 speak of the sense of hearing; whereas lines 3–6 and 10–11 mostly thematize sight. The former lines appear in connection with the second person plural (the “you” of “O spirti pellegrini”); the latter ones feature the first person singular (the “I” of “Io che veduta l’ho”). The two senses appear as split, divided in an apparent dichotomy between “self” (the protagonist) and “others” (the “spirti pellegrini”). Again, as in Il bianco e dolce cigno, the musical setting of Quando col dolce suono reinforces a discourse on a divided self, and again this discourse is prompted by a text that thematizes singing. The self has no meaning without “other,” but this madrigal also suggests that the self has no meaning without sensation—no subject existing (speaking, singing, hearing, viewing) without implying his/her own body. If “I” as a deictic marker is, abstractly speaking, an “empty word,” in performance it is “filled in” by voice and by a sentient body, generating presence effects. This is a lesson that, decades later, the new genre of opera will take up and put into practice on stage.  

 

 

 

 

•

•

•

•

•

In The Composer’s Voice, Edward T. Cone writes an illuminating passage on madrigals, one that has so far been neglected in the literature on the genre.29 In Cone’s view, madrigals can be approached in three ways. First, “any voice could be considered himself as a protagonist . . . thinking of himself in this light, and of his colleagues as personifying the projections of his own psyche.” In the second option, the madrigal preserves “the concept of the single vocal persona” that is “essentially identical with the implicit musical persona” (i.e., the composer’s voice, in Cone’s terminology): the singers, as individuals, have no realistic and dramatic significance, blending instead into a unified common entity. Finally, “the persona portrayed by the madrigal singer does not ‘compose’—does not live through—the words, but reads them.” The fruitfulness of Cone’s approach lies in its flexibility, the three options being, as he says, “by no means mutually exclusive.” The textural changes occurring in the two passages from Il bianco e dolce cigno and Quando col dolce suono discussed above can be interpreted, on one level, as a shift from the second to the first of Cone’s options: the four voices initially blend into a single implicit musical persona, but then they let one of them, the bass, occasionally emerge as protagonist. Or else: these textural changes can be interpreted as effecting a shift from a “reading” of the text in which the bass temporarily does not participate (third option) to an emergence of the composer’s voice realized through the “stepping forth” of the bass whenever he sings the word io (second option, merged with the first). As we have seen, a consideration  

 

116   Constructing the Narrator  

of the textural changes caused by the exit and reentering of this voice affects the interpretation of the piece as a whole. The text, as such, would not display one of its communicative meanings without its accompanying setting, and texture plays an important role in this respect, particularly through the reentrance of the bass part at the word io. In Arcadelt’s madrigals this situation occurs with such clarity and frequency that the bass, when playing this role, can be considered as an “agent” standing for the persona of the composer—in essence, standing for the narrator.30 The narrator, that is, becomes part of the poetic-fictional word created by the performers/ characters to a point of being identified, in performance, with one of them. One would be tempted to borrow the Genettian words homodiegetic or autodiegetic, used for narrative prose, or of the Pfisterian “epic” element used for drama. I prefer, as I have done above in chapters 2 and 3, the more generic term “presence effect” to highlight the fact that the musical narrator comes to embody, in performance, the “I” as an empty word—a deictic—as sung by the bass’s physical voice, filling it with his audible narrative voice. This is a quintessential Petrarchist move: as the Petrarchist poet replaces “Petrarca” as narrator, maintaining as immutable the character “Franciscus” (the “lover,” or protagonist), so the composer occupies the “slot” of the narrator by appropriating the poet’s voice. However, the performative aspect of music leaves the new musical narrator an additional option, which involves impersonation and embodiment, and is explored by playwrights and librettists in prologues or other “epic” elements: to step forward directly albeit temporarily in front of the audience as narrating agent through a presence effect. In the case of Quando col dolce suono, the presence effect is supplemented by a self-reflexive one, since the bass, by dropping out for lines 8 and 9 and listening while the other voices sing, enables a metadiscourse on music and listening. In this moment of heightened subjectivity, we can imagine the bass putting the palm of his hand to his ear, gazing at his fellow singers, and indeed listening to them—subject-effects always involving the body in performance. Another example of Arcadelt’s use of the bass to project subject-effects is the setting of Chi potrà dir (example 11; in the following transcriptions of poetic texts, italicized words signal the dropping out of the bass):  

 

 

 

Chi potrà dir quanta dolcezza provo di Madonna a mirar la luce altera che fà vergogna a la celeste sfera? Io no, che in me non trovo 5 lo stil che a lei s’aviene. Che mirando il bel volto e i bei costumi per non veder men bene vorrei perder ad un hor la vita e i lumi.31

Example 11

In Search of Voice    117

Example 11. Jacob Arcadelt, Primo libro di madrigali a 4 (Venice, 1539): Chi potrà dir quanta dolcezza provo, mm. 20–29.  

&C Œ Œ œ 

Œ œ œ œ

20

C

io no cheIin me

Io no

A

T

œ œ

VC œ œ œ Œ œ œ œœ œ œ

œ œ

Io

no

?C œ 

Io no

25

no

io

io

Œ œ w



V

Che





V



vie - ne.

vie - ne.

?

vie - ne.

∑

œ

œ 

œ œ

œ

œ 

Œ œ œ œ

œ

œ 



œ

œ 

Che

mi - ran - doIil bel vol

-

Che mi - ran - doIil bel vol

Che

Lo stil cheIa lei

s’a -

mi - ran - doIil bel vol

Lo stil cheIa lei

∑

-

œ œ

s’a -

.

tro - vo

-

-

∑

œ œ

œ

stil cheIa lei

œ œ Œ œ œ œ

no cheIin me non

mi - ran - doIil bel vol

. .

tro - vo

œ œ



œ œ

œ œ Œ œ œ œ

no cheIin me non

io no

&

j œ œ œ 

non tro - vo Lo

œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ Œ

VC

Io

B

œ.

œ œ

s’a -

∑

œ œ



œ œ

œ œ 



to eIi

bei co - stu - mi

to eIi

bei co

œ œ œ.

to



to

j œ œ œ

-



stu - mi



eIi bei co - stu - mi

Ó

Ó



Per

[1] Who could say how much sweetness I feel [2] when I gaze at the lofty light of Madonna, [3] which shames the celestial sphere? [4] Not I, for I do not find in myself [5] the style which is proper for her. [6] For when I gaze at her beautiful face and at her manners [7] rather than see less well [8] I would wish to lose at once both life and sight.

In the setting of the second line, the bass drops out after the verb mirar, leaving the upper voices singing the words la luce altera. The resulting effect is that the direct object (luce altera) is singled out and thus further “objectified,” so to speak.

118   Constructing the Narrator  

Then again, in the setting of line 6 (see mm. 26–29), the bass drops out when the same verb mirar is followed by the direct object i bei costumi.32 When the bass rejoins the other voices, his entry occurs “too early” since he alone begins line 7 (per non veder) while the other voices are still singing the last syllable of line 6 (-mi, second half of m. 29). By focusing the attention of the listener on the objects of the protagonist’s sight (luce in line 2 and costumi in line 6), the bass embodies the sensory aspect of the poetic-musical subject, behaving as an agent for the persona of the composer engaged in reflection on the meaning of appearances. It is no wonder, then, that this concretization of subjectivity emerges when the bass sings the word io (see m. 19). In lines 4 and 5 the protagonist answers his own question and reveals his divided self by admitting that he cannot find words to express what he feels. Working as a psychological doubling of the canto part, the bass twice alternates with it by leaping up a fifth—the divided state of his self signified by the contrast with the repeated note a' in the canto (Io no, mm. 19–21). Then the bass withdraws for the rest of line 4 and for the next line (che in me non trovo . . . , mm. 21–25). That this voice must think “of his colleagues as personifying the projections of his own psyche” (to use Cone’s words) is shown by the fact that, while the bass is silent, his colleagues sing the first-person pronoun me (m. 22): rhythmic emphasis is placed on this word but also (m. 24) on the pronoun indicating the protagonist’s love-object, lei. The line says that the lover cannot find the style that is proper for her. The lover’s inability to answer his own question appropriately (lines 1–3) is matched by the bass’s inability to sing this line. Embodying the lover, the bass’s absence gives meaning to the text sung by the upper voices. As shown in this example, the function of projecting subject-effects is not an exclusive prerogative of the bass voice: when the upper voices alone emphasize the first-person pronoun, they can be seen as projecting the bass’s psyche (in Cone’s terms). In Ahimé dov’è il bel viso, a madrigal that modern scholars have judged in rather contradictory ways,33 the bass skips the line that presents two instances of the personal pronoun (example 12a, line 7; words in italic signal the dropping out of the bass):  

 

 

 

 

Ahimé dov’è il bel viso, in cui solea tener suo nido Amore e dove riposta era ogni mia speme? Dov’è il bel viso, il bel viso ch’ornava 5 il mondo di splendore? Il mio caro tesoro, il sommo bene, chi me ’l ritien, chi me lo cela? O fortuna, o morte ingorda, cieca, spietata e sorda 10 chi m’ha tolto il mio cor, chi me l’asconde? Dov’è il ben mio che più non mi risponde?34



In Search of Voice    119 [1] Alas, where is the beautiful face [2] in which love used to nest [3] and where all my hope reposed? [4] Where is the beautiful face, the beautiful face adorning [5] the world with splendor? [6] My dear treasure, the highest good, [7] who removes her from me, who hides her from me? [8] O fortune, o greedy death, [9] blind, merciless, and dumb, [10] who has snatched away my heart, who hides it from me? [11] Where is my darling who answers me no more?

In lines 2 and 4–5 the thinning of the texture highlights both syntax (two subordinate sentences) and rhyme (Amore, splendore). In this madrigal, however, the bass has not only a syntactic function but also projects subjectivity by producing subject-effects. In the setting of line 7 (example 12a) this voice speaks in absentia, withdrawing at the moment in which the text expresses his pain for the absence of the lady (“who removes her from me, who hides her from me?”). Then in line 10 the identical meaning of “removing” and “hiding” returns, again featuring the repetition of the first-person pronoun (example 12b). But, in contrast with the setting of line 7, this time the bass marks the line’s beginning (chi m’ha tolto il mio cor . . . , m. 37) by presenting the subject of the imitation (he is the subject, after all), slightly preceding the entrances of the two accompanying voices. Then, while the canto is about to complete an exact imitation, the bass enters with an ascending leap of a fourth to begin the second half of the line (mm. 40–41, chi me . . . ), highlighting the first-person pronoun. He finally regains his harmonic  

 

Example 12a

Example 12. Jacob Arcadelt, Primo libro di madrigali a 4 (Venice, 1539): Ahimé dov’è il bel viso. a. Mm. 24–30.  

24

C

&C œ œ 

Œ  œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ

som-mo be - ne Chi

A

V C œ œ  Nw

som-mo be - ne

T

B

V C Aœ œ  ?C

Ó

som - mo be - ne

Aœ œ 

w

som - mo be - ne

me’l ri - tien

e chi me’l

Œ œ œ œ œ . Jœ 

Chi me’l ri - tien

 œ œ œ . Jœ 

Chi me’l ri - tien

∑

∑

œ œœ œ ce

-

œ œœœœ  -

-

Œ

œ

la?

O

ce - la?

O

e chi me’l

œaœ œ 

 Œœ

œ œ

w

 Œœ

œ œ

e chi me’l

∑

-

ce

∑

la?

O

Ó Œœ

O

(continued)

Example 12b

120   Constructing the Narrator   Example 12 (continued) b. Mm. 37–42.  

37

C

&C w

– da

A

VC 

∑



Chi

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 

w

m’ha tol - toIilmio cor, chi me l’a - scon - de?

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ  œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

w

sor - da Chi m’hatol-toIil mio cor chi m’ha tol-toIil mio cor, chi me l’a -scon - de?

T

œ œ œ œ œ œ V C œœœ œ

œ œ œ œ œ  œ œ œ œ

w

  - da Chi m’ha tol-toIil mio cor chi m’ha tol-toIilmio cor, chi me l’a-scon - de?

B

?C 

– da



Chi

œ œ œ œ 

m’hatol-toIil mio cor,

Ó

Œ œ 

chi me

œ œ 

w

l’a-scon - de?

role by presenting the same leap of a fourth, but in retrograde motion, to close the line in homophony ( . . . l’asconde). When Bishop Cirillo Franco, writing to Ugolino Gualteruzzi in 1549, praised this madrigal after listening to it, he did not have an exact recollection, since he claimed to have heard something like a patchwork of lines 7, 10, and 11: “I have heard a madrigal by Arcadelt in which the voices exclaim most passionately, ‘Chi mi tiene il mio ben, chi me l’asconde’ in certain rhythms and inflections that are so expressive that they make these words speak, even though they are not really spoken.” 35 In his memory of a performance of Ahimé, dovè il mio ben, this listener singled out precisely the passages featuring subject-effects. For him the boundaries between speaking and singing were blurred. He unconsciously grasped the communicative role of the “speaking” bass as a distillation and projection of the subjectivity of the musical narrator. •

•

•

•

•

In Arcadelt’s madrigals, the intermittent, mobile participation of the bass in the full polyphonic texture,36 sometimes emerging as the protagonist, sometimes disguising himself as the “listener,” often merely providing harmonic filling, represents a “flexible” self modeled on that presented by Petrarch in his Canzoniere: a discontinuous, variable, mutable, horizontal self, in constant search of stability, lacking a direct, vertical connection with the Absolute.37 That the self expressed in these madrigals is musically represented as a flexible one is also shown by the many and varied guises of its appearance. In Io ho nel cor un gielo (“I have



In Search of Voice    121

a frozen heart”), on a text by Ludovico Martelli (see above “Theatricality and Temporal Perspective”), the bass is silent when the other three voices sing, first, the words e s’io il patisco e cielo (“if I suffer and hide myself”), then, o cruda mia ventura (“o my cruel destiny”), and finally, non so quel che da madonna io voglio (“I don’t know what I want from my lady”).38 Each textual segment, then, presents the first-person pronoun as sung by all of the voices except the bass. In Il vago e dolce sguardo39 the poet implores the lady to listen to him, but when she does so and, as the protagonist says, ver me si mostra più ch’io non vorrei (“she shows herself toward me more than I would have liked”) the bass drops out, as if ashamed, while the soprano alternates with the lower two voices by repeating the words “toward me” (much like bass and soprano in the setting of Io no in Chi potrà dir; see above). Three poems that begin with the word io elicit a similar imitative setting: S’io pensasse che morte, Io mi rivolgo indietro, and Io non vo già.40 Indeed, in these last two madrigals, the first four notes of the subject are identical, as are the intervals of imitation. The self, moreover, can also be represented as a collective “we.” In Quanti travagli e pene41 the bass drops out for the setting of three lines: Amor, colui che vive / senza le dolci tue gradite pene / si può metter fra morti (“Love, the man who lives / without your sweet and pleasant sorrows / can be placed among the dead”), a text that focuses on the “you” invoked by the protagonist, i.e., Love (the word “your” is rhythmically emphasized). Then the bass reenters, slightly anticipating the upper voices for the setting of the line e noi che siam come sapete morti (“and we who are, as you know, dead”), thus shifting the address from the “you” to the plural self, “us.” Finally, since the Petrarchan “you” is none other than the other side of the “self,” we may expect to find, in Arcadelt’s madrigals, an emphasis on the words tu and voi. In Se il superchio splendore (“If the high splendor”)42 the opening line is sung (as in Il bianco e dolce cigno) first by the upper three voices. Then, for the second line, the bass enters two beats earlier than the others by singing alone the word te, to be joined by the other voices in setting the next word, dea (the second line reads: te dea terrena agli occhi miei contende, “with you, earthly goddess, in my eyes compete”). In Dolci parole morte (“Sweet dead words”)43 the bass rests for the line Ma poi che l’è sparita (“but since your soul has disappeared”); but then he “forgets” to enter on the words in voi non sento (“in you I don’t feel [or hear]”), which are first sung by the upper three voices alone: evidently, the bass is not really listening to them. When the bass tries to quickly make up for his delay by imitating the alto part, it is too late. While canto and tenor have a rest, the alto impatiently makes a cadence “on” the bass, on the word sento, and almost seems to reproach him. The upper three voices then try to sing the complete line: in voi non sento vostra anima pia (“in you I don’t feel [hear] your pious soul”), but the bass gets stuck on the first half of it by elaborating on an unusually long

122   Constructing the Narrator  

melisma on the word sento (which has the double meaning of “feel” and “hear”). It is time to put an end to this temporary subjective anarchy. After a cadence, the four voices sing together, in perfect homophony, the second half of the line, and move on. These examples show that the self represented in Arcadelt’s madrigals is a constantly displaced and mobile one, wandering in search of stability, as if it were the soggetto of a contemporary motet.44 What temporarily brings this self together is the madrigalistic setting itself: that is, a semantic unit included within a set (libro) that looks back at the “book” by definition, the collection of poems of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This imitation reaches the level of a shared poetics: just as the poet, caught in the contradictions of his self, takes refuge in pure sound and imposes through poetry an order on his fragmented self, so the composer makes use of music to construct pieces that each time provisionally attempt to redefine his subjectivity. •

•

•

•

•

Consistently, most of the editions of Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 published during the sixteenth century, although varying in the order in which they were arranged by publishers, feature as their opening madrigal Il bianco e dolce cigno and as their closing piece a setting of Quand’io penso al martire.45 This poem was extracted from Pietro Bembo’s youthful but greatly influential work Gli Asolani, first published in 1505, a treatise in dialogue form laid out in three books (libri) written in prose with occasionally interspersed poems (by 1600 it had seen twenty-two editions). The topic of Quand’io penso al martire—a canzonetta laid out in three quatrains of alternating seven- and eleven-syllable lines, uttered in Book I of Gli Asolani by the character named Perottino—presents similarities with that of Il bianco e dolce cigno: “the quibble . . . between the love life that rushes to death and the joy of dying and thus leaving behind the torment, which restores life,” in Carlo Dionisotti’s words:46  

 



5

10

Quand’io penso al martire, Amor, che tu mi dai, gravoso e forte, corro per gir a morte, così sperando i miei danni finire. Ma poi ch’i’ giungo al passo ch’è porto in questo mar d’ogni tormento, tanto piacer ne sento, che l’alma si rinforza, ond’io no ’l passo. Così ’l viver m’ancide, così la morte mi ritorna in vita: o miseria infinita, che l’un apporta e l’altra non recide.



In Search of Voice    123 [1] When I think of the martyrdom [2] that you, Love, inflict on me, in harsh and stark ways, [3] headlong I rush my own death [4] hoping to bring my torments to an end. [5] But when I reach the bay [6] which wafts me into port from seas of grief, [7] I feel such sweet relief, [8] my soul revives and I am forced to stay. [9] Thus living digs my grave; [10] thus dying raises me again to life: [11] O misery too rife, [12] which, wrought by one, the other cannot stave.47

In his setting48 Arcadelt highlights the “quibble” described by Dionisotti by making lines 9–11 (mm. 40–54) the climax of the madrigal (example 13). Much in the same way as Verdelot’s Quanto sia lieto il giorno, the setting of Quand’io penso al martire is a self-reflexive commentary on the madrigal as a new through-composed musical form, accomplished by measuring the distance from the tradition of strophic settings. The second quatrain (lines 5–8) uses the same music as the first, but only until line 8. The first half of this line (che l’alma si rinforza) changes course, musically speaking, and is declaimed homophonically, confirming the tonal focus of the piece (G, mm. 34–36); the second half of line 8 (ond’io no ’l passo) shifts to imitative counterpoint, emphatically cadencing on d (see beginning of example 13). Then Arcadelt resorts to the change of texture that, as we have seen, often marks the emergence of subject-effects in his madrigals. He thins out the texture to the three upper voices for the setting of line 9 (“Thus living digs my grave,” mm. 40–43), and then shifts to the full four voices for line 10 (“thus dying raises me again to life,” mm. 43–47), both lines ending on a full cadence on G (and both starting with the word così, “thus”). This is a suitable musical transposition of the above-mentioned “quibble” between living and dying, but in the highly subjective mood suggested by the two first-person reflexive pronouns appearing in these lines (m’ancide and mi ritorna). This subjective move prepares the plaintive outburst on o miseria infinita in line 11 (mm. 47–54), its setting repeated in longer values and featuring a shift to the flat side of the tonal spectrum, through a not yet heard B-flat triad (much like the shift to E-flat on the word piangendo in Il bianco e dolce cigno). This musical outburst is perfectly suited to the lyrically tragic character of Perottino, the heartbroken lover who recites the poem in Gli Asolani “with considerable effort” and restraining his tears (con fatica grandissima le lagrime agli occhi ritenne, as Bembo writes of Perottino). Gli Asolani tells of a three-day gathering of friends—three gentildonne and three gentiluomini—held at the idyllic villa of the ex-queen of Cyprus Caterina Cornaro, situated in the green of the Treviso countryside, at Asolo. The discussion revolves around the issue of whether love is good or bad. For Perottino love is only a source of sorrows. With a mix of emotion and gravitas, he supports this argument in Book I of Gli Asolani mostly in dialogue with one of the ladies, Berenice, who refuses to believe his pessimistic views. In Book II the character Gismondo presents instead the  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 13 Example 13. Jacob Arcadelt, Primo libro di madrigali a 4 (Venice, 1539): Quand’io penso al martire, mm. 37–56.  

37

C

A

T

œ œ 

&c Ó  Vc

w

œ œ 

on - d’iono’lpas

on



V c Œ œ

no’l

no’lpas -

sì la mor - te mi



sì la mor - te



la

mor - te

&Œ 

œ

51

O

Vœ œ 

.

mi - se



mi - se - ria

j V œ œ œ. œ  ?

mi - se - ria

œ œ 

mi - se

-

∑

- so

ri - tor - naIin vi - ta: O

sì la mor-te mi ri-tor-naIin



w

œ. œ œ œ    J

mi

œ œ  aœ   vi

ta: O

-

œ. œ œ œ    J ri - tor - naIin vi - ta:

mi

-



œ œ œ 

ria in - fi - ni - ta,

in

-

in

-

b

œ œ b



ria in

-

œ œ 

œ

Co - sì’l vi-verm’an - ci

ri - tor - naIin vi - ta:

V œ œ œ œ œ . œJ œ œ ?

pas - so

-

œ

œ   Œœ  aœ  

Co - sì’l vi-verm’an - ci

- so

-

œ

vi - ver m’an -ci - de,

œ œ   Œœ œœ 

œ  œ

Vœœ 

  Œ œ œ œœ œ Co - sì’l

so

w

œ œ 

on - d’io

&œ œ 

œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œaœ œ   Œ œ œ œ œ œ

?c   44

  Œ œ .

-

d’iono’l pas -

-

on - d’io

B



O

O

- de, Co -

œ   

∑

-

Co - sì

œ œ œœ  

œœ 

œ œ œœ  œ œ

mi - se - ria in - fi - ni - ta O

œœ 

œ œ bœ œ  œ œ



œ œ bœ œ  œ œ

mi - se - ria in - fi - ni - ta O

œœ

mi - se - ria in - fi - ni - ta O

œ 

œ œ œ œ

œ

œ. œ œ œ J

l’u-noIap-por-taIe l’al - tra non re -  

œ Aœ 

œ œ   Œ œ



œ Aœ 







Œ œ

Che l’u-noIap-por - taIe l’al - tra

fi - ni - ta, Che

fi - ni - ta,

de, Co -

mi - se - ria in - fi - ni - ta

Œ œ œ œ 

 

Co -

œ. œ J

Che l’u-noIap-por - taIe

l’al - tra

l’u-noIap-por - taIe

l’al - tra

fi - ni - ta, Che

œ œ 

œ. œ J



In Search of Voice    125

opposite view, that Love is good, full of piacevolezza, and an endless source of sensual joy. Book III—which too often has been seen as a Hegelian synthesis of the first two—features the third main character, Lavinello, arguing that love is the spiritual desire for true beauty, which results from proportion and harmony. He enthusiastically reports to the others the words of a hermit saint who told him that one should reject earthly love in favor of a spiritual love that leads to the vision of God’s eternal beauty—a clear Neoplatonic message. The language in which the characters featured in Gli Asolani express themselves in direct speech, both in prose and in poetry, is strongly indebted to Petrarch’s in the Canzoniere.49 However, as Luigi Baldacci observed, Bembo reduces Petrarch’s “psychology of opposites” to a “formulary of abstract generalizations,” resolving them “in symbols of easy madrigalistic use.” 50 The following words spoken by Perottino as a prelude to his reciting Quand’io penso al martire (almost a prose counterpart to Il bianco e dolce cigno) are an example: “It often happens . . . that when . . . lovers, overcome by their long agony, are near to death and already feel that life is gradually withdrawing from their troubled hearts, they, wretched ones, take such ecstasy and joy in dying that this pleasure (which comforts their poor souls all the more because they are so unaccustomed to all pleasure) restores their weakened spirits and sustains the life which was about to fail.” Soon after having recited Quand’io penso al martire, Perottino wonders: “What more can one say on the matter, except that the fate of lovers is so preeminently wretched that being alive, they cannot live, and dying, cannot die?” 51 The philosophy of Ficinian Neoplatonism and the language of Petrarch are transformed by Bembo into socialized rhetoric, detached from their more introspective qualities and made into the condition itself of writing, talking—and singing—about love within a courtly setting. This socialized performance—exemplified by the conversations of gentiluomini and gentildonne in the idyllic setting of Asolo—represents for sixteenth-century courtiers the ideal path to selfknowledge. In a conversational setting that at the same time is, as we shall see, a performance stage, the education to love proposed by Bembo as a model—and codified a few years later in Baldassarre Castiglione’s The Courtier—becomes the condition for self-fashioning at court.52 The madrigal becomes an ideal conduit for this larger discourse, and indeed its transmission all over Europe—the case of Marenzio being one of the most successful—represents a cultural translation of courtly values and models, much more than simply a transmission of a mere musical genre.53 Through the socialized language of love, Bembo also advanced a Petrarchist discourse on the self, which found an ideal counterpart in Arcadelt’s madrigals. At the beginning of Gli Asolani three young and beautiful girls perform, for the enjoyment of the queen’s court, three solo songs by accompanying themselves with instruments, the first two on the lute, the third on the viola. The first song  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

126   Constructing the Narrator  

deals with tragic love, which is the kind of love in favor of which Perottino argues in Book I. The second song concerns happy love, this corresponding to the kind of love that Gismondo joyously praises in Book II. Finally, the third song is about the purity of love and a return to a “golden age,” anticipating in part the subject of Lavinello’s Neoplatonic arguments in Book III.54 Describing in detail each performance before reporting the words of the songs, Bembo stresses the sensuality of the sounds of the instruments and the girl’s voices. He structures the first two songs in a parallel way by beginning them, respectively, with the lines Io vissi pargoletta in festa e ’n gioco / de’ miei pensier, di mia sorte contenta (“I lived as a young woman partying and playing, content with my thoughts and with my fortune”) and Io vissi pargoletta in doglia e ’n pianto / de le mie scorte e di me stessa in ira (“I lived as a young woman in sorrow and tears / irate with my companions and with myself”). These lines, as well as the two first quatrains, prominently feature first-person deictics, beginning in the past tense by recalling love’s initial illusions (for happy love in the former poem, for tragic love in the latter), to then shift to the present tense and the temporal deictic “now” for their opposite feeling (from line 3, respectively: or sì m’affligge Amor e mi tormenta, “now Love afflicts and torments me,” and or sì dolci pensier Amor mi spira, “now Love inspires me with such sweet thoughts”). They both finally conclude in the last quatrain each with a mythological example (Medea and Andromeda, respectively). In their parallel structure, the two songs divorce the two contrasting properties which Bembo himself in his later work Prose della volgar lingua (1525) described as contiguous in Petrarch’s poems, gravità and piacevolezza. In Gli Asolani Bembo dissociates them into different performances, indeed into different books (libri), each dominated by a single-sided character, Perottino, Gismondo, and Lavinello, representing respectively the gloomy, the sensual, and the spiritual side of Petrarchism.55 Petrarch’s “Franciscus” was, we remember, the solipsistic character of the Canzoniere, the poet-protagonist whose self was the locus into which all contradictions converge (see chapter 4). In the Asolani Bembo splits this solitary subject into a plurality of socializing characters engaged in a dialogue, fashioning himself on Petrarch as the narrator, and distilling his poetic language into an effective verbal code based on an ever-repeatable stock of standardized words and situations. In this way, he accomplishes a diffraction of the self through rhetorical means, recasting the Ficinian Neoplatonic philosophy dominating love poetry at the turn of the sixteenth century into a courtly, social, and rhetorical model to be imitated. In his madrigals Arcadelt re-presented Bembo’s plural, socialized, and diffracted self: a polyphonic, fragmented self, diffracted in both vertical and horizontal dimensions, performed by a communal yet internally individualized group of performers, addressing an audience that is the mirror of itself—or, simply, addressing themselves as performers, as we have seen. As a coherent yet flexible  



In Search of Voice    127

entity—as a madrigal book—Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 offered gentiluomini and gentildonne a narrative, a survey of “case studies” of Petrarchist love, much like Bembo’s Asolani or a canzoniere by a Petrarchist poet. It worked in this respect as another available tool for the nobility’s education in love. It was a book solidly framed at its edges by, on one end, a Neoplatonic statement—Il bianco e dolce cigno—and, on the other, its dramatized rhetoricization—Quand’io penso al martire—this latter text uttered, as we have seen, not by the solitary “poet,” as Il bianco e dolce cigno, but by a true fictional character. Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 became a model for musical composition, a repository of formulas from which composers borrowed over and over—one might call it, in this respect, the musical Canzoniere of the sixteenth century.56 In the settings, even within the seemingly narrow boundaries provided by Petrarchist poetry, the composer experimented with a variety of voices, both narrative and physical, using the polyphonic madrigal as the most flexible conduit to communicate subjectivity in Petrarchist fashion.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

W ho i s Speak i n g ? F rom S oggetto t o Dialogo

In discussing in the previous chapter Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno and Quand’io penso al martire, I considered as a relevant factor for composers and listeners whether the text is uttered by the generic “poet” or by a fictional character. As seen in chapter 4 (“Lyric Modes”), poems can be interpreted on a sliding scale from a diegetic to a mimetic pole: “I” poems are those in which the poet does not address anyone and keeps his own persona; “I–you” poems are those in which the poet uses indirect speech to address both human and non-human entities (“setting aside his own persona and borrowing another one,” in Minturno’s words); finally, a third category, sliding even more toward the mimetic pole, includes poems having a mimetic effect: dialogues, poems featuring direct speech, and those uttered by a character. On this scale, a text uttered by a fictional character would be located more toward the mimetic pole. The audience would attribute a higher degree of reality to a character impersonated by singers, as compared to a generic “poet,” and thus it would perceive the gap between author/poet and character/narrator as a wider one—the poet “wearing” another persona and almost disappearing. An “I” poem uttered by a clearly identifiable character is, in this light, more mimetic than an “I–you” poem originating in the poet’s own persona. Bembo’s Quand’io penso al martire, discussed in the previous section, might be considered an “I–you” poem in the first quatrain and an “I” poem in the remaining lines. This difference, however, is less relevant than the fact that the listener would perceive the words sung by the performers as originating from the fictional character Perottino. Arcadelt’s use of subject-effects for the kernel of Perottino’s Petrarchist message—the paradoxes of love (lines 9–11)—provides additional, albeit indirect, support for this view. A further distinction, finally,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

128   Constructing the Narrator  

can be made between a text uttered by a character like Perottino, derived from a work in dialogue form, and a dialogue poem including often unspecified characters quoted by the poet in direct speech. The remarkable musical differences (especially concerning texture) shown in early madrigals between dialogic and non-dialogic settings (see below) helps place the former ones more toward the mimetic pole compared to the latter, even when these are uttered by a fictional character. The issue of the relationship between narrative agents, characters, and the text set to music mattered to composers, performers, and audiences. The mode of enunciation in a non-dialogic poem by Petrarch such as Hor che ’l ciel e la terra is different from, say, an excerpt from a character’s speech featured in an epic poem such as Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, or a passage from a pastoral play such as Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido. The listener of Monteverdi’s Cruda Amarilli—the madrigal that dramatically opens his Book V (1605)—was in effect mentally transported into act 1, scene 2 of Guarini’s tragicomedy (see appendix 1 for the table of contents of Monteverdi’s Book V). There the shepherd Mirtillo, using Petrarch’s language of love, enters the stage to utter his disconsolate lament by addressing the absent Amarilli. Mirtillo’s lament, however, is not a monologue, since on stage with him is also the shepherd Ergasto, who replies by reproaching him for not having opened his heart earlier. For the listener who cognitively implies Ergasto’s presence, the shepherd worked as a fictional proxy, as the “he” witnessing Mirtillo’s “I” in his apostrophe to the absent “you,” Amarilli, who comes on stage only in act 2. In his second madrigal of Book V, however, Monteverdi indeed has Amarilli herself reply to Mirtillo: O Mirtillo, Mirtillo, anima mia, she says, Monteverdi excerpting Amarilli’s words from act 3, scene 4 of Guarini’s play.57 There the shepherdess is alone on stage, Mirtillo having left her in the previous scene, with the passage starting with Ah dolente partita, which Monteverdi set to music as the opening of his Book IV. By rearranging the time of the original events of the play to suggest a cause– effect relationship, Monteverdi appropriates Guarini’s voice, treating the narrative material as if it were a fabula from which to derive his own story (in narratological terms). The composer, that is, replaces the playwright as the narrator, using the fictional world of the play as a “reality” to create his own imaginary world, that of the madrigal book. The theatrical derivation of texts exercised an influence on composers also with respect to their discursive properties. Mirtillo’s and Amarilli’s words, if compared to those of a lyric poem (such as Guarini’s own Rime), are truly oratione (speech) in the sense used by Monteverdi himself in advocating his seconda prattica. They are intended to come out of real characters’ mouths (oratione in the etymological sense) and do not primarily originate from a fictional poet, who in this case completely “disappears” behind the characters. In this respect,  

 

 



In Search of Voice    129

Monteverdi followed and drew all the consequences from Vincenzo Galilei’s advice to composers to go to the theater and learn from characters acting on stage.58 As James Chater observed, only gradually did composers adapt to the theatrical qualities of Guarini’s text.59 During the decade after Luzzasco Luz­ zaschi first set to music excerpts from the play (1584–85), composers set passages from Il pastor fido as if it were, in Giovan Battista Marino’s words, un pasticcio di madrigaletti, a hodgepodge of madrigals, this word intended in the literary, not the musical sense. Starting with Wert and Marenzio—Chater continues— “passages were selected less for their Petrarchan sentiment, episodic quality or rhyme scheme than for their pathos, their dramatic or theatrical impact or their narrative potential,” and composers “devised ways of filtering the immediacy of stage performance through the traditional polyphonic texture of the madrigal . . . [adopting] more daring modal and harmonic usages and a more expressive Canto line.” 60 In his self-proclaimed seconda prattica Monteverdi followed the footsteps of Wert and Marenzio, becoming involved in a famous polemic with Giovanni Artusi revolving precisely around madrigals setting Guarini’s texts. One of the musical characteristics of the seconda prattica was its stated attempt to capture features of speech through a style termed by Alfred Einstein “choral recitative” or “homophonic chordal declamation,” the style, for example, used by Monteverdi at the beginning of Sfogava con le stelle in his Book IV. In his discussion of Monteverdi’s madrigalistic output Gary Tomlinson effectively relates the “epigrammatic” style used in Books III and IV in settings of Guarini’s Rime to the more rhetorical style of the Pastor fido settings in Book V, with its “linear expressive orientation” that prepares the way for the monodic declamation of Ariadne’s Lament. Tomlinson’s inquiry shows that, although the theatrical derivation does affect his settings, in order to imitate speech Monteverdi reacts most of all to the rhetorical features of the texts, regardless of their derivation.61 As discussed above in connection with Cone, it is the appropriation of a text by a composer—and the resulting fruitful exchange of voices between him and a poet (which I termed “equivocality”)—that changes de facto the discursive nature of texts, a musical setting being always performed even when the text is originally destined for reading. The ability of a composer to project a character’s speech implies a confidence in the ability of his own narrative voice to create an imaginary world. More recently, Stefano La Via has traced Einstein’s “choral recitative style” back to Cipriano de Rore’s late madrigals starting from the 1550s, finding in them the “ideal point of departure for the following experiments of the seconda prattica.” 62 In devising his own late style of homophonic chordal declamation, Rore managed “to combine the needs for declamatory clarity with those of musical expressivity.” In the rest of this section I expand on La Via’s observation on the origins of Monteverdi’s seconda prattica by discussing modes of enunciation in texts set to music by Rore and by his teacher Adrian Willaert. In both cases,  

 

 

 

 

130   Constructing the Narrator  

attention to modes of enunciation is combined with one toward the large-scale organization of their madrigal collections. Modeling a music collection after the Canzoniere becomes a “Petrarchist” aspect that is relevant also after Willaert and Rore, up to Monteverdi. •

•

•

•

•

The madrigal portion of willaert’s musica nova—a deluxe book published in Venice in 1559 by Antonio Gardano in the unusual upright quarto format but mostly composed about two decades earlier—consists of twenty-five settings exclusively of sonnets, all but one by Petrarch (see appendix 1).63 It is divided into sections according to the number of voices. The madrigals for four, five, and six voices set twenty-one non-dialogic poems, followed by four seven-voice dialogic madrigals, the first of which is on a text by the north Italian poet Panfilo Sasso (1455–1527). In Willaert’s collection, several references to Petrarch’s book, carrying the intention of attributing to the former the same function of model as the latter (which in fact it had), emerge through the arrangement of the texts. Starting the section for six voices in the mid-point of the collection (no. 14) is Aspro core e selvaggio e cruda voglia (RVF CCLXV), the first sonnet in the second part of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the rime in morte di Madonna Laura.64 The last madrigal (no. 25) sets RVF LXXXIV, “Occhi piangete: accompagnate il core,” a dialogue in the third person between the poet and his eyes, which in the Canzoniere is followed by Io amai sempre, et amo forte ancora (RVF LXXXV). This poem, uttered in the first person, is among the so called “anniversary sonnets,” cyclically recalling throughout Petrarch’s lyric sequence the time and place of the first encounter between the poet and Laura in 1339. From the start, Io amai sempre, et amo forte ancora (“I’ve always loved, and I love deeply still”) is characterized by a contrast between past and present tense, and thus has a narrative quality that associates it with the proemial sonnet RVF I. Willlaert chooses Io amai sempre to open his Musica nova (no. 1) and, as said above, the poem preceding it in Petrarch (“Occhi piangete”) to conclude it (no. 25). The composer thus gives his own collection a cyclical character: his “book” ends with no. 25 but, in light of the other book (Petrarch’s), the page can be turned and the work begins again. From the point of view of their rhetoric of address, the twenty-one poems of the non-dialogic part of Musica nova (nos. 1–21) feature a vast majority of “I” poems, giving an introspective character to most of the collection. The first section, consisting of four madrigals for four voices, opens, as said, with an “I” poem, actually with the word “I” itself: Io amai sempre, a sonnet that in its second tercet shifts to an I–you situation through a direct address to Love (Amor, con quanto sforzo oggi mi vinci!). Io amai sempre is followed by two more “I” poems (no. 2: Amor, Fortuna e la mia mente schiva and no. 3: Quest’anima gentil, che si  

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    131

diparte), concluding with no. 4: Lasso, ch’i’ ardo, et altri non me ’l crede, which from the second quatrain addresses Laura directly. The second section of Musica nova, made up of nine madrigals for five voices (nos. 5–13), also features exclusively “I” poems framed by two I–you poems: the first (no. 5: O invidia, nimica di vertute) addresses Envy, the last (no. 13: Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo) presents, in the second tercet, Love’s words in direct speech. Finally, the third section of Willaert’s collection, for six voices (nos. 14–21), consists uniformly of “I” poems, none of them featuring internal dialogue, such as the poet talking to his thoughts. Within this dense and gloomy penultimate section of Willaert’s collection, the subject of Laura’s crying (pianto) and its sonorous effects is shared by two pairs of related sonnets (nos. 16 and 17). The musical counterpart of Willaert’s predominant choice of introspective “I” poems for the five- and six-voice madrigals is his consistent use of the counterpoint technique of the wandering soggetto. As Howard Mayer Brown has shown, Willaert’s Musica nova madrigals feature a soggetto that migrates from part to part, as in motets. This is in contrast to the fixed superius–tenor framework that dominated previous madrigals by, for example, Verdelot and Arcadelt.65 This “high floating” soggetto, setting Petrarch’s lines, provides a metaphor for this poet’s mutable, horizontal self: a different, more continuous, yet equally effective incarnation than the intermittent subject of Arcadelt’s madrigals that I discussed in the previous section. In its linear unfolding, Willaert’s soggetto works as a narrative thread throughout the pieces, the composer appropriating the continuous voice of the literary narrator. In part III, chapter 26 of his Istitutioni harmoniche of 1558, Willaert’s student Gioseffo Zarlino compares the soggetto of musical counterpoint to the story of an epic poem or a tragedy, the quintessential narrative element since Aristotle:  

 

 

 

What is Required in Every Composition, and first on the Subject The first is the Subject without which nothing can be made. Just as the agent in any operation . . . bases his work on certain material called the subject, so the musician in his operations . . . finds the material or subject upon which he bases his composition. . . . Just as the poet has as the subject of his Poem History or Fable, which is either of his own invention or borrowed from others . . . so the musician . . . has a subject upon which to construct the composition.66

The composer treats his soggetto as the Aristotelian Agente treats his materiale (Physics, II, 2) and the Poeta his historia or favola (Poetics, 6–14). Later in Book III (chapter 41) Zarlino offers instructions on “How to write simple counterpoint, called note-against-note, for two voices” and elaborates again on the narratological meaning of soggetto. After claiming that he intends to provide only universal and not particular rules because it is up to the composer to use his intellect to  

132   Constructing the Narrator  

understand nature—just as a poet does—Zarlino cites a passage from Horace’s Ars poetica (42–44) concerning the order that a poet should follow in his narrative in setting forth his soggetto, which can be derived either from history or myth. The poet, writes Horace, “should say at present what requires to be said at present: he should defer much and leave it out for the time being.” 67 Virgil, Zarlino claims, followed precisely Horace’s rule in the Aeneid when he chose the subject of the fall of Troy and of Aeneas’s journey but he began his narration with the journey, thus “upsetting the chronology.” The poet, Zarlino continues, made this arrangement even more effective by having this story told by Aeneas to Dido in Carthage. A similar reordering, Zarlino says, is effected by a painter who having chosen “to depict a certain incident, accommodates the figures to his design . . . and arranges [them] in one way rather than another, standing or sitting, provided . . . the history or legend he depicts is respected.” Each painter in fact produces a different work of art by depicting the same subject; even the same artist paints the same subject in different ways.68 For Zarlino, the poet, the painter, and the musician are narrators who make two kinds of choices, the first regarding the subject matter, the second involving its rearrangement in the texts they produce. Zarlino in effect distinguishes among three narrative levels, in a way not dissimilar to modern narratologists. The first—which I henceforth call fabula—is the chronological sequence of events at the most abstract level: Troy burns, Aeneas embarks on his journey, and he reaches Carthage, where he meets Dido and tells her his story; this more abstract skeleton, Zarlino says following Aristotle, can either be invented or borrowed. The second level—the story—consists of the specific way in which the fabula is presented in the text by rearranging the chronological sequence; thus the last event in the fabula of the Aeneid comes first in Aeneas’s narrative, the story consisting of an act of memory (analepsis). The third level is the story as it is actually told—discourse—and this is shown by Zarlino through the example of Aeneas embedding the story of Troy in his own speech to Dido (Aeneas is an intradiegetic narrator).69 Fabula, story, and discourse all concern the artist as narrator, no matter which material he uses—words, notes, or colors. The artist needs to know how to find a good and suitable subject but also how to present it, involving the relationship between himself as narrator, the story, and the characters. Zarlino’s discussion of soggetto, of course, echoes that of the many Renais­ sance literary theorists who discussed at length the status of tragedy and epic poetry in light of Aristotle’s concept of mythos as mimesis of action.70 We have seen in chapter 4 (“Lyric Modes”) that Minturno extends these discussions to lyric poetry, also dealing with mythos (favola). Literati variously used the words soggetto, favola, azione, argomento to describe what Aristotle calls the “soul of poetry,” framing it, in a way similar to Zarlino, as a rhetorical issue belonging  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    133

either to the phase of inventio (when emphasis falls on the level of abstract fabula) or of dispositio (when they discuss the level of the actual story). Zarlino’s powerful image of the composer operating as an agent molding his material can be extended to Willaert’s narrative attitude toward Petrarch’s poetry.71 Just as Petrarch’s Canzoniere (or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta), Willaert’s Musica nova is organized as both a collection of individual pieces (in the sense of fragmenta, some of them thematically grouped together) and a macrotext, a sequence, with internal divisions. The main division, as we remember, is located at the midpoint (Aspro core, no. 14, the first of the six-voice section; see again appendix 1), coinciding with the beginning of Petrarch’s Rime in morte. As said above, the last madrigal (“Occhi piangete”) sets a poem that is followed, in Petrarch, by the first in Willaert’s collection (Io amai sempre). Willaert thus selects and rearranges the order of Petrarch’s texts in the way described by Zarlino for his artist-narrators, and as Monteverdi will later do for Cruda Amarilli and O Mirtillo with respect to Guarini’s Il pastor fido (see above). Even in the case of the diptych Cantai, hor piango and I’ piansi, hor canto (RVF CCXXIX and CCXXX), Willaert cannot resist the temptation to reverse the order (nos. 17 and 16, respectively). Perhaps the most effective way in which the composer imitates the poet’s voice at the level of musical discourse is through the sharp contrast between the technique of a unifying soggetto to set “I” poems, and that of a new style of polyphonic dialogue to set the last four dialogue sonnets using direct speech. In the seven-voice dialogues (nos. 22–25 in the collection), Willaert obtains a mimetic effect through a “kaleidophonic” alternation of the parts, as Denis Stevens called it. There is no clear separation in the vocal groups assigned to each character “but rather a constantly changing pattern of vocal strands and textures.” 72 The result of this “interweaving the voices and the words of both ensembles” is, according to David Nutter, that the “music-verbal identity of each ensemble risks becoming disembodied of its association and hence of its representative meaning.” 73 Yet Willaert, in contrast to Verdelot in his dialogue madrigals, compensates for this potentially destabilizing factor by consistently assigning the lower voices to the poet’s voice, and the upper voices to the interlocutors’ voices. The interlocutors’ voices are: Love for Sasso’s “Quando nascesti, Amor?” (no. 22),74 the ladies (donne) for “Liete e pensose” (no. 23, RVF CCXXII), the poet’s soul for “Che fai, alma” (no. 24, RVF CL), and his eyes for “Occhi piangete” (no. 25, RVF LXXXIV). In addition, at least two of the voice parts, the uppermost and one supporting voice, remain stable in each of the two combinations of voices, allowing for a performance for vocal duet accompanied by instruments. Since these more stable voices are the only ones carrying the complete text of the sonnet, the singers performing the other parts (if they do) gain a highly fragmented experience of the poem—even more than Arcadelt’s intermittent bass-subject, which, as we remember, alternates performing with listening. Actually, these less stable parts  

 

134   Constructing the Narrator  

also alternatively participate in the settings of the passages assigned to the other ensemble, until all seven voices sing together for the repeated setting of the last two lines—as in “Occhi piangete,” the last madrigal of Musica nova. Table 1 shows the relationship between the alternation of voices in “Occhi piangete” (numbered 1 to 7 in the left-hand column) and the dialogue between the poet and his eyes. This results in an ever-changing arrangement in the alternation of voices, generating extreme textural variety (A b C d E f; see bottom row: poet’s sections in capital letters, interlocutors’ in lower case). From this point of view, “Occhi piangete” is diametrically opposed to “Quando nascesti, Amor,” the first madrigal of the seven-voice dialogue section (no. 22). In this last case, the poet keeps for himself the lowest four voices (nos. 4, 5, 6, 7), whereas the interlocutor adds or subtracts each time one voice to or from the trio of voices (nos. 1, 2, 3). This results in a quasi-chiasmatic pattern: A b A c A d A e A d A c A b A d. The second madrigal of the dialogue section, “Liete e pensose” (no. 23), presents a clearer allocation of voices, resulting in the alternation pattern A b A c. The last two madrigals, setting the two “internal dialogues” poet/soul and poet/eyes (“Che fai alma” and “Occhi piangete”), present, at the beginning, the same initial allocation of voices (2, 3, 5, 6, and 1, 4, 7); but the first madrigal then continues with the more regular pattern A b C d C b C. Willaert’s prismatic technique of “systematic variation,” as Nutter aptly calls it, applied to a discursive situation that is, however, always identical (the dialogue), generates musical structures that are “almost perverse in [their] complexity,” as in “Occhi piangete.” 75 It is not by chance that the term soggetto in Zarlino’s Istitutioni harmoniche has at least two meanings: one is that of “narrative thread” discussed above regarding non-dialogic madrigals, the other is numero sonoro (sonorous number), which better suits the dialogic madrigals.76 The texts of the dialogic madrigals (22–25) embody a different concept of subjectivity compared to the non-dialogic ones (1–21). Each group requires a different musical technique, the wandering soggetto in one case (madrigals for four to six voices) and a kaleidoscopic textural variety in the other (madrigals for seven voices). Thanks to this highly organized structure, the seven-voice section of Musica nova becomes a mini Canzoniere in dialogic form. The singers of Willaert’s madrigals, that is, experience Petrarch’s fragmented self as performed. But performance is ultimately what brings unity to their selves. Viewing instead the issue of agency from the point of view of the composer: just as in the dialogic sonnets (compared to the non-dialogic ones) the poet “softens” his voice by creating characters speaking in direct speech, so the composer in the settings adjusts his musical technique dramatically, as it were, shifting to a more mimetic characterization. Still, Willlaert’s voice resounds distinctly in both dialogic and non-dialogic settings, his mimetic impulse in the dialogic settings as strong as his diegetic voice in the non-dialogic ones. In the former, the fictional character—the poet 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    135 Table 1   Adrian Willaert, “Occhi piangete,” from Musica nova (Venice, 1559): alternation of voices

Voice

Clef

1: C 2: V 3: A 4: VII 5: T 6: VI 7: B

g2 c1 c2 c3 c3 c4 c3

Poet

Eyes

Poet

Eyes

Poet

(1–15)

(15–27)

(26–37)

(37–49)

(49–71)

X

X

X X X X

X X X

X X

A

X

X X X X

b

C

d

E

X

X X

X X X X X X

f

g

X X X X

Eyes

(69–91) (90–end)

X

X X

Eyes

character—is as musically (texturally) stable as the poet-narrator is in the latter through the ever-present soggetto. However, just as in the non-dialogic settings the soggetto flexibly wanders horizontally among the voices, so in the dialogic ones the texture varies vertically, accomplishing a different kind of diffraction of the self—yet another incarnation compared to Arcadelt’s intermittent version. At the beginning of each dialogic madrigal, the composer is careful to strongly assert his voice through a homophonically declaimed setting of the poet’s words (his own), symmetrically paralleling the full sonority of the tutti at the end of the piece, in which the two characters seem to blend despite the words belonging only to the interlocutor (as per convention).77 As opposed to the beginning and the end of the madrigal, where the narrator’s voice is the “loudest,” in the middle of it (that is, in most of the piece) the composer-poet “sets aside his own persona and wears another one,” to use Minturno’s words—although he never disappears. By juxtaposing “I” poems and dialogue poems in his Musica nova, Willaert shows that the unity between narrator and character blending within the same “I” in Petrarch’s non-dialogic poems is indeed illusory. The narrating and the experiencing “I”s do belong to different temporal planes, as the proemial poems of the Canzoniere show, and they are only provisionally allowed to coincide within the I/I–you poems. It indeed takes a small shift in narrative and musical levels—from I/I–you poems to dialogue poems, and from a six- to a seven-voice texture—to split narrator and character and create a fictional character in direct speech: a character—the poet—who, in the last section of Musica nova, talks to himself in decreasing degrees of fictionality and increasing ones of embodiment—from Love, to the Ladies, to his own soul and eyes. The poet’s “I” is always divorced, from the start, no self ever existing without an other. It is an embodied and sentient self (as the last and the first of Willaert’s madrigals show). Finally,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

136   Constructing the Narrator  

it is a performing self, one unfolding in the time of the performance and thanks to it. Willaert’s exegesis of Petrarch operates not only at the microtextual level, within the single madrigal (as shown by Martha Feldman, among others), but also at the larger one of the macrotext.78 By almost single-mindedly appropriating Petrarch’s poetics of the self, Willaert made available to his fellow composers an expanded range of possibilities to become full musical narrators. •

•

•

•

•

cipriano de rore’s madrigali a cinque voci (1542) consists of twenty madrigals.79 The book manages to coordinate a tight musical organization according to the eight traditional modes with an equally structured organization of the poems within the collection (see appendix 1). At either end of the book, two ballatas on texts by the contemporary poet Giovanni Brevio (nos. 1 and 20) frame, respectively, Petrarch’s sonnet Hor che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace (no. 2) and a twin poem, the anonymous madrigal Hor che l’aria e la terra e ’l vento tace (no. 19). Proceeding from each end towards the middle point of the book, madrigals nos. 3 and 18 both set poems by an anonymous author, a sonnet and a madrigal, respectively. Framed by these six pieces (three at the beginning and three at the end) are fourteen madrigals (nos. 4–17) exclusively setting sonnets, eleven by Petrarch and three by poets contemporaneous (or almost) with Rore. As far as the musical organization according to modality is concerned, poems nos. 1–3 are set in mode 1 and nos. 18–20 in modes 1, 2, and 3. Petrarch’s sonnet no. 4 starts the sequence of pieces in modes 2 to 8, which are unequally divided among the fourteen settings (nos. 4 and 5 in mode 2, nos. 6, 7, and 8 in mode 3, no. 9 in mode 4, nos. 10 and 11 in mode 5, nos. 12 and 13 in mode 6, nos. 14 and 15 in mode 7, and finally, nos. 16 and 17 in mode 8). Feldman’s subtle and comprehensive discussion of Rore’s Madrigali a cinque voci in City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice highlights the tinta of seriousness and rough expressiveness of most of the poems selected by Rore, which share topics such as “death—both feared and augured—and untamed wilderness.” 80 Rore’s poetic choices, revealing an expressionistic “Dantean” Petrarchism, emerge in contrast with the more introspective ones by Willaert in his Musica nova also when they are considered from the perspective of the poems’ rhetoric of address. In contrast to the predominance of “I” poems in Willaert’s settings for five voices, Rore’s Madrigali a 5 are almost equally divided between “I” poems (eleven, three of which, however, featuring internal dialogue) and a group of I–you poems, three of which feature multiple addresses, and one direct speech. Rore finally sets (no. 5) the oniric sonnet RVF CCL (Solea lontana in sonno consolarme) in which Laura appears in a dream to the poet and talks to him in direct speech, interrupted only by the poet’s “she said” (dice ella). Rore’s extremely varied textual choices result in a much more extroverted  

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    137

musical style, compared with Willaert’s. As Feldman shows, Rore’s music features “bold motivic strokes, erratic declamatory pacing, florid melismas and disjunct melody,” as well as the “widened expressivity” offered by the use of black notation for all but two of the madrigals. As a result, the composer is able to complement the Willaertean “speech time” with a more “expressive time,” and his teacher’s rhetoric of “syntactic clarification” with his own “semantic expression”—all this, however, still within the boundaries of “post-Josquinian continuous polyphony.” 81 It is in his late period, however, that Rore’s madrigals change toward an even more dramatic, almost theatrical style. Roughly during the 1550s–1560s the composer abandons his previous pervasive use of imitative counterpoint and thus the almost continuous presence of the Willaertean soggetto. A frequent adoption of four-voice texture for his five-part pieces allows Rore to juxtapose voice groups and thus liberate the musical discourse from adherence to the pace of the textas-read, in order to better adapt the setting to the various shifts in rhetorical address. Rore’s oratorical style, typical of his late period, is homophonic and declamatory, the musical discourse interrupted by dramatic rests and characterized by daring harmonic motions. It is so experimental that today’s scholars are at a loss in assigning these pieces to any particular mode.82 The hallmark of this new style is found in a group of nine madrigals mentioned both by Giovanni de’ Bardi and by Giulio Cesare Monteverdi in connection with the seconda prattica style.83 Four of them are published in Rore’s Book II a 4 (1557): O sonno, o de la queta umida ombrosa (Giovanni Della Casa), Crudele, acerba, inessorabil Morte (second stanza of Petrarch’s RVF CCCXXXII), Schiet’arbuscel di cui ramo né foglia and Un’altra volta la Germania strida; five madrigals are set for five voices: Se ben il duol che per voi donna sento, Di virtù di costumi di valore, Quando signor lasciaste entro a le rive, Poi che m’invita Amore, and Da le belle contrade d’Oriente (the first three published in Book IV a 5, 1557, the fourth one in a 1565 collection, and the last in Book V a 5, 1566). Only one of these madrigals can be classified as an “I” poem (Di virtù), whereas the remaining ones consist of two mimetic poems (i.e., those using direct speech: Un’altra volta and Da le belle contrade) and six I–you poems. Rore’s poetic choices in his late period are thus more rhetorically oriented than those in his earlier Madrigali a 5, leaving no room for the more introverted “I” poems by Petrarch set by Willaert.  

 

 

•

•

•

•

•

The subject of the anonymous narrative sonnet Da le belle contrade is the moment in which two lovers part at dawn, featuring an alternation of still lingering sexual joy and inevitable sorrow. This is told from the perspective of the poet-­protagonist, who uses the past tense and quotes the passionate words of the beloved in the present tense:

138   Constructing the Narrator  







4

Da le belle contrade d’oriente chiara e lieta s’ergea Ciprigna, et io fruiva in braccio al divin idol mio quel piacer che non cape humana mente,

8

quando sentii dopo un sospir ardente: “Speranza del mio cor, dolce desio, te n’vai, haimé, sola mi lasci, adio! Che sarà qui di me scura e dolente?

11

Ahi, crudo Amor, ben son dubiose e corte le tue dolcezze, poi ch’ancor ti godi che l’estremo piacer finisca in pianto.”

Né potendo dir più, cinseme forte iterando gl’amplessi in tanti nodi, 14 che giamai ne fer più l’edra o l’acanto. [1] From the beautiful regions of the East, [2] clear and happy rose Venus, and I [3] enjoyed in the arms of my idol [4] that pleasure that no human mind can understand, // [5] when I heard after a burning sigh [6] “Hope of my heart, sweet desire, [7] you’re going away, alas! You’re leaving me alone! Farewell! [8] What will become of me, dark and sad? // [9] O cruel love! Much too tentative and brief are [10] your sweet caresses, since you even take delight [11] in seeing this extreme pleasure end in tears.” // [12] Unable to say more, she held me tight, [13] repeating her embraces in many coils [14] more than ever ivy or acanthus made.

The poem displays a manneristic tension between the quadripartite form of the sonnet (two quatrains followed by two tercets, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) and the arrangement of its discursive content. Direct speech takes up lines 6– 11, dividing the poem into three unequal sections, of which the outer ones, of unequal length, are entrusted to the poet-protagonist. Rore, however, assigns to the framing narrative sections (five and three lines respectively) an equal length in terms of number of measures (twenty-five), reserving thirty of them (mm. 26– 56; see example 14) for the central section in direct speech, made up of six lines. The composer therefore imposes a different narrative time on that of the “story” as written by the poet, framing the woman’s lament in a balanced way, by also centering the outer sections on the key of F, and the internal lament on that of A. In the sonnet, the first quatrain presents the enjambment et io / fruiva in braccio (similar to lines 2 and 3 of Il bianco e dolce cigno), which unequally splits the quatrain into an initial segment focused on Venus and a second segment centering on the poet, with the deictics io and mio placed in rhyming position (again as in Il bianco e dolce cigno). The woman’s speech is also split, first addressing the lover (lines 6–8) and featuring one first-person deictic for each line (mio cor, mi lasci, di me), then love (lines 9–11), with additional emphasis  

 

 

 

Example 14 Example 14. Cipriano de Rore, Quinto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1566): Da le belle contrade d’Oriente, mm. 24–59.  

24

C

A

∑

&b c Vb c œ

– spir

T

Vb c œ

– spir

Q

Vb c œ

j œ. œ œ nœ  Ó

Ó Œ œ

“Spe - ran-za del mio cor,

œ  #  Œ œ # œ . œJ œ œ  Ó

ar-dent - te

 Œ œ

œ 

? c œ b

ar-dent - te



– spir

&b 

30

Œœ 

o,

ar-dent - te

Te’n vai,

.

“Spe - ran

Œ

œ

œ Œ œ œ

Vb w

Ó

Œ

Vb Ó

Œ œ 

Ó

o,

o, Te’n vai

 Œ œ

œ Œ 

hai - me,

œ

œœ œ  JJ



œ

œ 

 œ œ w





de - si -

∑

œ bœ 

cor, dol - ce

de - si -

œ œ œ œ œ nœ Œ œ œ œ Ó

so -la mi la - sci,

a - di - o.

Ó

œ Œ œ œ

∑



Ó

Œ œ œ œ

∑

Ó Œ œ #

Ó

Ó

Ó

Œ œ œ œ

 



hai - me,

Te’n vai, hai - me

Ó 

-

dol - ce de - si -

mio cor, dol - ce

del

za del mio

 Ó

hai - me, T’en vai,

Te’n vai,

? œ œ  b

-

œ. œ œ œ

de - si

Œœ

#œ 

.

œ  

hai - me,

œ œ  Vb

o, Te’n vai,

dol - ce

“Spe-ran - za del mio cor,

 Œ œ

Œ œ 



“Spe - ran - za

 œ   œ b

Ó

“Spe - ran-za del mio cor,

so - spir ar - dent-te

B

Œ  œ #œ

hai - me,



hai - me,

a - di - o.

a - di - o.

Œ œ œ œ Œœ a - di - o.

a - di - o.

∑

Che

(continued)

& b #œ œ 

36

Che sa - rà

Vb Ó

œ œ

#. qui

œ 

Che sa - rà qui

V b nœ œ 

Che sa - rà

n. qui

œ 



œ œ 

di me scu - raIe do - len

œ 



#œ œ 

 œ

-

di me scu - raIe do - len - te?

œ 



.

di me scu - raIe

œ 

#

Ó

Œ Ó

Ó

te?



do - len - te?



Ahi



Ahi

Ó b

Ahi

Te’n vai,

œ Œ 

? œ œ  b

Ó 

hai - me,

o, Te’n vai

hai - me,

a - di - o.

Œ œ œ œ

Ó



hai - me,

a - di - o.

Che

∑

Example 14 (continued)

& b #œ œ 

36

Che sa - rà

œ œ

Vb Ó

qui

œ 

Che sa - rà qui

V b nœ œ 

n.

Vb œ œ 

.

Che sa - rà

?b

sa - rà

qui

∑

&b œ  œ

Vb



cru-doIA - mor,

œ  œ



œ 



œ

-

#œ œ 



œ 



Œ Ó

Ó

te?

di me scu - raIe do - len - te?

œ 

Ó

œ 

.

œ œ





do - len - te?

w

di me scu - raIe do - len - te?

∑

œ

œ

∑

œ œ





Ahi



Ahi

Ó b

Ahi



Ó

∑

∑

Ahi

œ  œ œ œj œjb œ œ

cru - doIA - mor, ben son du -bio-seIe cor-te Le tue dol-

.

œ

œ œ bœ  œ œ œ œ œ œ J J



cru - doIA - mor, ben son du -bio -seIe cor-te Le tue dol-

cru-doIA - mor, ahi

cru - doIA - mor, ben son du -bio -seIe cor-te Le tue dol-

 b 

∑

b

&b  

48

cez - ze,

b 

cez - ze,

V b b  b

di me scu - raIe do - len

#

b.

œ b œ

cru-doIA - mor,

Vb

ahi



cru-doIA - mor, ahi

Vb œ  œ ?

∑

Œœ



œ œ 



di me scu - raIe

qui

42

Vb

œ 

#.

cez - ze,

∑

Ó

Ó

 Ahi

œ

œ

∑

œ

 bœ œ bœ  œ œ œ œ œ œ J J ∑

 bœ œ

∑

j j œ b œ œ œ œ œ bœ

cru - doIA - mor, ben son du -bio-seIe cor-te Le tue dol-

Œb œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ   poich’ancor -

∑

ti go - di

Che

œ œ n  

œœ 

l’e-stre - mo pia-cer fi - ni -



œ œ œ bœ   œ œ

œ. œ œ œ œ #œ œ  œ  œ



œ œ œ œ  œ  nœ

 œ œ .

poi ch’ancor

poi ch’ancor

∑

ti go - di Che l’e - stre

-

mo pia-cer fi-ni-scaIin

ti go - di Che l’e - stre - mo pia - cer

∑

.

œ

 œ œ 

 œ .

œ

fi - ni - scaIin

  

?

cru-doIA - mor,

∑

b

Ó



œ

œ

 bœ œ

j j œ b œ œ œ œ œ bœ

cru - doIA - mor, ben son du -bio-seIe cor-te Le tue dol-

Ahi

Example 14 (continued)

Œb œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ  

&b  

48

cez - ze,

b  Vb

cez - ze,

V b b  Vb

cez - ze,

∑

poich’ancor -



ti go - di

œ. œ œ œ œ #œ œ  œ  œ

œ œ œ œ  œ  nœ

 œ œ .

ti go - di Che l’e - stre

poi ch’ancor

∑

∑

.

Che

œ

&b œ œ

 Ó

poi ch’ancor



∑

# Ó

pian

-

- to.”

pian

-

-

to.”

pian

-

-

to.”

pian

-

-

to.”

V b œ. Vb w ? w b

j œ 

 œ œ 

ti go - di Che l’e - stre - mo pia - cer

- scaIin pian - to.”

Vb w

 œ œ 

l’e - stre - mo pia - cer

œ œ œ œ   œ œ

55

mo pia-cer fi-ni-scaIin

-

ti go - di Che l’e - stre - mo pia - cer

? b  b b cez - ze,

l’e-stre - mo pia-cer fi - ni -

œ œ œ bœ   œ œ

poi ch’ancor



Che

œ œ n  

œœ 

œ.

Né

 Ó

œ

fi - ni - scaIin

  

fi - ni-scaIin

  

fi - ni-scaIin

j œ œ œ œ 

Œ œ. Né

po - ten - do dir più,

œ œ œ œ œ Jœ œJ œ œ œ  J

po - ten - do dir più, né po - ten - do dir più,

∑

Ó

j œ œ 

 Œ œ

œ

œ  Œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. JJ

œ.

Né po - ten - do dir più,

Né

 œ .

po -ten - do dir più, né

œ.

Né

Ó

œ œ œ œ œ J

po - ten-do dir più,

Ó

Œ œ

œ œ œ œ  J

po - ten - do dir più,

cin­

142   Constructing the Narrator  

on the addressee (tue dolcezze, ti godi). In the music, the role of the composer as a narrator seemingly blending with the protagonist of the poem is stressed by the change in measures 10–15 to a decisively homophonic texture for the words et io / fruiva in braccio al divin idol mio (lines 2 and 3). The shift in line 4 to the object of the enjoyment (the “it”) is signaled by the return to the imitative texture characterizing the first eight measures, centered on Venus. The setting of line 5, in which the canto drops out, returns to homophonic setting, again emphasizing the poet-protagonist (sentii), before the woman takes over with direct speech in measure 25 (see example 14). Performers and listeners are gradually transported to a new imaginary world also thanks to the alternation in musical textures that audibly parallels the shift in deictic orientation featured in the text (“it”/“I”). Shifting deictic orientation is a technique that literary scholars consider effective to accomplish the cognitive transition from real to fictional worlds.84 Composers like Rore used musical means to enhance this effect. The central section of the Da le belle contrade (mm. 25–56), setting the woman’s lament as remembered by the poet-protagonist, has a dual relationship with the preceding section. On the one hand, it is set apart in rather stark ways. Preceded by the dropping out of the canto in measures 21–25, this central section is tonally more unstable, although its two main cadences fall on A (mm. 39–40 and 55–56), which becomes the temporary tonal focus of the section. Also, compared to the first section, the textures used by Rore reach a higher degree of both fragmentation (mm. 30–35, more below) and consolidation (mm. 41–50, written in homophonic declamatory style). This alternation depends, as in the first section, on the entity addressed, in this case the lover and Love, respectively. On the other hand, this central section does include an audible reference to the first section of the madrigal: the 4–3 semitone suspension in measures 39–40 on dolente echoes the similarly plaintive double descending semitone in measures 24–25 on ardente. The latter passage occurs at the liminal point in which the poem transitions gradually from indirect to direct speech (line 5 to 6). The canto, we remember, had been silent for the setting of line 5, but soon before she resumes singing, the alto rises high enough to meet the beginning of her vocal line (at g'), In singing line 5, the quinto becomes slightly asynchronized soon after the words dopo un (m. 23), so that the syllable -te of ardente overlaps with spe- of speranza, capitalizing on the common vowel /e /. This commonality in sound, precisely at the moment of transitioning to direct speech, is paralleled by that in harmony, which does not change much in the shift from indirect to direct speech. The shift is bridged by the prolongation of the triad on D, with its upper neighbor chord g, the harmonic resolution D g being weakened since g falls on a weak syllable and on an upbeat (only in m. 28 D truly resolves on g). A previously unheard G major triad is introduced on the word mio in measure 26, which refers to the woman speaker, signaling that she is taking the stage as a character.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    143

This artful musical transition from line 5 to 6—from indirect to direct speech—reveals Rore’s diegetic control. It is as if the composer-narrator did not intend to retreat abruptly behind the newly introduced character, making her entry too overtly visible on the imaginary stage created for her (and this stage is indeed imaginary since the woman’s words are, as we know, those recalled by the poet-protagonist). Much clearer instead is the resumption of the poet’s own voice in measures 56–57, setting line 12, through reduced texture and a clear-cut return to the key of F after a dramatic pause. If the anonymous poet who wrote the sonnet had no other choice than enclosing the woman’s words in quotation marks, the composer was able to instead blur these boundaries at the moment in which the protagonist starts recollecting the lament (I will discuss in chapter 6 this slight asynchronicity between the musical and the poetic levels, terming it “interference”). Eventually, however, the narrator does indeed retreat at the words sola mi lasci (“alone you leave me”) in order to lend voice monodically, albeit for a moment, to the newly-created character. In measure 33 the three lower voices drop out and leave the stage to a tiny soprano solo performing the ascending chromatic line a'–bâ'–bà'–c''. She alone sings the words referring to herself. The narrator “steps aside” and “disappears” in order to give voice to a real character, who steps forward. This intriguing passage can be viewed as a commentary on the process of creating a character having her own voice, one no longer tied to the communal one typical of madrigals. The composer leaves the character “alone,” and moves the madrigal a step forward toward opera (a similar situation will be discussed in chapter 6 for the last measures of Combattimento). To the extent that this musical passage is a madrigalism—it literally does what the words say—it also transcends it. In the following measures (35–41) Rore makes the most out of Arcadelt’s lesson in the use of texture, in a passage bracketed by two dramatic rests. Line 8, che sarà qui di me scura e dolente, features a shift in verb tense—present to future—and a spatial and personal deictic—qui and me—anchoring the woman’s speech to the location of the performance and to her body. Yet, on the symbolic level, her outburst refers back to the attributes of Venus chiara e lieta in line 2, through their very opposite attributes scura e dolente. Accordingly, in contrast to the diatonic setting of line 2, the harmony now covers the entire chromatic spectrum, except for Eâ. As for texture, whereas for line 3 and 5, entrusted to the narrator, the canto had refrained from singing, here for line 8 (the setting of which is similarly homophonic) the bass drops out and listens to the others, as if allowing the woman to emerge as a character (note that on the deictic di me the four voices become synchronized). It is hard, then, not to hear the bass as embodying the poet-protagonist when, after the addressee shifts from the lover to Love at the words Ahi crudo Amor! and the setting has completed the total chromatic with  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

144   Constructing the Narrator  

the missing note Eâ, he—the bass—returns in measure 43 by imitating the quinto (which in turn pauses until measure 51). In measures 43–48 we indeed listen to both the poet-protagonist and the character reaching the deep sorrows of a D-flat chord on dolcezze, those, however, dubbiose and corte that crudo Amor delivers to both. So, when in measure 56 the bass resumes the setting of the protagonist’s indirect discourse (line 12, soon joined by the alto, the bass this time carrying the soggetto), their association is firmly established. Rore again displays his skill in shifting between narrative levels, by envoicing poet-protagonist and womancharacter in a variety of ways, never loosing sight of their relationships, and by gradually transitioning from indirect to direct speech, and vice versa. All this goes beyond a mere “reading” of the poem, and even beyond exegesis: it is a recreation of a fictional world through music. The alternating play of closeness and distance between the composer-narrator and his two characters (the poet-protagonist and the lamenting woman), resulting from his intermittently but audibly lending voice to the performer-characters in a variety of ways, raises issues similar to those confronted by narratologists in discussing the role of the author-narrator in both verbal and non-verbal narratives. How do we perceive, in Rore’s setting of Da le belle contrade, the woman’s voice according to the protagonist’s view of her? If such perception is indeed the result of the musical setting, can we attribute this point of view to the composer himself as the narrator? Finally, and more generally, how does a musical narrator construct an imaginary world into which he transports singers and listeners alike during the performance? As we shall see in part III, Monteverdi confronts these very questions in Books V–VIII of his madrigals, in which the issue of “point of view,” or focalization, becomes crucial in developing the narrative autonomy of the musical setting and its ability to tell the “story” of the poem. This implies a confidence in the possibilities of the composer to have a voice as narrator. In the rest of this chapter I explore one important component of this process: the creation of large-scale narratives developed in madrigal books toward the end of the sixteenth century by composers such as Giaches de Wert and Luca Marenzio, according to patterns borrowed from the literary tradition of Petrarchism.85  

 

 

 

The M adr ig a l B ook a s C anzoniere

In late Renaissance Italy, Petrarchism and vernacular poetry became almost synonymous. The 5,270 books of poetry published in Italy between 1470 and 1600—mostly in Venice—would have been inconceivable without the 160 editions of the Canzoniere published in the same period, of which 120 came out after 1530. Orthodox Petrarchist poetry developed between 1500 and 1530 in conjunction with the explosion of the Venetian publishing industry and the polem 

 



In Search of Voice    145

ics concerning the correct use of vernacular language (questione della lingua). These culminated with Pietro Bembo’s codification of Petrarch’s language as the one on which poetry should be modeled, a thesis he argued in Prose della volgar lingua (1525). The almost contemporaneous publication of the poetry books by Gian Giorgio Trissino (1529), by Bembo himself, and by Iacopo Sannazaro (both in 1530) “defined,” according to Amedeo Quondam, “the new forms of the lyric code of modernity as rigorously connected to the model of Petrarch alone, and founded the economy of its imitative reuse.” These books marked, in Quondam’s view, the birth of Petrarchism.86 Editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere were often accompanied by substantive commentaries, one of which, authored by Alessandro Vellutello in 1525, entirely rearranged the ordering of the poems according to what the commentator believed to be the chronology of Petrarch’s love story. Comments on individual poems were also published separately, for example as an outcome of public readings within academies. The accademia is one of the most important environments for the dissemination of the madrigal: “a circle,” as Alfred Einstein puts it, “which permits and appreciates every act of subjectivity, every boldness, and every experiment.” 87 By considering this context as one privileging social interaction and conversation, the main difference between Petrarch’s poetics of the self and that of his sixteenth-century imitators emerges. For Petrarch, poetry involved a circular movement within the self, even when addressing a “you” (see chapter 4, “Voi ch’ascoltate”). His was an essentially solitary artistic experience, linked to the process of writing. For the Petrarchists, instead, poetry was a socializing experience, a means of communicating and representing the self—indeed themselves—in front of real, empirical others, often during a public performance. As Quondam aptly frames this difference:  

 

[In Petrarchism] the communicative value of that subject . . . who is authorized to say “I” by the lyric tradition . . . is radically and dynamically transformed in its meaning: Petrarch is at the same time “passed on” and betrayed. . . . This is because the individual voice of that “I” which spoke from a remote and solitary place is metamorphosed, decomposed, refracted, since it becomes a voice socialized into more voices: those of the many, very many readers who know, if necessary, how to become authors and even singers. In order to be Petrarch-like and Petrarchist, madrigal (as a poetic form) needs to segment, refract, replicate, and dissolve that voice which was originally alone and solitary; this voice needs to become polyphonic in its essence and function . . . [to shift] from solitude to sociability . . . [and become] multivoiced: from Petrarch’s monologue to Petrarchist polyphony.88

Anton Francesco Doni’s Dialogo della musica (1544) shows that Petrarchist poetry and the madrigal interact as forms of communication within a context— the academy—characterized by blurring boundaries between speech and music—  

 

 

146   Constructing the Narrator  

“music in a living and realistic frame,” as Einstein puts it.89 Doni’s Dialogo is a mix of literary and musical texts published, like a madrigal book, in partbooks and reporting dialogues and performances likely to have occurred a couple of years earlier within two academic meetings, the first held probably in Piacenza, the second in Venice. Doni himself was the secretary of the academy of the Ortolani in Piacenza and in his works he often mentions an imaginary academy called “dei Pellegrini.” The Dialogo is, after all, a work of fiction, thus more than a “report.” As Einstein notes, considering that Boccaccio was the model for literary dialogues, the alternation between conversation and narration in the Decameron is replaced in Doni’s Dialogo by that between conversation and music.90 The madrigals thus substitute for the narrative sections—they are perceived as “telling” something. For example, two madrigals included in the second part of the Dialogo (nos. 15 and 16, one anonymous, the other by Perissone Cambio) set texts in praise of women whose names are mentioned in the conversation, Isabella Guasca and “Selvaggia” (probably the same person). Both madrigals are preceded by love letters, which are quoted complete in the dialogue.91 The first letter praises the lady as characterized by leggiadria (gracefulness), listing her physical attributes; then the madrigal following the letter—Chiaro, leggiadro nume—lauds her spiritual side in Neoplatonic fashion. The second letter again praises the lady for her moral virtues and includes a sonnet in her honor. Relevant from the point of view of the narrative strategy is that the letters are both read by the person who is in effect their addressee, Selvaggia. After her reading of the second letter, the character Bargo reveals the trick—Selvaggia has basically praised herself—and then proposes to the lady, who pretends that nothing had happened, to listen to a madrigal indeed addressing her: Deh! perché comè il vostro al nome mio, /  parimenti conforme / a mia voglia non è vostro desio? (“For pity’s sake, why is your desire not equal to my wishes, as is your wish to my name?”). In this episode, madrigals are shown to be part of a communicative chain of embedded exchanges—like Chinese boxes—together with letters and poems read aloud. Also, the context is one of conscious exchange of personal identities, a feature that was intrinsic to the institution of the academy, since each member carried a nickname and a personal emblem. The split between person and persona was, in effect, made official and thus it is no wonder that academies were a fertile environment for the emergence of “performers” in both poetry and music—performers of their selves, or, to adapt Stephen Greenblatt’s definition, self-fashioning characters.92 In the context of traditional discourses about love as part of the education of the nobility, dialogue, letters, and (I would add) madrigals become in academies “communicative forms that propose a coherent and homogeneous elementary paradigm of verbal exchange,” 93 an exchange in which an I addresses a you.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    147

Theater too, often the product of academies, participated in this communicative paradigm. The dialogic form used by Doni, in which characters speak in direct speech and ordinary language, makes his work theatrical in the sense that the conversation appears to be staged for a reader (a “he” or “she”) who “overhears” it, reproducing the paradigmatic situation of the audience of a play. In the late Renaissance both the academy and the court are loci for the staging of verbal exchanges which easily slip into texted music performances, as we can read in works such as Doni’s Dialogue or Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation regarding academies, and Bembo’s Gli Asolani or Castiglione’s The Courtier regarding courts (more below). In a classicistic culture founded on the imitation of nature through models, conversational exchange worked as the model for social, artistic, and intellectual life—a “form of living” for aristocracy gathered in academies and courts.94 The “you” of Petrarch’s Voi ch’ascoltate, as discussed in chapter 4 (“Appropriating the Self”), is often invoked in the proemial sonnets of Renaissance poetry books. In the sixteenth century, because of the socialized context in which poetry was produced, transmitted, and received, this “you” is no longer the undetermined voi of Petrarch—a generic listener—but becomes an embodied self, a real person—for example, the members of an academy or the nobility patronizing publications. We have seen that Monteverdi addresses to a historical “you”— his ex-patron Eleonora Gonzaga—the proemial material of his Selva morale e spirituale, including the dedication letter and the first two madrigals. Similarly, to mention one among many possible examples, in Luigi Tansillo’s proemial sonnet of his canzoniere (Libro di rime, Naples 1550), the person addressed as the voi is the poet’s patron and dedicatee, the nobleman Don Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Duke of Sessa:95  

 

 

 

 

 

Signor, per le cui man mostrar ne volse valore et cortesia quanto ognun pote; ......................... 5 s’humile don mai real braccio accolse, accolga il vostro le mie basse note ......................... 13 leggendo i miei sospir, sappiate come io amai sempre et amo forte anchora.96 [1] Sir, through whose hands [2] value and courtesy are shown as best as one can; . . . [5] if a royal arm has ever accepted a humble gift [6] then let your arm receive my low notes . . . [13] by reading my sighs, know that [14] I always loved and I still love strongly.

This poem is representative of the way in which, besides in dedications and often in conjunction with them, the discourse addressed to the patron can be

148   Constructing the Narrator  

articulated in Petrarchist fashion. The patron is focalized through his hands and arms, which are the recipients of the poet’s basse note (line 6), an expression derived from the basse rime of stanza 4 of Petrarch’s sestina RVF CCCXXXII, Mia benigna fortuna. The nobleman is also described as reading the poet’s sospir (line 13, derived from the sospiri of line 2 in RVF I) about the woman he loves (line 14, which is lifted from the first line of RVF LXXXV, the sonnet opening Willaert’s Musica nova).97 Through a redirecting process typical of Petrarchism the beloved is not a woman, as in Petrarch, but the patron/dedicatee who has always been loved, and will always be, by the poet. In the prose dedication of his canzoniere Tansillo offers his product to the Duke of Sessa by using for his rime the same adjective basse of line 6, thus establishing a link with the proemial sonnet.98 As we shall see, in his Book IX a 5 (1599) Luca Marenzio adopts a rhetoric of address similar to Tansillo’s. In offering his work to Vincenzo Gonzaga and selecting the poems set to music accordingly, Marenzio too draws from Petrarch’s sestina RVF CCCXXXII, Mia benigna fortuna. He also uses as the last text of the madrigal book a poem by Guarini dealing with hands (La bella man vi stringo), which can be interpreted as those of the patron, as in Tansillo. Finally, also in Marenzio’s case the dedicatory letter functions as a key to the interpretation of the work. In different contexts and through different means, Monteverdi in the Selva morale e spirituale, Tansillo in his Libro di rime, and Marenzio in his Book IX a 5 linked their works to contextual elements by opening up their “borders” (those that can in effect be physically touched in a book) in the direction of an I–you dialogue with their patrons—with those who accept the work in the first place as an object-gift. In the socializing context of early modern Italian academies, the members stood for the “listeners” of the prototypical proemial sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate. The relationship between the “I” and the “you” was no longer, as in Petrarch, one of private allocution—from author to reader—but one that can be termed of collocutive exchange, “collocution” involving speaking or conversing with one or many (cum loquere). Indeed, the cultivated nobleman (gentiluomo) participating in conversations and reading or improvising poetry—a performer, through voice, of his own self—became the anthropological model for nobility.99 The behavior of the gentleman as conversatore was codified in treatises, themselves laid out as conversations (dialoghi) or about conversation itself, works that became popular as how-to textbooks throughout Europe. After Bembo’s dialogue Gli Asolani of 1505, three enormously influential treatises in dialogue form, all first published in Venice, became bestsellers translated into most European languages: Baldassarre Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), in which one of the characters participating in the conversation (taking place in Urbino in 1507) is Pietro Bembo himself;100 Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (posth. 1558), devoted to etiquette; and finally, Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation (1574).101  

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    149

Guazzo was a member of the Mantuan academy within which Monteverdi’s Orfeo was performed, the Invaghiti, and to which the librettist Alessandro Strig­gio belonged with the nickname il ritenuto (see chapter 1). In The Civil Conversation, in which Guazzo advocates music as essential to the education of the nobility, the author eloquently praises the epistemological value of conversation and, in turn, of voice: And I want to tell you, moreover, that it would be wrong to believe that one acquires doctrine better in solitude among books than in conversation among scholarly men. It is better to learn the doctrine by ear than by eye, and sight would not be consumed nor the fingers sharpened in turning the pages of writers, if you could have their continuous presence and receive by ear their living voice (la viva voce), which with miraculous force is imprinted in the mind.102

The “living voice” (viva voce) represents for Guazzo an effective instrument of affective persuasion—a means that might even go beyond the effective content of communication:  

I say therefore that our native tongue will utter words that will have the force to move spirits and will represent with the beauty and value of that gold which we have mentioned, when one puts a bit of study in the action (actio), or else in the sound of the words, a sound which, if well considered, has the force to make seem that which it is not, or more than it is. And with all that the orations of Demosthenes are full no less of high eloquence than of singular prudence, no less one says that in Demosthenes the main of part of Demosthenes is missing, because one cannot hear that which one hears.103

From Guazzo’s emphasis on the living voice, it takes a small step not only to assign epistemological and narrative value to the performance of vocal music— as indeed is the case in Doni’s Dialogo—but to also hypothesize that an opera such as L’Orfeo could effectively stage, or frame, an academic debate about Love (Invaghiti meaning “Lovestruck”). Just as the civil conversazione in the academy transmitted knowledge through voice, L’Orfeo could serve as yet another means for the “sentimental education” of the academicians and their young protector, Francesco Gonzaga, as countless of treatises about Love were already doing. Music, text, and staging take on, in this case, a different balance than that featured in Doni’s Dialogo. But the three elements still participate in the same paradigm of verbal exchange and communication accomplished through otii and intrattenimenti for the educational benefit of nobility. Viewed as literary texts rather than reflections on and of performances, dialogues such as Guazzo’s Civil conversazione or Doni’s Dialogo allow their authors to experiment with various ways through which to make their narrative voices  

 

150   Constructing the Narrator  

audible in the text, by exploiting the distance between themselves as narrators and the characters enacting the conversations. A similar variable gap lies between the real and the fictional author of dialogues, since authors often claim to have participated in the conversation reported in the book, or to be able to report about it because they heard it from others. Often the author’s opinion is audible between the lines of a specific character participating in the dialogue. Thus, for one, a treatise in dialogue form mimics the actual conversations occurring in courts or academies, functioning as a model for behavior and performance of the self; for another, it allows the author to diffract his voice into a polyphony of voices without renouncing his own, i.e., without completely “disappearing” behind the characters. We have seen that a homologous way of using authorial voice at a variable distance and audibility with respect to characters/singers is central to the development of the polyphonic madrigal—for example in Willlaert’s Musica nova, itself possibly conceived for an academy—and that Arcadelt’s madrigals can be viewed as performing the diffracted self enacted by Bembo in his dialogue Gli Asolani, which stages conversations and music performances at the court of the Queen of Cyprus. It is thus not only that an economy of verbal exchange underlies both literary and musical forms of communication, but that these forms implied the construction of a narrator—whether poet or composer—able to consciously modulate and adjust the distance between himself and the characters he creates. The rise of the vernacular dialogue in the first half of the sixteenth-century coincided with that of orthodox Petrarchist poetry and with the spreading of academies. These phenomena, in turn, took place in the period in which the questione della lingua, involving the issue of writing poetry, was heatedly discussed, often within academies, with published outlets in dialogue form (including the three “model” treatises mentioned above). The invention and first development of the madrigal took place within the same geographical centers and intellectual circles, and during the same decades, in which these discourses—on language and through language—developed. Thanks to the shared adoption of a standardized poetic language that every cultivated person could learn by studying and memorizing Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the number of poets skyrocketed, and the social occasions to write, recite, listen, read, and publish poetry multiplied. The public of poetry readers was so numerous that it overlapped with that of the authors, i.e., with the poets performing in academies—the loci for conversation and music-making. Activities related to poetry and music, including financing a publication as dedicatee, became an instrument for the recognition of elevated social rank. High rank was not so much related to sheer financial wealth as to the “virtues” associated by nature with nobility (whether one needed to be noble in order to possess these virtues was the subject of debate). As Castiglione’s The Courtier exemplifies, singing and  

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    151

listening to texted music—an activity that after 1530 consisted mostly of singing and listening to madrigals setting poetry by Petrarch and the Petrarchists—was among the social and cultural practices associated with nobility and with its virtues, such as war-making, riding, dancing, playing games, drawing, painting, and engaging in conversation: all activities during which voices easily slipped from speech to music-making.  

 

•

•

•

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Between 1520 and 1600 composers published about 2,466 settings of Petrarch’s poetry included within 511 prints, with a peak in production during the decade 1560–70.104 One of the earliest madrigal prints, that of Bernardo Pisano published in 1520, bears the name of the Model in the title page itself: Musica . . . sopra le canzone del Petrarca, although the publication included settings of other poets as well.105 Starting with Cipriano de Rore’s Madrigali a 5 of 1542 composers began to publish books mostly or exclusively devoted to Petrarch’s settings.106 In the later part of the century and the beginning of the next, musicians did not ignore Petrarch but the decline in the number of settings of his poetry is evident.107 Whereas during his career Orlando di Lasso, for example, devoted to Petrarch sixty-four out of 185 settings, that is 35 percent of his output, Monteverdi based only six madrigals on his poetry, as mentioned.108 Beyond statistics, it is important to consider, as Franco Piperno has done, the significance of setting, publishing, commissioning, dedicating, and putting together a book of madrigals featuring Petrarch’s poems. Madrigal books that included a high percentage of Petrarch’s texts were published by composers who were active precisely in those areas of Italy where a Petrarchan culture was most present, that is, Tuscany (with Florence and Lucca), the Venetian Republic (Venice, Verona, Padua, Brescia, Capodistria, Udine, and Bergamo), and finally, the Kingdom of Naples, Sicily included. Often, setting Petrarch was a way for a composer at the beginning of his career to authorize himself in the eyes of the competition—in the same way in which an unknown poet authorized himself by using the language of the Model. There are significant parallels in the chronology and dynamics of publication of collective editions of madrigals, Petrarchist poetry, and literary epistles, as forms of communication participating in the “paradigm of verbal exchange” mentioned above.109 Piperno, in providing abundant data up to 1570 to effectively support this relationship, observes, for example, that the first two known collective editions of madrigals (the Primo libro di madrigali a 5 and the Primo libro di madrigali a misura di breve) were published by Gardano in the same year (1542) as the Primo libro di lettere volgari published by Aldo Manuzio. Three years later, Gabriele Giolito published the Rime diverse di molti excelentissimi autori, which was the first of a series of nine poetry books (giolitine) that played an  

 

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essential role in disseminating Petrarchist poetry during the century. All three publishers—Gardano, Manuzio, and Giolito—were located in Venice and each was responsible for putting together these collectively-authored books. Madrigal books possibly shared with poetry books their local nature as well (e.g., by featuring poets and musicians originating from the same city or court), their encomiastic nature (the occasion being, for example, the death of a lady or a poet), and the fact that they often included works by lesser-known authors who did not have the possibility of publishing a single-authored volume. Just as literary collections often presented poems by different authors engaging in an exchange with one another, so madrigal books presented multipartite texts set as cycles by different composers—another example of the shared economy of verbal exchange. The “collective format” of madrigal books could witness as many internal varieties as those featured in poetry books, both types attesting to the vitality of the “system of repetition” characterizing Petrarchism.110 Obviously, the tendentially centrifugal arrangement of the poems set to music within collective editions of madrigals stood at the opposite side of the spectrum if compared with the organization of single-authored volumes, in which the arrangement could approach the centripetal one of a Canzoniere. The Petrarchist poets who were included in madrigal books (not counting the myriad anonymous poets) matched in name and relevance those present in poetry books. In commenting on a survey of the poets whose works were set to music in sixteenthcentury madrigal books, Quondam concluded that the repertory of poesia per musica “overlaps with the ‘library’ of poems in remarkable and precise ways: they represent a bipartite economy of communication, in which the text is dynamically amphibious and mobile, between writing and voice—actually, in many voices.” 111 Considering this permeability of boundaries between poetry as such and poetry set to music, one wonders in what measure the verbal text affected the perception of a madrigal, whether its previous knowledge played a role, and whether texts—being included in an object that was meant not only as a script for performance but as a gift to a dedicatee—made sense as a sequence, or even as a narrative, as arranged within a madrigal book. Madrigal books could also be arranged according to strict musical parameters—e.g., by modes—in which case it is to be verified if the sequence of the texts was taken into account or if it randomly followed the musical organization. We have seen that both Willaert and Rore, but also Monteverdi in his Selva, accomplished a miraculous equilibrium between the two types of discourses—the musical and the literary—and that they advanced their Petrarchist poetics by arranging their books through a meaningful organization of both levels. Was the literary text perceived as having autonomous value in the experience of listening to madrigals? We don’t know, and it certainly depended on the kind  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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of listener. Madrigals were often (perhaps most often) performed by instruments alone. But there is some evidence for a positive answer to the above question, at least within certain contexts. That particularly sophisticated listener and generous patron of the genre, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, used to read aloud the texts of the madrigals sung by the famous Concerto delle donne, as we know from the letters written in 1582 by Cavalier Grana to Luigi d’Este: [March 7] I also saw and heard the Duke read with great pleasure a most beautiful madrigal [just the poem] about the lovely eyes and lovely hands of a lady. [July 21] The Duke retired toward the first fig tree with the balustrade barring him from the view of those he did not want to see him, and, holding in his hand a book wherein were written out by hand all the verses that the ladies were singing, he enjoyed himself greatly for two hours.112

The manuscript book from which the Duke used to read was among those that Luzzasco Luzzaschi owned (or could consult and copy) after the death of his patron and the devolution of Ferrara to the Pope in 1597. The Duke of Mantua Vincenzo Gonzaga, cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, and cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini actively sought these manuscripts from Luzzaschi, including those with the texts alone, called libri delle parole dei madrigali (books including the words of the madrigals).113 Evidently, there was a shared consciousness that these libri had something of an autonomous value as objects and as autonomous works. In the rest of this chapter I discuss madrigal books by Giaches de Wert and Luca Marenzio in which the sequencing of the texts of the madrigals appears to be far from random. In some cases the organization of these books suggests that the composers arranged them through narrative designs that would have been perceived as similar to those of poetry collections. These narrative designs were already part of prior cognitive experiences of cultivated readers and listeners, and would have been held as part of their “set of expectations” regarding the organization of poetry or music collections. Readers and listeners would accordingly have comprehended both types of works. •

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Giovan Battista Nicolucci, known as “il Pigna,” was, until his death in 1575, the powerful secretary to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. A historian, philosophy professor, and man of letters, Pigna had close contacts with Battista Guarini and Torquato Tasso, who both admired and feared him for his great political influence. He was also preceptor of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Luca Marenzio’s patron. As a Petrarchist poet, Pigna wrote two canzonieri: Il ben divino, in which “Laura” is the singer and noblewoman Lucrezia Bendidio (hence the title), and a collection entitled Gli Amori.114 This last was the subject of an extended comment in his own time that also dealt with the arrangement (dispositione) of the poems: “The

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arrangement of these rhymes on the topic of love is such that at the beginning is placed the act of falling in love, and at the end there is the act of the joining of the spirits, which follows after having reached the requital of the loved object; toward which end, before the conclusion, various accidenti are required to occur.” 115 In Pigna’s narrative, as soon as the poet falls in love, he makes a plan of how to pursue the beloved. The accomplishment of his aim would not be so perfect, the commentator says, were it not “refined through labors and through experience,” since one loves “more those things which are conquered with greater effort, and . . . those that have become better known to us.” At first, the poet may be hindered in the execution of his plan because he is little expert or hesitant and does not have confidence in himself. But the responsibility of failure may actually fall on the woman’s shoulders when she “does not assent to him . . . or . . . gives one assent instead of another (as in not allowing him to look at her and to speak to her, and in being courteous to him in her glances and words but not in meaning that she loves him), or . . . she denies him assent by showing him exterior signs that she has not accepted his love.” As a consequence of these difficulties, the poet imagines a final repudiation from the woman and “torments himself in seeing the lovely qualities of the woman and in being deprived of them.” The lover continually seeks relief from the martyrdom caused by this deprivation, but, not finding a solution, he faces the prospect of abandoning the enterprise. Since a lover cannot interrupt the natural course of love, if the poet is not loved in return, he “must resolve to want to die while loving.” Reaching the summit of the accidenti, the only solution is that the woman becomes moved to compassion and accepts in the end “the servitude of the lover”—which is eventually the case, through the “mutual embodiment of the two souls.” The commentator summarizes the story by saying that in this way  

between the two extreme acts—falling in love and reaching the union of the spirits—these cases in orderly fashion intervene: knowing the terms of one’s own love, wanting to continue to love, finding oneself inexpert, not having the consent [of the beloved], having of one’s consent for another, imagining of a denied assent, tormenting oneself because of an imagined exclusion, searching for relief in martyrdom, searching for one relief in place of another, the feeling of the return of love. And all this is said on account of the subject. [Emphasis mine.]  

 

The accidenti of love eventually lead to a happy end—a conclusion less spiritual than Petrarch’s but pursued using his lexicon and topoi. The commentator stresses the value of the lover’s imagination in this process: poems lamenting repudiation by the beloved, her cruelty, her departure (partenza), etc. emerge as products of the mind of the suffering poet, not as real events. The happy end, however, is real, so I refer to this type of narrative as happy-end canzoniere.  



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In his pastoral play Aminta, Tasso had in mind precisely the loved/hated Pigna in devising the character of the wise poet Elpino philosophizing about love. He also published an erudite commentary on three canzoni composed by Alfonso’s secretary. Like Pigna, Tasso dedicated a collection of poems (a canzoniere) to Lucrezia Bendidio, publishing it in Mantua in 1591. In the dedication to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, Tasso writes that in his book “Love emerges out of confusion (amore esce dalla confusione) , in the same way in which Love was described by the ancient poets as emerging out of Chaos (dal seno del caos).” A productive confusion in the mind of the reader was thus one of the effects of experiencing a canzoniere as a way of educating oneself about Love. In studying one of the three versions of Tasso’s collection for Lucrezia, a modern critic detects the presence of a narrative design, which I summarize as follows (each of the units—1a, 1b, etc.—includes one or more poems; italics are mine):116  

 

1. Falling in love: (a) love, awakened by the appearance of the woman, grows thanks to her song; (b) description of the beauties of the woman. 2. The distance: far from the woman, the lover is consoled by her in dream. 3. The wedding of the woman: far from her, the lover hears the news of her ­wedding. He laments of it to Love and hopes that the beloved will allow him to be able to continue to love her and to celebrate her. 4. The return: returning to her, he drives away his troubled thoughts. 5. The happy meeting: (a) at the sight of the woman, he does not know how to express in words his feeling, but she reads him in his pallor and encourages him: the courteous act makes him forget every torment suffered; (b) he sees Love in the eyes of the beloved: Love commands him to sing the victories of her and his loving servitude. 6. The courtly acts, completed during the stay with her, meant as ­intermediaries of love, at the beginning happily completed, at the end unhappily interrupted. Singing about these acts, the poet executes the order of Love (various courtly acts and entertainments follow): (a) the gift of herbs; (b) the mirror; (c) the ribbon; (d) the dance; (e) the laments of an older woman. 7. His departure: (a) nearing the hour of departure he prays the woman to stop the course of the heavens with her eyes; (b) taking leave of the beloved he is consoled by her words. 8. The second distance. 9. The refusal of the woman: (a) other times he has seen his woman being compassionate towards him; but now she reveals herself to be cruel; (b) the old age of the lovers: her old age will be revenge for her cruelty; (c) both her cruelty and piety spur him to love her; (d) the third distance, caused by her stay at Comacchio; (e) the compassion that he sees in the eyes of his woman is a cruel deceit; (f) the sight of the woman, though she is merciless, gives birth to a love that purges every unworthiness. 10. The reaction of the lover: disdain and disappointment; his disdain ­extinguishes love for an earthly beauty; his mind (ingegno) lifts him, as a poet, to celestial objects;

156   Constructing the Narrator   he repudiates his song of love and by being silent he will condemn the woman to the oblivion from which he had pulled her. He no longer fears her cruelty but only her flattery. 11. The palinode of the disdain: he suffers for having offended his woman.

The main differences between Tasso’s and Pigna’s narrative designs are that the former features multiple departures (partenze; see words in italics), which are indeed real and not imagined, and that there is no happy end. In one of the three versions of Tasso’s canzoniere for Lucrezia (other than the one used to extrapolate the above narrative) the order of the units is different but the beginning and the end of the narrative remain almost unchanged. The revised order then becomes: 1 4 5a 6c 6d . . . 10 11 3. In comparing these versions it emerges that, in the passage from one version to the other, some groups of thematically related poems remain unchanged, such as those in units 4–5a and 10–11 in the version used above. Generalizing from the cases of Pigna and Tasso, one can say that both canzoniere types feature a non-linear narrative design based not only on the kind of plot—the presence of partenze, the role of imagination, the happy end—but also on a framework consisting first of a defined beginning and ending and second of a variable middle part in which groups of related poems emerge. This organization effectively counterbalances the confusing effect—Tasso’s confusione—potentially produced in the reader’s perception by the alternation of different states of mind reflected in individual poems, many of which can in fact be switched in order.117 Concerning the first aspect of the framework—beginnings and endings—we have seen in chapter 4 that it was Petrarch who determined the essential features of the proemial sonnet in the Renaissance: I–you polarization, a contrast between a then and a now, and an emphasis on the material itself that poetry is made of. To these, Renaissance poets often added an invocation to Love as the addressee and the apparition of the Muses. Petrarch, as we have seen, also groups together the first five sonnets as proemial. As for the ending, Petrarch’s poem to the Lady Virgin (RFV CCCLXVI) is often replaced in the Renaissance by one directed to God, but still in the same prosodic form of the canzone, since it was thought of as being more elevated than the sonnet and thus mirroring the ascending spiritual progression leading to the conclusion of the book. We shall see that some madrigal books make use of a similar narrative frame through texts in which the dedicatee is encoded. On the musical level, one of the most common devices used at the end of madrigal books is an increase in number of voices.118 Concerning the second aspect—the possible associations between or among poems in the middle part of poetic canzonieri—Petrarch again provided his imitators with the model by grouping together thematically or prosodically related poems. Structural connections exist between contiguous poems in the Canzoniere, which were then imitated during the Renaissance.119 For example,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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the pair of sonnets RVF CCXXIX–CCXXX, Cantai, hor piango and I’ piansi, hor canto (appearing in reverse order in Willaert’s Musica nova) suggests a literal connection that Pietro Bembo exploited to open his own Canzoniere with the sonnet Piansi et cantai l’aspra guerra. Petrarch’s poems feature many types of thematic links, as in the diptych formed by RVF XLI–XLII (Quando dal proprio sito and Ma poi che ’l dolce riso), the former dealing with the departure of Laura, the latter with her return. But connections can be both literal and thematic, as with those in the pair CCCXXXVIII–CCCXXXIX. The lines of the former poem Non la conobbe il mondo mentre l’ebbe / conobbil’io, ch’a pianger qui rimasi, etc. (12–13) resonate at the beginning of the latter poem as Conobbi, quanto il ciel li occhi m’aperse. In the earlier poem the poet, but not the world, attains knowledge of Laura, whereas in the latter one the poet’s knowledge splits into earthly and divine, but he fails in attaining the second kind. These are only a few among the types of links present in contiguous poems of the Canzoniere. In madrigal books, similar textual associations can have the effect of lending an audible tinta to the work.120 marenzio’s book ii a 5 (1581), for example, features connecting words or word-compounds in both contiguous and distant poems, as shown by the following partial transcription of the poetic texts set to music in this book:121  

 

 

 

1. Deggio dunque partire, / lasso, dal mio bel sol che mi da vita? 2. Perché di pioggia il ciel non si distille / e la riva del Tebro tanto inondi,  / che lascino le Ninfe vezzosette / di coglier verdi frondi e mille herbette / con odorati fiori /  per tesser ghirlandette / a gli amati pastori, / fa biondo Apol che ’l tuo splendor ritorni /  a far seren’i giorni. 3. Amor io non potrei. 4. Amor, poiche non vuole. 5. Quando sorge l’aurora, / ridon l’herbette e i fiori, / e i pargoletti amori / van con le Ninfe intorno / al mio bel sole adorno, / scherzando ad hor’ ad hora, / onde la terra e ’l ciel se n’innamora. 7. A l vago del mio sole / lucido raggio che ’l bel Mincio honora, / anzi l’ingemma e ’ndora, / gitene a schiera a schiera, / lieti scherzando pargoletti Amori / là dove è sempre eterna Primavera, / e giunti fiori a fiori / di candide viole / tessete ghirlandette /  e l’aurea chioma ornando siate attenti / ch’udirete dolcissimi concenti. 8. Itene a l’ombra de gli ameni faggi, / . . . / Mentr’il mio canto e ’l mormorar de l’onde / s’accorderanno e voi di passo in passo / ite pascendo fiori, herbette e fronde. 9. La bella Ninfa mia ch’al Tebro infiora / co’ piè le sponde e co’ begli occhi affrena / rapido corso all’hor che discolora / le piaggie il ghiaccio con sì dolce a pena, / a seguire le sue orme m’innamora / ch’io piango e rido e non la scorgo a pena. 10. O voi che sospirate a miglior note [“notte” in the original: Petrarch, RVF CCCXXXII] / ch’ascoltate d’Amore o dite in rime, / pregate non mi sia più sorda morte, / porto delle miserie, e fin del pianto.

158   Constructing the Narrator   11. Strider faceva le zampogne a l’aura / il Pastorel di Filli o per Neera, / se più pregiando quel che diede a Laura / d’honesto amor perpetua lode e vera, / quando a l’alba Titon le chiome inaura / a salutar la nuova Primavera / fuor di fiorite siepi e d’arborscelli /  uscian cantando mille vaghi augelli. 12. I’ piango; ed ella il volto / con le sue man m’asciuga; e poi sospira [from RVF CCCLIX]. 13. Già Febo il tuo splendor rendeva chiaro. 15. Già torna a rallegrar l’aria e la terra / il giovenetto april carco di fiori, / il mar s’acqueta, il giel fugge sotterra, / scherzan le vaghe Ninfe e i lor Pastori / tornan gli augelli a l’amorosa guerra / Lieti a cantar nei matutini albori. / Ed io piango la notte e son dolente, / tosto che’l sol si scopre in oriente. 16. Se ’l pensier che mi strugge /  . . .  / men gli occhi ad ognor molli [RVF CXXV].

These literal connections emphasize elements related to time, place, and person, and thus have a deictic, orienting function. They include: the time of the year: Primavera, spring, in nos. 7 and 11, and Aprile, April, in 6 and 15; images related to water: in no. 2 pioggia, rain, and Tebro, Tiber, in 7 Mincio, the river of Mantua, in 8 onde, waves, in 9 Tebro again, in 9, 12, and 15 piango, I weep (and, indirectly, in 16 as well); the name of Laura and its derivatives: l’aura, l’ora, l’aurea, aurora, in turn generating rhymes in poems nos. 5, 7, and 11 (and, indirectly, in the three Petrarch poems nos. 10, 12, and 16);122 and the theme of singing in nos. 7, 8, 11, and 15. Finally, there are generic recurring word compounds such as scherzando pargoletti amori in nos. 5 and 7 and tessete ghirlandette in nos. 2 and 7. The anonymous Al vago del mio sole (no. 7) includes many of these literal connectives. Mentioning Mincio as the river of Mantua, the poet invites baby cupids (pargoletti Amori) to weave little garlands of flowers (tesser ghirlandette) and to ornate the golden hair (l’aurea chioma) so that they will hear very sweet harmonies (dolcissimi concenti). Marenzio’s Book III a 5, published the year after Book II and dedicated to the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona, features a madrigal setting of the anonymous poem Ecco più che mai bella e vaga l’aura that echoes the images of Al vago del mio sole in most likely describing the singer Laura Peperara, a member of the Ferrarese Concerto delle donne. Poems in praise of Peperara often mention the river Mincio, since she was born in Mantua; thus Al vago del mio sole in Book II probably refers to her.123 Might the other poems in Book II featuring the recurrent images present in Al vago del mio sole also refer to Laura? Marenzio’s Book II a 5 is dedicated to Lucrezia d’Este, the Duchess of Urbino and sister of both Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara and Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Marenzio’s patron in Rome. Together with Margherita Gonzaga, Lucrezia sponsored Laura Peperara as one of the ladies of the famous Concerto delle donne. Poems nos. 2 and 9 in Book II, as we have seen, mention the river Tiber, thus alluding to Rome, the city where the composer was living under the patronage



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of Cardinal Luigi, who himself was fond of the Concerto. In sum, the discursive space of the book is located in an abstract pastoral world but includes precise references to Rome (via the Tiber) and Ferrara (via the Mantuan Peperara). Marenzio visited Ferrara a few months before publishing the book and thus had direct experience of listening to the Concerto. His dedication of Book II, dated October 25, 1581, is signed from Rome and implies that Lucrezia had already listened to the madrigals that, Marenzio writes, are now “boldly daring to return” to her in published form. The often florid musical style of these pieces and the use in some of them of two sopranos suggest a connection to the Ferrarese environment as well.124 Identifying Laura Peperara as the subject of most, if not all of the poems in Book  II helps to explain the small but significant modification that Marenzio makes to the text of no. 10, a stanza drawn from Petrarch’s sestina RVF CCCXXXII, Mia benigna fortuna. The word notte (night) is changed into note (musical notes) so that the first line becomes O voi che sospirate a miglior note (see the text in table 6, stanza 12).125 This small modification changes the meaning from “O you who sigh for better night” into “O you who sigh for better notes.” This change is in keeping with the theme of singing highlighted in Book II and with the recurrence of the name Laura (hence Peperara) in others. In a Petrarchist move, however, the voi is transformed from the abstract and generalized “listeners” of Petrarch’s poems to the real and socialized “you” listening to the Concerto delle donne in Ferrara of the early 1580s, an audience that included Marenzio’s patron and the composer himself. In a technically virtuosic style, the setting of the fifth line, muti una volta quel suo antiquo stile (let her [death] for once change her ancient style), explores the extreme tonal regions, the bass running downward in the mollis direction through the complete circle of fifths (C–F–Bâ, etc., mm. 30–40). Three years after the publication of his Book II, Marenzio included in his Book I a 4–6 a setting of a sestina by Iacopo Sannazaro (O fere stelle) in which the second line is modeled precisely on the fifth of O voi che sospirate. As we shall see, the composer sets this line by going through a very similar harmonic tour de force through the circle of fifths. He thus builds a bridge between two madrigal books, and does so through note, through music. In these harmonically bold passages the composer inscribes himself even more audibly in his own work. This parallels Petrarch’s virtuosity and self-­ consciousness in adopting the artificial form of the sestina, which I discuss below. We would miss the Petrarchist resonances of Marenzio’s textual change from notte to note—and indeed the composer’s appropriation of Petrarch’s voice— without considering the intertextual connections that make Book II even more of a “book,” one narrating a story that is both personal and universal.  

 

 

 

 

 

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In the sixteenth century the large-scale organization of poetic canzonieri would have been part of the cognitive baggage of cultivated listeners of madrigals, a set of expectations that I describe as a “script.” The term “script” is used in cognitive studies to describe how we make sense of situations with which we cope in real life, such as when, for example, a doctor’s waiting room reminds us of the dentist’s waiting room, or the plot of West Side Story reminds us of that of Romeo and Juliet.126 We process these similarities by matching these experiences “with memory representations of old ones,” so that “understanding can be claimed to depend on the occurrence of appropriate remindings.” 127 Our memory abstracts from experiences by producing structures containing knowledge about specific situations that in turn are embedded in memory structures containing knowledge about more general situations. These are called, respectively, scripts and scenes. “Waiting room” is an example of a scene that can contain different scripts—different sequences of actions—providing specific knowledge about other kinds of waiting rooms. Cognitive-bent narrative studies have appropriated the meaning of script as “a description of how a sequence of events is expected to unfold.” 128 A script is activated as a “source story” at the moment in which the reader experiences a new story, which becomes the “target story.” 129 Following this model, the listener or reader of a madrigal book draws, from his or her memory, structures acquired through earlier experiences—including those derived from the literary experience of reading poetry books—and superimposes them, as scripts, on his or her experience of the work. The two main scripts discussed above—the “happy end” one exemplified by Pigna, which features real and imagined lover’s setbacks, and the one exemplified by Tasso, which includes multiple partenze and a tragic end—are activated as “source stories” at the moment, for example, in which a dedicatee receives a book of madrigals as a “gift”: he or she therefore relates each piece to those two larger narrative designs, gaining a fuller comprehension of the “target story.” Similarly, a listener or performer of an individual madrigal relates it to the previous or the next one in the collection through connective words (or parallel musical elements), as he or she would do when reading poems in a poetry book, including Petrarch’s prototypical Canzoniere. This process works similarly for other parallel features of madrigal and poetry books, involving any previous literary knowledge stored in the memory of listeners, readers, and performers, as the recipients of the musical work. We have seen that the first two madrigals of Monteverdi’s Book V (Cruda Amarilli and O Mirtillo) presuppose the knowledge of the two main characters of Guarini’s Pastor fido and indeed of its entire plot, in order to comprehend the boldness of the composer’s move of closely juxtaposing two different moments in the play. Thus knowledge of Guarini’s play generates in the recipients a fuller narrative comprehension of two otherwise unrelated pieces. More generally, the “happy  

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    161

end” script, of which Guarini’s play is an example, shapes the minds of recipients into comprehending the narrative design of the madrigal book. The work, in this view, stands at the intersection of two processes: on one side, the composer’s selection of a soggetto or story (e.g., Guarini’s play) and the rearrangement of its parts (remember Zarlino’s view of the composer as narrator); on the other side, the set of expectations held by the recipients (dedicatee, reader, listener, performer) in the form of scripts. A narrative impulse similar to that present in Monteverdi’s Book V, as triggered by Guarini’s play, can be found in marenzio’s book vii a 5 (1595).130 Marenzio’s shares three settings with Monteverdi’s later Book: no. 3 (Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora), 12 (O Mirtillo, Mirtillo, anima mia), and 10 (Questi vaghi concenti), which are located respectively as first, second, and last madrigal in Monteverdi (see table 2 for Marenzio and appendix 1 for Monteverdi).131 As in Monteverdi’s Book, the first madrigal in Marenzio’s, Deh, poi ch’era ne’ fati ch’io dovessi, has apparently no proemial function but throws the listener right into the story of Mirtillo in act 1, scene 2 of Guarini’s play. The text of the third madrigal, Cruda Amarilli, is also drawn from the same scene but from an earlier passage: Marenzio reverses the order of two excerpts in which Mirtillo laments his unrequited love for Amarilli (first lines 322–27, then 272–91) and intersperses them, in madrigal no. 2, with Linco’s address to Silvio excerpted from the ­previous scene (Quell’augellin, che canta).132 In act 1, scene 1 of Il pastor fido Linco solicits the stubborn Silvio to abandon hunting and to imitate the birds who love one another. At the point at which Linco mentions the bird’s desire for love—ed odi a punto, o Silvio, il suo dolce desio (and hear now, o Silvio, its sweet desire)—Marenzio changes the word “Silvio” into “Tirsi,” the first of many modifications of the original texts included in this book. This textual change and the rearrangement of the excerpts (from 2–3–1 in Guarini to 1–2–3 in Marenzio) create a new narrative. Since in the two excerpts in which Mirtillo is the speaker (corresponding to nos. 1 and 3 in Marenzio) he never mentions his own name—or that of Ergasto, his interlocutor in scene 2 (from which Marenzio’s nos. 1 and 3 are drawn)—it is possible for “Tirsi” to replace Mirtillo. However, for the listener to the three madrigals, or for the viewer turning the pages of the partbooks, this replacement is gradual, a process accomplished only at the end of the second madrigal, when Tirsi is mentioned instead of Silvio. Until that point, one would not know that the identity of the speaker in the first madrigal is also changed from Mirtillo into Tirsi. Accordingly, the speaker of madrigal no. 2—which, in Guarini, is Linco—is replaced in the new narrative by the absent Ergasto, since he is the interlocutor of Mirtillo/Tirsi in scene 2 and, consequently, in madrigal no. 1. Thus Tirsi becomes the speaker of madrigals no. 1 and 3, and Ergasto that of no. 2, in an “identity theft” in which the first replaces  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2   Luca Marenzio, Settimo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1595): overview Title 1 Deh, poi ch’era ne’ fati ch’io dovessi 2 Quell’augellin, che canta 3 Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora 4 O disaventurosa acerba sorte! 5 Al lume delle stelle 6 Ami, Tirsi, e me ’l nieghi 7 O dolcezze amarissime d’amore 8 Sospir, nato di fuoco 9 Arda pur sempre, o mora 10 Questi vaghi concenti 11 O fido, o caro Aminta 12 13 14 15 16 17

O Mirtillo, Mirtillo, anima mia Deh, dolce anima mia (A. Bicci) Com’è dolce il gioire, o vago Tirsi Care mie selve, addio Tirsi mio, caro Tirsi Ombrose e care selve

Poetic source

System

Clef

Final

Guarini, Pastor fido, I, 2 (322–27) ibid., I, 1 ibid., I, 2 (272–91)

durus

c1

A

he Mirtillo

durus durus

c1 c1

G e

he Linco Ergasto he Mirtillo Tirsi

him Silvio Tirsi her Amarilli

durus

c1

B

he Bembo

him Brother

durus durus durus

g2 g2 g2

A A c

Narrator + he Tirsi she Amarilli? he Mirtillo/Tirsi

Reader + it “stelle” him Tirsi himself

durus mollis

g2 g2

e f

he Mirtillo/Tirsi? he Mirtillo/Tirsi

it “sospir” himself (Corisca)

mollis mollis

g2 g2

g A

himself him Aminta + him Mirtillo / Tirsi

mollis mollis mollis mollis mollis mollis

g2 c1 c1 c1 c1 c1

C G G D D F

he she Lucrina Amar. + Narrator (Ergasto) she Amarilli she Amarilli she Corisca Amar. she Amarilli she Amarilli he Ergasto

Bembo, Alma cortese, 74–80 Tasso, Rime e prose Anon. Guarini, Pastor fido, III, 1 Anon. Guarini, Pastor fido, III, 6 Anon. Guarini, Pastor fido, I, 2 ibid., III, 4 ibid., III, 3 ibid., III, 6 ibid., IV, 5 ibid., IV, 5 ibid., V, 8

Speaker

Addressee Tirsi

Tirsi

himself

her Amarilli

him Mirtillo him Tirsi him Tirsi it “selve,” him Mirtillo him Tirsi it “selve”



In Search of Voice    163

Mirtillo, the second Linco (in table 2 see the last two columns on the right, in which arrows indicate character replacements). Ergasto’s role in act 1, scene 2 of Il pastor fido, however, is that of a voice of wisdom who tries to calm Mirtillo down: quite the opposite of Linco’s role of inciting Silvio to love in act 1, scene 1. Therefore, after Quell’augellin, che canta (madrigal no. 2), the outcry Cruda Amarilli following this incitement—as redirected toward Mirtillo/Tirsi by Linco/Ergasto—becomes the result of something like throwing oil on fire. The increasingly inflammatory progression goes from Mirtillo/ Tirsi reflecting on his own death in the first madrigal—using the Petrarchan oxymoron life/death in an introspective “I” poem—to the reply of Linco/Ergasto in the second madrigal—a mix of narration and address in direct speech—to, finally, the desperate lament addressed to Amarilli in the third madrigal, Cruda Amarilli, an I–you poem.133 For Cruda Amarilli Marenzio selects a longer portion of Guarini’s text (lines 272–91 of act 1) compared to Monteverdi (272–79). After the line about death (i’ mi morro tacendo, “I will die silently”) that concludes Monteverdi’s setting, in Marenzio’s madrigal Mirtillo/Tirsi continues by elaborating on the Petrarchan topos of nature sympathizing with the protagonist. The excerpt set by Marenzio concludes with the evocation of suicidal death (al fine / parlerà il mio morire,  / e ti dirà la morte il mio martire, “finally / my death shall speak,  / and my death will tell you of my suffering”). Since this topic is similar to the one presented in the first madrigal, Cruda Amarilli closes the circle. Marenzio’s rearrangement and modification of Guarini’s text shows that the composer, as the narrator, creates a new story out of the fabula offered by the preexistent text; or, said differently—from the point of view of the listener’s comprehension—that the narrative of Guarini’s play can be superimposed, like a script, on the target story of the madrigal book, to generate meaning. This process involves characters exchanging their voices (a process I called equivocality in chapter 4) and a refunctionalization, within the new context of the madrigal book, of traditional Petrarchan topoi (the suffering lover using the death/life metaphor and the invocation to a sympathizing nature). Indeed this refunctionalization works as a double process, since Petrarch’s language for the lyric is, first, recontextualized by Guarini within his play, and then is translated by Marenzio into poetic texts intended to be used as settings within a madrigal book that eventually is, in turn, performed. The condition of possibility for such intertextual journeys—in the passage from the lyric to the stage to the chamber—is the “passing on” of the role of narrator, from Petrarch to Guarini to Marenzio, as well as the relative stability of the characters they create, “Franciscus,” Mirtillo, and Tirsi. These recontextualizations require adjustments in the verbal text emerging through small modifications that often concern deictic words and include the  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

164   Constructing the Narrator  

names of characters. Deictic words work thus as contextual anchors, precisely as linguists describe them (see chapter 2).134 The role of Marenzio as narrator further emerges in the three madrigals following Cruda Amarilli. The first of these, no. 4, sets Pietro Bembo’s O disaventurosa acerba sorte! and can be thought of in relationship to the first three by following the cue offered by the musical parameters (see columns 3, 4, and 5 in table 2).135 These parameters operate at a different but related narrative level in creating associations between and among pieces. The setting of O disaventurosa—the only madrigal in the book featuring alla breve meter (|  )—shares the same ambitus as the preceding pieces (low clefs, or c1) and is set in the unusual mode “Locrian,” with finalis B. Its beginning may immediately follow the end of Cruda Amarilli, the chord on E at the end of Cruda resolving on that on B at the beginning of O disaventurosa. The text of O disaventurosa is excerpted from the end of the the fourth stanza of a 214-line canzone entitled Alma cortese, which Bembo places in his Rime as the first within the final group of poems (nos. 142–65). In an example of the “socializing” aspect of Petrarchism, these poems lament the death not only of Bembo’s beloved woman, corresponding to the “Laura” of Petrarch’s rime in morte, but also of his friends and, in Alma cortese, of his brother. Marenzio selects from Alma cortese lines 74–80:  

 

 

 

O disaventurosa acerba sorte! 75 O dispietata intempestiva morte! O mie cangiate e dolorose tempre! Qual fu già, lasso, e qual ora è ’l mio stato? Tu ’l sai, che, poi ch’a me ti sei celato né di qui rivederti ho più speranza, 80 altro che pianto e duol nulla m’avanza. [74] O unfortunate, bitter destiny! [75] O merciless, untimely death! [76] O my changed and saddened condition! [77] What was my state once, alas, and what is it now? [78] You know it, that, since you are hidden from me, [79] and I have no longer hope to see you again, [80] there is nothing left other than tears and sorrow (trans. Myers).

Line 78 is the semantically densest moment of the stanza. The deictic orientation shifts, first, from the “you” of “destiny” (sorte, line 74) and “death” (morte, line 75) to the poet’s self (O mie cangiate . . . mio stato, lines 76–77), then from the poet to his brother, directly addressed as Tu in line 78. This apostrophe, however, is immediately balanced by the reference to the first-person pronoun, me. Marenzio modifies the text of line 78 and splits it into two lines:  



In Search of Voice    165 [781 ] Tu ’l sai, anima mia, [782 ] che, poi ch’a me miser ti sei celata [781 ] You know it, my soul, [782 ] that, since you [feminine] are hidden from me, miserable

The augmented text reinforces both deictics Tu and me by adding, respectively, the Guarinesque compound anima mia and the word miser. Finally, the word celato becomes celata, changing a masculine into a feminine ending. In this way the composer transforms the speaker/character “Bembo” into the highly subjectivized shepherd “Tirsi”—the character he created in the previous three madrigals—addressing a woman, presumably “Amarilli,” who replaces Bembo’s brother.136 As an effect of Marenzio’s modifications, “death” is referred to the speaker, not the addressee, and thus it refers back to the theme of suicide introduced in madrigals nos. 1 and 3. Marenzio’s modifications to O disaventurosa refunctionalizes the meaning of Bembo’s poem—itself imitating Petrarch—to fit the Guarinesque narrative of the madrigal book. By changing the addressee from a man into the beloved woman, Marenzio fully appropriates Bembo’s text by, so to speak, re-­Petrarchizing it, at the same time that it recontextualizes it in the new world of the pastoral play, refashioned in madrigalistic guise. In his somber setting the composer splits the new text into a dialogue among individualized voices on the words Tu ’l sai. This is followed by a strictly homophonic setting for the rest of the modified text, which is characterized by strong harmonic excursions. All of these features make this passage stand out with respect to the surrounding music. The fifth madrigal in Marenzio’s Book VII sets a short poem by Torquato Tasso, Al lume delle stelle (“By the light of the stars”). A generic narrator first tells about Tirsi lamenting in tears under a laurel tree, and then lets him speak in direct speech, in an address to the beloved’s eyes. The fifteen measures setting the section in indirect speech are sung by only two voices, except measures 2–5, in which a third voice briefly imitates the soprano, only immediately to drop out until all voices come together in measure 16 for the apostrophe to the eyes. This madrigal starts the high-clefs section of the first part of the book, set in cantus durus (see columns 3 and 4 in table 2). This section then overlaps with the second part of the book, set in cantus mollis. Arrangements according to system and ambitus were common in Marenzio’s time but by no means normative in publications of madrigal books.137 Marenzio evidently adjusted the arrangement of the poems to the expectations of the publisher, Angelo Gardano, who favored such ordered collections. Within such ordering, the assignment of the same modal final to two successive madrigals created the possibility of an association between poems. Madrigal no. 6, by an anonymous author, is in fact a poem that could be paired with the preceding one as a kind of response (alto and tenor actually start  

 

 

 

 

166   Constructing the Narrator  

with the same note as the end of no. 5, while the soprano picks up the high E of the previous beginning). The speaker is clearly a woman, who can be identified with the Amarilli of madrigal no. 3. The pairing of madrigals nos. 5 and 6, both set in cantus durus, high clefs, and A (respectively, system, ambitus, and final) shows that anonymous poems were probably written in order to be inserted at convenient points within a madrigal book, also because they are often those that turn out not to have been set by previous composers, as is the case of Ami, Tirsi, e me ’l nieghi. Within the first ten madrigals of Book VII, all uttered by a male character, madrigal no. 6 fulfills the narrative need of introducing the female character, Amarilli, first mentioned in madrigal no. 3. This gradual introduction of Amarilli mirrors the strategy adopted by Guarini in his Pastor fido, in which the female protagonist comes on stage only in act 2 (with the words Care selve beate, resonating in madrigals nos. 15 and 17). That Amarilli, in Book VII, “enters” thanks to a non-Guarini text—actually an anonymous one, which then might have well originated from “Marenzio” as author/narrator—is a testimony to the power of the musician to fully appropriate the voice of the poet. Retrospectively, the narrator in madrigal no. 5—the one who first speaks and then withdraws to make Tirsi speak—is the first proxy for the voice of the composer, who thus appropriates and authorizes himself through none other than Tasso. The voice audible in the indirect speech passage of Al lume delle stelle is the one that Monteverdi will transform into a character called “Testo” by excerpting a passage from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata for his Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (see below, chapter 6). Marenzio’s clear distinction in texture between indirect and direct speech in Al lume delle stelle, as compared with, for example, the gradual distinction of the two levels in Rore’s Da le belle contrade (discussed above), is a result of a different way of relating narrator with character, the madrigalistic setting offering a wide range of possibilities for calibrating this relationship.138 Madrigals nos. 7–9 in Marenzio’s Book VII consist of three soliloquies, the first and third uttered by Mirtillo/Tirsi (both in act 3 of the play), the second by an anonymous male character. At the lexical level the connection among the three texts is through the word sospiri (sighs), which up to that point had appeared only in no. 1—Qui pur vedrolla al suon de’ miei sospiri, Mirtillo/Tirsi says in no. 7 (O dolcezze amarissime d’amore). This is probably the same character who starts the anonymous madrigal no. 8 addressing one of those very sighs as: Sospir, nato di fuoco. Finally, Mirtillo/Tirsi is the character who in no. 9 (Arda pur sempre, o mora) has his burning heart characterized by pianti e sospiri (a Petrarch-derived compound), the text being again drawn from Guarini’s Pastor fido. This “linkage technique” through one word or word compound is reminiscent of that present in Petrarch’s canzoniere, as discussed above. Contiguous poems  

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    167

in madrigal books often show, beyond the restricted vocabulary that they all share, linking elements such as anima mia in nos. 12 and 13, which is the word compound that Marenzio added to Bembo’s poem for madrigal no. 4, as we remember. If one of the contiguous texts is anonymous, as is the case of the second of the three poems under discussion, it is presumable that the texts were purposely associated with each other, and that the anonymous poem was written by the composer or by one of his associates. If madrigals nos. 7–9 are grouped together, then the triptych overlaps with the division of the second part of Book VII (nos. 9–17) in cantus mollis, the book combining different interlocking semiotic systems to make sense as a whole. Madrigal no. 10, Questi vaghi concenti, is, like the previous three texts, a soliloquy uttered by a male character; thus it can be grouped with the preceding triptych to form a unit placed between poems no. 6 and no. 11, both uttered by a female character. Madrigal no. 11 (O fido, o caro Aminta)—the third in the mollis section—starts a group of six contiguous poems all featuring a female character (see column 6 in table 2). Each of the six excerpts features a different way of associating “Amarilli,” as the character created by Marenzio and loved by Tirsi, with the original “Amarilli” created by Guarini and loved by Mirtillo. This process replicates at the level of characters the appropriation occurring at the level of narrators. Probably because of this sense of new beginning suggested by the different gender of the speaker, the text excerpted for madrigal no. 11 is out of order, derived from act 1, scene 2, and not from act 3. It shows, however, another layer in the process of equivocality set in motion by the composer’s act of selecting, within a madrigal book so narratively oriented, passages from a play. In Guarini, the speaker is Ergasto, the character who was listening to his fellow shepherd Mirtillo/ Tirsi in madrigals nos. 1 and 3 (and who accordingly “replaced” Linco in no. 2). The excerpt starts with Ergasto quoting the character Lucrina (female) addressing Aminta (male), who had just killed himself. In Il pastor fido Lucrina announces her own death with the words:  

 

 

 



465

. . . “O fido, o forte Aminta, o troppo tardi conosciuto amante, che m’hai data, morendo, e vita e morte, se fu colpa il lasciarti, ecco l’ammendo con l’unir teco eternamente l’alma.”

[462] . . . “O faithful, O strong Aminta [463] O lover whom I knew too late, [464] and who, by dying, have given me both life and death, [465] if leaving you was a mistake, now I make amends [466] by joining my soul eternally with yours.”

168   Constructing the Narrator  

At this point Ergasto takes over the narrating role:

470

E questo detto, il ferro stesso, ancora del caro sangue tiepido e vermiglio, tratto dal morto e tardi amato petto, il suo petto trafisse . . .

[467] And this said, having drawn the same blade, [468] still wet with his warm and crimson blood, [469] from his dead and belatedly loved breast, [470] her own breast pierced . . .

In Guarini, the story of the unfaithful nymph Lucrina and the priest Aminta is told by Ergasto to Mirtillo to explain why Diana is irate with Arcadia, a necessary background (antefatto) to the plot of the play and, at that point (act 1, scene 2), a discouraging element for Mirtillo in his pursuit of Amarilli. In line 462 Marenzio replaces the words o forte Aminta with o caro Aminta, using the word featured as the first line of madrigal no. 16 (Tirsi mio, caro Tirsi), which also resonates with both no. 15 (Care mie selve) and the last madrigal (Ombrose e care selve). Also, Marenzio adds the compound la bell’Amarilli to line 467 after the words E questo detto, shifting the rest of the line to a new one (il ferro stesso, ancora). It is thus Amarilli who is suicidal, not Lucrina, which cannot of course be the case in Guarini, since Amarilli in the end happily marries Mirtillo. But the book is Marenzio’s, not Guarini’s. Thus the name change and the narrative situation it generates can be explained by taking into account the script provided by Pigna’s Canzoniere, which I called the happy-end script. Although its origin is in the lyric and not in the dramatic genre, this script displays a narrative trajectory, one characterized, however, not by cause-and-effect connections, as in a play, but by meaningful relationships between events.139 In Pigna’s canzoniere, the lover imagines repudiation and torments himself with an exclusion from love that is only his mind’s product, as are the beloved’s cruelty, the partenze, etc. Imagination thus accounts for the words quoted by Ergasto in the play and lifted by Marenzio to start madrigal no. 11. Taken out of context and attributed to la bell’Amarilli (instead of Lucrina), the words in direct speech beginning the madrigal lose any causal connection with the background of Guarini’s play. They are entirely redirected into the new co-text of the madrigal book through a process that is similar to that displayed in no. 4, the excerpting and modification of Bembo’s lyric poem on his brother’s death (although from a different point of departure, since no. 4 excerpts from a lyric poem, no. 11 from a play). In no. 4, the change of addressee from Bembo’s brother into a woman (Amarilli) transforms the male–male situation into the male–female one typical of Petrarch— as if Petrarchism were brought back to its true origins, so to speak. Similarly, Marenzio’s recontextualization of Guarini’s O fido, o forte Aminta as no. 11 of his Book brings the excerpt back to the world of the Petrarchan suffering lover, who  

 

 



In Search of Voice    169

imagines a suicide. This process, however, works both in and out of the happyend script, since Mirtillo himself (on whom Marenzio’s Tirsi is modeled) does fashion himself as the Petrarchan suffering lover in Cruda Amarilli (no. 3). In both madrigals, nos. 4 and 11, the recontextualization of the excerpt brings it into a new, non-lyrical, and non-theatrical environment—into the fictional world of the madrigal book. The process occurs first from the point of view of a male character (Tirsi in no. 4) then of a female one (Amarilli in no. 11) according to the division of the book into madrigals featuring two predominant speakers/ characters of different gender (see columns 6 and 7 in table 2). As seen in the cases of Bembo, Guarini, and Marenzio, the Petrarchan master script—the Script—always acts in the background of any possible discourse, whether in the lyric, in the drama, or in texted music, by pulling the new cotext toward and away from itself. Both the master script, of which the script of the Petrarchist canzoniere is an outgrowth, and the pastoral script, of which Guarini’s play is the quintessential incarnation, converge at a higher narrative level within that hybrid product that is the madrigal book, which thus re-presents Petrarchism in general. This is possible because the composer’s narrative voice is able to appropriate those of his literary predecessors, putting their works in a new and yet derivative co-text, by treating them as material/fabula.140 This entirely new work, in turn, is received by the audience by applying preexistent literary scripts preserved in memory. An “identity theft” similar to that just described for Amarilli/Lucrina occurs in madrigal no. 14, in which the text is excerpted from a passage spoken by the petty and scheming nymph Corisca, who, at that point in Guarini’s play (act 3, scene 6), addresses Mirtillo. Yet her words can easily be attributed to Amarilli, given that she might speak about herself in the third person by quoting herself. And since Mirtillo is not mentioned by name in the original text, he can again be Tirsi. The remaining four texts (nos. 12, 13, 15, and 16) are spoken by Amarilli herself, but in one case—Tirsi mio, caro Tirsi—Marenzio’s reworking of Guarini’s text is heavier than in any other case since, in the play, Amarilli addresses not Tirsi but her own father, starting with the line Padre mio, caro padre (act 4, scene 5, line 733).141 The fact that in nos. 12 and 15 Amarilli mentions Mirtillo, and not Tirsi, is not a “mistake” but shows Marenzio’s conscious strategy as narrator, resulting in the listeners/readers processing Guarini’s play as if it were both a source and a target script. There would indeed be no point in totally disactivating Guarini’s play script from the memory of the audience/readers, because the intertextual game resides precisely in the productive interference of the play script with both the Petrarchist script (the happy-end type of canzoniere) and, at the root, Petrarch’s archetypical Script. The madrigal book, in this sense, works like a palimpsest. The role of the narrator as the one in control of the intertextual game is finally reaffirmed at the end of Marenzio’s book. The last word is given in no. 17 to the  

 

 

 

 

170   Constructing the Narrator  

old shepherd Ergasto, who, as seen, in the previous madrigals plays different but related roles: the silent listener in Tirsi/Mirtillo’s laments in nos. 1 and 3, the utterer of no. 2 taking the place of Linco, and the character-narrator in no. 11. Ergasto can then be seen as the character who—like La Musica in Monteverdi’s Orfeo—works as the spokesperson for the author/narrator throughout the work. As the narrating male voice, he is shown to have the power to embed other characters’ speeches in his own, to retire behind them, or speak in the first person. He is also, retrospectively, the voice that, by using a reduced musical texture, introduces Tirsi in madrigal no. 5, Tasso’s Al lume delle stelle. My point is that Ergasto has an equivocal role similar to that of the composer/ narrator with respect to the characters he creates. In his Annotazioni to the play (a self-commentary) Guarini attributes to Ergasto an agency role that goes beyond that of other characters. The poet says that Ergasto’s name derives from the Greek word for operante (the one who works) “in order to show that one needs to work for the benefit of friends.” 142 This active role of Ergasto—as if he were a “stage director” who acts to make things reach the lieto fine—fits the one assigned to him in the madrigal book, and indeed Marenzio’s own role. As typical of paratextual elements, the role of Ergasto is implied or present at the book edges, where the narrator’s voice is always more audible. In the penultimate scene of Il pastor fido (act 5, scene 8) Ergasto rejoices at length about the marriage of Mirtillo and Amarilli. He is overheard by Corisca, who is surprised to see Ergasto so happy, not suspecting that the two protagonists have indeed reached the union she plotted to avoid for the whole play. Ergasto begins his second segment in the scene with the words Selve beate, which Marenzio changes into Ombrose e care selve for the last madrigal, no. 17. At the point in the Guarini text in which Ergasto mentions the two lovers, Marenzio replaces the line de’ duo beati amanti (of the two happy lovers) with the words d’Amarilli e Tirsi and adds the extra line aventurosi amanti (fortunate lovers). The words aventurosi and amanti are each lifted from the lines that Ergasto utters in Guarini’s play soon after the passage set to music by Marenzio (lines 1336–44). Corisca asks if Ergasto is perhaps heading to a wedding, which she thinks is that of Silvio and Dorinda. Ergasto replies (lines 1354–56): E tu l’hai detto a punto. Inteso hai tu l’aventurosa sorte de’ duo felici amanti? (And you said it appropriately. Have you understood the fortunate destiny of the two happy lovers?). The words aventurosa sorte, in turn, refer back to Bembo’s poem chosen by Marenzio as no. 4 in the Book: O disaventurosa acerba sorte. This madrigal, as we have seen, participates in the discourse on death advanced by the first and third pieces in the book. Musically, no. 4 sticks out from the collection as being, as said, the only one set in misura alla breve and thus conveying additional gravitas. In Marenzio, the change from the disaventurosa sorte in no. 3 to the  

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    171

aventurosi amanti in the final joyous madrigal embodies the narrative trajectory of the Book, from imagined death to marriage, a trajectory characteristic of many contemporaneous madrigal collections.143 •

•

•

•

•

“Ergasto” is one of the main characters in Iacopo Sannazaro’s enormously influential Arcadia, first published in Naples in 1504, a pastoral romance in which the shepherd Sincero stands as the proxy for the author. Later in the century, the poet Antonio Piccioli modeled his shepherd Ergasto on Sannazaro’s homonymous character (borrowing also from Sincero) and made him into his spokesperson and the protagonist of the Prose tiberine del pastor Ergasto (1597).144 Written in a mix of prose and poetry (as Sannazaro’s), Piccioli’s work describes the activities of a group of Arcadian shepherds whose names at the beginning of the book are explicitly keyed to those of the members of a Roman academy called the “Shepherds of the Tiber Valley.” The volume is dedicated to the leader (principe) of the pastoral academy, Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, whose nickname was “Tirsi” and who was Marenzio’s patron in the 1590s (he may have inspired Shakespeare to create his character Orsino in Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love,” etc.). Torquato Tasso too was a member of the “Shepherds” under the nickname of Clonico, and so were literati such as Giovan Battista Strozzi the Younger, Antonio Decio, and Antonio Ongaro. “Aminta” was the nickname of Fabio Orsini, Virginio’s brother, to whom Tasso dedicated his poem Rogo amoroso. In this work the poet used the nickname Tirsi (the same as Virginio Orsini), as he had done in his pastoral play Aminta.145 Given the habit of encoding flesh-and-blood people behind fictional pastoral names, it is tempting to see behind the names “Tirsi” and “Clori” in the poems set to music in marenzio’s book vi a 5 (1594) the identities of the dedicatees, Virginio Orsini and his wife Flavia Peretti.146 The composer had paid homage to their wedding three years earlier with his Book V a 6. Book VI includes poems written by the “shepherds” Tasso and Ongaro (respectively nos. 3 and 6 in table 3).147 The possible presence of the dedicatees disguised under pastoral names of madrigal books is yet another aspect of the socialization of the Petrarchan discourse in late Renaissance Italy discussed above: the opening up, typical of Petrarchism, of the I–you relationship inaugurated by Voi ch’ascoltate into the plurality of real-life and self-fashioning agents populating courts and academies. In madrigal books the pastoral code is used as yet another means of communication within the relationship between composer and patron. Far from being only a private one, through publication this I–you relationship becomes socialized, being “witnessed” by that “third party” represented by the “world,” the buyers of the madrigal book.148  

 

Table 3  Luca Marenzio, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1594): overview

1 2 3 4

Title

Poetic source

System

Clef

Final

S’io parto, i’ moro, e pur partir conviene Clori nel mio partire Donna de l’alma mia, de la mia vita Anima cruda sì, ma però bella

Arlotti, Parnaso Anon. Tasso, Convito Guarini, Pastor fido, IV, 9 ibid., III, 6 Ongaro Guarini, Pastor fido, III, 3 Caro Anon. Strozzi

mollis mollis mollis mollis

c1 c1 c1 c1

mollis durus durus

5 Udite, lagrimosi 6 Stillò l’anima in pianto 7 Ah, dolente partita 8 Ben ho del caro oggetto i sensi privi 9 Amor, se giusto sei 10 Hor chi, Clori beata 11 Deh Tirsi, Tirsi, anima mia, perdona 12 13 14 15 16 17

Clori mia, Clori dolce Mentre qual viva pietra Voi bramate ch’io moia “Rimanti in pace,” a la dolente e bella Ecco Maggio seren, chi l’ha vestito Cantiam la bella Clori (a 8)

Guarini, Pastor fido, III, 4 Strozzi Anon. Anon. Celiano (A. Grillo) Strozzi Anon.

Speaker

Narrative

G G G F

Tirsi Tirsi Tirsi Clori

Separation

c1 c1 c1

A E A

Tirsi Narrator Tirsi

durus durus durus

c1 c1 g2

G G G

Tirsi Tirsi Tirsi

durus

g2

A

Clori

durus durus mollis mollis mollis mollis

g2 g2 g2 g2 g2 c1

A C G A C F

Tirsi (Narrator) Tirsi All Narrator Narrator

Rapprochement/ intimacy

Death Life/wedding



In Search of Voice    173

When the dedicatee is inscribed not only in a paratextual part such as the dedication but also in the body of the work itself, the composer becomes even more the agent of a two-media narrative affected by a set of expectations held by both patron and public—expectations that we referred to as “scripts.” Because of the composer’s possible personal relationship with the patron, the musician’s own life becomes in-scripted as well in the book as a story-script, one present in the memory of the dedicatee in addition to the fictional narrative. As a consequence, the boundary between author and narrator, as well as that between recipient and narratee, is blurred, in a process similar to that of “Il Petrarca” reordered and commented on by Vellutello. There, as we remember, Petrarch is said to narrate the story of his own life through the Canzoniere. In turn the readers transform themselves into “Petrarch” by imitating not only his style but his life, thereby truly comprehending Petrarch’s work. In this equivocal context, the adoption of a proxy such as “Ergasto” standing for the writer Piccioli or the musician Marenzio—respectively in the Prose del pastor Ergasto and in Book VII a 5—is yet another Petrarchist move. Metadiscursive strategies—such as the run though the complete circle of fifths in O voi che sospirate—represent, in this context, deictic references pointing toward the role of the author/narrator. This move anticipates that made in operatic prologues, for example in Monteverdi’s adoption of La Musica as his proxy in Orfeo (see above, part I). The narrative of Marenzio’s Book VI a 5 alternates the roles of “Tirsi” and “Clori” with that of the narrator (see column 6 in table 3). The composer, in this case more consistently than in Book VII, accordingly modifies all the proper names in the original poetic sources. The narrative (see the last column on the right) fits a script that is similar to the Tasso-type of canzoniere characterized by partenze (see poems nos. 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15) but modified through the happy-end type, as required by the nuptial theme. Accordingly, the book can be divided into four sections: separation between the lovers (1–9), rapprochement and intimacy (10–13), death (14–15), and final attainment of love (16–17). The narrator is present in each of the sections (6, 15, 16, 17) except the second one, in which he “retires” between the characters Tirsi and Clori engaged in dialogue (nos. 10–12). Yet at the end of this second section, poem 13 could be interpreted as uttered by the narrator in dialogue with his soul, using the word lagrime (tears) as a connective to 2, 6, 11, and 15, and forming a transition to the next grave section. The passage from the first to the second section is signaled by the change of ambitus (see column 4) from c1 (low clefs) to g2 (high clefs). However, such musical divisions are not to be interpreted as rigid signposts, because different musical parameters interlock with one another. Despite standing between the low-clef and the high-clef sections, both nos. 9 and 10 have the finalis G (column 5) and fall within a durus section spanning nos. 6 to 13 (column 3).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

174   Constructing the Narrator  

The madrigal book engages two semiotic systems—the verbal and the musical—in a way that is far from arbitrary, its organization involving, at the verbal level, the consideration of a variety of enunciative modes. For example, of the ten madrigals in which Tirsi’s voice is heard, four are in G mollis, three in G durus, and two in A durus. Those in G mollis are all monologues, the first three placed in succession at the beginning (1–3), giving the tinta to the book. The three madrigals in G durus are all relational (I–you type): 8 and 9 address Love, and 10 features a dialogue between Tirsi and Clori. Finally, of the two madrigals in A, no. 7 is the logical resolution of the preceding one set in E both in subject (partenza) and harmony (E–A); whereas the text of no. 12 “responds,” as we have seen, to the previous one uttered by Clori, which is also in A. The presence of a single narrative and the creation of characters show that the composer, by modifying and sequencing the poetic texts and by accordingly arranging musical parameters in a logical way, appropriates the voices of the poets he selects, and merges them into one voice—his own. This confidence in the power of music to narrate, with and beyond the received text, will be crucial for later opera composers. It inaugurates that productive tension between the creators of music and those of the libretto (indeed often more than a tension) which runs in history from collaborations such as that between Monteverdi and Striggio to that of, say, a Verdi and a Boito, up to the more recent past.  

 

 

 

 

 

•

•

•

•

•

giaches de wert’s book viii a 5 (1586) is dedicated to Duke Alfonso II, but it is Margherita Gonzaga (his wife and the sister of Vincenzo I, Duke of Mantua) who is inscribed in the collection at various levels.149 None of the two “scripts” considered so far can be invoked, the book’s rhetoric of voice and address being strongly characterized by the presence of the patron, in a play of equivocality between real and fictional characters (table 4). Two triptychs of madrigals frame the collection, nos. 1–3 and 13–15. From the musical point of view, each triptych has its own set of musical parameters (same system, ambitus, and final, thus the same tonal type). From the literary point of view, both triptychs refer to Duchess Margherita. She is identified simply as Donna (in nos. 1, 2, 13, and 15; see the last column on the right, “Topics/ Connectives”) and only in no. 14 by proper name. Within each triptych the third poem (nos. 3 and 15) derives from the canzoniere by Giovan Battista Pigna, who, as we remember, was the powerful secretary of the dedicatee’s husband— precisely from this collection we extrapolated the happy-end script. Also by Pigna is another poem (Non è sì denso velo) in praise of a generic lady (evidently Margherita) placed as no. 9 among the central madrigals nos. 4 to 12, all characterized by a strong presence of excerpts from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Flanking Pigna’s poem, the excerpts from Tasso’s epic poem are spoken by,  

 

 

Table 4  Giaches de Wert, Ottavo libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1586): overview Title

Poetic source

Io non son però morto Rallegrati mio cor ch’ogni dolore Sì come ai freschi matutini rai Vezzosi augelli infra le verdi frondi

5 Fra le dorate chiome

Anon. Anon. Pigna, Amori Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XVI, 12 Anon.

6 Usciva omai dal molle e fresco grembo 7 Sovente all’or che su gli estivi ardori

Tasso, GL, XIV, 1 ibid., VII, 19–20

1 2 3 4

8 “Misera, non credea ch’agli occhi miei” 9 Non è sì denso velo 10 Qual musico gentil, prima che chiara

ibid., XIX, 106–107 Pigna, Amori Tasso, GL, XVI, 43–47

11 Forsennata gridava “O tu che porte”

ibid., XVI, 40

12 Non sospirar, pastor, non lagrimare 13 Questi odorati fiori 14 Vener, ch’un giorno avea

Tasso, Eclogue III Anon. Anon.

15 Con voi giocando Amor, a voi simile

Pigna, Amori

Mensuration

c c c c

|

|

c c |

| |

c c c c

System

Clef

Final

Speaker

Topics/Connectives

mollis mollis mollis mollis

c1 c1 c1 c1

G G G F

he he he Narrator

mollis

c1

F

durus durus

g2 g2

C A

durus mollis durus

g2 g2 c1

D f E

durus

c1

E

durus durus durus

c1 c1 c1

d d d

durus

c1

d

Narrator + she Amarilli Narrator Narrator + she Erminia she Erminia he Narrator + she Armida Narrator + she Armida she Amarilli he Narrator + she Venere he

“Donna” “Donna” “la vostra man” Garden of Armida (place) Amarilli’s “capelli,” “lacci” Pastoral setting (time) Lament Lament Praises lady Lament Lament Pastoral setting “Donna real” “Margherita” “capelli,” “lacci” “voi” (Donna)

176   Constructing the Narrator  

respectively, Erminia (7–8) and Armida (10–11)—all these settings sharing the mensuration alla breve. The sense of a narrative is enhanced by the fact that the “stage” for the two lamenting women is set in the triptych of poems nos. 4–6, the first of which (Vezzosi augelli) establishes a sense of place, being set in the garden of Armida, the third (Usciva omai) a time for the action, night. Placed in between them, poem no. 5 (Fra le dorate chiome), by an anonymous author, praises “Amarilli” ’s beautiful hair (capelli), which Love braids (tessea lacci). But poem no. 14 (Vener, ch’un giorno avea) also features Love braiding, this time Margherita’s hair (again, capelli and lacci). Thus, retrospectively, “Amarilli” in no. 5 can be inferred as standing for the Duchess too. This is confirmed by the fact that the words of no. 12 (Non sospirar, pastor) are uttered in the literary source— Tasso’s Eclogue III (Festa campestre)—by “Amarilli,” that work being dedicated by the poet to Margherita. Margherita is therefore not only present at the edges of the book but is also encoded in the “prologue” (i.e., madrigals 4–6) and “epilogue” (no. 12) of what one scholar called “a single dramatic action.” 150 This action is created by reordering the soggetto of Tasso’s Gerusalemme as an action featuring two women— Erminia and Armida—as the only protagonists. Wert appropriates in this way Tasso’s role of narrator (see madrigals nos. 4, 6, and 7). As is well known, Wert, Tasso, and Pigna were all personally connected while working for the Ferrarese court of Margherita and Alfonso, and a number of madrigals in Book VIII were probably originally composed to be sung by the Concerto delle donne, since their upper voices are written for sopranos. The presence of the secretary of the Duke as the author of poems located at strategic points in the narrative of Wert’s Book VIII shows that, in the Italian Renaissance, any appropriation of voices—indeed the possibility itself of “speaking”—needs to be authorized by a patron or his surrogates, often within the political context of the court; or, as an alternative, by the collective approval provided by academies.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

•

•

•

•

•

The dedication to Vincenzo Gonzaga—Margherita’s brother and Monteverdi’s patron—of marenzio’s book ix a 5 (1599) frames the I–you relationship composer/patron in a revealing way. Marenzio reminds Vincenzo that during the past months he ordered him to send some madrigals, since the Duke of Mantua, “a Prince no less sublime in rank than in intellect (sublime . . . intelletto),” had already been pleased by them. Professing obedience and affection, the composer claims that “perhaps it will happen that in the future my feeble intellect (debole intelletto), inspired by your grace, may produce products even more worthy of your highness.” 151 Marenzio’s job situation in Rome in the late 1590s was rather unstable. He was at the service of cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini (Tasso’s last patron), a nephew of the Pope but a lesser figure compared to the more  

 

 



In Search of Voice    177

powerful cousin Pietro.152 By offering Book IX, Marenzio may have attempted to persuade the Mantuan Duke to employ him. The composer, however, died a few weeks after signing the dedication, on August 22, 1599. The unbalanced power relationship emerging from the dedicatory letter seems to leave space for only one small but significant point of intersection between the parties involved in the transaction: their “intellect”—the Duke’s “sublime” intelletto matched by Marenzio’s however “feeble” one. The former’s intellect is tied to high rank, i.e., to nobility, the taste of which is, by definition, as elevated as are its moral virtues (see chapter 1). The latter’s intellect is tied to the fruits of talent, to the “humble few notes” of Book IX, as Marenzio says later in the dedication. It was in the same year of publication of this book that the character called l’Ottuso defended Monteverdi in the dialogue entitled Seconda parte dell’Artusi, citing passages excerpted from Marenzio’s Book IX and praising the composer for the “greatness of his most lively intellect” (grandezza del suo vivacissimo intelletto).153 Marenzio’s possible attempt to persuade Vincenzo to employ him involved a relationship between two intelletti that implicated both the musical and the literary levels. Vincenzo was not only, as is well known, a formidable patron of music but most likely one also trained in composition, as his father Guglielmo was. The Duke would have been able to appreciate, and perhaps reward, the transcendental technical sophistication of Book IX, in which the composer stretches musical technique and artifice to their limits. In turn, this sophistication would have reverberated, through the publication, into the “world,” as a tangible countermark of the patron’s rank and prestige—in a similar way as did, for example, the later publication of the score of Monteverdi’s Orfeo (see chapter 1). Emblematic of the musical style of Marenzio’s work is the today still famous setting of Petrarch’s Solo e pensoso. In the setting of the first two lines (Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi / vo misurando a passi tardi e lenti) the canto features a spectacular chromatic line proceeding in steady semibreves, first ascending through a ninth (g'– a'') then descending through a fifth (a''–d''), floating over initially restless and then increasingly more measured inner parts, mostly in angular motions.154 All the oppositions between self and other included by Petrarch in the following lines (the poet vs. people, nature, and Love)—oppositions stored in the listener’s memory as a preexistent script—are encapsulated as an emblem and represented by Marenzio as a divided self. As unusual as its musical characteristics are Marenzio’s retrospective poetic choices in Book IX (table 5). Half of the fourteen poems are by Petrarch, whose musical fortune in the preferences of musicians was in sharp decline at the end of the sixteenth century. The opening poem is by none other than Dante, of whom only a dozen texts had been set to music in that century. Together with the following four texts by Petrarch, the excerpt from one of Dante’s canzoni petrose makes up a section that presents two of the characteristics of the proemial part in a  

 

 

 

 

 

178   Constructing the Narrator   Table 5  Luca Marenzio, Nono libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1599): overview Title

Poetic form

1 Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro 2 Amor, i’ ho molti et molti anni 3 Dura legge d’Amor, ma benché obliqua 4 Chiaro segno Amor pose alle mie rime 5 Se sì alto pon gir mie stanche rime 6 L’aura che ’l verde Lauro e l’aureo crine 7 Il vago e bello Armillo 8 Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi 9 Vivo in guerra mendico e son dolente 10 Fiume ch’a l’onde tue ninfe e pastori 11 Parto o non parto? Ahi come 12 Credete voi ch’i’ viva? 13 Crudele, acerba, inessorabil morte 14 La bella man vi stringo

Poetic source

System

canzone stanza

Dante, Rime, 103, st. 1

durus

c1

A

sestina stanza

durus

c1

e

durus

c1

d

durus

c1

d

durus

g2

d

sonnet

Petrarch, RVF CCCXXXII,1 st. 10 Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis III Petrarch, RVF CCCXXXII, st. 5 Petrarch RVF CCCXXXII, st. 11 Petrarch, RVF CCXLVI

durus

g2

A

madrigal sonnet

Grillo, Rime di diversi2 Petrarch, RVF XXXV

durus durus

g2 g2

C G

sonnet

Ongaro, Scelta di rime3

mollis

c1

d

sonnet

ibid.

mollis

c1

F

madrigal

Guarini, Rime4

mollis

g2

G

madrigal sestina stanza

ibid. Petrarch, RVF CCCXXXII, st. 2 Guarini, Rime

mollis mollis

g2 g2

G A

mollis

g2

d

tercets sestina stanza sestina stanza

madrigal

Clef Final

1. RVF = Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere). Sestina CCCXXXII begins “Mia benigna fortuna e ’l viver lieto.” 2. Rime di diversi celebri poeti dell’età nostra (Bergamo: Comino Ventura, 1587). 3. Scelta di rime di diversi moderni autori. Non più stampate, 1 (Genoa: Heredi di Gieronimo Bartoli, 1591). 4. Battista Guarini, Rime (Venice: Ciotti, 1598), entitled “Dipartenza restia” (no. 11), “Dipartenza mortale” (no. 12), “Mano stretta” (no. 14).

Renaissance canzoniere as described above: the self-reflexive (or metadiscursive) quality and the invocation to Love (Amor). The poet reflecting on the material of poetry—the first aspect—is audible in the very first line of Dante’s poem Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (“I yearn to be as harsh as in my words”) as well as in the use of lines ending with the rhyme words rime and stile in madrigals no. 2, 4, and 5, three stanzas from Petrarch’s sestina Mia benigna fortuna. From this poem Marenzio had drawn, as we remember, one stanza for his Book II, O voi che sospirate a miglior no[t]te. The second aspect—the invocation to Amor—is found in madrigal no. 2, the word reverberating also in the first lines of the following two texts.  

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    179

This five-part prologue, which is out of proportion to the nine madrigals that follow it, lends an unmistakable tinta of gravity (gravità) to the rest of Book. Gravity, as Bembo had pointed out in his Prose, is the quality of poetry that is opposed to sweetness (piacevolezza). From the point of view of content, in the first five poems of Book IX the lover is exclusively portrayed in the gloomiest of moods, the three stanzas from Petrarch’s sestina being drawn from the in morte section of the Canzoniere. From the formal point of view, the choice of stanzas drawn from a canzone and a sestina as well as of tercets from Petrarch’s Triumphi—thus no sonnets or madrigali—is also a marker of solemn and dignified gravità. Contemporary poetic conventions dictated the formal markers of gravità in poetry. They included: the distance between rhyming lines (the further between them, the more grave the sound), harsh combinations of consonants (such as in aspro), the persistent use of the vowels a and o, the clash between identical vowels at the end of one word and beginning of the next, enjambments, rhetorical figures such as antithesis, hyperbaton, and parenthesis, long grammatical periods, and, finally, Latinisms. The first five poems in Marenzio’s Book IX feature most of these characteristics.155 In this grave context, Petrarch’s sonnet starting with the sweet-sounding words L’aura che ’l verde Lauro (madrigal no. 6) represents a turn to a more piacevole side, although this poem, placed in the Canzoniere within the section in vita, features presentiments of Laura’s death. The rest of the poems set in Book IX alternate between different poetic styles: persistent gravità in the two remaining Petrarch texts nos. 8 (Solo e pensoso) and 13 (Crudele acerba, the fourth stanza of Mia benigna fortuna, the same sestina used for nos. 2, 4, and 5); pastoral classicism in nos. 6, 9, and 10, written by two contemporaries of Marenzio (Antonio Ongaro is one of the “Shepherds of the Tiber Valley” discussed above); finally, inflamed expressivity in the madrigali by Guarini, nos. 11, 12, and 14, on which more below. Marenzio’s inclination toward gravità in Book IX is tied to its destination to Vincenzo as a member of high-ranking nobility. In the late Renaissance, gravità was the literary style associated in poetry not only with gloomy feelings, but also with philosophical pursuits and with qualities such as honesty, dignity, majesty, magnificence, and greatness.156 As such, gravità denoted the character and behavior of nobility itself, reflecting its perceived higher ethical and aesthetic standards, not exempt from melancholic feelings. By dedicating to Vincenzo a book characterized by gravità Marenzio made it a mirror of the nobleman. Tasso made explicit the link between gravità and noble status by relating them to Duke Vincenzo in his dedication of Il re Torrismondo (1587), a dark and melancholic tragedy in which a king is torn by passion and eventually kills himself. The poet established a direct parallelism between the gravità of his play and the gravità of Vincenzo, between the tragedy’s perfection and the duke’s perfection (perfettissimo poema and perfettissimo principe).157  

 

Table 6  Text of Petrarch’s sestina “Mia benigna fortuna,” in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere), CCCXXXII. (The underlined numbers indicate the stanzas set by Marenzio in Books II a 5, II a 6, I a 4–6, and IX a 5.) 1

Mia benigna fortuna e ’l viver lieto, i chiari giorni et le tranquille notti e i soavi sospiri e ’l dolce stile che solea resonare in versi e ’n rime, vòlti subitamente in doglia e ’n pianto, odiar vita mi fanno, et bramar morte.

7

Nesun visse già mai più di me lieto, nesun vive più tristo et giorni et notti; et doppiando ’l dolor, doppia lo stile che trae del cor sì lacrimose rime. Vissi di speme, or vivo pur di pianto, né contra Morte spero altro che Morte.

2

Crudele, acerba, inessorabil Morte, cagion mi dài di mai non esser lieto, ma di menar tutta mia vita in pianto, e i giorni oscuri et le dogliose notti. I mei gravi sospir’ non vanno in rime, e ’l mio duro martir vince ogni stile.

8

Morte m’à morto, et sola pò far Morte ch’i’ torni a riveder quel viso lieto che piacer mi facea i sospiri e ’l pianto, l’aura dolce et la pioggia a le mie notti, quando i penseri electi tessea in rime, Amor alzando il mio debile stile.

3

Ove è condutto il mio amoroso stile? A parlar d’ira, a ragionar di morte. U’ sono i versi, u’ son giunte le rime, che gentil cor udia pensoso et lieto; ove ’l favoleggiar d’amor le notti? Or non parl’io, né penso, altro che pianto.

9

Or avess’io un sì pietoso stile che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte, come Euridice Orpheo sua senza rime, ch’i’ viverei anchor più che mai lieto! S’esser non pò, qualchuna d’este notti chiuda omai queste due fonti di pianto.

4

Già mi fu col desir sì dolce il pianto, che condia di dolcezza ogni agro stile, et vegghiar mi facea tutte le notti: or m’è ’l pianger amaro più che morte, non sperando mai ’l guardo honesto et lieto, alto sogetto a le mie basse rime.

10

Amor, i’ ò molti et molt’anni pianto mio grave danno in doloroso stile, né da te spero mai men fere notti; et però mi son mosso a pregar Morte che mi tolla di qui, per farme lieto, ove è colei ch’i’ canto et piango in rime.

5

Chiaro segno Amor pose a le mie rime dentro a’ belli occhi, et or l’à posto in pianto, con dolor rimembrando il tempo lieto: ond’io vo col penser cangiando stile, et ripregando te, pallida Morte, che mi sottragghi a sì penose notti.

11

Se sì alto pòn gir mie stanche rime, ch’agiungan lei ch’è fuor d’ira et di pianto, et fa ’l ciel or di sue bellezze lieto, ben riconoscerà ’l mutato stile, che già forse le piacque anzi che Morte chiaro a lei giorno, a me fesse atre notti.

6

Fuggito è ’l sonno a le mie crude notti, e ’l suono usato a le mie roche rime, che non sanno trattar altro che morte, così è ’l mio cantar converso in pianto. Non à ’l regno d’Amor sì vario stile, ch’è tanto or tristo quanto mai fu lieto.

12

O voi che sospirate a miglior notti [note], ch’ascoltate d’Amore o dite in rime, pregate non mi sia più sorda Morte, porto de le miserie et fin del pianto; muti una volta quel suo antiquo stile, ch’ogni uom attrista, et me pò far sì lieto.

13

Far mi pò lieto in una o ’n poche notti: e ’n aspro stile e ’n angosciose rime prego che ’l pianto mio finisca Morte.

translation of the stanzas included in marenzio’s book ix a 5: 2  Cruel, harsh, inexorable death, / reasons you give me to be unhappy / and bear my life in lamentation, / with dark days and wretched nights: / my deep sighs do not fit in verse, / and my arduous torment conquers any style. 5  A clear sign put Love in my rhymes / in her pretty eyes, and now she puts weeping / there to sadly recall joyful times, / thus with grief I change style, / and beg you, pale death, / release me from such woeful nights. 10 Love, I wept for many, many years / my deep woe in sorrowful ways, / but I cannot hope for less terrible nights with you / and so I set out to beseech death / to take me away, to carry me away, joyfully, / to the person I sing and cry for in rhymes. 11 If my tired rhymes could spin so high / to reach to where she lives with neither wrathful tears, / her beauty pleasing heaven, / she would well recognize the changed style / that she might have liked before death / brought her clear day, and me dark nights.



In Search of Voice    181

Gravità called for the most difficult artistic challenges and for a high degree of artificiality. In this respect Book IX a 5 shares its inclination toward gravità with another, very unusual book that Marenzio composed earlier in his career: book i a 4–6 (1587; see contents in appendix 1).158 In the dedication of this Book to Count Mario Bevilacqua, Marenzio claimed that he composed the madrigals in a “manner that is quite different from the past,” one characterized by mesta gravità (“sad gravity”). Although Bevilacqua was not a high-ranking noble like Duke Vincenzo, he was an unusually sophisticated music lover. An influential member of the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, he held a renowned private music salon in which madrigals were performed.159 Marenzio’s words in the dedication of Book I a 4–6 to Count Bevilacqua have a Petrarchan overtone (remember the line of RVF I “when I was in part another man from what I now am”) that resonates with the content of the book. Musically, for example, the madrigals are all characterized by a somber tone and use exclusively cut-time mensuration (|  ), a musical signifier for gravità. In the choice of literary texts Marenzio twice uses the same Petrarch sestina RVF CCCXXXII, Mia benigna fortuna, the quintessential grave poem. He sets the third and sixth stanza in this sestina, placing them as nos. 1 and 5 in his collection (see table 6 for Petrarch’s sestina and appendix 1 for Marenzio’s Book: in table 6 the stanzas with identical rhyme-words are shown side by side in the two columns: compare stanzas 1 and 7, 2 and 8, and so on). Marenzio’s choice of sestina CCCXXXII is not random.160 He had used it earlier both in his Book II a 5 in 1581 (see above, O voi che sospirate) and in his Book II a 6 (Nesun visse già mai); and he would later use it in Book IX:  

 

 

  Stanza in RVF CCCXXXII (sestina) Madrigal book 12 II a 5, no. 10 7 II a 6, no. 2 3, 6 I a 4–6, nos. 1, 5 10, 5, 11, 2 IX a 5, nos. 2, 4, 5, 14  

date of Publication 1581 1584 1588 1599

Marenzio’s persistence throughout his career in setting this sestina is in itself a Petrarchist move, which culminates in the later collection. But, as in other cases, the composer’s choice gains meaning in light of others he makes within the individual books. Marenzio’s sensitivity in selecting literary texts that are connected to one another bespeaks his role as narrator, as modeled on that of Petrarch. In Marenzio’s Book I a 4–6, which includes fifteen madrigals (see appendix 1) seven texts are by Iacopo Sannazaro, two of them deriving from sestina stanzas: no. 9, Fiere silvestre, and no. 14, O fere stelle. The book thus features four stanzas drawn from sestinas, two by Petrarch (both from the same poem) and two by Sannazaro. Sannazaro’s O fere stelle itself borrows heavily from Petrarch’s sestina set in the same book.161 The first two lines of Sannazaro’s stanza read:  

182   Constructing the Narrator   O fere stelle, homai datemi pace / e tu, Fortuna, muta il tuo crudo stile. O cruel stars, concede me peace at last, / and you, Fortune, change your crude style

Almost all of these words are drawn from three passages of Petrarch’s sestina (see again table 6): men fere notti (stanza 10, line 3), Mia benigna fortuna (stanza 1, line 1), muti una volta quel suo antiquo stile (stanza 12, line 5).162 This last line includes the keyword stile and belongs to the stanza that Marenzio had already set to music seven years earlier in Book II a 5, the one beginning with O voi che sospirate a miglior note (in which, as we remember, he changed the word notte into note). Indeed Marenzio, in Book I a 4–6, set the second line of Sannazaro’s stanza e tu, Fortuna, muta il tuo crudo stile in a similar way as, in Book II a 5, he set the line muti una volta quel suo antiquo stile. In a display of technical virtuosity, in O fere stelle the composer explores the extreme tonal regions in a downward sequence through the circle of fifths in the mollis direction (C–F– B-flat etc., mm. 10–19)—a harmonically breathtaking effect parallel to that in Book II a 5 described above (p. 159). The link that Marenzio creates between his two madrigal books of 1581 and 1588, prompted by the word stile, suggests that the composer was aware of the fact that the self-reflexive aspects of Petrarch’s poem could allow him to build bridges between his own works. Marenzio’s interest in Petrarch’s sestina CCCXXXII is revealed not only by his use of different stanzas for three of his madrigal books published in the 1580s—and later again for his Book IX of 1599—but also by the position of the settings within these books. In all four books—II a 5, I a 4–6, VI a 6, and IX a 5—a stanza from this sestina is placed as the first Petrarch setting in the collection, and/or it heads a section. In Italian poetry, within a sestina stanza the six lines never rhyme with one another but the same rhymes are used in each stanza throughout the poem; indeed, instead of traditional rhymes, entire rhyme-words are repeated. In the case of Petrarch’s sestina, the rhyme-words are (see stanza 1) lieto, notti, stile, rime, pianto, morte. The order of these rhyme-words is changed in each stanza according to a fixed rule called retrogradatio cruciformis (cruciform retrograde motion): a B C D E F, then f A E B D C, and so forth.163 RVF CCCXXXII, in addition, is a sestina doppia (double sestina) in that the cycle repeats twice (in table 6 the stanzas with parallel rhyme-words are placed side by side). It is the only one among Petrarch’s nine sestinas in the Canzoniere to be included in the section in morte. Marianne Shapiro has noticed an aspect of RVF CCCXXXII that might have attracted, besides Marenzio, many late Renaissance composers, who published 116 settings of its stanzas between 1508 and 1621: “The rhymewords are semantically heterogeneous, more so than in any of the other sestinas (by Petrarch), and their meanings fluctuate so little that context affects them maximally. From one six-strophe cycle to the other the poem is semantically  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



In Search of Voice    183

cohesive. The musical structure accordingly becomes dominant, to the extent that the reader is affected by patterns of antithesis and other kinds of twining.” 164 Marenzio, however, took an interest in this sestina just when Petrarch settings, including those from this poem, were numerically in decline within the poetic choices of his fellow composers. His settings of eight stanzas in the period between 1581 and 1599 raise the question of the nature of his personal engagement with a text that presents such a high degree of formalization—the very opposite of the then fashionable madrigali (intended as poetic form). He never set this sestina in its entirety, however, as Giovanni Bodeo did in 1549 or Philippe de Monte in 1562 (both in their Book I a 4), or as Marenzio himself did with another Petrarch sestina, Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro in Book VI a 6 in 1595. Instead Marenzio drew from RVF CCCXXXII at different stages throughout his career as a published composer of madrigals. In Book IX (see again tables 5 and 6) the four stanzas from Mia benigna fortuna set in madrigals nos. 2, 4, 5, 13 are not presented in the order in which they originally appeared in the poem, which is stanzas 10, 5, 11, 2. Madrigal no. 2 sets stanza 10, which includes as its first line the invocation to Love, an aspect found, as discussed, in proemial poems of literary canzonieri. We also noticed that in the two contiguous madrigals nos. 4 and 5, setting stanzas 5 and 11 of the sestina, the respective first lines present the same rhyme-word: rime, an index of self-reflexivity. As a consequence of the way a sestina works, all the other rhymewords in both stanzas 5 and 11 are arranged in a parallel way (pianto, lieto, stile, Morte, notti). This is because the two stanzas fall at the same point in the regular rotation of rhyme words within the two identical cycles making up a sestina doppia (see stanzas 5 and 11 in table 6). Similarly, the stanzas that Marenzio chose for the fifth madrigal of Book I a 4–6 (Fuggito è ’l sonno) and for the tenth madrigal of his Book II a 5 (O voi che sospirate)—i.e., stanzas 6 and 12 (see bottom part of table 6)—have a parallel arrangement of rhyme-words, except that the composer, as we have seen, modifies the first rhyme-word notti into note, increasing selfreflexivity. Similarly self-reflexive is the choice of stanza 3 to open his Book I a 4–6 since the word stile appears in the first line as the first rhyme-word (Ove è condutto il mio amoroso stile?). After having already set, five years earlier, stanza 7 in his Book II a 6, there was only one stanza left in the sestina that, in Book IX a 5, Marenzio could use to complete his own sestina cycle throughout his madrigal books, in order to feature all the instances in the rotation of the six rhyme-words. This was Crudele, acerba, inessorabil Morte, that is, stanza 2, which the composer placed as the penultimate madrigal in Book IX. It is the only piece of the collection set in misura breve, a mensuration that Marenzio had used for all the settings of the sestina stanzas in his previous madrigal books, but not yet in Book IX. Marenzio’s choice of consistently setting stanzas from Petrarch’s sestina over  

 

 

 

 

184   Constructing the Narrator  

the course of his career, with the aim of completing a full cycle, not only reflects on the large scale the discourse on cyclic time implicit in the formal scheme of sestinas. It also amounts to a quintessentially Petrarchan project: the representation of life’s narrative as inscribed into “scattered rhymes” (rime sparse) organized within the sequence of a Canzoniere—in the case of Marenzio, one spanning eighteen years, from Book II a 5 (1581) to Book IX a 5 (1599). Petrarch’s collection provided the Script according to which readers or listeners—including the dedicatee—could interpret Marenzio’s project by inscribing it into the narrative arch of the Canzoniere. Marenzio’s narrative act—a performance of the self, in and through time—is, however, not as solipsistic as Petrarch’s, and certainly not one to be over-romanticized. As is typical of sixteenth-century Petrarchism, it is a performance interwoven into larger social dynamics, which, in the end, authorize it. The condition for the completion of this narrative, thus of its existence, lies in the I–you relationship between composer and patron activated in Book IX by the former in the dedication to the latter—that unbalanced correspondence between two intelletti, one “sublime,” the other “feeble.” The epilogue of Book IX alludes to this I–you relationship. Marenzio chooses Guarini’s La bella man vi stringo (“I squeeze your lovely hand”) and sets it as a musical canon for two voices, imitating at the lower fourth, one semibreve apart. La bella man, which is a poetic madrigale and thus has a completely free rhymescheme, provides the perspective according to which the above-mentioned sestina life-project, just accomplished in the previous madrigal Crudele acerba, can be observed and comprehended (italics indicate deictics; underlined words are not sung by the bass).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mano stretta] La bella man vi stringo, e voi le ciglia per dolor stringete, e mi chiamate ingiusto et inhumano. Come tutto il gioire 5 sia mio, vostro il martire, e non vedete che se questa è la mano che tien stretto il cor mio, giusto è il dolore perchè stringendo lei stringo il mio core. [Squeezed hand] [1] I squeeze your lovely hand, [2] and the eyelids you close in pain, [3] and you call me unjust and inhuman. [4] As all the pleasure [5] is mine , yours is the anguish, but do you not see [6] that if this is the hand [7] that holds my heart, the suffering is just, [8] because by squeezing it, I squeeze my heart.

Marenzio’s placement of this witty poem at the conclusion of Book IX a 5 provides a point of view on the entire Petrarch project, a perspective that originates not in the past (as it would have been if Marenzio had chosen a Petrarch poem,



In Search of Voice    185

for example) but in the present time. In Marenzio’s time Guarini was a living poet and the free-rhyming madrigale was the fashionable poetic form of the day. In a move similar to Petrarch’s in RVF I, the past appears to be focalized, put into perspective, and offered to the recipient of the work from the point of view of the “now”—whether the past pertains to the previous pieces in the madrigal book, to Marenzio’s own life and music, the sestina project, or the composer’s relationship with the patron (which dated back to the early 1580s). We have seen that the “edges” of madrigal books are often the privileged loci of intersubjective exchange in which the relationship between composer and dedicatee comes to the surface. In Marenzio’s own Book I a 4–6—the book that most resembles in gravità his Book IX—the identity of the dedicatee Mario Bevilacqua emerges, at first, through an anonymous poem set at the beginning of the six-voice section, which mentions “river,” “waters,” and “sea,” alluding to the last name “Bevilacqua” (meaning “drink the water”). Then the composer again inscribes the patron in his work by making a small but significant modification in the text of his last madrigal, a dialogue for ten voices setting a stanza from a canzone by Sannazaro. In the last line: lassar di me qua giù memoria eterna (to leave of me an eternal memory below) Marenzio changes the deictic word me into noi (us). This modification, as Paolo Cecchi writes, “seems to associate the dedicatee with the creator in an aspiration toward an everlasting fame, which is achieved through the subtlety and the pathos of musical art.” 165 It is also a change, Cecchi claims, the effect of which is to acknowledge the correspondence between the gravitas of the compositional style of the book and the superiority of the social (and thus intellectual) status of the dedicatee. Similarly, in the last madrigal of Book IX, La bella man, the sophisticated patron—Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga—may be inscribed at both musical and literary levels: at the musical level, through the subtlety of the technical device of the strict canon for two voices at the lower fourth; at the literary level, through a binary relationship I–you signified by first- and second-person deictics, words that—by virtue of their constitutive semantic indeterminacy—function as revealing contextual anchors. The two levels, the musical and the literary, coincide, however, only in the larger, pragmatic sense, not in the small-scale literal one. To offer a literal reflection, the poem would not have called for a canon but for one of those extremely expressive musical settings that Marenzio, for example, had used in that same Book to set the two Guarini poems nos. 11 and 12 (Parto o non parto? and Credete voi ch’i’ viva?). Something else, then, is at work in La bella man: a disassociation of the roles of music and text, a disassociation that points to the active role of the composer as narrator, fully absorbing the poet’s role and redirecting the musical code toward the patron. The result of this process is that the text’s literal content is estranged from itself. This process of estrangement, which presupposes a high degree of  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

186   Constructing the Narrator  

autonomy of music as such (in other words, a self-conscious degree of autonomy of the composer as narrator), will serve Monteverdi well in his madrigals and operas, as we shall see. It was not a process foreign to Petrarchism, however— on the contrary. The fact that Guarini’s text is, at one level, a love poem for a woman—although the gender is never specified—does not detract from the fact that, in the sixteenth-century Petrarchist tradition, both addresser and addressee may no longer correspond to the traditional characters “lover” and “beloved.” Despite using the same Petrarchan language of love over and over, these two “slots” can be occupied by a variety of agents, in a phenomenon parallel to that of the replacement of Petrarch as the narrator by a variety of Petrarchist poets. We have seen, for example, that Tansillo in his canzoniere addresses the patron using Petrarch’s language of love, including our sestina CCCXXXII, and that he targets the patron’s “hands” and “arms” as love-objects. In Bembo’s O disaventurosa acerba sorte, set by Marenzio in his Book VII a 5, the language of love, as discussed, is redirected instead toward the author’s brother, with Marenzio, however, reversing this process back to the traditional roles lover (man)–beloved (woman). Similarly, Bembo models an entire sonnet in praise of the poet Giovanni Della Casa (no. 141 in his Rime) on the words of sonnet RVF CXLVI in Petrarch, which praises Laura. And in a sonnet addressed to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (no. 92) Bembo uses the sentence io fui vostro (I was yours) by adapting Petrarch’s words for the deceased Laura in RVF CCLXVII. In sum, patrons, brothers, or other historical figures, no matter their gender, could replace Petrarch’s “Laura.” In Petrarchism, as Nicola Gardini writes, “the erotic language is deprived of its semantic specificity and used as a universal medium.” 166 With calculated precision, in La bella man Guarini displays the dialogic relationship between the “I” of the protagonist and the addressed “you” by using deictic words. In the final epigrammatic sentence, a conceit wittingly collapses the two agents into the “I” alone—the hand of the lover squeezing not the hand of the loved one but his own heart. In Marenzio’s setting the two upper voices move in canon whereas the other voices move freely. In this context the bass keeps his own distinct role as narrator. Lines 3–5 read: “[3] and you call me unjust and inhuman. [4] As all the pleasure [5] is mine, yours is the anguish.” But in the setting (example 15) the bass skips two portions of the text, both featuring the possessive pronoun in the first person: “and you call me” (E mi chiamate, not shown in the example) and “as all the pleasure is mine” (come tutto il gioire sia mio, mm. 13–16). In the second case, however, the tenor sings the words vostro il martire in long-held values (mm. 14–16), whereas the upper three voices repeat, at the same time, come tutto il gioire sia mio—the words skipped by the bass. The result is that the deictics vostro and mio (yours and mine) are juxtaposed vertically—something which polyphonic music, but not poetry, can do. At the end of the piece (starting from m. 24, not shown in the example) the texture becomes  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 15. Luca Marenzio, Nono libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1599): La bella man vi

stringo, mm. 12–18. Example 15  

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reIe

188   Constructing the Narrator  

sparser and the textual segments more and more detached. The bass seems to be the only voice holding himself together. It delivers the text in easily audible long-value notes, with no repetitions, embodying the collapse of the “other” into the “self” expressed in the text. The identity of the two intelletti mentioned in the dedication letter of Book IX—Marenzio’s and the patron’s—finds an emblematic rendering in the setting of La bella man; emblematic in the literal sense that the verbal text is illustrated by another text that does not fully coincide—but which the active recipient can nonetheless associate—with it. At the macrotextual level, the sustained strict counterpoint featured in this last piece of Book IX refers back to the equally artificial and technically arduous one pervading the opening madrigal of the collection, the setting of Dante’s Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro. From Dante to Guarini, then, via Petrarch, Marenzio offers to the patron a mini-narrative of Italian literary history. But, most of all, the composer recapitulates his own artistic life through the narrative provided by the repeated settings of Petrarch’s sestina, summarizing his past achievements in the eyes of the “world,” from the point of view of the present time. In that present time the composer offers these achievements—himself, his past—to the patron, in his quest for employment. It would be easy to over-romanticize—and thus perhaps dismiss—the words used in 1609 by the Flemish printer Pierre Phalèse when, on the title page of his complete edition of Marenzio’s nine books of madrigals for five voices, he characterized Book IX as suo testamento (his [Marenzio’s] testament).167 Phalèse’s was indeed the third bibliographic “monument” to the just deceased composer, after the first complete edition published by him in 1593–94 (Marenzio being still alive) and that by Kaufmann in Nuremberg in 1601, just two years after the composer’s death and the publication of Book IX. To the extent that a testament is a narrative of one’s own life, the Flemish printer might have hit the mark.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pa rt T h r e e

Staging the Self

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6



Monteverdi, Narrator

F rom Na r r at io n t o F oca l i z at io n

We have seen in chapter 5 that in Da le belle contrade d’Oriente Rore only gradually accomplishes the shift from narration to quotation, the two narrative levels being instead clearly marked by indirect and direct speech in the poetic text (as it could not otherwise be in verbal language). Music temporarily suspends its rigid mirroring of the text, to resume it after overcoming the threshold between indirect and direct speech, or vice versa (see the gray area in figure 8). This mitigation of what would regularly be a sharper transition between levels shows that the composer, more than the poet, is truly in charge as the narrator. The temporary disjunction created by music in transitioning between narration and quotation forms a gray area of “interference.” I adopt this term with a meaning similar to that used in linguistics for bilinguals, when they use “features belonging to one language while speaking or writing another.” 1 Interference can also be comparable to free indirect discourse in written verbal language, according to narratological studies: the narrator does not release diegetic control; still, the reader clearly perceives that the words originate from a character.2 As we have seen, over the course of his career Rore increasingly chooses texts presenting direct speech, offering opportunities for him to generate interferences, signaling a shift toward musical dramatization. Willaert’s dialogic settings feature an even more complex situation as far as interference is concerned, since they blur boundaries between textures associated with the two “characters” engaged in the dialogue. Both Willaert’s and Rore’s compositional choices oper191

192   Staging the Self  

indirect speech

direct speech

Music Text Figure 8. Narrative interference in texted music.

ate within a Petrarchist musical aesthetics in which the narrator—the “I”—is in full control and in which his point of view prevails. Interferences between narrative levels can be interpreted in terms of point of view or of focalization. The term focalization, in narrative studies, “denotes the perspectival restriction and orientation of narrative information relative to somebody’s (usually, a character’s) perception, imagination, knowledge, or point of view.” 3 External focalization occurs when the character’s point of view is appropriated by the narrator. If, on the contrary, a character’s point of view overshadows that of the narrator, and/or appropriates that of other characters, focalization becomes internal, the character “filtering” narration. Focalization, perspective, and point of view are terms useful to distinguish between the agent who “speaks” and the one who “sees,” perceives, and experiences, that is, between the narrator and the focalizer. In considering performed texted music, however, this classic narratological distinction, originally conceived for prose texts like novels, needs to be adjusted. In such a hybrid situation, after a character is given life by a poet, it is the composer who authorizes him or her to “speak” (in the figurative meaning) or to sing (literally).4 In turn, the performer, who is entrusted with the representation of the character, may appropriate the point of view of the composer, or even replace him as speaker. The narrative situation of texted-music performance is thus closer to that of spoken theater in its relationship between dramatist, characters, and actors. For texted music, as for theater, the terms focalization and point of view are suitable because the performer may literally see, perceive, and experience the events of the narration. Indeed, it is often from the performer’s point of view that the audience interprets the narrated events. Especially in his late madrigals and operas, Monteverdi distinguished and developed the roles of narrator and focalizer. Starting from Book VI of madrigals (1614) the composer set into music poetry today usually labeled as “Marinistic,” from the poet Giovan Battista Marino. Marinist poems presented “stories” to a higher extent than traditional Petrarchist poetry—hence the composer’s preference for them (this, of course, being a larger phenomenon involving other musicians of his time, such as Sigismondo D’India). As Monteverdi inherited  

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   193

from the madrigal tradition the role of musical narrator, his theatrical sensibility also led him to develop that other, more visually-oriented agent, the focalizer. He did so by using the madrigal as a platform for experimentation, testing the first results on stage in Orfeo. In this chapter I examine in this light madrigals mostly included in Monteverdi’s last four books, especially those on texts by Marino and the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. In chapter 7 I discuss the dramaturgy of his last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea as dependent on characters projecting a focalizing effect—yet another subject-effect after the three discussed so far (self-reflexive, presence, and narrative; see pp. 41–42, 52–54, and chapters 3 and 5). In the case of staged or semi-staged works, since such effects occur in the life of performance, it is imperative to examine both the scores and the stagings. The productive tension between the points of view of composer and performer underlies, as we remember, the ornamented version of Possente spirto in act 3 of Orfeo (see chapter 2). In this aria Monteverdi seems to deprive the singer of the possibility to create his own embellishments by prescribing them in great detail. Embellishments, in this theoretical scenario, provide a subjective perspective, a point of view. The composer’s overdetermination of what would conventionally be the performer’s domain prevents Orpheus from becoming, on stage, a focalizing agent (one having his own point of view)—and even less so a proxy for the narrator (as La Musica is instead in the Prologue). Luca Ronconi’s staging of this crucial passage in the opera, discussed in chapter 3, adds another dimension to the predominance of the role of the composer on that of performer. While Orpheus sings on stage, Charon, his back to the audience, listens to him while standing on a boat symbolized by a moving pedestal situated in the space traditionally reserved for the audience, which is entirely occupied by water symbolizing the river Styx (see figure 7 in chapter 3). As a result, the audience, sitting exclusively in the theater boxes, sees Orpheus on stage through the eyes of Charon. By having Orpheus focalized through Charon’s eyes through his position on stage, Ronconi allows the audience to identify itself for a moment with Charon, and perhaps to even hear Orpheus from Charon’s perspective. The libretto provides the director with a clue pointing to this direction. After having listened to Possente spirto Charon admits to having been delighted by Orpheus’s performance, by his pianto (tears) and canto (song).5 In doing so, Charon reflects what the audience presumably experiences during Orpheus’s performance. The process of focalization, in this case, enables the audience to experience and perceive action through a particular character’s perspective, or filter. This capacity of focalizing subjects and events, therefore, does not belong exclusively to the composer and/or the performer. It represents instead, as Ronconi implicitly shows, a possibility for the stage director to enhance the public’s experience and appropriate the composer’s role as narrator. This appropriation provides in effect the intellectual justification for contemporary Regieoper, which, in this perspective, can be seen as a modernist result of Petrarchism. The stage director becomes  

 

194   Staging the Self  

the last element in a chain of appropriations that, as seen in chapter 4, originates in the one made by Renaissance Petrarchist poets with respect to the Model (Petrarch)—a move that was then imitated by madrigal composers setting their texts. In Orfeo La Musica fulfills the dual role of being both proxy for the narrator and focalizing character. As discussed in chapter 2, La Musica begins the Prologue by appropriating the role of subject-narrator in all of its communicative functions. In the performance of the first three strophes, personal deictics play a crucial role for the audience in effecting the cognitive shift from real to fictional world. In the fourth strophe the character makes clear that she is indeed the teller of Orpheus’s story. In the fifth and last strophe, however, just before the action of the opera begins, La Musica highlights objects on stage by pointing to queste piante (these trees) and queste rive (these shores) in order to identify and visualize the augellin (bird) and the onda sonante (sounding wave) that should not move or make sound (in the last line it is the wind that is asked to refrain from blowing). Emphasizing her pointing with the spatial deictic queste, as well as with the personal one suo referring to the wind (which should stop blowing on its path), La Musica enables spectators to see the opera according to her perspective, or filter. To her role as narrator, displayed especially in the fourth strophe, she therefore adds that of focalizer (with focalizing effect). Given her generic name, her presence in the Prologue (traditionally a selfreflexive part of any work), and the fact that she is “marked” by her instrumental ritornello, La Musica’s role as focalizer provides a self-commentary on an important role played by instrumental music not only in Orfeo but in opera as a genre: that of providing perspective, or point of view. La Musica’s focalizing function is confirmed in Orfeo by the return of “her” instrumental ritornello between acts 2 and 3, and between acts 4 and 5. These are the only places in the opera in which the sets change, from Arcadia to the Underworld, and vice versa. In both places La Musica’s point of view enables the audience to “see” the stage, even if the set changes were to be evoked only in performance, or minimally staged. Instrumental music facilitates the cognitive shift to a different location within the fictional world, providing the audience with visual orientation. It fulfills, in essence, a deictic, perspectival function.6 (We shall see in this chapter that, in Monteverdi’s madrigals setting Marino’s poems, instrumental music plays a similar perspectival function and, in chapter 7, that the vocal counterpart of instrumental music—the pure melisma detached from the meaning of words— has a similar role, as mentioned above for the embellished version of Possente spirto.) In his production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Ronconi appropriately complements the focalizing role of La Musica with a visual cue. Water seeps at first, between acts 2 and 3, through the seams of the wooden floor covering the space tradition 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   195

ally reserved for the audience, to then be reabsorbed in the transition from act 4 to act 5 (in the televised production this “Baroque” meraviglia is in both cases further emphasized by a close-up of the wooden floor). Water thus becomes a metaphor for instrumental music, for its fluency, indeterminacy, liquidity. But water is also—similar to the fountain of Hippocrene on Mt. Helicon—the mythological source of poetic inspiration. La Musica in fact proclaims in her first line to have come from the river Permessus, which is located on that same mountain where the fountain of Hippocrene is located (Dal mio Permesso amato a voi ne vegno). Music and poetry then blend naturally, and the flow of instrumental music is only a temporary step toward this ever renewing blend, embodied by the character of the poet-musician Orpheus. In Ronconi’s production, as we remember, Orpheus sits on stage already from the beginning of the Prologue, blindfolded and listening to La Musica. The stage director, then, anticipates La Musica’s role as focalizer in the opera: at this point she focalizes Orpheus, and her focalizing role overlaps with that, called for by the text, of standing for the narrator. Or—we may ask—is it actually Orpheus who focalizes La Musica? Does the audience listen to La Musica with Orpheus’s ears, given that he calls so much attention to the sense of hearing by being on stage blindfolded? If Orpheus in some way focalizes the audience’s attention toward La Musica, his would be a different mode of focalizing than that of La Musica, one that occurs silently (I will later discuss this mode as “internal focalization”). This ambiguity, generated by the stage director by simply introducing a blindfolded Orpheus listening to La Musica singing the Prologue, is semantically productive. It is also rooted in the text of the opera itself. As discussed in chapter 3, the textual justification for the director’s anticipation of the stage entrance of Orpheus—from act 1 (when he should in fact first appear on stage) to the Prologue—is the chiasmus suggested by the libretto text between the words Orfeo son io, sung by Orpheus in act 3, and Io la Musica son, sung by La Musica in the Prologue. Each character can provide a perspective on the other since, in essence, they are interchangeable. But this situation does not only pertain to Monteverdi’s opera, or to the particular production under discussion. Silent and singing characters, on stage and accompanied by instrumental music, are what makes opera what it is. Inspired by a highly self-reflexive text, Ronconi generates through his staging a commentary on opera production and on the relationships between performers and audience—in essence a commentary on opera as a genre. Instrumental music (La Musica as a metaphor for instrumental music) is the ever-present agent that focalizes characters and continuously re-presents the narrator. Yet, any character can be a focalizer, whether silently (Orpheus) or not (La Musica). All opera, once more to quote from Adorno, is Orpheus.7  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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196   Staging the Self  

In early opera it is especially the bass part—the basso continuo—that represents the ever-present agent which both “speaks” and “sees,” embodying the functions of both narrator and focalizer. From the point of view of the performer of the figured bass, all music—all action—is included in his or her realization of the figures. In a perspectival, subjective, and performative meaning, the metaphysical capacity of figures to signify reality through sound (according to the Pythagorean tradition) finds in continuo realization an empirical, visual manifestation. Indeed, most of the time, the agent representing the narrator is not an individual performer, but an ensemble producing a polyphonic texture, similar to the madrigal. In the polyphonic realization of the individual bass line, the word “performance” can thus be intended in its etymological sense, as something that “awaits completion” (from the French word parfournir), in this case as something that completes the potential implicit in the figures of the continuo line. As was often the case, the composer himself might have displayed his role as narrator and focalizer by leading the ensemble from a continuo instrument, both hearing and seeing the performers, as well as authorizing them as co-narrators. In the madrigal tradition since Arcadelt, as discussed in chapter 5, the vocal part of the bass plays a crucial role by often highlighting segments of texts featuring personal deictics. The bass, that is, carries narrative agency, also with respect to focalization. Deictics are words that “feature a particular reference to the point of view of the speaker,” as linguist Karl Brugmann first observed.8 In capitalizing on the madrigal tradition, Monteverdi, as Dean Mace aptly noted, makes use of a “dramatic bass” that “relates to the upper parts so that the whole musical fabric moves . . . with the rhythm and sound of words in order to create in music . . . a meaning analogous to that of poetry.” 9 Even further: the bass carries a deictic function and becomes a narrative agent, more specifically the proxy for the composer as both narrator and focalizer. This move allows the other voices in the polyphonic concentus to carry other narrative functions, in particular those of focalizers (both internal and external; more below). Monteverdi’s “dramatic bass” liberates the other voices as mimetic agents at the same time that it keeps them under diegetic control. Mace rightly considers Torquato Tasso’s work as the catalyst for this liberation. In selecting excerpts from the Gerusalemme liberata to be set to music in his terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1592), Monteverdi found short “story lines” in which characters undergo a change in their emotional conditions (see appendix 1 for the contents of Book III).10 Many of the poems that the composer set in this Book and in the following ones are no longer the atemporal “lyric poems” representing the lover’s abstract emotional state, as was typical of the earlier and more strictly Petrarchist phase of the madrigal.11 The excerpts from the Gerusalemme set by Monteverdi in Book III enact the psychological transformation of the characters’ conflicting emotions—his or her inward “action.”  

 

 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   197

In setting Armida’s speech in the three-part madrigal Vattene pur, crudel, con quella pace in Book III, Monteverdi selects two non-contiguous excerpts from Tasso’s Gerusalemme (canto XVI, ottave 59, 60, and 63: ottave 61 and 62 are not set).12 In the resulting compound text, the narrator briefly intervenes between two direct-speech statements of the sorceress. In the first statement, which covers the first part of the madrigal and continues into the beginning of the second part (ott. 59 and 60, lines 1–4), Armida expresses her rage against Rinaldo, who is about to leave her. She only briefly admits to loving him. Tanto t’agiterò, quanto t’amai (“I will show you as much as anger as the love I had for you”), she says, but the second term of comparison (quanto t’amai) is not given musical emphasis by Monteverdi, Armida’s rage dominating the setting at this point. In the second statement, which concludes the third and last part of the madrigal (ott. 63, lines 3–8), the sorceress appears prostrate and resigned—Monteverdi’s setting communicating her subdued state. This time she openly proclaims her love (Ed io pur anco l’amo, “and I still love him,” etc.). Between these two statements by Armida, the poetic narrator “steps in” and describes first her falling inanimate on the ground (e cadde tramortita, “and she fell almost dead,” ott. 60, end of the second part of the madrigal) and then her awakening (Poi ch’ella in sé tornò, “after she came back to herself,” ott. 63, beginning of the third part). From the narrative point of view Monteverdi’s suturing of the end of ott. 60 with the beginning of ott. 63 is artfully seamless. Nonetheless the lines that Monteverdi did not set in Vattene pur, crudel (ott. 61 and 62) matter. Listeners—and one thinks especially of Vincenzo Gonzaga as the patron of both Tasso and Monteverdi—would have cognitively filled in the gap, by knowing the “script.” 13 In ott. 62, just before Armida’s awakening, the narrator tells the reader that Rinaldo indeed abandons Armida forever, despite her plea. In ott. 61 the narrator empathizes with Armida by addressing her directly: Chiudesti i lumi, Armida . . . apri, misera, gli occhi (you closed your lights [eyes], Armida . . . open, O miserable one, your eyes). This passage shows a narrative technique typical of Tasso by which the poet “steps into” the action and engages in a dialogue of sort with a character. As Ezio Raimondi explains, Tasso often represents his self as a narrator who “inserts himself into the text, in the fabric of the plot and of the dialogic exchanges, as a theatrical character who listens and reacts, almost face to face, as an omniscient and mimetic interpreter who experiments on himself, through his affective and choral logic, the passions, the peripeteias of a heroic melodrama.” 14 By “choral logic” Raimondi means, literally, that the poet plays a role similar to that of the chorus in Greek tragedy. The poet becomes a “passionate narrator” who “has in common with the characters an emotional point of view” and whose narrative function is that of “a lyric comment transferred from the stage to the evocable space of narrative” (spazio evocabile del racconto). The result is what Raimondi calls a “pathetic narration.” 15 In his madrigals, including semi-staged works such as Combattimento di Tan­  

 

 

 

 

198   Staging the Self  

credi e Clorinda, and eventually in his operas, Monteverdi appropriates Tasso’s function as “passionate narrator,” transferring it from the realm of poetic narration to that of performed texted music—from an evocable space to a scenic, or theatrical, space. In this way he accomplishes something of a reversal of the path taken by the poet, who had dramatized epic poetry. The composer learned from the poet how to construct a narrator who is no longer a lyric but also a theatrical self: a post-Petrarchist agent who is able to relate to, and empathize with, the characters he creates, characters changing over time according to outer and inner actions. Through performed texted music Monteverdi brought Tasso’s dramatization of poetry from the page to the stage, so to speak. Music, text, and physical action blended in a new art form thanks to a process that can be termed remediation.16 The composer openly acknowledged the poet’s influence in the preface of his madrigali guerrieri et amorosi . . . libro ottavo (1638).17 In Combattimento and in Lamento della ninfa, for example, he adapted Tasso or Tasso-like narratives to devise the new, hybrid genre of madrigali con gesto, or rappresentativi, as opposed to those senza gesto included in the same Book. In putting together this retrospective collection in 1638, his earlier Combattimento, composed for a 1624 performance, must have appeared to the composer as a turning point of his career, in his search to project narrative meanings. Throughout this process the bass voice represented for Monteverdi an ideal ground for experimentation. Since Arcadelt, the bass had played an important role as narrative foundation of madrigals (see chapter 5: “Diffracting the Self”). In Monteverdi’s Book VIII this role is programmatically announced in the very first madrigal, Altri canti d’Amor, tenero arciero, on an anonymous text. This setting works as the “Prologue” to the first of the two sections into which Book VIII is divided, the madrigali guerrieri (Songs of War; see appendix 1 for the contents of this Book). At the beginning of the second section of the Book, i.e., the madrigali amorosi (Songs of Love), Monteverdi places a symmetrical madrigal that sets a similarly structured sonnet, Altri canti di Marte e di sua schiera, on a text by Marino. This is the poem that begins Marino’s epoch-making poetry collection Rime amorose of 1602, having a proemial function similar to Petrarch’s Voi ch’ascoltate. Monteverdi’s aim in appropriating Marino’s role as a post-Petrarchist poet-narrator could not have been clearer. To display this appropriation, with the consequent claim to artistic dignity and fame equaling those of the poet, the composer went so far as to write the parallel text Altri canti d’Amor, or to commission it from a poet. In the settings of both Altri canti d’Amor and Altri canti di Marte, the bass has an important narrative function. In Altri canti d’Amor, for six voices, six string instruments and continuo, a trio consisting of tenor, canto, and quinto sets the first quatrain of the sonnet, referring to Love:  



Monteverdi, Narrator   199



4

Altri canti d’Amor, tenero arciero, i dolci vezzi, e i sospirati baci; narri gli sdegni e le bramate paci quand’unisce due alme un sol pensiero.

Di Marte io canto furibondo e fiero i duri incontri e le battaglie audaci. Strider le spade e bombeggiar le faci 8 fo nel mio canto bellicoso e fiero [1] Let others sing about the tender archer Love’s [2] sweet charms and sighed-for kisses, [3] let them recount the quarrels and the longed-for reconciliations [4] when two souls are united by a single thought.  // [5] Of Mars I sing furious and fierce [6] harsh clashes and bold battles. [7] Swords clatter and flashing guns resound, [8] I make in my warlike and fierce song.

After the first quatrain, the trio leaves the stage to the solo bass, which starts the second quatrain singing, on a repeated D, only the words Di Marte (“Of Mars”). Instead of immediately moving on with the rest of line 5: “I sing furious and fierce” (io canto furibondo e fiero), the bass is interrupted by the trio, repeating di Marte di Marte on a D major chord. The trio then repeats obsessively the same word/sound compound, joined by the alto, tenor, and bass (plus the two violins), as if they were all stuttering. Unbowed, the bass alone regains its autonomy and continues assertively with di Marte io canto (“Of Mars I sing”) descending through the triad d-B-G in slower motion. But again he is obliterated by the full ensemble singing di Marte furibondo e fiero (“of Mars furious and fierce”) and completing the line by unfolding the previously repeated chord into an arpeggiated G major triad in concitato style. Finally, the solo bass repeats, for the last time, di Marte io canto, descending through a C major triad. By self-reflexively holding the predicate io canto the narrator raises expectations about the object of his singing: what is it indeed, of Mars, that the narrator is singing about? The following lines of the poem of course provide the answer, but the profoundly disjunct way in which Monteverdi continues to set these lines has the result of emphasizing the distinction between, on the one hand, the singing subject as embodied by the bass, and, on the other, the attributes and the objects he sings about. In the two grammatical sentences of lines 5 to 8, the “harsh clashes and bold battles” of line 6 are the objects of the poet’s song as much as the clattering of the swords and the resounding of the guns of line 7, despite the lines being separated by a period. Common to the two sentences are the equally self-reflexive predicates io canto (5) and fo nel mio canto (8), both referring to the singing subject:

200   Staging the Self   (i) io canto [ = 5]

(ii) i duri incontri e le battaglie audaci [ = 6]

(i) fo nel mio canto [ = 8a]

(ii) strider le spade e bombeggiar le faci [ = 7]

The setting accordingly deconstructs the text by emphasizing the bass as the carrier of the first unit (i), and the ensemble as the carrier of the second (ii). After the tutti setting line 6 in genere concitato, the solo bass again stops the action, skipping line 7 to sing the words of line 8a fo nel mio canto on a repeated C. Lines  7 and 8 follow, set in the previous tutti/concitato style, hammering first on a C and then on a G major chord (quickly the ensemble also sings fo nel mio canto but we hardly hear it). Given the identification of the bass with the narrator accomplished by Monteverdi through his rewriting of the two quatrains, it comes as no surprise that this is the voice who alone addresses the dedicatee of the Book, Emperor Ferdinand III, in the following tercet (lines 9–11), the tutti/concitato resuming only for the final tercet:  

Tu cui tessuta han di Cesareo alloro la corona immortal Marte e Bellona 11 gradite il verde ancor novo lavoro,

14

che mentre guerre canta e guerre sona, O gran Fernando, l’orgoglioso choro del tuo sommo valor canta e ragiona.

[9] You, for whom an immortal wreath of imperial laurel [10] have been plaited by Mars and Bellona, [11] accept this fresh, still new work, // [12] for while war sings and war plays, [13] O great Ferdinand, this proud chorus [14] is singing and reasoning of your matchless valor.

In sum, in Altri canti d’amor the identification between the bass voice and the composer/narrator is made programmatically explicit. In Monteverdi’s trajectory as a madrigal composer, the process of empowering the bass with this pivotal role had taken a sharp turn more than thirty years earlier, with the last six madrigals published in his quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci of 1605.18 These were no longer a cappella but, for the first time, fully concertato madrigals. By splitting the bass line into voice and instrument, Monteverdi allowed not only the bass but also a plurality of narrative agents to emerge, liberating each voice to become fully independent. Each of these six groundbreaking madrigals of Book V—particularly those set for five voices and continuo (all but one on text by Battista Guarini)—relate the two now-divorced lower parts to the rest of the ensemble in a variety of ways. I will focus on the bass voice in these madrigals, since it greatly affects the listener’s perception of the role of the narrator, as a point of departure for its development in the following madrigal books.  

 

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In Ahi, come a un vago sol cortese giro, the first of the six concertato madrigals in Book V, the bass voice exclusively sings the words Ah che piaga d’amor! (“Oh, a love wound!”). Monteverdi lifts these words from the last line of the poem, interjecting them as a refrain between lines 3 and 4, and 7 and 8—a reordering of lines that bespeaks his role as narrator. In Troppo ben può questo tiranno Amore the continuo and the bass share the first three lines of text, which are in the third person (“This tyrant Love is all too powerful, / since running away does no good /  for anyone who cannot abide him”). But when the poem shifts its deictic orientation to the first person (Quand’io penso talor com’arde e punge, “When I think sometimes how he burns and stings”) all the voices, except canto and continuo, drop out, to rejoin them only temporarily for the words io dico, “I say,” for which the bass voice doubles the continuo (on deictic orientation see p. 54 and the music analyses in chapter 4 and 5). Canto and continuo then continue with the direct address Ah core stolto (“Oh foolish heart”) alternating with all the other voices for the imperative non l’aspettar and the question che fai? (“do not wait, what are you doing?”). As in Ahi, come a un vago sol, in Troppo ben può the bass voice appears as relying upon the continuo, but not as mechanically as in the previous madrigal. The narrator does use direct speech but, as Massimo Ossi observes, only for the embedded passages in which he reports his own words.19 The poems set in Book V as the last two madrigals for five voices and continuo—Amor, se giusto sei and “T’amo mia vita”—are both of the “I–you” type (see chapter 4: “Lyric Modes”), the poet directly addressing Love (Amore). In Amor, se giusto sei the bass voice emancipates itself from the continuo becoming a fully independent agent for the first time. The canto sings the first three lines in an accompanied solo: Amor, se giusto sei, / fa che la donna mia, / anch’ella giusta sia (“Love, if you are just, / make my lady / be just also”). But then, at the point in which the deictic orientation shifts in the text, the canto passes the ball to the bass, who alone sings the fourth line: Io l’amo, tu il conosci, e ella il vede (“I love her, you know it, and she sees it”). This is a semantically dense line which defines the triangular narrative situation of the poem as split among poet, Love, and beloved. The line deploys all three personal deictics (io, tu, and ella) and the three key verbs “to love,” “to know,” and “to see.” The bass is thus entrusted with the distillation of the deictic, cognitive, and affective spectrum generated by the poem’s narrative situation, one common to much early modern love poetry. Musically, the setting of line 4 inaugurates a continuo line that is then repeated and varied in the setting of line 5 (strophic bass), which is entrusted to the tenor alone.20 As in the Prologue of Orfeo (see chapter 2: “ ‘I am Music’ ”), the association between deictics and strophic bass provides a verbal-musical “anchor” bespeaking the function of the composer as narrator. Finally, in “T’amo mia vita” the bass again doubles the continuo but it is joined each time by alto and tenor, while the canto alternates with the trio of the lower  

 

 

 

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voices by singing exclusively the words “T’amo mia vita” as a refrain (again, Monteverdi’s modification of the original “story line”). The narrative function played by this lower-voice trio is similar to that of the three men in Lamento della ninfa, as I shall discuss below: that of focalizing an upper voice by enabling it to come to life as an isolated character, projecting a beam of light onto her, so to speak. In Guarini’s poem the words “T’amo mia vita” (placed in quotation marks) are uttered by the absent beloved in the lover’s memory. The beloved is thus only evoked through reminiscence. The musical setting and its performance, however, transform the absent beloved into a living, singing, present body. This is the result of a narrative process enacted in front of the audience’s eyes by two agents: on one side, an omniscient/omnipresent narrator and external focalizer embodied by bass, alto, and tenor; and, on the other, a focalized character embodied by the canto. The quinto, interestingly, is silent for the first forty measures of the madrigal, and enters only to join the communal setting of the last line. Until then, however, the quinto is not merely peripheral but carries out the important narrative role of what I term internal focalizer, i.e., the silent agent standing for the (silent) audience and providing a point of view. The result of this process in “  T’amo mia vita” is similar to the triangular situation distilled in line 4 of Amor, se giusto sei, in which poet, Love, and beloved one corresponded to the I, the you, and the she. But in “  T’amo mia vita” the three “slots” I, you, and she are occupied by, respectively, composer (bass, alto, tenor), audience (quinto), and performer (canto). The flexibility and indeterminacy that characterize deictics as textual “empty words” thus make it possible for a variety of narrative agents to fill them, in this case as if they were three different slots to be occupied. In Amor, se giusto sei, the line: Io l’amo, tu il conosci, e ella il vede (“I love her, you know it, and she sees it”) is emblematic of the communicative situation of performed texted music—including, as we shall see, that particular variety of it presented by musical theater.  

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Opera and concertato madrigals share common narrative strategies, peculiar to them as performed texted music, which are different from those presented by, say, prose works or spoken theater. External focalization—the audible process by which the focalizing agent is the narrator, a proxy for him, or a character replacing him—does not merely alternate with internal focalization, which originates exclusively from silent characters. In performed texted music, internal focalization is embedded in, or concurrent with, external focalization: the narrator never recedes into the background to let the characters speak—as is the case, for example, with prose dialogues—and never completely disappears behind the characters, as in spoken theater. In particular, instrumental music—the most audible and visible manifestation of the composer as narrator—is continuously  

 

 

 

 

 



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present, whereas characters appear only intermittently and can be focalized by various instruments, as we shall see. The focalizing function of instrumental music emerges, for example, in accompanying ostinato bass patterns, such as the descending tetrachord repeated thirtyfour times in the middle part of Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa, one of the rappresentativi madrigals of Book VIII. In what was destined to become a standard emblem of the lament aria—a convention21—the composer’s subjectivity was indelibly imprinted from the start. It is peculiar to the Baroque period that a communal element proper to a cultivated oral tradition, such as an ostinato bass, could paradoxically be as subjective as the most individual of the composer’s decisions. This is perhaps because the meeting point between communality and individuality lies in the performer’s subjectivity, in the agent that by definition crosses boundaries (including those of gender) in the life of the musical event. As Lorenzo Bianconi observes, in the Lamento della ninfa Monteverdi transforms an innocent canzonetta by Ottavio Rinuccini into a “musical scenography of notably tragic dimensions.” 22 The composer extrapolates from the poem both the passages in direct speech, uttered by the nymph speaking in the first person, and those in indirect speech, entrusted to the poet/narrator speaking “in the third person.” He then sets the former passages as an uninterrupted lament sung by a soprano and the latter ones as a “chorus” sung by three male voices, who express pity for the abandoned woman, interjecting their lines “from the rear of the imaginary musical ‘stage.’ ” 23 From the narrative point of view this “staging” effect is in part generated by the frame provided by the parti che cantano fuori del pianto della ninfa (“parts that are sung outside of the weeping of the nymph”), as Monteverdi describes the two tenors and the bass in the score; interestingly, the word used by the composer is not canto but pianto, which indicates a quality of the performance but also the foreseeable reaction of the audience. The three male singers alone are responsible for the introduction and the conclusion of the piece, corresponding to strophes 1–3 and to strophe 10 of the original text by Rinuccini, which consists of ten quatrains interspersed with a refrain (see table 7).24 Clearly separated from the lament proper, Monteverdi prescribes the two framing sections (strophes 1–3 and 10) to be performed al tempo della mano (following the beat of the hand) and not al tempo dell’affetto dell’animo (the beat of the affection of the soul), as is the central section (strophes 4 to 9). The three men skip the first three refrains in the original poem and sing the first three strophes without interruptions. Then they leave the stage to the nymph, who starts singing strophe 4 after the first of the thirty-four instances of the descending tetrachord in the continuo. The men interject various instances of the refrain into the nymph’s lament, but fragmenting it in such a way that, of the six complete instances included in the original poem (after strophes 4 to 9), only three are sung in their entirety.  

 

 

 

Table 7  Text of Ottavio Rinuccini’s canzonetta “Non havea Febo ancora,” set to music by Monteverdi as Lamento della ninfa 1

Non havea Febo ancora recato al mondo il dì ch’una donzella fuora del proprio albergo uscì. [refrain:] Miserella, ahi più no, no, tanto giel soffrir non può.

6

Non vo’ più ch’ei sospiri se non lontan da me, no, no ch’i suoi martiri più non dirammi a fè. [refrain]

2

Su ’l pallidetto volto scorgeasi il suo dolor, spesso le venia sciolto un gran sospir dal cor. [refrain]

7

Perché di lui mi struggo, tutt’orgoglioso sta, che sì, che sì s’io ’l fuggo ch’ancor mi pregherà? [refrain]

3

Sì calpestando fiori errava hor qua, hor là, e suoi perduti amori così piangendo va. [refrain]

8

Se ’l ciglio ha più sereno colei, che ’l mio non è, già non rinchiude in seno, Amor, sì bella fè. [refrain]

4

“Amor,” diceva, e ’l piè mirando il ciel fermò, “dove, dov’è la fè ch’el traditor giurò? [refrain]

9

Né mai sì dolci baci da quella bocca havrà, ne più soavi, ah taci, taci, che troppo il sa.” [refrain]

5

Fa che ritorni mio amor com’ei pur fu, o tu m’ancidi, ch’io non mi tormenti più. [refrain]

10

Sì tra sdegnosi pianti spargea le voci al ciel; così ne’ cori amanti mesce amor fiamme, e giel. [refrain]

1  Phoebus had not yet / brought daylight to the world / when a maiden stepped out / from her own house’s door. / [refrain] Poor girl! Ah, no, no longer / can she withstand such coldness. 2  On her pale face / her sorrow could be observed: / and every so often came / a deep sigh from her heart / [refrain] 3  Treading on flowers / she roamed now here, now there / and [of] her lost loves / she goes about bemoaning thus / [refrain] 4  “Love (she said, her feet / firm, gazing at the sky), / where is, where is the faith / that the traitor vowed? / [refrain] 5  Let return to me / my lover as he once was, / or else kill me, so that / I torment myself no more / [refrain] 6  I no longer want him to draw breath / if not far away from me / No, no, his tormenting words / can no longer be said to me. / [refrain] 7  Because I destroy myself for him / he is full of pride; / that yes, yes, if I flee from him / will he entreat me again to stay? / [refrain] 8  If she has a more serene eyebrow, / that woman, than mine, / she does not bear in her breast, / love, so fair a faith. / [refrain] 9  Nor ever such sweet kisses / from those lips she will have, / nor softer . . . Ah, quiet, / quiet, he knows it only too well.” / [refrain] 10  Thus with indignant tears, / she uttered these words to the sky. / Thus, in loving hearts / Love mingles flame and ice. / [refrain]



Monteverdi, Narrator   205

In the central section of the Lamento the role of the three lower voices changes. They become, in Monteverdi’s words, le altre tre parti che vanno commiserando in debole voce la ninfa (the other three parts which express pity for the nymph in a soft voice) and their music is laid out in score, not in separate partbooks. This distinction in roles carries implications for the narrative effect of the entire piece. The more objective temporal frame provided by the outer sections (sung al tempo della mano) can be compared to the spatial frame dividing Charon from Orpheus in the Ronconi production of Orfeo, discussed above (see again figure 7 in chapter 3). Because of the framing, the three lower voices in the Lamento can gradually appropriate the focalizing function of the bass, to then detach themselves from it and proceed their own way at the beginning of the lament proper, adopting a different role. The “theater of the mind”—or, one might say, the “theater of the ear”—created by Monteverdi through such framing devices can be mapped onto the real one of figure 7: the Nymph replaces Orpheus as focalized character, the three men replace Charon in the focalizer function, and the continuo group the orchestra pit as proxy for the narrator and itself a focalizer. The difference between the narrative situation of Orfeo and that of the Lamento lies in the fact that Charon in Possente spirto is only an internal focalizer (the silent agent standing for the audience and providing a point of view, like the quinto in the first forty measures of “T’amo mia vita”  ): he does not speak/sing but only sees, perceives, and experiences. The three men in the Lamento are instead external focalizers—the agents providing point of view and actually singing—and this by virtue of their audibly joining the narrator, whose voice is heard in the continuo. We audibly perceive the objective distance between focalizing agents (i.e., the three men and the continuo) and the focalized one (the Nymph) through their highly polarized texture (lower voices versus canto), even more so because the texture of the narrating/ focalizing pole is polyphonic-madrigalistic, a traditional conduit for composers as narrators, as seen in part II. The three men’s focalizing function helps the audience in identifying with the “action”—in the same way that Charon does in Ronconi’s Orfeo by silently watching the singing hero, his back to the audience. When the verb used by the three men turns, for the only time in the setting, from past to present tense for the interjected words Miserella ahi più no, no, / tanto giel soffrir non può, the three singers are no longer doubling the narrator’s voice, as in the framing sections. They in effect echo what the audience might emotionally but silently express at that very moment, becoming themselves focalizers. Composer, characters, and audience are presented with equal strength within performance through autonomous narrative agents—narrator (continuo), external focalizers (three men), and focalized character (the Nymph), with the audience being drawn in as internal focalizer. Their shared quality is pianto, something that, by its liquid  

 

 

 

 

 

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nature, crosses physical boundaries, in this case also the boundaries among the agents involved in the performance event. No wonder we would like the lament and its ostinato bass to continue forever. We have been gradually drawn into the scene—on “stage”—as fully participating subjects, no longer mere eavesdroppers.  

 

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The contemporaneous presence of focalizing and focalized agents in performance generates, as I mentioned, a subject-effect—the fourth one in addition to the selfreflexive, the presence, and the narrative effects (discussed on pp. 41–42, 52–54, and in chapter 3). In the Prologue of Orfeo, La Musica introduces (remarkably so) all four subject-effects in the course of setting five strophes. But it is the focalizing effect that actually generates real operatic action in the last and fifth strophe, just before the beginning of act 1. To the extent that madrigals present a focalizing effect, they can be considered “theatrical,” or leaning toward opera. This effect presupposes significant distance between two narrative agents, a distance symbolized in opera theaters by the gap between stage and audience, but one that can also be generated in the listener’s mind in chamber settings, as in cantatas and oratorios. The focalizing agent (or agents) can either be a silent character, thus internal, or a “speaking” (audible) one, thus external, as are the narrator through instrumental music, or one or more characters doubling him in that function. The focalized agent (or agents) assumes full connotation as a character in a more realistic way, as if he or she were under a spotlight—the beam of light being projected from the focalizing subject. This occurs often in conjunction with deictics, as in the solo moment at the words Sola mi lasci (“you leave me alone”) in Rore’s Da le belle contrade, when the narrator “recedes” in the background and the character “steps forward” in a more vivid way, if only for a moment (see p. 143). In Monteverdi’s career as a madrigalist, epic poems such as Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, theatrical texts such as Battista Guarini’s Pastor fido, and finally the mixed-mode poems by Giovan Battista Marino and his imitators presented the composer with opportunities to experiment with the above-described “interferences” between narrative levels, thus with the issue of the relationships between narration and focalization. It is as if the composer staged for the audience an elaborate negotiation between, on the one hand, himself as the narrator and, on the other hand, the performers, their voices, and the characters represented by them. It is hard not to see in this negotiation a “laboratory” through which Monteverdi tests not only his role as narrator but also his capacity to create operatic characters—characters holding or reflecting points of view, in other words, focalizing or focalized agents. On the macrotextual level, Monteverdi’s role as narrator can best be observed in the careful organization of his late madrigal books. In Books VI (1614), VII (1619), and VIII (1638), madrigals working as prologues and epilogues frame a  

 

 



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narration that is internally strengthened by poetic and musical associations (see appendix 1 for the tables of contents of Books VI–VIII). In chapter 4 I explored the composer’s late use of this narrative strategy in Selva morale e spirituale as indebted to Petrarch (“Appropriating the Self”), and I discussed the tripartite division of Petrarch’s Canzoniere into Principio, Narrazione, and Uscita devised by Antonio Minturno in the sixteenth century (“Lyric Modes”). In Renaissance poetic canzonieri—as well as in the madrigal books adopting their model— the liminal parts, Principio and Uscita (rhetorically, Exordium and Peroratio), become loci of intersubjective exchanges traditionally featuring the prominent voice of the narrator, in conjunction with self-reflexive poetic texts. In Monteverdi’s Books VII and VIII the proemial function of Principio is fulfilled by one opening madrigal featuring concertato music and instrumental sinfonia. At the end of both Books the function of Uscita is played, besides by canzonettas, by madrigals in genere rappresentativo and by balli (these are nos. 25–29 in Book VII and nos. A8–9 and B9–13 in Book VIII: see appendix 1). Book VIII actually replicates this organization twice within two symmetrical sections entitled madrigali guerrieri and amorosi. Both the madrigale rappresentativo and the ballo concluding the madrigali guerrieri stage a narrator-character called, respectively, “Testo” in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and “Poeta” in Volgendo il Ciel, the prologue to the Ballo. The narrator’s voice is thus strongly heard not only at the beginning but also at the end of Books VII and VIII, in the Balli. Actually, the entire body of the narrator is, in a sense, staged as well, as much as it is in the prologue of Orfeo, in which La Musica, as we have seen, is on stage as the composer’s proxy.25 Between Principio and Uscita, both Book VII and VIII feature duets, trios, and quartets with continuo, providing the Narrazione proper. In the Narrazione the body and voices of the performers as focalizers or focalized agents are more prominent, rather than the body and the voice of the narrator, although the continuo assures the presence of the narrator also when individual “characters” emerge more realistically, singing in monodic style. The organization of Book VIII borrows another important narrative element from a previous madrigal book, the Sixth, that is, the use of poems by Petrarch. Book VI is divided into two parts, each initiated by a lament: Ariadne’s lament (no. 1: Lasciatemi morire) and Glauco’s (no. 6: Incenerite spoglie, a sestina, itself a quintessentially Petrarchan poetic form). Each lament is followed by a Petrarch setting: Zefiro torna (no. 2) and Ohimé il bel viso (no. 7). Similarly, in Book VIII each of the proemial madrigals at the beginning of the two sections (madrigali guerrieri and amorosi) is followed by a Petrarch setting: Hor che ’l ciel e la terra (A2) and Vago augelletto (B2). Setting a Petrarch text is a “conservative” poetic choice at the time of Monteverdi, and an unusual one for the composer, who set Petrarch only six times during his career. The choice of Petrarch to set a  

 

 

 

 

 

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madrigal that, by virtue of its position in the collection, has a narrative function similar to that of the proemial poems in the Canzoniere—or of a Prologue in an opera—points to the composer’s role as substituting for that of the poet. This is typical of the madrigalian tradition that I characterized in part II as “musical Petrarchism.” The composer, that is, adopts the same rhetorical strategy used by the Petrarchist poets in the late Renaissance, that of appropriating the voice of the Model (Petrarch). The presence of a Petrarch text as part of the “proemial” madrigals, together with the use self-reflexive poems as “prologues,” confirms that the narrator-function that Petrarch devised by organizing his poetry collection as a Canzoniere is now adopted by the composer as a model. Interestingly, the relationship composer/poet is articulated differently in the two madrigal books, VI and VIII. In the former, to set both Petrarch poems Monteverdi uses a traditional five-voice a cappella texture, as a reference to the classic madrigal tradition. In the latter instead, by adopting the concertato style, the humanistic gesture of setting a text by Petrarch is inflected toward modernity—toward a post-Petrarchist, Marinist aesthetics, one might say. In both cases, the adoption of a Petrarch text is an index pointing not only toward the persona of the composer as a narrator, but also, as in Petrarch, toward himself as a character, indeed the protagonist of the work (the “I”). In this sense, for Monteverdi, as Pirrotta has suggested, setting a Petrarch text is a personal, almost autobiographical choice.26 This is also shown in the Selva morale e spirituale by the association he establishes between the Petrarch texts set at the beginning of the collection and the semiautobiographical dedicatory letter (see chapter 4). In the madrigals of his last three Books, the composer often detaches himself from the poetic and musical material—although never completely—enabling characters to come to life independently as focalizing and focalized agents. This move undermines verisimilitude thanks to a play of association and disassociation between voice and character, in an emphasis on the madrigalistic notion that characters do not indeed match individual voices, the composer maintaining full control as narrator. In this respect, Monteverdi’s relativistic and almost deconstructive attitude toward text and reality is in contrast to the naturalistic aesthetics of the Florentine recitar cantando and to his own poetics of empathetic involvement with the characters’ emotions, which he learned from Tasso (see above). It is an attitude that instead displays the influence of the aesthetics of Giovan Battista Marino, which I discuss in chapter 7 in the Venetian version promulgated by the Accademia degli Incogniti. Marino (1569–1625), by far the most influential Italian poet of the seventeenth century, wrote the texts of half of the madrigals in Monteverdi’s Book VI and six out of the twenty-nine texts set in Book VII.27 The Neapolitan poet was the intellectual father of the librettist of Monteverdi’s Poppea, Giovan Francesco Busenello, and, like him, a member of the Venetian Incogniti. Just as Petrarchism  

 

 

 

 

 



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represented, for the sixteenth-century madrigal, the condition of possibility for the development of a composer’s narrating voice, Marinism in the early seventeenth century enabled a worldview that, by making a greater variety of topics available to poets, provided composers with new opportunities for musical representation.28 Most importantly for my argument, Marinism denied the very possibility of a single, unitary point of view by advocating a plurality of perspectives on the wider world newly disclosed to poets. In this pluralistic aspect—in its enabling a multiplicity of points of view—resided Marinism’s modernity, which paralleled that of Galileian science. This multiplicity of points of view characterized in turn Monteverdi’s madrigalistic settings, especially those in Books V to VIII, in which the composer developed the role of the focalizer.29 Finally, Marinism strongly questioned both the legitimacy of verbal language to reflect the world and the necessity for artists to abide by tradition. In his later madrigals and operas, Monteverdi embraced this post-Petrarchist aesthetics, including, as we shall see, the new emphasis on the epistemological power attributed to pure voice. At the same time, he acknowledged continuity with that particular musical tradition he called seconda prattica, a tradition in which, as seen in part II, the narrator’s voice rarely relinquished control.  

 

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In 1602 Marino, then living in Rome, published in Venice the first two parts of his Rime, which earned him extraordinary success and an advancement in his job prospects (he went from the patronage of the papal high cleric Melchiorre Crescenzo to that of the powerful nephew of the Pope, Pietro Aldobrandini). The first part of the Rime—dedicated to Crescenzo—is divided into nine sections: Amorose, Marittime, Boscherecce, Heroiche, Lugubri, Morali, Sacre, and Varie, followed by Proposte from and to the poet. This flexible, multifocused organization is very different from that of Petrarch’s rigidly bipartite Canzoniere, divided into rime in vita and in morte of Laura. It is instead reminiscent of the arrangement of Battista Guarini’s Rime, published by the same printer just four years earlier. Marino’s multifocal collection shows the formidable expansion, compared to Petrarch’s restrictive model, in the range of topics and perspectives that Italian poetry covered at the turn of the century. Still, since the first part of Marino’s Rime is made up exclusively of sonnets (an obvious reference to Petrarch), novelty in content is balanced by tradition in form. Also, each of the sections of this first part displays a careful internal organization, as if it were a micro-canzoniere. They feature opening and closing poems with relevant rhetorical and thematic import, which frame clusters of contiguous poems displaying topical connections and generating micro-narratives. Petrarch, then, is not forgotten but rather overcome and reintegrated within a new, post-Petrarchist,  

 

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expanded worldview, in ways that are analogous to the musical processes being discussed here in part III. Monteverdi’s first settings of Marino’s poetry are included in his sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci of 1614, which is organized, as mentioned above, into two parts, with an additional madrigal working as an epilogue (see appendix 1).30 The two parts are symmetrical (nos. 1–4, 5–9), each consisting of fivevoice a cappella madrigals (a lament cycle plus one Petrarch setting)31 and each followed by, respectively, two and three five-voice madrigals with basso continuo. The Book closes with a dialogue madrigal for seven voices.32 Five madrigals set texts by Marino. They are the final, dialogue madrigal and four out of the five madrigals for five voices and continuo (one is by an anonymous poet). All four madrigals for five voices and continuo on texts by Marino set poems from the section entitled Rime boscherecce in the first part of the Rime (1602).33 Indeed three of these madrigals appear as contiguous in this poetic source (nos. 41–43):  

 

 

Marino Monteverdi’s Poem no. Book and no. Oratio Batto, qui pianse Ergasto 41 VI, 9 obliqua “Misero Alceo” 42 VI, 8 obliqua “A Dio Florida bella” 43 VI, 4 obliqua A quest’olmo 47 VII, 3 recta Qui rise, o Tirsi 50 VI, 7 recta

Five years later, in his Book VII, Monteverdi sets, as no. 3, one more sonnet from the Rime boscherecce, no. 47 in Marino, entitled A quest’olmo, a quest’ombre (see again appendix 1). This madrigal is the only one set for six voices (with obbligato violins, flautini, and continuo) within a group of fourteen duets with continuo (no. 2 and nos. 4–16). It thus seems curiously misplaced in Book VII, as both Massimo Ossi and Eric Chafe have observed.34 Indeed, A quest’olmo might have been conceived with the other four madrigals from the Rime boscherecce set in Book VI as well. All five texts, as we shall now see, challenged the composer in unique and different ways in his role as narrator. The eighty-eight poems of Marino’s Rime boscherecce are characterized by an intricate network of associations. Distributed into twenty-five large thematic areas, each interlocking with one or more of the others, the topics of the poems range from that of birds, to union vs. separation, to Elpinia (the name of the beloved), nature and/vs. beloved, the cruelty of the beloved and/or nature, pastoral disguising of the poetic “I” and of the beloved, the wind, various metamorphosis, the kiss, etc.35 In the collection, poem 41, Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, begins a new thematic area which includes the next two poems, both also set by Monteverdi in Book VI, “Misero Alceo” (42) and “A Dio Florida bella” (43). They are distinct, both formally and thematically, from those included in the previous  



Monteverdi, Narrator   211

group, consisting of poems 36–40, which deal with kisses—thus intimacy—and are laid out in oratio recta (for example: “Filli, you invite me to kisses, and already offer me / your sweet-smelling mouth so that I can kiss it”). The following three poems (41–43) deal instead with the opposite situation, that is, flight (fuga, 41), departure (partenza, 42), separation (43)—in sum, detachment. Also in contrast with the previous group, poems 41–43 are laid out as oratio obliqua, or mixed mode: the narrator overhears the characters speaking in direct speech and introduces them with words such as “he said” or similar.36 This formal aspect is also shared by the text set as the last madrigal of Book VI, Presso un fiume tranquillo, which is drawn from the second part of Marino’s Rime and features a dialogue between the shepherds Eurillo e Filena, interspersed in each of the four strophes with the intervention of the narrator-witness. But in contrast to the four poems from the Boscherecce, the topic of Presso un fiume is intimacy, the last word being “kisses” (sien mille i baci, “be there a thousand kisses”). Presso un fiume thus fits the conventional “happy ending” of many madrigal books. Four out of the six madrigals with continuo included in Book VI, then, feature poems written in mixed mode, in one case—Batto, qui pianse—a sort of double mixed-mode that potentially confuses readers (more below). In addition, three among the continuo madrigals—Batto, qui pianse, “Misero Alceo” and “A Dio Florida bella”—are closely related through the topic of detachment, creating within Marino’s Boscherecce a coherent narrative unit as poems nos. 41–43. Monteverdi thus lifted this narrative unit and placed it in his Book VI. In discussing these three continuo madrigals I consider them together, as a unit, since the composer (or anybody else with knowledge of Marino’s popular book) could read them consecutively in it. The topic of detachment shared by these three poems powerfully resonates with that of the two large-scale lamenti included in Book VI, Ariadne’s and Glauco’s, two characters both abandoned by their beloveds, though under different circumstances. Both formal and actual detachment—or distancing—can be said to characterize most of the poems set by Monteverdi in his Book VI. This distancing aspect pertains not only to the text, but affects the relationship between the musical and the textual level, and that between the composer as narrator and the characters that are presented in the poetry and are brought to life, so to speak, by him. Monteverdi began this gradual distancing process—which at the same time is a distancing from the madrigalistic tradition—in the six continuo madrigals of Book V, four of which, as we have seen above, set poems from Guarini’s Rime, the poetry book that served as Marino’s model. These six groundbreaking madrigals, we remember, are the last within a collection characterized, as all of Monteverdi’s previous Books, by a cappella madrigals. The introduction of continuo in Book V signaled a shift in Monteverdi’s strategy as narrator; Marino’s poems set in Book VI enabled him to fully develop it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

212   Staging the Self   •

•

•

•

•

We have seen above that the mixed-mode text of Lamento della ninfa offered Monteverdi the opportunity to display, through the setting, different narrative agents, thereby creating a theatrical effect. The three contiguous poems that the composer lifted from Marino’s Boscherecce (poems 41–43) are also written in mixed mode. In his settings Monteverdi provided different solutions to the problem of relating narrator with characters, a problem that emerges in settings of mixed-mode poems. These solutions can be thought of as located on a continuum from the prevalence of the narrator as focalizer in Batto, qui pianse Ergasto to the emergence in “A Dio Florida bella” of two characters as external focalizers who almost take over the role of the narrator—a situation that prefigures opera. In order to re-create a new fictional world in musical terms, the composer does not hesitate to modify Marino’s texts, including their distribution of narrative roles. Batto, qui pianse—a sonnet that has often been mischaracterized by critics of Monteverdi’s setting in Book VI—features a narrator who begins by speaking to a character named “Batto” about the story of the shepherd Ergasto, which takes place near a river bank (words in italics are in direct speech; underlined words were modified by Monteverdi):  

 

 

 

No. 41. Racconta gli amori d’un pastore 4

Batto, qui pianse Ergasto; ecco la riva ove, mentre seguia cerva fugace, fuggendo Clori il suo pastor seguace, non so più se seguiva o se fuggiva.

—Deh ninfa (egli dicea) se fuggitiva fera pur saettar tanto ti piace, saetta questo cor, che soffre in pace 8 le piaghe, anzi ti segue e non le schiva.  

Lasso, non m’odi?—E qui tremante e fioco e cadde e tacque. A questi ultimi accenti 11 l’empia si volse e rimirollo un poco:  

14

allor di nove Amor fiamme cocenti l’accese. Or chi dirà che non sia foco l’umor che cade da duo lumi ardenti?37

No. 41. The poet tells of the love feelings of a shepherd [1] Batto, here Ergasto wept; here is the bank [2] where, while Clori was pursuing a fleeing doe, [3] fleeing herself from her pursuing shepherd, [4] I could no longer tell if she was pursuing or was pursued. // [5]—Ah, look (he said) if you the fleeing beast [6] so enjoy shooting [7] shoot this heart with arrows, for it suffers in peace [8] its wounds, and it pursues you, and does not avoid them. //  [9] Alas, don’t you hear me?  



Monteverdi, Narrator   213 And here shaking and panting, [10] he became quiet, and fell. Upon hearing these last words, [11] the pitiless one turned around, and gazed at him briefly: // [12] in that moment, Love with new and scorching flames [13] lit him up. Now who will say that the moisture [14] trickling from his two ardent eyes is indeed not fire?

In lines 5 to 9 Ergasto addresses in direct speech a shepherdess called Clori while trying to follow her. The pursued Clori, as the narrator describes in the first quatrain, is in turn pursuing a deer. This dazzling chain of deferments is one of the decentering strategies through which Marino continually shifts point of view in his poems, creating a dynamic, post-Petrarchist Baroque world in which any stable agency—any deictic center—seems to continually slip away.38 The role of narrator-poet as addresser of the poem is reinforced by the presence of Batto as silent addressee. Batto is, in our terminology, an internal focalizer, doubling the role of the audience. After the passage in direct speech, in the first tercet the narrator resumes his role by telling Batto that Clori indeed turned toward Ergasto and gazed at him, the shepherd becoming enflamed and aroused. Finally, in lines 13 and 14, the narrator (or Batto?) shifts verb tense from past to present by rhetorically asking: “now [notice the temporal deictic or as opposed to allor in line 12] who will say that the moisture trickling from [Ergasto’s] two ardent eyes is indeed not fire?” The plot of Batto, qui pianse thus features two couples, each formed by one “speaking” addresser and one silent addressee, Narrator-Batto and Ergasto-Clori. The narrative level of the first couple, Narrator-Batto, however, is “higher” than that of the second one, Ergasto-Clori, since it embeds and frames it. In the first line the activation of this mini-narrative world—a miniature opera—is facilitated by Marino’s use of deictics of place—“Batto, here Ergasto wept, here is the bank”—which are then reiterated in lines 2 (ove), 7 (questo cor), 9 (E qui), and 10 (A questi). Deictics, as we know (see chapter 5), work as effective cognitive shifters in transporting readers from their own real-life world into a new fictional world. Readers of Marino’s poem feel relocated as if they, together with the poet and his interlocutor Batto, were witnessing the “scene” of Ergasto who pursues Clori and is aroused by her beauty at the moment in which she suddenly turns around and gazes at him. These same readers, however—although not Monteverdi, as we shall see—may be confused by such mixing of narrative levels. This confusion is indeed calculated by Marino as a dazzling effect similar to that caused in the first quatrain by the play of words on seguire/fuggire. It is a strategy that fits the poet’s unstable, decentered, ever-shifting Baroque worldview. The version of the title of Monteverdi’s madrigal often found in today’s literature, “Batto,” qui pianse Ergasto, “ecco la riva,” unfortunately misreads the narrative structure of the poem—and consequently Monteverdi’s setting—by introducing Ergasto’s direct speech in the first  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

214   Staging the Self  

line, which instead belongs in its entirety to the narrator’s voice. Ergasto starts speaking only in line 5 (see the words in italics in the text above).39 In the three poems from the Boscherecce nos. 41–43—forming the narrative unit set by Monteverdi in Book VI—Marino carefully balances the relationships among different narrative agents. This is shown by the titles featured in the table of contents of his collection, which is significantly called Racconto dei poemi (narrative of the poems). The title of Batto qui pianse (41) reads: Racconta [the subject being the poet] gli amori di un pastore (“He tells of the love feelings of a shepherd”). The title given to the following two poems, also set by Monteverdi, is in both cases Un pastore, che si diparte dalla sua ninfa (“A shepherd, who departs from his nymph”), the grammatical subject being no longer the narrator but the male character. This, in itself, signals a shift of focus. In Misero Alceo (no. 42) the shepherd Alceo addresses a silent shepherdess, Lidia, but the poet-narrator has no counterpart in the narrative, as he had with Batto in no. 41 (words in italics are in direct speech; underlined words were modified by Monteverdi):  

 

 

No. 42. Un pastore, che si diparte dalla sua ninfa —Misero Alceo, del caro albergo fore gir pur convienmi, e ch’al partir m’appresti. Ecco, Lidia, ti lascio e lascio questi 4 poggi beati e lascio teco il core.

Tu, se di pari laccio e pari ardore meco legata fosti e meco ardesti, fa’ che ne’ duo talor giri celesti 8 s’annidi e posi, ov’egli vive e more.

Sì, mentre lieto il cor staratti a canto gli occhi lontani dal soave riso 11 mi daran vita con l’umor del pianto.—  

Così disse il pastor, dolente in viso. La ninfa udillo. E fu in due parti in tanto 14 l’un cor da l’altro, anzi un sol cor diviso.40 No. 42. A shepherd who departs from his nymph [1]—Wretched Alceo, far from my beloved shelter [2] I must go and prepare myself to leave. [3] See, Lidia, I leave you, and leave [4] these heavenly hills, and I leave with you my heart. // [5] You, if with like ties and like ardor [6] were united to me and with me burned, [7] allow your two celestial eyes [8] to be my heart’s nest, where it lives and dies. // [9] So, while this happy heart will remain close to you, [10] my eyes, far away from your sweet smile, [11] will give me life with the dew of my tears.— // [12] So spoke the shepherd, sadness in his face. [13] The nymph heard him. And meanwhile in two parts were one heart from the other, [14] rather was just one heart, divided.  



Monteverdi, Narrator   215

In “Misero Alceo” the narrator actually steps in only in the last tercet, starting with the word Così (“so”). He advances the narrative by reporting the response of the nymph, and finally elaborates on the conceit of the heart (core) divided into two parts (parti, a word referring to partire, the very topic of the poem). In “A Dio, Florida bella” (no. 43), both shepherds, Florida and Floro, have an exact equal amount of direct speech, occupying most of the poem; the poet-narrator, who again has no interlocutor, is present only in the first tercet (starting with the word Così, as in no. 42) and in the last line through the single word dicean (“they said”). (Words in italics are in direct speech; underlined words were modified by Monteverdi): No. 43. Un pastore, che si diparte dalla sua ninfa —A Dio, Florida bella, il cor piagato nel mio partir ti lascio, e porto meco la memoria di te, sì come seco 4 cervo traffitto suol lo strale alato.—  

—Caro mio Floro, a Dio; l’amaro stato consoli amor del nostro viver cieco: che se ’l tuo cor mi resta, il mio vien teco 8 com’augellin che vola al cibo amato.—  



Così su ’l Tebro a lo spuntar del sole, quinci e quindi confuso un suon s’udìo di sospiri, di baci e di parole.

11

—Ben mio, rimanti in pace. E tu, ben mio, vattene in pace, e sia che ’l ciel vole. 14 A Dio Floro (dicean) Florida a Dio.—41  

 

 

No. 43. A shepherd who departs from his nymph [1]—Farewell, beautiful Florida, my wounded heart [2] in parting I leave you, and I take with me [3] my memory of you, just as with it [4] a transfixed stag carries off the winged arrow. // [5] —My dear Floro farewell, may love console us [6] for the bitter fate of our blinded life; [7] for if your heart stays close to me, mine will come with you, [8] like the bird that flies off to its favorite food // [9] So on the river Tiber, at sunrise, [10] from one side and from another, confused arose the sounds [11] of kisses, of sighs, and of words // [12]—My love, remain in peace: and you, my love, [13] go off in peace, and let heaven’s will be done. [14] Farewell, Floro (they said), Florida, farewell.—  

 

 

 

In sum, in Marino’s poems 41 to 43 of his Rime boscherecce the role of the narrator progressively diminishes, whereas that of the two departing characters expands, as is evident from the sheer number of lines that the poet assigns to each of these agents (in italics above). In his settings, however, Monteverdi recalibrated the role of the two agents—  

216   Staging the Self  

narrator and characters—as he found them in Marino’s poems. In this way he creates for the listener a modified fictional world. In setting Marino’s “Misero Alceo” he goes so far as to change the poetic text substantially. In the first two lines Alceo speaks by addressing himself as “wretched Alceo,” to then address Lidia in line 3. But Monteverdi assigns the first two lines to the poet-narrator, shifting the two verbs in line 2 from the first person in the past tense (conviemmi and m’appresti) to the second person in the present tense (convienti, t’appresti). This newly-conceived narrator, however, does not fully coincide with the narrator speaking in the last tercet, in which the verbs are all in the past tense (Così disse il pastor . . . La ninfa udillo. E fu in due parti, etc.). The first narrator instead partakes in the action by directly addressing the main character as Misero Alceo, using, as said, the present tense. This is reminiscent of the shifting role of “Testo” in Monteverdi’s later Combattimento, in which, as we shall see, this proxy for the narrator addresses the warrior Tancredi with the words: Misero, di che godi? As we remember, this transformation of the poet into “a theatrical character who listens and reacts, almost face to face” with a character is a narrative technique that Monteverdi learned from Tasso by setting excerpts from the Gerusalemme liberata in Book III. Through this technique the composer becomes a “passionate narrator” (Raimondi), like Tasso, but using a different medium: performed texted music.42 In all three settings Monteverdi assigns to the narrator’s voice a five-part polyphonic texture and, in nos. 41 and 42, a harmonic area restricted to keys with one or two flats. The characters’ speeches instead are set mono­dically (in 42 and 43) or as a duet (41); in nos. 41 and 42 the characters explore the harmonic regions with no flats, mainly A minor. Texture, harmony, and melody are also used to create narrative “interferences,” that is “gray” areas in which the passage from direct to indirect speech is not immediately matched by the setting; there is instead a “deferral” of one of the musical characteristics associated with the second type of speech, while the previous situation temporarily “lingers on” (see again figure 8). By blurring the prevailing pattern of alternation in setting direct and indirect speech and thus slightly derailing the listener’s expectations, interferences signal the composer’s own distribution of narrative and focalizing roles. For example, the voice (or the voices) assigned up to a certain moment to the narrator—or the harmony associated with him—is used to set to music temporarily the beginning of a section assigned to a character—or vice versa. As a result, the listener perceives that also in other passages seemingly featuring an obvious distribution of roles, voice and narrative agent are not squarely matched.43 In Batto, qui pianse Ergasto’s lines in direct speech are assigned to canto and alto, but so are the words egli dicea pertaining to the narrator (line 5). Musically, the narrator does not “step in” at that moment, as, for example, do the three men singing the word dicea interrupting the Nymph in the Lamento della ninfa (see  

 

 

 

Example 16

Monteverdi, Narrator   217

Example 16. Claudio Monteverdi, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1614): Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, mm. 42–46; harmonic interference Ergasto/narrator.  

42

&c 

C

– va

Ó

– va

T

B

w



-

Las

-

œ #œ œ  J J

Ó

- di?”

w

so non m’o - di?”

∑

∑

∑

∑

?c

∑

∑

∑

∑

w

w

w

w



E

b. E

Vc

?c

b. c.

œ œ w J J

Las - so non m’o -

Ó

&c w

Q

Œ 

j j œ œ

qui tre­

j r œ œ.œ 

E qui tre - man –

j j œ œ

.

E

qui tre­

.

œ œ

above). In Batto, qui pianse the two high voices—an unrealistic representation of a single male voice, this too revealing the prevailing role of the musical narrator—start singing in measure 26 (Deh mira) turning abruptly the G harmony of the cadence in measure 25 to the E harmony of measure 28, eventually cadencing on A minor in measure 40. This duet is in stark contrast to the narrator’s previous section set in d, g, and B-flat. Yet, at the point in which Ergasto implores Clori to listen to him (Lasso non m’odi? mm. 43–45, example 16), the two voices, after cadencing on a', turn to D minor, one of the narrator’s harmonies. In this passage Ergasto thus shares with the narrator the harmony of D minor. Then the bâ in measure 46 on the “E” of E qui tremante (line 9) clearly signals the return to g as one of the narrator’s main harmonic areas. As Eric Chafe observes, these three extra measures assigned to the duet (mm. 43–45) represent the first affirmation of the tonic in the piece—the key that should be the narrator’s domain—although it “lacks finality” and “serves, in fact, as a bridge to a renewal of the g harmony.” 44 In the rest of the setting, tenor and bass initiate or lead each of the sentences (E qui tremante . . . A questi ultimi accenti . . . Or chi dirà). Marino’s strengthening of the narrator’s role through the absent interlocutor Batto and the embedding of Ergasto’s speech is reflected in Monteverdi’s setting on a variety of musical levels. Ergasto is focalized both by the musical narrator as the external focalizer and by Batto as the internal focalizer, the voices of bass and tenor reflecting this duality. We hardly hear Clori,  

 

 

 

 

 

218   Staging the Self  

although one could make the case that the high voice of Ergasto is the result of her internal focalizing role. And even when the narrator, as seen, takes over from measure 46 (line 9: E qui), we might hear her voice in the canto as slightly asynchronized and then taking the lead in measure 60 at the words Allor di nove Amor. Clori’s silent role in the poem—squeezed between those of the three male agents—is indeed ambiguous in the setting. Monteverdi’s subtle modification of the first words of Ergasto in addressing her—from Deh ninfa in the poetic source into Deh mira in the score—emphasizes Clori’s eyes, thus her seeing, not her speaking. This is indeed appropriate for a focalizing agent and in line with Marino’s emphasis on the magic effect of Clori’s gaze, which causes Ergasto’s arousal and the poet’s final ecstatic exclamation. Contrary to the silent Clori in Batto, qui pianse, in “Misero Alceo” the female character musically comes to full life at the end of the piece. As usual, the composer reserves for the narrator mollis harmonies and polyphonic texture (which confirms Monteverdi’s transferring of the first two lines from the character to the narrator, discussed above). The words in direct speech (lines 3–11) are instead assigned, realistically, to a solo tenor singing in the durus area, supported by a strophic bass. When narration resumes at the word Così (line 12), it is the tenor, however, not the ensemble, that starts the section with a solo (m. 58), and then lingers behind the group (example 17). This textural interference reveals the tenor’s role as focalizer, a function he borrows from the narrator. On the second syllable of the word nin-fa in line 13 the tenor finally joins the group (m. 65), but only after a Bâ is introduced in the previous measure for the first time after forty-four measures (as Chafe observes).45 B-flat major is now the harmony that brings the absent Lidia before the listener’s ears. But it is as if the tenor, and not only the polyphonic group, had made this miracle happen. The tenor continues to be active by splitting himself into a duet with the alto on the words e fu in due parti intanto l’un cor da l’altro (mm. 67– 71, lines 132–14). Both voices sing in the same range in a 2–3 suspension chain illustrating the “two parts” as the hearts of the lovers, cadencing in measure 72 on the single note: a, in a unison tutti setting the words anzi un sol cor. The key of A minor was that of Alceo’s solo section in measures 26–58; thus this polyphonic section (mm. 67 ff.), which is seemingly assigned to the narrator alone, displays harmonic interference between Alceo and the narrator. At the word diviso (mm. 72–74) the canto voice suddenly surfaces from the ensemble by jumping to a high c'' and then descending cadentially on b' and a', harmonized, respectively, by a 4–3 ornamented suspension and a major triad by the rest of the voices, in full, glorious polyphony. The nymph is no longer a silent, internal focalizer but is now fully focalized as a character, as a voice. Lidia comes to full life as a character through Monteverdi’s music. This occurs within a section attributed to the narrator alone but in which her lover Alceo has already musically “interfered” as  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 17



Monteverdi, Narrator   219

Example 17. Claudio Monteverdi, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1614): “Misero Alceo,” mm. 54–61; textural interference Alceo/narrator.  

54

C

Q

A

T

B

b. c.

&c

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

Œ

&c

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

Œ

&c

∑

∑

∑

∑

∑

Œ

?c

dis-seIilpa - stor

œ

dis-seIilpa - stor

œ

dis-seIil pa -stor

Co - sì

Co - sì

j r V c Œ œ. œ 

w

con l’u-mor

  #w del

∑

∑

?c w

# n w

∑

œ œ 

pian - to.” Co-sì

∑ w

∑ w

 œ œ w

œ

Co - sì

Ó Œ

Œœ

 œ œ w

œ  

œ œœ œ

co - sì dis - seIilpa-stordo –

Co - sì

œœ 

 œ œ w

 œ œ w

pa - stor disseIil -

 œ œ w

external focalizer, thus preparing Lidia’s own “entrance” as a focalized character. When canto and quinto (from m. 74) sing the same 2–3 suspension chain previously used by alto and tenor to set the same words (now transposed up a fourth) and finally lift the entire vocal group up by transposing the cadential tutti twice to reach C major (m. 87), we do hear Lidia as a narrative agent. Yet she is never given voice by Marino. That Lidia is transformed from internal focalizer into a temporarily focalized character—thus not into an external focalizer situated at the same level of Alceo and of the narrator—is shown by the third and final repetition of the words setting the conceit of the “divided yet united” heart (E fu in due parti, etc., m. 87). All three instances of this passage correspond to merely the last one and a half lines in the text. The setting, however, takes about one third of the entire piece. This slowing down of the musical-narrative time with respect to the textual time allows the two characters to emerge and interfere by having their voices heard in the “background” of the narration, thereby creating a theatrical, focalizing effect. In measure 87 the tenor/alto duet returns at the same pitch level of their first appearance in measure 67. But at the moment in which the cadence approaching the unison on a should occur (m. 91), the bass voice—the proxy for the narrator—  

 

 

 

 

220   Staging the Self  

intervenes with one additional and unexpected instance of the half line e fu in due parti intanto, shifting the entire harmony to the key in which the piece must indeed end, D minor—the one associated with the ever-present narrator. Through focalizing effects, then, the two shepherds in “Misero Alceo” (Alceo and Lidia) gain a greater musical independence compared to that exhibited by the shepherds in Batto, qui pianse (Ergasto and Clori), who were both overshadowed by the overarching, embedding force of the communicative axis narrator-Batto (reaffirmed by Monteverdi). The setting of the final poem in the narrative unit lifted by Monteverdi from Marino’s Rime boscherecce—“A Dio, Florida bella”— shows the emergence of two voices with equally focalizing roles, which in effect almost completely overshadow that of the narrator. Even in this case, however, Monteverdi is careful not to simplistically identify voice with character or narrator. After assigning Floro’s speech in the first quatrain to the tenor singing in D minor, and then Florida’s parallel speech to the canto singing a fourth higher over the same strophic bass, the narrator steps in by singing in F, a mollis key that was already touched by Floro (m. 35). Earlier, Floro had also introduced a recurring “farewell” motive in measures 5–7 (first identified by Chafe), which plays a narrative role in the rest of the setting. In an instance of textural interference (example 18), at the beginning of the setting of the first tercet, the canto does not merge with the ensemble but lingers on for the word Così (the same word that displayed textural interference in “Misero Alceo”). Then, in measure 38, the tenor voice, in a delayed interference, anticipates the rest of the ensemble (a lo spuntar). The canto’s role as active agent powerfully emerges in measures 47–50 when this voice modifies, in “her” key of A minor, “his” farewell motive of measures 5–7 by augmenting it and turning it into a full cadence on parole (c''–b'–a') reminiscent of that on diviso in “Misero Alceo,” discussed above. She then takes up the farewell motive literally in measures 51–52, when she resumes direct speech (Ben mio rimanti in pace), to make it the leitmotiv of the rest of the piece. As expected, at the beginning of the setting of this final “confusing” tercet, the two characters are represented each by their own voices, the others pausing for lines 12 and 13. Remarkably, during the setting of the final line, when the tutti resumes in polyphonic confusion (for example, she sings the words vattene in pace, which should belong to him), Floro still makes his voice heard through two recitation notes (d' and e') sticking out from the rest of the ensemble, he alone singing “his own” words Florida a Dio (without dicean). The focalizing role of the two characters permeates the entire setting by overshadowing even that of the ever-present narrator, in a confusion of roles that is thematized by Marino himself in his poetry as one of sound (suon, line 10).46 It is perhaps the narrator who this time becomes almost a focalized agent, by receding into the background, his voice barely heard. The performers/characters take the lead, in a narrative situation that is only a short conceptual step from opera.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 18



Monteverdi, Narrator   221

Example 18. Claudio Monteverdi, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1614): “A Dio, Florida bella,” mm. 35–42; textural interferences Florida–Floro/narrator.  

35

C

Q

A

T

B

b. c.

 

w

œ œ œ b  

w

-

le

.

œ œ œ   

a lo spun - tar del So

 

w

w

.

œ œ œ   

w

bw

œ

Œœ œ œ

&c

Ó

&c

Œœ  

bw

&c

Œœ  

Vc ?c ?c

Co-sì su’l Te - bro

Co - sì su’l

Co - sì su’l

Œœ   Œ

.

Co - sì su’l

a lo spuntar -

Te - bro

Te - bro

a lo spun-tar

œœ œ w

Te - broa lospun-tar

del So

-

-

leQuin - ciIe quin­

del So

-

le

w

Te - bro

œ œ œ b  

a

w

œœ  

bw

.

œ œ œ b  

w

•

•

•

j œ

del So

 

.

•

 œ.

le Quin - ciIe

bw

lo spun-tar

le

-

del So

œ  

Co - sì su’l

w

j œ œ. œ œ w w

•

The two remaining poems by Marino that Monteverdi lifts from his Rime boscherecce to be set to music, in addition to the trio of nos. 41–43 discussed in the previous pages, are Qui rise, o Tirsi (no. 50) and A quest’olmo, a quest’ombre et a quest’onde (no. 47). Monteverdi includes them in Books VI and VII respectively, in the latter case, as mentioned, by misplacing the madrigal within an otherwise carefully ordered collection.47 In Marino’s Rime the two sonnets belong to a group of five poems (47–51) that share a prevailing theme: the poet’s memory of spending time with his beloved Clori in a locus amoenus. Poem no. 50 has the title Mostra ad un pastore il luogo dove baciò la sua ninfa (“he [the poet] shows to a shepherd [i.e., Tirsi] the place where he kissed his nymph”), whereas no. 47 is entitled Rimembranza di antichi piaceri (“Remembrance of former pleasures”). In both poems the prevailing topic is strengthened by the recurrence of deictics of time and especially of place, these last emerging almost obsessively: in no. 50 through the repetition of the adverb of place qui (at the beginning of lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 12) and in no. 47, by having questo repeated three times (lines 1 and 4).  

 

222   Staging the Self   No. 50. Mostra ad un pastore il luogo dove baciò la sua ninfa









4

Qui rise, o Tirsi, e qui ver me rivolse le due stelle d’amor la bella Clori; qui per ornarmi il crin, de’ più bei fiori al suon delle mie canne un grembo colse.

8

Qui l’angelica voce in note sciolse, ch’humiliaro i più superbi tori; qui le Gratie scherzar vidi, e gli Amori quando le chiome d’or sparte raccolse.

11

Qui con meco s’assise, e qui mi cinse del caro braccio il fianco, e dolce intorno stringendomi la man, l’alma mi strinse.

14

Qui d’un bacio ferimmi, e ’l viso adorno di bel vermiglio vergognando tinse. O memoria soave, o lieto giorno.

No. 50. He shows a shepherd the place where he kissed his nymph [1] Here did she laugh, Tirsi, and here pointed [2] beautiful Clori her two stars of love at me; [3] here, to adorn my hair, a handful of the most beautiful flowers [4] she gathered as I played my pipes // [5] Here the angel-like voice released notes [6] that humbled the most arrogant bulls; [7] here I saw the Graces frolicking and the Cupids [8] when she gathered up her flowing golden hair. // [9] Here she sat with me, here she put her arm [10] around my waist and, gently holding me [11] as she touched my hand, she held my soul. // [12] Here she wounded me with a kiss, and then her face [13] was dyed in the ruddy color of bashfulness. [14] O sweet memory, O joyous day! No. 47. Rimembranza di antichi piaceri



4

A quest’olmo, a quest’ombre, et a quest’onde, ove per uso ancor torno sovente, eterno i’ deggio, et avrò sempre in mente quest’antro, questa selva e queste fronde.

In voi sol, felici acque, amiche sponde, il mio passato ben, quasi presente, Amor mi mostra, e del mio foco ardente 8 tra le vostre fresche aure i semi asconde.



11

Qui di quel lieto dì soave riede la rimembranza: allor che la mia Clori tutta in dono se stessa e ’l cor mi diede;

14

già spirar sento erbette intorno e fiori, ovunque o fermi il guardo o mova il piede, dell’antiche dolcezze ancor gli odori.



Monteverdi, Narrator   223 No. 47. Remembrance of former pleasures [1] To this poplar tree, to these shades, and to these waves, [2] where still I often return, [3] forever must I return, and I shall never forget [4] this refuge, this wood, and this foliage. // [5] In you alone, happy waters, welcoming shores, [6] my past happiness, almost present, [7] Love shows me, and of my ardent fire, [8] among your fresh breezes, the seeds conceals. // [9] Here, from that gentle day, sweetly comes [10] the memory: of the moment in which my Clori [11] as a gift all of her self and her heart conceded to me; // [12] I already feel the scent of the young grass and the flowers, [13] wherever I either rest my gaze or move my feet, [14] and the traces of erstwhile sweetness.

Both of Marino’s sonnets are laid out in oratio recta, that is, they feature only the narrator speaking, with no alternation of indirect and direct speech. In his settings of Qui rise, o Tirsi and A quest’olmo Monteverdi deploys the entire arsenal of alternating vocal textures that he uses to give life to characters in the poems laid out in oratio obliqua discussed in the previous pages. For A quest’olmo he adds to the continuo four concertato instruments, that is, two violins and two flutes. Monteverdi breaks down and almost disintegrates the monolithic narrator presented by Marino—there are no “characters” in these two poems, such as Florida, Floro, Alceo, etc. The new narrator stages himself through different vocal personae, which emerge as both focalizing and focalized agents. Since narrator, characters, and voices do not coincide—as the narrative interferences discussed above show—the narrator-as-character can focalize himself through different voices, and even instruments. Monteverdi’s shattering into fragments of the narrator’s self—his own self— amounts to a liberating process that represents a step that goes beyond the fragmentation characterizing “musical Petrarchism,” as described here in part II. Thanks to focalization, the self is not only multiplied but also staged through different autonomous “characters,” whom we can actually both hear and see, perceive, and experience. To generate this kaleidoscopic effect, Monteverdi needed the theatrical poetry that he found in Marino, in which “scenes” and “settings” are recreated through, among other means, an emphasis on deictic words. These words, as discussed, help to recenter the listener’s imagination by transporting it into a fictional world, the one populated, in Marino, by the various Batto, Ergasto, Alceo, Lidia, Florida, Floro, Tirsi, and the like. In this fictional world the poet himself is not a mere observer but a full participant as a character, as the descriptive title of no. 50 (Qui rise, o Tirsi) makes clear (“he [the poet] shows to a shepherd [i.e., Tirsi] the place where he kissed his nymph”). In Monteverdi’s settings, the creation of this fictional world is further accomplished through a process of multiplication of narrative agents resulting in that musical theater of the mind (or of the ear) that so effectively characterizes, for example, his Lamento  

 

 

 

 

224   Staging the Self  

della ninfa. Marino’s and Monteverdi’s narrative aims converge in giving life to a post-Petrarchist fictional world in which they stage themselves as subjects. In this respect, the composer must have seen musical theater as the logical consequence of a process for which the madrigal provided him with the narrative toolbox. In the setting of Marino’s sonnet no. 50—Qui rise, o Tirsi, for five voices and continuo—Monteverdi picks up on the theme of memory shared by poems 47–51 of the Boscherecce. The composer lifts the final line of the poem O memoria soave, o lieto giorno, changes the word soave (sweet) into felice (happy), and makes it a memorable refrain set by the entire ensemble, interjecting it at the end of the two quatrains. Although this refrain always starts in F major—the madrigal’s tonal focus is D minor—it is presented each time in a slightly different way (in the last instance, for example, the words O memoria are immediately repeated). As Lorenzo Bianconi has shown, the bulk of this “nostalgic tale” is organized by alternating solo, duet, and trio episodes.48 The sequence of alternating textures occurs, however, in an unpredictable way. The narrator—whose presence is assured by the continuo—focalizes himself first as the two cantos (lines 1–2), then as alto and tenor (lines 2–3), followed, after the first refrain, by a canto solo (lines 5–6), a trio (the two cantos and the alto), and again a canto duet. The second refrain introduces the first tercet, which is set, first, as a duet between canto and alto, and then as a trio for the lower voices (alto, tenor, and, for the first time, the bass). At this point (m. 106) the bass voice enters not by duplicating the continuo but by singing in imitation with the other two voices. We thus hear the agent that had until then been silent: Tirsi, the addressee of the poet-narrator as well as the internal focalizer (both functions are, as we remember, fulfilled by “Batto” in Batto, qui pianse). Within this kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the narrator’s self, however, we hear only once, but clearly, a resounding solo voice: that of the canto setting lines 5–6, which in Marino’s sonnet reads (see above): qui l’angelica voce in note ­sciolse / ch’umiliaro i più superbi tori (“Here the angel-like voice released notes /  that humbled the most arrogant bulls”). Monteverdi, however, modifies the first of these two lines by omitting the words in note sciolse (“released notes”) and replacing them with e le parole (“and the words”; example 19, mm. 54–55), thus eliminating the original rhyme –olse of sci-olse with lines 1, 4, and 8 (rivolse, colse, raccolse). His setting brings out Clori’s voice at the moment in which she is evoked by the poet through her physical voice, transforming her into a focalized character. It is indeed hard, for the audience, not to see her in the performance of this poignant passage. The soprano might actually step forward, physically and not only figuratively. That Clori sings as an active agent is shown by her indulgence in the key of F major (mm. 51–55) in the only passage within a D minor piece in which F major is not assigned to the refrain O memoria, etc. This harmonic interference between the beginning of her solo passage and the setting of the narrator’s  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 19

Monteverdi, Narrator   225

Example 19. Claudio Monteverdi, Sesto libro di madrigali a 5 (Venice, 1614): Qui rise, o Tirsi, mm. 49–61; interferences narrator/Clori, as external/internal focalizers.  

49

C Q

gior

-

& c wœ œ 

– to gior – to - gior -

A T

B b.c

no

# ww

. œ

- no no

V c # œœ œ  œ ww ?c 56

&Œ

– lie - to

gior

ww

∑

gior - no no -

ww

Ch’u - mi - li - a - ro

j r œ .œ 



V

∑

?





∑ 

j  œ œ b œ. œ œ Œ œ œ. œ  

Qui l’an - ge - li - ca



. œ Œ

vo - ce

∑

∑

b 

 

i più su - per - bi

to

e le pa - ro - le

∑ w

w -

-

œ #œ œ œ #œ œ  œ œ œ œ ∑

∑

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

∑

-

ri



∑

∑ 

w

repeated exclamation O memoria, which immediately precedes it in measures 37–50, confuses her identity with that of the narrator and external focalizer, who is the one in effect giving life and voice to her through perspectival memory. The musical setting accentuates this confusion in three ways: by having the canto start her solo passage in measure 51 on the same note (a') that ends the tutti in the previous measure; by excising the words referring to music (in note sciolse, “released notes”) and replacing them, as said, with the words e le parole (“and the words”); finally, by interspersing the text with three rests: qui l’angelica voce (rest) e le parole (rest) ch’umiliaro (rest) i più superbi tori (cadence on d). This last segmentation (3 + 2 + 2 measures) further fragments the phrase-rhythm that characterizes the preceding refrain (4 + 3, then 3½ + 3½, mm. 37–50). Furthermore, by progressively lowering the melodic ambitus down a fourth (from a' to e'), the passage prepares the final stepwise ascending phrase on i più superbi tori (“the most arrogant bulls”) spanning a seventh (e' to d'') and finally cadencing on D minor. This signals the return to the main key of the piece, last heard in measure 36, just before the refrain.  

 

226   Staging the Self  

Within this temporal enclosure (refrain + solo, mm. 37–61, from O memoria to tori) we are given the time to breathe and to identify ourselves with the narrator’s act of memory through a temporal expansion that is typical of psychological time. As set by Monteverdi, the sentence sung by the solo (qui l’angelica voce e le parole ch’umiliaro i più superbi tori, “Here the angel-like voice and the words / that humbled the most arrogant bulls”) does not make grammatical sense, since it lacks the verb in the main clause (in Marino: sciolse, “released”). But Monteverdi is not misreading the poem. Since he is in charge as narrator, the past tense is provided by music itself, by the sound of memory. The listener might decide during the second rest (after parole) to whisper in her mind the missing verb, perhaps the sciolse of the original poem. In any case, the resulting effect is that, as an audience, we are not merely presented with a newly-created fictional world of which we are passive observers, or eavesdroppers. Rather, since our tonal, textural, and ryhthmic perspective shifts with that of the narrator and external focalizer (the “I” of the poem), we become ourselves focalizing agents, transported into this world as full and active participants, as internal focalizers. In A quest’olmo—the third madrigal in Monteverdi’s concerto. settimo libro de madrigali of 1619—scored for two cantos, alto, two tenors, bass, two violins, two flutes and continuo, the instruments take on a focalizing role by expanding on the traditional role of the continuo as narrator and external focalizer; the voices are mostly focalized agents into which the narrator projects himself. In this madrigal too, as in Qui rise, o Tirsi, Monteverdi manages to give voice to the role of the absent woman in the narrative, Clori. This occurs in the setting of the first tercet (lines 9–11). In it, Clori is for the first time evoked directly in the poem and indeed mentioned by name, after the narrator has evoked the place of his encounter with her (first quatrain, lines 1–4) and has addressed the river that reminds him of his “ardent fire” for the nymph (second quatrain, lines 5–8):  

 

 

 

 

 

[9] Qui di quel lieto dì soave riede [10] la rimembranza: allor che la mia Clori [11] tutta in dono se stessa e ’l cor mi diede. [9] Here, from that gentle day, sweetly comes [10] the memory: of the moment in which my Clori [11] as a gift all of her self and her heart conceded to me.

In the setting, two flutes enter (m. 99) just before the word allor (line 102 ) is sung by the bass, a voice that until that point had only a peripheral role. The bass then, accompanied by the flutes, concludes this tercet, until the end of line 11 (m. 117). This passage (mm. 99–117) is one of the only two extended solo passages in the madrigal, the other one being sung, accompanied by two violins, by one of the two tenors earlier in the piece, in measures 51–67, setting lines 5, 6, and the first half of line 7:  

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   227 [5] In voi sol, felici acque, amiche sponde, [6] il mio passato ben, quasi presente, [7] Amor mi mostra . . . [5] In you alone, happy waters, welcoming shores, [6] my past happiness, almost present, [7] Love shows me . . .

In both passages (mm. 51–67 and 99–117, setting respectively lines 5–71 and 102 –11) a pair of instruments precedes the entry of the solo voice and then overlaps with both voice and continuo in lively counterpoint—two violins in the first solo passage, two flutes in the second. Also, in both passages the harmony shifts toward D minor, and the solo line doubles a very angular continuo line—there is really no “singable” melody since the instruments have unmemorable lines in imitative counterpoint. The emergence of the narrator as focalized character through the solo voice is called for in both passages by a shift of emphasis in the poetic text, from spatial to personal deictics: respectively, from quest’antro, questa selva, e queste fronde (line 4: “this refuge, this wood, and this foliage”) to In voi . . . il mio passato . . . mi mostra (lines 5–71: “in you . . . my past . . . shows me”); and from Qui di quel lieto (line 9: “Here, from that gentle”) to allor che la mia Clori . . . se stessa . . . mi diede (lines 102–11: “of the moment in which my Clori . . . her self . . . conceded to me”). In the first solo passage (mm. 51–67, lines 5–71 ) the narrator mirrors himself in the “waters” and “shores” that are shown to him by Love as memories of his “past happiness, almost present.” These silent agents—Nature and Love—are brought to life by the two violins, which had been silent since the beginning of the piece and now step forward—and might do so literally in performance—only after the entire first quatrain of the sonnet is performed. The two instruments are not “seen” or “experienced” by any other agent; on the contrary, they actively enable the modulations from G to C to D minor, in conjunction with the continuo and the tenor at the unison. Audible in the music through the two musical instruments, although not given voice directly in the poem, Nature and Love focalize the narrator, showing him his past (Amor mi mostra, “Love shows me”). The same play with identity occurs in the second solo passage (mm. 99–117, lines 102–11). Here, however, Nature and Love no longer double the narrator, but it is Clori who emerges as the only alter ego, conceding all of herself, body and soul, to the narrator. As with the solo passage in Qui rise, o Tirsi, in A quest’olmo a full-ensemble passage immediately precedes the solo episode that gives life to the female character (again a character named Clori) and sets it up by mentioning the word “memory” (here rimembranza, there memoria). In A quest’olmo, compared with the similar nuanced evocation of Clori in Qui rise, o Tirsi, the contrast between tutti and solo is starker. For example, for the first time within a piece in C major, the note Bâ appears prominently on the very name of the evoked nymph (m. 103). The focalizing role of the instruments adds an element of clarity to the  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

228   Staging the Self  

narration. Monteverdi will again make use of instruments as effective narrative tools in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda but within a much longer narrative in which the visual element is actually brought into the foreground—“stepping” forward no longer being an imaginary action.  

C ombattimento be t wee n Pag e a n d S tag e

The distinction between character and voice, and that between narrator and focalizer, explored by Monteverdi in his madrigals of Books VI and VII setting Marino’s sonnets, helps to make sense of the quasi-operatic situation of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. In this madrigale con gesto (madrigal with gesture), included in the guerrieri section of Book VIII, the narrative agents are seemingly stable and well-defined—they are, after all, three real flesh-andblood characters: “Testo,” “Tancredi,” and “Clorinda.” In light of the composer’s other experimentations with musical narrativity examined above, however, these characters are, as we shall see, dynamic and unstable, their roles shifting during the piece.49 As in the Marino settings Batto, qui pianse, “Misero Alceo,” and “A Dio, Florida bella,” Monteverdi adopts for Combattimento a text laid out in oratio obliqua, an excerpt from Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (canto XII, ottave 52–62, 64–68). As in “Misero Alceo,” the composer takes the liberty of modifying the original text to suit his own narrative strategy.50 Finally, as in A quest’olmo, instrumentation—strings and continuo—plays a crucial role in advancing the narrative. The character “Testo”—Monteverdi’s own invention—works in Combatti­ mento as a proxy for the narrator, that is, in the same way that La Musica does in Orfeo, the bass voice in Altri canti d’Amor, and the continuo in the concertato madrigals discussed above (the text of Combattimento as set by Monteverdi is in appendix 2). As a character visually interacting with others on stage, however, Testo has the full ability to focalize and to be focalized. Combattimento can be interpreted as a work in which Testo has the roles of both narrator and focalizer. The former role is prominent in the setting of the first three stanzas, making up the first of the three sections of the madrigal (ott. 52–54 in Tasso, stanzas 1–3 in Monteverdi, mm. 1–133).51 This narrator is at first characterized by distance from the characters, its origin being the extradiegetic narrator “Tasso” in the epic poem; at the same time, having being transformed by Monteverdi into the homodiegetic “Testo,” he is a character himself, a participant in the action, and can take on more of a role as focalizer. In the course of Combattimento, Testo gradually loses his detachment, becoming more and more involved in the action and in the two warriors’ emotions. Thus in the second section of the madrigal (ott. 55–65, stanzas 4–13, mm. 133–364), Testo stresses more his role as focalizer— the agent who sees, perceives, and experiences.52 This is particularly evident in  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   229

live performance, as I will discuss by commenting on a video recording, the 1993 staging by Pierre Audi conceived for the Nederlandse Opera.53 Finally, in the last section of the piece (ottave 66–68, stanzas 14–16, mm. 359–445), Testo almost appears to be receding into the background and to lose diegetic control over the material, letting Clorinda finally emerge as the focalizer. Indeed, at that point Clorinda even borrows, in Monteverdi’s musical adaptation, Testo’s own words. As it has been observed, the last line of Tasso’s poem set to music in Combat­ timento is assigned in the original text to the narrator, that is, Testo says, referring to Clorinda: E dir parea “s’apre il ciel, io vado in pace” (she seemed to say: “heaven is opening, I depart in peace”). Monteverdi, however, disregards the meaning of the verb parea (“seemed”) and shifts the words in direct speech to Clorinda’s voice. This interference (see above), by which the musical character Clorinda appropriates the words of the (literary) narrator, is prepared by Monteverdi, as we shall see, throughout the work. More generally, this liminal passage of Combattimento reveals an evaporation of the boundaries between fiction and reality that is typical of opera. Using Tasso, Monteverdi highlights the conceptual transition from madrigal to opera by breaching fiction. Paradoxically, Clorinda comes to full life as a character at the very moment in which she dies. Opera conceptually begins when the narrator renounces his voice in order to concede it to a real character and retires behind the “voice” of the instruments (La Musica does just that in Orfeo). In Combattimento, the instruments even seem to “die” with the character, the strings playing their last note in arcata morendo (“dying while bowing”), as the score prescribes. At the beginning of the madrigal Monteverdi tends to minimize the differences among the three characters, despite their different vocal registers. Indeed Testo establishes a triadic tinta from the beginning of his narration in measures 1–9. This triadic quality permeates not only Clorinda’s part but the entire setting of the first two stanzas, including the music played by the instruments (e.g., mm. 31–37, on which more below). The emphasis on the raw material of music—the triad—places the first section of the madrigal (mm. 1–133) under the firm control of the narrator, i.e., the composer. This strategy accomplishes a cognitive deictic shift in the audience, highlighting Monteverdi’s “ability to transport interpreters [in this case, the audience] from the here and now of face-to-face interaction, or the space-time coordinates of an encounter with a . . . narrative, to the here and now that constitutes the deictic center of the world being narrated.” 54 The raw material—the triad as the deictic center of music’s tonal space—anchors the audience to the new narrative world created by musical theater. Just a couple of minutes into the performance, the audience finds itself immersed in a new story world, and might very well forget that the sung text derives from an epic poem by Tasso, a text conceived to be read. In passages of Combattimento, Monteverdi alters the ottave of the Gerusa 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

230   Staging the Self  

lemme liberata by either conflating its text with the alternative version of the Gerusalemme conquistata (Tasso’s revision of the Liberata, made to satisfy censors) or by rewriting the poet’s lines. I focus on one example of the former case, drawn from the second stanza of Combattimento, in order to show how the composer’s selection of specific words displays his ability as narrator, bearing extensive implications for his setting and its perception, including the visual aspect (the words in italics show the variants between Tasso’s version in the Liberata and Monteverdi’s version in his setting). Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata, XII, 53 [3] Non vuol Tancredi, che pedon veduto [4] ha il suo nemico, usar cavallo, e scende. [5] E impugna l’uno e l’altro il ferro acuto, [6] ed aguzza l’orgoglio e l’ire accende [7] e vansi a ritrovar non altrimenti [8] che duo tori gelosi e d’ira ardenti. Monteverdi: Combattimento, stanza 2 [3] Né vol Tancredi, ch’ebbe a piè veduto [4] il suo nemico, usar cavallo, e scende; [5] e impugna l’un l’altro il ferro acuto, [6] ed aguzza l’orgoglio e l’ira accende; [7] e vansi incontro a passi tardi e lenti [8] quai duo tori gelosi e d’ira ardenti. [3] Tancredi, who has seen that his enemy is on foot [the translation does not vary between the two slightly different versions], [4] does not wish to use a horse, and dismounts; [5] each of them grasps his sharp sword, [6] whets his pride, and ignites his wrath [7] and they Tasso: find themselves not dissimilar Monteverdi: approach each with slow, lingering steps [8] Tasso: to two jealous bulls Monteverdi: like two jealous bulls ablaze with anger.

Monteverdi lifts the words for lines 3, 7, and 8 from the Conquistata (but he does not borrow the variant with the Liberata in line 5: “e tragge l’uno e l’altro il ferro acuto”). In particular, the words a passi tardi e lenti (slow and lingering steps) derive from Petrarch’s RVF XXXV, the famous first-person sonnet Solo e pensoso (Alone and pensive) referring to the poet himself as the narrator (Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi / vo misurando a passi tardi e lenti). The word passi (steps) emphasizes the relationship with the word piè (foot) used in line 3. The resulting newly-stressed Petrarchan topic of the “steps” (passi), in turn, provides Monteverdi with the opportunity to insert four identical instrumental passages in measures 58–60, 61–63, 64–66, and 67–69. They mimic precisely the “slow and lingering steps” through which Tancredi and Clorinda approach each other. This prescient foreshadowing by instrumental music of the verbal narrative—a mark  

 

 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   231

of the composer’s omniscient role as narrator—is first introduced at the very beginning of the piece (mm. 10–11), when the strings and the continuo anticipate the beginning of Testo’s narration by outlining the triad of D minor: Va girando colei l’alpestre cima (“She [Clorinda] circles the mountainous peak”), Testo sings at this point (line 3 of stanza 1). In the first section of Combattimento Monteverdi then focalizes the two warriors’ steps—themselves having a musical and poetic dimension—orienting our visual perception toward them, as if in a camera closeup. Such a move, in turn, facilitates the deictic shift from our real-time world to the world of fiction. The effort to establish the narrator’s role in the setting of the first two stanzas sets the stage for the third stanza (ott. 54), which begins with the line Notte, che nel profondo oscuro seno (“O night, who in your dark, murky bosom”). Here Testo, as the character visually embodying the narrator, takes over to such a degree that critics have compared this passage to the prologue of Orfeo.55 In dramatic narratives, as we have seen, the sections that foreground the narrator addressing the audience may be called “diegetic” or “epic.” 56 The Notte stanza, as set by Monteverdi, bears all the musical and textual characteristics of an operatic prologue, such as strophic setting and self-reflexive topic. The subject-effects that we have discussed in this chapter and in chapter 2 in relationship with the prologue of Orfeo—self-reflexive, presence, narrative, and focalizing—are, as a consequence, prominent here as well, although deictic words are for the most part absent.57 In his video production, the director Pierre Audi—whose name I henceforth use to mean “the filmic narrator”—capitalizes on Monteverdi’s strategy of highlighting Testo’s role as both narrator and focalizer (“Monteverdi” is Audi’s musical counterpart as narrator, with Testo becoming the proxy-character for both).58 Audi, as we shall see, also assigns an increasingly prominent visual role to Clorinda. The action takes place on a stage that appears to be made of desert sand. The setting is minimal. A tall metallic wall, with vertical rectangular sheets protruding from its surface, runs the entire length of the stage. A large rock sits at center stage. Further downstage, slightly stage right, are two large metal basins with crackling fires lit in them. The lighting is dim and natural in color, and the atmosphere is pervaded by an earthly, brown glow. Testo, wearing an austere dark gown and carrying a blanket on his right shoulder, appears silently before the music begins, during an introduction in which he walks, alone and pensive, close to the two crackling fires. The fires can be interpreted as symbolizing the two shifting foci of the narrative process taking place in the subsequent action, those of narrator and focalizer. At the beginning of the setting Testo gazes at the camera, narrating his story by addressing an audience that is absent but may be imagined seated further downstage, where the camera is located at the beginning. The viewer of the video has no sense  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

232   Staging the Self  

Figure 9. Claudio Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, production by Pierre Audi (Opus Arte OA 0972B D): screenshot corresponding to m. 10 (Clorinda: Lorna Anderson).

that the representation takes place in a real theater, so the imaginary audience might sit, communally, close to the performers. In measure 10, when the string quartet enters by imitating Clorinda’s steps, the entire frame is occupied by her feet (figure 9). While the action takes place behind Testo, he does not turn toward it. The camera is thus initially not meant to show his point of view, but the audience’s. Testo’s role as narrator is therefore emphasized, the camera-eye focalizing the action and appropriating the role of the instruments. These are indeed never shown during the production, so their role as visible, external focalizers is diminished. After measure 16 the camera shots alternate between Testo and Tancredi, until the viewer realizes that Testo is finally gazing at the action (around m. 23). Gradually, the camera shows the point of view of Testo as Tancredi follows Clorinda. But as soon as the dialogue between the two warriors becomes more intense (from m. 38), Testo’s gaze again turns toward the audience. At the moment in which Testo describes the warriors approaching each other (e vansi incontro . . . a passi tardi e lenti) and the instruments punctuate his description, the action occurs completely behind him, the camera again working as the focalizing agent (figure 10). The Notte stanza shows Testo’s power as narrator, which is similar to that of La Musica in the Prologue of Orfeo (both are strophic settings). Testo sits on his blanket and addresses the audience. But at this point in the performance of



Monteverdi, Narrator   233

Figure 10. Claudio Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, production by Pierre Audi (Opus Arte OA 0972B D): “a passi tardi e lenti” (ottava 2, Testo: Guy de Mey; Clorinda: Lorna Anderson; Tancredi: Maarten Koningsberger).

Combattimento a prolonged freeze-frame effect for the two warriors would be unlikely since the action is already underway and cannot be stopped for long without endangering dramatic continuity. This ambiguity—or, in Ossi’s words, “the tension between dramatic and narrative time” 59—is built into the score. The instrumental interlude marked passeggio (“walk,” at mm. 80–97 and 106–13) frames the first strophe, setting lines 1–4 of the third stanza, and must refer to some kind of physical “walking,” presumably by the warriors. The score problematizes the status of the piece as “work” by referring to its performance and creating a disjunction with it. The Notte stanza is a problematic passage for any staging of Combattimento: what are the two warriors going to do for about five minutes while Testo meditates on their actions? Audi first freezes the action of the warriors for the interlude, but when Testo starts singing Notte their fight loudly resumes. Testo and “his” music are oblivious to it. In this way, the characters acquire life silently, independently of any musical relationship with Testo, the role of which was instead heavily emphasized in the setting of the first two stanzas. Audi’s compromise solution brings out the productive ambiguity implicit in the text. Analyses of the score of Combattimento that exaggerate the freeze-frame, “prologue” effect risk missing the mark. During the subsequent guerra (battle), characterized musically by the genere concitato, Testo steadily maintains his focus toward the public, emphasizing his  

 

 

 

 

234   Staging the Self  

role as narrator. Yet he cannot help but turning quickly toward the warriors in two passages: at measure 175, in the setting of stanza 5, when the clash of their armor is imitated by the instruments, and Testo sings dansi con pomi e infelloniti e crudi / cozzan con gli elmi insieme e con gli scudi (“they hit each other with the pommels roughly and cruelly / they butt each other with their helmets and shields”); and at measure 199, in the setting of stanza 6, when the confrontation resumes (line 5: Tornano al ferro, “They return to their steel”) and Testo spins around to face the characters. At first he seems excited at the fight. But then he turns away in distress in measure 202 when he sings sangue (blood), a keyword that Monteverdi himself introduces by modifying Tasso’s original word piaghe (sores), and is thus not one of his borrowings from the Gerusalemme conquistata. It is only during the setting of the seventh stanza (from mm. 228–29) that Testo becomes more of a participant in the action. At the point in which he describes Tancredi gazing at Clorinda’s flowing blood (the keyword sangue), Testo lifts his blanket and walks upstage toward the two contenders. From center stage he approaches Tancredi, who stands far stage right. A camera from a low angle behind the male warrior shows Testo in a reaction shot facing and pitying Tancredi for his vanity (ne gode e insuperbisce, “this pleases and flatters him,” mm. 234–35). Testo’s emotional identification with the warrior emerges when, turning his gaze for a moment away from him, he exclaims O nostra folle / mente ch’ogni aura di fortuna estolle! (“Oh our foolish / mind, raised up by every breeze of fortune!” mm. 235–39). Then, again, Testo bridges emotionally with Tancredi in the climactic moment in which he addresses him face to face with the words Misero, di che godi? (“Wretched man, why are you enjoying this?”, the beginning of stanza 8, figure 11). In Tasso’s poem this is one of those “passionate” moments in which, as we remember, the narrator steps into the action and empathizes with the characters, playing the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In Audi’s production this moment represents a turning point in the staged action. For the words un mar di pianto (“a sea of tears,” mm. 248–49) Testo again turns his gaze away, the camera this time closing in on him. By calibrating the distance between the characters and by using careful camerawork, Audi gradually shifts the focus of the action. Now the character is indifferent to the narrator, whereas in the staging of the first seven stanzas the opposite situation was true: the narrator was, to a certain extent, indifferent to the characters, mostly turning his back to them and simply narrating the action, not participating in it. That is: only after he has stressed his role as detached narrator does Testo allow himself to fully empathize with the characters and to focalize them. One of the main tasks of the performance consists of calibrating the modality and timing of the shift in emphasis from narration to focalization, implied by Monteverdi’s text. This shift from narration to focalization is similar to that effected by the  

 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   235

Figure 11. Claudio Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, production by Pierre Audi (Opus Arte OA 0972B D): “Misero, di che godi?” (ottava 8, Testo: Guy de Mey; Tancredi: Maarten Koningsberger; Clorinda [in the back]: Lorna Anderson).

three men in Lamento della ninfa (discussed above), except that in Lamento the composer is much more prescriptive about boundaries. Thanks to a clear-cut dramatic construction devised by Monteverdi through an artful manipulation of the poetic text, the three men first inform the audience about the dramatic situation (Non havea Febo ancora, strophes 1–3), to then become focalizers of the nymph’s pianto in the Lament proper ( [Amor] dicea / Miserella, strophes 4– 9), finally rounding out the story by returning to their role as narrators (Sì tra sdegnosi pianti, last strophe). As a longer and more complex madrigale rappresentativo, Combattimento allows Monteverdi to smooth out transitions, leaving the staged performance with more leverage in generating autonomous meanings. Whereas before the setting of the eighth stanza the characters were absorbed into Testo’s role (also musically; remember the triadic motions), Testo is now fully involved in the character’s shifting emotions—as we too are with him. Tancredi’s words asking Clorinda to reveal her name are sung, true, while Testo is again turned away from the characters. But the shot beginning with Testo’s rispose la feroce (“The fierce woman replied”)—words set on a broken D major triad arpeggiated upward and then completed by Clorinda’s Indarno chiedi (‘In vain you ask,” mm. 283–85)—reveals Testo’s emotional involvement and deep concern for her. When l’ora fatal (“the fatal hour”) arrives, the respective positions on stage of Testo and the warriors are inverted. Now Tancredi and Clorinda are situ 

 

 

 

 

 

236   Staging the Self  

Figure 12. Claudio Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, production by Pierre Audi (Opus Arte OA 0972B D): “e se rubella in vita fu” (ottava 13, Testo: Guy de Mey; Clorinda: Lorna Anderson).

ated further downstage, closer to the audience, and Testo stands behind them. Clorinda gradually becomes the focal point of the video production, also through over-the-shoulder shots, like that shown in figure 12. During her moving concession in strophe 14 (Amico, hai vinto, “Friend, you have conquered,” mm. 365–83) the camera zooms slowly toward Clorinda’s face. Then, during the recognition scene, although we hear Testo’s voice, the video shows only Tancredi’s reaction. Indeed Monteverdi at this point adopts for Testo a musical style that could de facto belong to Tancredi (who sings in the same vocal range), resulting in what we might call character interference. Testo becomes a vessel for Tancredi’s emotions: Testo’s words la vide e la conobbe (“he saw her and recognized her”) are set in a rapid succession of sixteenth and eighteenth notes (mm. 409–10), followed, after a dramatic rest, by: e restò senza e voce e moto (“and remained speechless and motionless”), set on a repeated low D in slow, lingering quarter notes, punctuated by rests. Singing Ahi vista, ahi conoscenza! (“Ah, what a sight! Ah, what a recognition!” mm. 417–19)—a double cry framed by tragic silences, which literally could be put into the mouth of Tancredi—Testo is again alone in the filmic frame, but the viewer is at this point fully transported into the warrior’s mind. From that moment on, Testo gradually concedes the filmic space to Clorinda. A close-up of her face dominates the performance of the final moments of the madrigal, unifying in a single overarching visual-semiotic unit—under her, and not Testo’s, control as the agent—the last line, thus encompassing both indirect  

 

 

 

 

 

 



Monteverdi, Narrator   237

and direct speech: [Testo:] E dir parea: “S’apre il ciel, io vado in pace” (“she seemed to say: ‘heaven is opening, I depart in peace’ ”). To the musical interference created by Monteverdi in his inter-medial effort of turning Tasso’s epic characters into fully musical-theatrical ones, the video performance adds its own interference, the additional and powerful layer of the image. After the musical setting has ended, Clorinda’s actual passing away is shown as a slow-motion leaning backward of her head, in a silent moment paralleling the narrator’s first walk around the stage. The final, moving frame, characterized by formal symmetries, shows Clorinda lying dead on the rock, with Tancredi kneeling and bowing his head in reverence, and Testo, subdued, far behind Tancredi but in the same exact posture—the filmic narrator keeping the last word for himself. It would be reductive to call Combattimento a pre-operatic work. From Tasso to Monteverdi to “Testo” to Clorinda to Audi, this video production of Combat­ timento engages the viewer through a highly dynamic play (itself a combattimento) of shifting narrative roles. It shows the potential of this piece to transcend not only genres but also media. Any staged performance of this piece draws the audience into a “theater” that is no longer imaginary, as it was in the other madrigalistic settings discussed in this chapter, but real—a theatrical space as opposed to an evocable space. But this space, in turn, can become a filmic space by expanding and redirecting the roles of narrator and focalizer. As Tasso says in the Notte stanza: the opre memorande (“memorable efforts”) of the two warriors are degne d’un chiaro sol, degne d’un pieno theatro (“worthy of a bright sun, worthy of a full theater”). In appropriating Tasso’s voice, Monteverdi took this claim literally, triggering a process of cross-fertilization among genres and media of which we have probably not yet seen the end.  

 

7



The Possibility of Opera

In the performances of the Prologue of Orfeo, as staged by Luca Ronconi (see chapter 3), and of Combattimento, as staged by Pierre Audi (chapter 6), a character at first represents the narrator—La Musica in the former case, Testo in the latter one. Both characters assert their presences through musical, verbal, and scenic effects. At a later phase—respectively, in the third and seventh strophes of their settings—La Musica and Testo also emerge as focalizing agents, their function as narrators gradually receding into the background in order to “give life” to focalized characters—respectively, Orpheus and Tancredi/Clorinda. Clorinda becomes so autonomous a character as to herself become a focalizer at the end. Under this perspective, both performances can be said to stage the birth of musical theater, and in the second case, we might add, out of the spirit of the madrigal. The madrigal is traditionally dominated by the narrator’s voice, diffused into the polyphonic concentus. But in the hands of Monteverdi, particularly in his Books V to VIII, the madrigal becomes the privileged site for the performance of a plurality of points of view. Characters come to life intermittently even despite their absence from the verbal text as such, thanks, for example, to the focalizing role played by instruments in concertato madrigals. Still, the narrator remains the ever-present voice (in narrative terms) that is audible and visible mostly in the continuo line, but also intermittently in individual voices (in physical terms) such as the bass—this was a traditional conduit of the “speaker” since Arcadelt. The implicit power of the composer as narrator remained a staple of operatic performances into the seventeenth century (and beyond), as attested by Charles de Saint-Évremond’s claim that “the composer comes to mind before the operatic hero does; it is Rossi, Cavalli, Cesti, whom we imagine . . . and one cannot deny  

 

 

 

 

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The Possibility of Opera    239

that in the performances at the Palais Royal everyone is thinking a hundred times more of Lully than of Thésée or Cadmus.” 1 In the following pages I discuss a political and cultural context relevant to the above developments and characterizing the Venice of the first half of the seventeenth century, in which Monteverdi operated. In 1637, the Serenissima, as known, saw the beginning of public opera, followed six years later by the masterwork in the genre, The Coronation of Poppea. I focus on the politics and culture of the elites, in particular the academy known as the Incogniti (the Unknowns). It is within this Venetian intellectual circle that human voice was accorded a unique epistemological value in the making of subjectivity—an indispensable condition for the creation of operatic characters defined primarily by their voices. This view of voice depended on a larger, skeptical worldview, typical of some late Renaissance intellectual circles (in this respect proto-Enlightenment-like), which mistrusted commonly accepted dogmas about the value of reason.2 The role played by Giovan Battista Marino in this context was prominent, his aesthetics widely shared also by the librettist of Poppea, Giovan Francesco Busenello, a member of the Incogniti. As seen in chapter 6, Monteverdi’s settings of Marino’s poems in his Books VI and VII allowed the composer to develop a proto-operatic fictional world in which characters emerge within a “theatre of the ear” that is all the musician’s autonomous invention as narrator. Marinist aesthetics enabled the multiplicity of points of view characterizing the fictional world of Monteverdi not only in his madrigals but also, as I claim, in his last operatic masterwork. In the final part of the chapter I explore the issue of multiple perspectives in relationship to Poppea.  

The A e s t he t ic s of No t h i n g : M o n t e v e r di ,   M a r i n o, a n d t he I n co g n i t i

The Accademia degli Incogniti was one of the largest and most prestigious academies in seventeenth-century Europe. Active in Venice between ca. 1623 and 1661, the academy counted among its three hundred members librettists such as the author of Poppea Giovan Francesco Busenello, Giacomo Badoaro (the librettist of Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria), Maiolino Bisaccioni, Giacomo Dall’Angelo, Giovan Battista Fusconi, Scipione Errico, Nicolò Beregan, and Giulio Strozzi. In addition to librettos and cantata texts, Incogniti members wrote poetic praises of the divas singing on the stages of Venice, such as the Roman Anna Renzi (the first Octavia in Poppea). They also might have played a role in the activities of the Teatro Novissimo, the theater which, in 1641, saw the premiere of Giulio Strozzi and Francesco Sacrati’s opera La finta pazza—the besttraveled opera at the time, touring much of Italy, to finally be brought to Paris in 1645 (it too featured Renzi in the original cast).3 A subgroup of the Incogniti  

240   Staging the Self  

during the late 1630s, known as the Accademia degli Unisoni, was, as its name suggests, especially interested in music, holding its meetings in the house of singer and composer Barbara Strozzi, the stepdaughter of the Incognito Giulio. The Incogniti’s reputation spread all over Europe via an effective self-promoting propaganda machine, in part thanks to their contacts with several Venetian publishers (notably Sarzina, Baba, and Valvasense), which, despite the threat of censorship, continued to print the Incogniti’s licentious works.4 Many of the academicians were in fact libertines, their religious views bordering on blasphemy and Protestantism. In the first twenty years of its existence (1637–57) Venetian opera could fully develop thanks in part to a favorable political and religious environment that, in modern terms, can be roughly defined as “progressive” and “liberal.” A libertine academy such as the Incogniti could prosper only in a period in which the city enjoyed a freedom that modern historians deem as unprecedented in European history. Giovan Francesco Loredano, the founder of the Incogniti and the prime engine of their activities, published several narrative works ranging from lascivious amorous novels to austere religious meditations. The academicians met in his palace near S. Maria Formosa, in the sestiere of Castello. An echo of these gatherings is preserved in a collection of discourses published in 1635 dealing with the most varied subjects, from the trivial (such as cheese-tasting) to the serious (politics, history, and aesthetics).5 The last discourse of the nineteen in the collection is entitled Le Glorie del Niente (The Glories of Nothing) and was written by Marin Dall’Angelo.6 Like Busenello (the author of Poppea) and other librettists, Dall’Angelo was a prominent Venetian lawyer. He was also the leader of another academy, the Accademia degli Imperfetti, to which Busenello and Bisaccioni belonged, and the father of librettist Giacomo, both an Incognito and an Imperfetto. Le Glorie del Niente had been published separately a year earlier as part of a polemical exchange of views between the Incogniti and certain French intellectuals.7 In this Franco–Italian polemic the issue at stake was the concept of Nothing, advocated by the Italians but opposed by the French. The exchange started with a discorso by the Incognito Luigi Manzini, entitled Il Niente (Nothing), published in May 1634.8 Dall’Angelo’s Glorie del Niente must have appeared shortly after it, since a harsh reply to both essays was published in July, written by the Frenchman Raimondo Vidal and entitled Il Niente annientato (Nothing annihilated), with a dedication to Gasparo Coignet, the French ambassador in Venice. In the following month, Jacques Gaffarel, an emissary of Richelieu, attempted a compromise, but in 1635 a certain “Villa, Accademico Disarmato” concluded the diatribe with a detailed critique of Manzini’s discorso. This debate echoed many earlier discussions on the same subject dating from as far back as ancient philosophy, and continued the tradition of “paradoxes on  

 



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Nothing” that flourished during the Renaissance.9 Expanding on this tradition, the academicians extended the philosophical compass of Nothingness so broadly that it illuminates other aspects of their ideology, including the aesthetics implied in their support of the genre of opera. The main thesis of Manzini’s Il Niente—one that was certainly inflammatory, to judge from the subsequent reactions—is “that no thing, outside of God, is more noble and perfect than Nothing.” 10 The author begins his essay by praising novelty over authority, and the “new” over the “old,” claiming for himself a new freedom (nuova libertà) of judgment. He rejects all philosophical and theological assertions about the inadmissibility of Nothing as well as scientific claims about Nature’s avoidance of a vacuum (horror vacui)—impressively so, as this is a full decade before Torricelli’s discovery of the actual physical vacuum. Nothing, Manzini says, “includes in itself all that is possible and all that is impossible.” 11 In a display of virtuoso rhetoric, he initiates a long and elaborate list of attributes of Nothing by affirming that Man himself is Nothing—a statement that he curiously supports by claiming that the Latin word Homo contains two Os to represent two zeros that, in turn, represent Nothing (!). Indeed, all human disciplines and liberal arts, according to Manzini, evolve from Nothing. He discusses in turn: perspective, painting, sculpture, military arts, architecture, philosophy, politics, theology, arithmetic (here again the zero is his evidence), dialectic, rhetoric—and finally grammar, of which Manzini says: “It is an unhappy discipline that only tries to shape boys’ rough voices; the same voices which, as soon as they are exposed to air, are dispersed by strong winds, and which, if pious minds did not collect their fantastic relics, would—all of them, at the point of their birth—vanish into the wide sepulcher of Nothing and evaporate.” 12 In this passage voice and nothing are directly associated. To the list of what we may henceforth call “figures of Nothing”—including voice—the author adds sleep, darkness, silence, time, and death. In his treatment of the last two figures Manzini touches not only on the semantic area of the vanitates vanitatum portrayed in contemporary painted “still lives” (one thinks of Evaristo Baschenis), but also on ideological assumptions common to much early seventeenth-century Italian literature: in particular, the poems dealing with the time preceding God’s Creation, when there was no time. For the Incogniti, this nihil, contrary to Doctrine, is not dispelled by the act of Creation, but is still within and around us, constantly reminding men of the blurred boundaries between Life and Death. Only at the point of death will we completely “open our eyes” to the “wonders of Nothing” (le meraviglie del Niente)—until that moment, we can only be alerted to the signs of what is indeed denoted by absence.13 Manzini’s essay was soon echoed by Dall’Angelo’s discorso on the same subject, Le Glorie del Niente, which reinforced its main points. Dedicating his essay to the founder of the Incogniti, Loredano, Dall’Angelo presents a list of figures of  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nothing similar to Manzini’s. For example, under the rubric “Life” Dall’Angelo claims that men are nothing but “dust, shadows, and dreams, which in the end only aim to teach us that our life is an animated trumpet that keeps playing, in the triumph of death, the admirable Glories of Nothing.” 14 Other concepts explored by Dall’Angelo indicate the aspiration on the part of the Incogniti toward a unifying, even encyclopedic philosophy of Nothing. These include “poetics,” described as “a very formal idea of all Nothing” (“can it,” the author wonders, “be itself without inventions, like fables without phantasms, which are nothing else than nothing?”);15 “histories,” which are “none other than many glorious annals of the wonders of Nothing”;16 and finally, “politics,” a subject relevant to theater (musical and nonmusical): And if we turn to politics, you see that its aim is nothing else than increasing or augmenting the magnitude of the wonders of Nothing. If politics teaches how to add to the greatness of one Prince, you’ll see in it a great master in annihilating the greatness of another one. If politics has already added to the greatness of somebody in the past, what else has it done through this help other than having caused the opening of many Royal Theaters, in which the Nothing represents, in the outcome of the plots, the wonders of its own Glories? In them you can see how from the fall of the first queen of the world, the Babylonian monarchy, arises the great throne of the Persian; from the ruins of the Persian are built the foundations of the Greek; and from the ashes of the Greek is ignited the flame of the greatness of the Roman one.17

Dall’Angelo affirms that the soul of man is also Nothing, reinforcing Manzini’s similar claim (but quoting from Skeptic philosophers), and so are his virtue, history, health, and study. In contrast to the humanistic ideology predominant in the Renaissance, the author claims that the disciplines of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric), far from empowering man in his search for knowledge, teach him nothing else than to embellish “those voices that serve only as midwives to the vain products of our imagination, delivering them perfect into the air only in order to vanish into Nothing.” 18 Dall’Angelo also lists all four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) as deriving from Nothing. Dall’Angelo’s belief that the disciplines of language cannot be used to gain knowledge of the world has far-reaching implications. Since the world to which language should refer is indeed Nothing, words become useless. A comprehensive conception of an all-involving Nothing—a true Weltanschauung—can certainly not spare human language. Compared to previous, late-Renaissance assumptions, Dall’Angelo’s claims reflect a “paradigm shift,” a shift that, by extending the concept of Nothing to language, both he and his fellow academician Manzini were no doubt conscious of accomplishing (Manzini, we remember, opens his essay by praising novelty over authority). Their views of the relative value of reality and language bear four significant consequences for music and opera.  

 



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First, the Incogniti aesthetics reveals a profound distrust of verbal language— words, in their view, are as unsubstantial as the outside world that they mirror and to which they refer. The Incogniti skepticism affects in primis the status of written texts. This is evident in other works of theirs, for example, in the novels of Loredano, in which characters often show a remarkable inability to speak normally, as if they were affected by logorrhea or aphasia. Such symptoms of a crisis of language, however, are not only a peculiar characteristic of Incogniti works but, as modern literary critics observe, they can also be considered one of the main stylistic features of Italian literature during the period in which the academy flourished. In that period, which critics generally consider the beginning of the Baroque, many literary genres lost their internal balance, their classic decorum and equilibrium. Prose texts, for example, either stretched themselves into multi-volume works of gigantic proportions or shrank into the tiny dimensions of the aphorism, in both cases disrupting the reader’s temporal expectations. The Incogniti philosophy of nothing, with its distrust of the power of verbal language, may well be considered the philosophical premise of these stylistic extremes. These features also characterize contemporaneous texts written for music, i.e., poesie per musica and librettos, texts of special interest to the academicians. In such texts, programmatically, the semantic “weight” of words tends to evaporate, while their sonorous aspect prevails. On the page, for example, arias appear as short aphoristic poems. But in the life of performance the music stretches the text’s temporal dimension, conveying the feeling and the dramatic situation. Distrust of the meaning of language is compensated by trust in the power of voice. The Incogniti distrust of written texts opens the door to performance— and Venetian opera will immediately capitalize on this new opportunity. A second consequence of the Incogniti claims (one not unrelated to the first) affects the fabric of language itself, that is, the dependence of sound on sense.19 If words (as the Incogniti claim) lose their power to reflect reality—i.e., if they are disentangled from their meanings—then the relationship of meaning to sound and voice is disrupted, entering a situation of crisis and instability. To borrow from the terminology used by Michel Foucault in describing the linguistic situation of a wide variety of discourses produced in seventeenth-century Europe: If words are no longer the “marks of things,” a void opens up in language between signifiers and signifieds; the former, emancipated from the latter, become free to “wander off on their own” and to play with themselves as pure sonorous entities.20 This dissociation of sound and meaning enables a positive evaluation, indeed a legitimization, of sound in itself, affecting not only its linguistic but also its musical aspect. Two autonomous sounding structures enter in fact into a relationship when text and music are joined together. Being equal in status, music does not need to claim its dependence on texts. The Incogniti’s distrust of verbal meaning legitimizes new music-stylistic choices. For example, the use of sound-miming  

 

 

 

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melismas to illustrate textual meaning (madrigalisms) can coexist with passages that efface meaning, such as overvocalizations resulting from asynchronicities between text and music.21 These phenomena become justified from the aesthetic point of view. After all, why bother to reflect the meaning of words musically if they signify nothing? A third consequence of the detachment of res and verba accomplished by the Incogniti philosophy is the dismantling of a traditional notion that had dominated the aesthetics of opera since late sixteenth-century discussions on the legitimacy of the genre, centering on Aristotelian precepts of imitation in drama: the adherence to the principle of verisimilitude.22 If (as the Incogniti claim) the world has no meaning and signs are divorced from the things they should signify, then no reality can be persuasively staged, either verbally or visually. The Renaissance ideal of art imitating nature loses its raison d’être, and verisimilitude becomes dispensable. Indeed, the Incogniti’s innovative views represent the counterpart—better, the epistemological condition—of two principles at the root of seventeenth-century aesthetics in Italy: novelty (novità) and the “marvelous” (meraviglia). These two principles, positively emphasizing imagination and experimentation, are diametrically opposed to that of verisimilitude, with its implications of realism and adherence to received notions. It is revealing in this respect that Marino—the champion and main practitioner of the aesthetics of “novelty” and of the “marvelous”—was also a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti. He was the author of the prototypical Baroque dictum “il fin del poeta è la meraviglia” (the aim of the poet is to marvel), a sentence that might have been extended de facto to the aims of opera producers. Finally, breaking with the principle of verisimilitude also allowed the Incog­ niti—and opera—to set aside another tenet ruling Renaissance drama, one endlessly discussed by literary theorists, the so-called Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action.23 The three unities were discussed by Incogniti librettists in the prefaces to their works, often, however, simply to dismiss them, claiming that modern taste and the need to satisfy the audience were enough to breach them. Busenello, the librettist of Poppea, argued against the unity of time in the preface to Didone (1641), against those of time and place in that of Giulio Cesare (1646), and against unity of action in Gli amori di Apollo e Dafne (1640). He justifies this last breach by invoking the example of Guarini’s tragicomedy Il Pastor fido, with its two-tiered plot involving two couples of lovers—Mirtillo and Amarilli, and Silvio and Dorinda—which provided librettist Giovanni Faustini (not an Incognito, however) with the model for the plots of his operas of the 1640s and 1650s. As Andrea Battistini has observed in relationship to the plot of Poppea, “while the literati suffered for a long time the vetoes of the pseudo-Aristotelian unities, the librettists and the musicians, much more unscrupulous than the literati, allowed themselves to weave within the same opera multiple and varied actions, such as,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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in Poppea, the tragic act of Seneca’s suicide, the moving event of Octavia’s exile, and the erotic scenes tied to the appearance on stage of Poppaea.” 24 As a consequence of this disregard of dramatic unities, operatic plots could now fully resemble those of novels (romanzi), a genre in which the Incogniti were indeed masters.25 In the words of one of the Incogniti novelists, Giambattista Manzini, the genre of the novel was “the most stupendous and glorious machine devised by the mind,” one that could freely blend history, poetry, and epics, and compete with more established literary genres. The same could be said for the new Venetian operas of the 1640s and 1650s, which, precisely like contemporary Venetian novels, had clear commercial goals and aimed to cultivate a wide and diversified public, from the nobleman to the prostitute. The libertine academy even made a collective effort to publish a multi-authored collection of novels written by forty-five of its members and entitled Cento novelle dei signori Incogniti, which came out in 1651 but was published in a first installment of thirty items in 1641.26 Incogniti libertine writers such as Ferrante Pallavicino, Francesco Pona, and Antonio Rocco (but also Loredano) all wrote several successful novels, often censored by the Church. The Incogniti activity in this literary field is to be seen in a European context in which this popular genre was starting to become what it still is today, and to which the Venetian authors made a significant contribution, their works being translated into French, German, English, and Spanish.27 The novel is the genre characterized by that relationship between narrator and characters, and by that multiplicity of points of views, from which modern narratology first developed its main conceptual tools, such as focalization. In a chapter of his essay “Dramaturgy of Italian Opera” entitled, significantly, “The Opera as Novel,” Carl Dahlhaus discusses the plot of Francesco Cavalli’s Erismena (1655) as a manifestation of the poetics of “beautiful confusion” or beau irrégulier (Boileau). Dahlhaus traces its roots to the Baroque novel of Hellenistic derivation: “as ‘ideal types’, both the musical and the spoken forms of baroque drama”—he claims, although unaware of the Incogniti novels—“are derivatives of the novel, for it was only in that genre’s almost unlimited space that the interplay of deceptions, calumnies, misunderstandings, and mistaken identities could achieve the essential degree of complication.” 28 If opera, as Dahlhaus claims, does resemble a novel—and this, as we have seen, is particularly true in the Venice of the late Monteverdi (Francesco Cavalli’s teacher)—then the issue arises as to the identity of the narrator and its relationship to the characters—an issue with which the madrigal had long dealt with before the Incogniti laid the ground for a new operatic aesthetics.  

 

 

 

 

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aesthetics: Petrarch’s concept of female Beauty. That the academician was aware of disrupting traditional notions is shown by the elaborate rhetorical maneuver to which he resorts in his essay to introduce the issue as part of his “catalogue” of attributes of Nothing. Deceptively, he first lists all the reasons why we should indeed believe in Beauty as the manifestation in the universe of the One, thus following the Neoplatonic tradition embodied, for example, in much sixteenthcentury love poetry influenced by Petrarch or by the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino.29 But then the Incognito’s prose takes a brusque turn: “Yet this is not so, listeners. On the contrary: there is nobody else that can more certainly explain to us the glories of Nothing than Beauty: she, the glorious hand that in the great painting of the universe, brushes for us the wonders of Nothing; she herself is the vague and most gracious Nothing . . . , the first mother of the glories of Nothing.” 30 In support of his controversial claim that Beauty is Nothing, Dall’Angelo quotes the following lines: O diletto mortal, gioia terrena, come pullula tosto e tosto cade! Vano piacer che gli animi trastulla, nato di Vanità, svanisce in nulla. (emphasis added)31

Dall’Angelo draws the four lines from the seventh canto of L’Adone, Marino’s masterwork of 1623, today considered the quintessential Baroque poem.32 The lines conclude the episode featuring a beautiful singer named Allurement. In Adone VII music and voice are so central that the canto can be considered a manifesto of the musical aesthetics of the period. In this respect it provides a background for understanding the Incogniti’s views on voice and, indirectly, on opera—as well as Monteverdi’s own aesthetics.  

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L’Adone is a poem of immense ambition and proportions, indeed the longest one in Italian literature (about forty thousand lines divided into twenty cantos). Its refined style has been aptly characterized by a modern scholar as “grandly musical.” 33 Marino often uses language not so much for its content, or for advancing the narrative, but for its purely sonorous qualities, almost as if he were toying with language’s signifiers. In effect the poem is poor as far as narrative elements are concerned, the plot consisting basically of a gigantic reelaboration (the longest in world literature) of the myth of Venus and Adonis as recounted by Ovid, filled with lengthy digressions. One of Marino’s most extensive additions to the myth consists of the visit of Venus and Adonis to the Palace of the Senses. There the young boy is “educated” by the goddess in the pleasures of the senses by walking through five Gardens,



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those of Sight, Smell (canto VI), Hearing and Music, Taste (canto VII), and finally Touch (canto VIII). In canto VII, entitled “Le delizie” (The delightful things), Adonis and Venus enter the Garden of Hearing after a guardian playing the lyre welcomes them.34 The famous lines “Music and Poetry are two sisters / who alleviate the afflicted” (1, 1–2) announce the topic that repeatedly surfaces in the canto, the relationships between voice and words.35 Through a detailed anatomic description of the ear and of its functioning, the guardian of the garden explains to the visitors the value of hearing (11–17). Then he brings them to a large birdcage in which several species of birds, all described in great detail, sing their “symphony” (18–31). One bird stands out in the group: the nightingale, the “musical monster” (musico mostro), “the sounding atom” (atomo sonante), whose performance is described as if it were that of a virtuoso singer (ottava 33):  

 

 

To hear a musical monster: oh what a wonder, one that is heard, yes, but only a little bit, how it now breaks its voice, and now recovers, now stops it, now twists it, now soft, now loud, now it murmurs lowly, now thins it, now makes of sweet groppi a long chain, which always, whether it scatters it or gathers it, with the same melody it ties and loosens.36

The nightingale first sings a “lament” and then a “canzonetta,” while Adonis listens with “attentive ears” (orecchie fisse). Mercury arrives and tells the lovers a story that reminds them of the price once paid by the nightingale for such gorgeous singing (38–62): One night an abandoned lover took refuge in a forest and started singing his lament accompanied by his lute. A nightingale heard him, stopped singing his plea for the coming day, and started, little by little, to imitate the lover’s lament. The man took pleasure in hearing the imitation of his singing, so, initially with the intention of mocking the bird, he started playing some really virtuoso passages on the lyre to see if the bird was able to follow him. To the lover’s dismay, the nightingale actually managed to replicate everything that he played, so that a heated contest arose, which, in canto VII, lasts for nine ottave (44–53). The contest ends with the brutal death of the nightingale, literally exploding because of excessive singing (54). Mercury concludes the story as follows: the poet, after having buried the bird within his lute, kept one of its feathers with which he wrote his lament on the death of the nightingale (55–62). Through the episode of the contest between poet and nightingale Marino creates a powerful narrative symbolizing the birth of written poetry out of the death of singing: it is necessary for the nightingale to die in order for the poet to start writing (earlier he only improvised). That is: if music and poetry are indeed  

 

 

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sisters (as Marino claims at the beginning of the canto), the latter can exist only insofar as the former sacrifices her very essence, although music does survive within poetry as a memory, an absence (i.e., a nothing). The episode of the contest also shares important characteristics with other literary narratives concerning the bird’s singing and, by association, the voice’s relationship with death; for example, with the story of the Lacaedemonian and the nightingale narrated by Plutarch, which was adopted in the Renaissance by Erasmus and then repeated as a topos by many other writers, a story that culminates (as Marino’s contest does) with the death of the bird and the suggestion that it was always just a nothing. Death is also the outcome in the Greek myth of Procne and Philomela, at the root of many references to voice in European literature.37 In this instance, as in Marino’s contest, death is followed by lament: Procne is transformed into a nightingale perpetually lamenting her child Itys, whom she has killed to avenge her husband’s rape of her sister, Philomela.38 As the nightingale’s lament represents Procne’s memory of the death of her son, so too the poet’s lament in Marino’s episode of the contest in Adone VII represents the memory of the nightingale’s death. Marino also follows this death-lament pattern in his Rime boscherecce (part of La Lira), a collection of short poems discussed in the previous chapter in connection with Monteverdi’s settings in Books VI and VII.39 The eighty-eight poems of the Boscherecce are divided into two sections, 1–64 and 65–88, the second section being merely a monothematic appendix entirely devoted to Polyphemus. In the first section—the body of the work—the Procne myth informs poems 2 to 5, which praise the singing of the nightingale, similarly to ottava 33 of Adone VII, quoted above. The last poem, no. 64, is instead a lament on the bird’s death. The narrative implicit in Marino’s arrangement of these poems thus again follows the myth’s path from singing to death and lament. Consequently, the subtext of the central poems, from 6 to 63, is death. These poems include the sonnets set by Monteverdi in his Books VI and VII—nos. 41, 42, 43, 47, and 50—poems that, as we have seen, are characterized by the topic of detachment (flight, departure, separation). In light of Marino’s narrative in the Boscherecce, Monteverdi’s settings of seemingly innocent pastoral poems take on an additional tragic subtext, because detachment becomes a signifier for death through singing. The topic of death, we remember, also informs the other settings included in Book VI: the two grandiose lament cycles, by Arianna (Lasciatemi morire) and by Glauco (Incenerite spoglie), and the two Petrarch settings derived from the in morte part of the Canzoniere, Zefiro torna and Ohimé il bel viso. Monteverdi’s poetic choices in Book VI are thus characterized by an overall tragic tinta, as it emerges from considering the poetic source for four out of the ten settings therein included, those on texts drawn from Marino’s Boscherecce (poems no. 41, 42, 43, and 50 in Marino, corresponding to madrigals nos. 9, 8,  

 

 

 

 

 



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4, and 7 in Monteverdi). If, then, the topic of Monteverdi’s Book VI was indeed death, what was its purpose and destination? Book VI is the only madrigal book by Monteverdi that, mysteriously, contains no dedicatee. It was published in Venice in 1614 soon after the composer had moved from Mantua to Venice after having served the Gonzagas since about 1592, the year of the dedication of Book III to Duke Vincenzo. The poetic content of Book VI has a clear retrospective character. The Lamento d’Arianna was of course originally composed, in the monodic version, for the opera Arianna performed in Mantua in 1608 for the wedding of Vincenzo’s son, Francesco, to Margherita, who came from the court of Savoy in Turin. Marino was employed at that court by Margherita’s father, Carlo Emanuele  I, from 1608 to 1615. Hidden under the name “Glauco” in Incenerite spoglie is none other than Duke Vincenzo, mourning the death of the singer Caterina Martinelli, who had been scheduled to sing Arianna but had died prematurely. On February 9, 1612, just two years before the publication of Book VI, Duke Vincenzo passed away, leaving the dukedom to Francesco, the dedicatee of the score of Orfeo. This score was published in Venice in 1609 and then reissued in 1615, the year after Book VI came out. Francesco died prematurely the same year as his father, on December 22, 1612. We know that the relationships between Monteverdi and Francesco’s successor, his brother Ferdinando, were not ideal—the musician having left for Venice just two years after the new duke came to power. It is likely, then, that the retrospective Book VI was put together to commemorate the death of the two Gonzaga dukes—father and son—who had indeed protected Monteverdi (and his brother Giulio Cesare) for about twenty years and had both passed away just before its publication. In early modern Italy, patronage links, as Claudio Annibaldi reminds us by singling out Monteverdi’s career as an example, did not simply and abruptly break once an artist switched patrons.40 This is shown, for example, by Monteverdi’s autobiographical dedication of his Selva morale to Vincenzo’s daughter, Eleonora Gonzaga, written in 1641 from Venice, almost three decades after he had left Mantua (see chapter 4). As discussed in chapter 6, by choosing to set Marino’s narrative-oriented poems in Book VI, Monteverdi undoubtedly signaled a shift in his musical poetics. It is possible that his poetic choice also helped him to link the work to his personal and professional past.  

 

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In Marino’s Adone VII the narrative pattern “singing–death–lament” is so pervasive that it can be said not only to affect the episode of the deadly contest between poet and nightingale (ottave 38–62) but to also extend backward to the one preceding it (32–37), which includes ottava 33 (discussed above), describing the bird’s joyful and solitary performance as a virtuoso singer. In light of this pattern, the second episode is indeed the natural outcome of the first. The assumption  

 

 

 

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that death is constantly implied in the nightingale’s singing is reinforced by an examination of the oldest literary source for ottava 33, a passage from the Natural History of the Latin encyclopedist Pliny the Elder. Pliny describes nightingales as singing “harmoniously for fifteen days and fifteen nights consecutively, without interruption,” then he adds: In the first place there is so loud a voice and so persistent a supply of breath in such a tiny little body; then there is the consummate knowledge of music in a single bird: the sound is given out with modulations, and now is drawn out into a long note with one continuous breath, now varied by managing the breath, now made staccato by checking it, linked together by prolonging it, or carried on by holding it back; or it is suddenly lowered, and at times sinks into a mere murmur, loud, low, bass, treble, with trills, with long notes, modulated when this seems good—high, middle, low register.41  

But what is most relevant to our point is that in Pliny this passage is followed by a description of the heated contests occurring between nightingales. The contests, he says, often finish tragically with the death of one of the contenders, who would rather stop breathing than singing. Other nightingales instead (Pliny continues) prefer to listen first to the best singers and then to start imitating them; then teacher and pupil exchange parts and we can perceive that often the teacher reproaches the pupil for his mistakes. The idea of “contest” is a crucial aspect of nightingales’ singing according to Pliny, whose text has been immensely influential in European literature. Among the many literary works influenced by this description of the nightingale—specifically, the bird’s joyful singing—is Guarini’s Mentre vaga angioletta. Monteverdi sets this poem in his Book VIII of madrigals (publ. 1638; see chapter 6). The setting features two tenors competing with each other in highly virtuoso passages, in an exaltation of pure voice. Monteverdi’s doubling, however, is not strictly required by Guarini’s poem, which describes the experience of listening to one singer only. The doubling thus represents a reference, through music, to Pliny’s description of the emulation between the birds—a text only implied by the poet but openly suggested by the composer, who evidently takes over as the narrator.42 As seen, the two episodes of Adone VII described above (ottave 33 and 38– 62) are related through their common Plinian source: the joyful nightingale singing in ottava 33 is only a prelude to the bird’s tragic death in ottava 56. Marino absorbs and reelaborates the archetypical narrative pattern concerning nightingales present not only in Pliny’s description but also in Plutarch’s tale and in the myth of Procne. In effect, in canto VII, singing appears to be a “veil” that disguises what the Incogniti consider, as we have seen, the most inevitable among the manifestations of Nothingness, death. Since the bird is obviously a trope for the singer—through the performance Adonis learns about the sense of  

 

 

 

 



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hearing—Marino, then, in these two episodes, is advancing a discourse on the power (and dangers) of the human voice. This is further confirmed by a third episode, covering ottave 81–95 and following those involving the nightingales: the manifestation and disappearance of Allurement, a monstrous but charming character, half-woman and half-bird (but with fish scales, and so a Siren). This episode unfolds a narrative whose outcome reinforces Marino’s main point, i.e., that human voice simply disguises death. After having heard the sad story of the musical contest, Venus and Adonis enter the Garden of Music and meet the living allegories of Poetry and Music, two women, one appealing to the intellect, the other to the senses. If Poetry learns from music both rhythm and meter, Music learns from Poetry how to enrich sounds with concepts.43 Marino himself provides the clue for the reader to associate the mythological world he describes in Adone with the contemporary musical world of opera and singers. In a clear reference to the Florentine camerata and to the emergence of monody (69–70), the poet claims that only Italy was able to inherit the ancient Greek art of balancing music and poetry. This perfect equilibrium of the two sisters, however, is lost soon afterwards (81), when, all of a sudden, a female figure—Allurement—emerges from inside a flower and starts singing with an enchanting and magical voice.44 Both a moral condemnation of and a fascination with the character of Allure­ ment coexist in Marino’s description of her physical attributes and of her singing.45 Before reporting her words, Marino defines them as “alluring and clear voices, in which death was welcomed into the air” (89, 7–8; italics mine).46 The poet is fully aware of the ambiguities involved in dealing with the power of voice. On the one hand, he upholds the thesis that song is deceiving and lascivious, that it appeals to our irrational side and thus is morally condemnable. On the other hand, Marino describes sound and hearing as an indispensable source of pleasure and delight. In the end, he does not solve this apparent contradiction, but simply juxtaposes the two sides of the issue, leaving the dialectic, so to speak, in place. The danger of voice, for example, is a theme that indeed emerges at the beginning of the canto (1–7), before Venus and Adonis reach the Garden of Hearing. There, echoing the century-long condemnation of female voice within Christian doctrine, Marino speculates on whether female voice can be morally acceptable when it is completely freed from words. This time the poet gives a negative answer: voice is indeed conducive to lasciviousness. Yet, during the rest of the canto, as we have seen, the poet transparently betrays (and conveys) his undeniable fascination with pure voice, by highlighting its most sensual and physical characteristics through the evocation of both the nightingale’s and Allure­ment’s singing. The final part of the episode of Allurement shows the dangerous side of singing, but, again, in an ambiguous way. The singer herself warns Adonis about  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the transitory nature of Beauty: “Beauty,” she says, “is a flash of lightening, age a shadow, / which cannot stop the inevitable flight [of time]” (91, 1–2).47 At this point Allurement disappears, almost dematerializing under the effect of a ray of sun. Her dissolving into air is followed by Marino’s final reflection on the whole episode (95): “O deadly delight, earthly joy, / how it swarms at once, and at once falls! / Vain pleasure that amuses souls, / born of vanity, vanishes into nothing.” 48 These, we remember, are the lines that the Incognito Dall’Angelo quotes in the section of his Glories of Nothing dealing with Beauty as “the first mother of Nothing.” By considering the context of canto VII of Marino’s Adone (that is, by reading the lines quoted by Dall’Angelo as the Incogniti themselves would have read them) it emerges that Beauty (in Dall’Angelo) coincides with Allurement (in Marino): both are indeed singers. For Marino, Beauty and Voice converge in the character of the vanishing Allurement. But Dall’Angelo, as we have seen, takes a further step. For him, Beauty and Voice fall under an identical semantic umbrella: they are both vanitates, tropes for death, “figures of Nothing.” The ramifications of the equation made by the Incogniti among Nothing, Beauty, and Voice are consequential for the genre of opera ever since its origins on the public stage in Venice. In operas, female characters—none perhaps more so than Monteverdi’s Poppaea—were represented on stage as alluring not only for their physical beauty but also for their enchanting voices. By enabling the concept of Nothing to be woven into a rich semantic web with Voice, Beauty, and Death, the Incogniti were in effect paving the way to that particular diva, the femme fatale, who was to dominate the operatic stage for centuries.  

 

 

F oca l i z at io n i n P oppea

Around the concept of Nothing, as we have seen, the Incogniti built a constellation of related tropes. These included Voice, Death, and Beauty, but also Time, Dust, Darkness, Dreams, Silence, Sleep, etc. In literary works, these figures formed a “repertoire” upon which writers drew whenever the subject fell into the semantic area of Nothing.49 Busenello, the author of Poppea, adopted these tropes frequently in his poetic works, including in his libretto for Monteverdi. For example, in the Prologue, Fortune says in addressing Virtue (here and below, figures of Nothing are in italics): Ogni tuo professore se da me sta diviso rimane un vacuo nulla destituito da numeri, che mai non rileva alcun conto; sembra un foco dipinto che né scalda, né splende.50



The Possibility of Opera    253 Any devotee of thine / if it is divided from me, / remains a vacuous nothing, / devoid of numbers, that can never / be counted; / it is like a painted fire / which neither warms nor shines.

In mocking Virtue, Fortune calls her a Nothing. She claims that, just as zero has meaning only in relation to real numbers (such as 10, 20 . . . ), Virtue (“a vacuous nothing”) has meaning only in relation to her, Fortune (a “real number,” as she deems herself). But Busenello’s is a highly relativistic world, one in which everybody and everything are indeed Nothing, and Truth depends on the interpreter’s perspective, just as his fellow Incogniti show in their works. As a consequence of this skepticism and relativism, the same quality that, in the Prologue, Fortune attributes to Virtue—being Nothing—is also assigned in the opera to a very different character, Poppaea, who is indeed the opposite of Virtue. This time the focalizer—the agent holding the point of view—is the rejected Otho, who sings these words at the beginning of the opera, after the Prologue:  

 

 

 

E pur io torno qui, qual linea al centro51 qual foco a sfera e qual ruscello al mare. And yet I still come back, like a line to the center, / like fire to its sphere, like a river to the sea.52

Later in act 1 (scene 11), Otho again makes use of the same trope: Ahi, chi ripon sua fede in un bel volto predestina se stesso a reo tormento, fabrica in aria e sopra il vacuo fonda, tenta palpare il vento, ed immobil afferma il fumo, e l’onda.53 Alas, to trust a pretty face / destines one to cruel torment, / builds in the air and upon a vacuum, / like trying to catch the wind / or stay the movement of smoke and wave.

Earth, Fire, and Water in the first passage, Air in the second: all four elements are gathered by Otho to signify the “goddess of Beauties on Earth,” crowned as such by Love at the end of the opera.54 Beauty, we recall, as Busenello’s fellow Incognito Dall’Angelo demonstrates in his Glorie del Niente, is indeed “the first mother of Nothing” (all four elements are also Nothing, as we have seen). Otho’s desire toward Poppaea thus revolves around Nothing—it is illusory.55 Poppea’s first scene, as we have just seen, shows a desperate Otho waiting and moaning outside the palace where his beloved is sleeping with Nero. Otho is experiencing a de-centering of his self—his lost center being Poppea, to whom he is magnetically attracted “like a line to its center” (qual linea al centro). As Ellen Rosand has pointed out, Otho’s de-centered feelings are reflected musically in  

 

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the shape of his wandering melody and in the continuous avoidance of cadential resolution.56 Otho makes use of deictic words (see chapter 2; they are underlined below) to communicate his own point of view. In his opening lines he claims that even if the lights in Poppaea’s window do not appear, “I know that my sun (i.e., Poppaea) is herein” (so ben io che sta’l mio sol qui dentro). For these words, which follow a conditional sentence in the third person (“And if any light appears to me”), the music shifts from triple-meter aria to duple-meter recitative (m. 19), when the word io is sung. Then aria style returns in measure 23 on the words “E pur io torno io torno qui, qual linea al centro” (repeated words are in italics), a sentence in which the density of deictic words (personal, spatial, and verbal) is proportional to Otho’s will to return to his deictic center, Poppaea. During the entire opera, Otho’s part is highlighted by an emphasis, both in the libretto and in the setting, on deictics, but in particular on the first-person pronoun, often in connection with spatial deictics and with verbs of motion having a deictic quality. A few examples among many, this again from the opening scene: Caro tetto amoroso, albergo di mia vita e del mio bene, il passo e il cor ad inchinarti viene. Apri un balcon Poppea col bel viso in cui son le sorti mie, previeni anima mia precorri il die. Dear home of my affections / the dwelling of my life and of my own good, / my steps and my heart come to pay you homage. // Open a balcony window, Poppaea! / Let the lovely face that rules my fate / come in advance, my love, and anticipate the dawn.

The instances of the deictic questo (this) in the rest of the scene are underlined by Monteverdi’s repetitions: “Questi questi sospir . . . son questi son questi i servi di Nerone . . . questa questa è la fede” (These these sighs . . . are these are these Nero’s servants . . . this this is the faith). Later in the first act (scene 11), in his tense dialogue with Poppea, Otho contrasts himself with Nero: Ad altri tocca in sorte bere il cor, e a me guardar il vaso ......................... Siede egli a mensa a satollar sue brame in amaro digiun mor’io di fame. Fate permits others / to drink the wine, while I may only look upon the jar /  . . .  / He sits at table and satisfies his hunger / while I, fasting, must starve in misery.



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Then, Otho’s soliloquy in the next scene is again marked by repetitions: “Otton Otton, torna torna in te stesso . . . Mio cor mio cor, torna torna in te stesso . . . (Otho Otho return to yourself . . . My heart my heart return to yourself . . . .” In Otho’s effort to persuade Drusilla of his love in act 1, scene 13, repetition also spreads to words beyond deictics, revealing his true, deeper doubts.57 For act 2, scene 6, the scenario (synopsis) of the opera published in 1643, thus bearing witness to the premiere, emphasizes Otho’s tendency toward Petrarchan introspection and self-reflection, matched in the opera only by Seneca: “Otho rages against himself for having had thought of injuring Poppaea, to whom, in hopeless passion, he contents himself to live subjected.” 58 Otho begins this scene with the words: “I miei subiti sdegni, / la politica mia già poco d’ora / m’indussero a pensare / d’uccidere Poppea” (My sudden rages, / my politics, already a little time ago / have led me to think / of killing Poppaea). He then continues for the rest of the scene in the same subjective vein. The setting of this solo scene is shapeless, gaining a sense of direction and centeredness only toward the end. In the following scene, which Giulio Ongaro calls “the pivotal scene in the opera,” 59 Otho, after his confrontation with Octavia, who forces him to accept killing Poppaea, invokes the gods, looking up for a sense of orientation: “O ciel o ciel o Dei / in questo punto orrendo / ritoglietemi giorni e i spirti miei” (O heaven, o heaven, / in this horrid moment, / take the days and my spirits away from me). In act 1, scene 9, Drusilla finds him still in a desperate state: “Io non so non so dov’io vada / . . .  / l’aria che m’entra in sen quand’io quand’io respiro/ trova il mio cor sì afflitto,” etc. (I do not know I do not know where I am going . . . / The air drawn into my breast when I when I breathe / finds my heart so utterly downcast). The scene in which Otho attempts to murder Poppaea (II, 12) starts with “Eccomi eccomi trasformato / d’Ottone in Drusilla” (Here I am here I am transformed /  from Otho into Drusilla). Finally, in act 3, scene 4, when Drusilla and Otho both claim to be responsible for Poppaea’s attempted murder, they do so by pointing to themselves: [Drusilla:] Io fui io fui la rea / ch’uccider volli / l’innocente Poppea. / . . .  / [Otho:] Io io con le vesti di Drusilla andai /  . . .  / [Otho:] Il patibolo orrendo a me s’aspetta [Drusilla:] A me s’aspetta [Otho:] A me s’aspetta [Drusilla:] A me [Otho:] A me [Drusilla:] A me [Otho:] A me a me s’aspetta. / Dammi, Signor, con la tua man la morte. [Drusilla:] I am I am the guilty one / who planned to kill / the innocent Poppaea. / . . . /  [Otho:] I I dressed in Drusilla’s clothes went /  . . .  / [Otho:] The dreadful death awaits me [Drusilla:] awaits me [Otho:] awaits me [Drusilla:] Me [Otho:] Me [Drusilla:] Me [Otho:] awaits me me. My lord, let me die by your hand.

Notice that Busenello’s original text has Otho saying simply: “Il patibolo orrendo a me s’aspetta, / dammi, Signor, con la tua man la morte” (The dreadful death

256   Staging the Self  

awaits me /  My lord, let me die by your hand). Thus Monteverdi adds Drusilla’s interpolations and all the repetitions of the first-person deictic.60 Otho’s insistence on the first-person deictic throughout Poppea bespeaks not only his deep emotions and introspective attitude, but also his role as focalizer in the opera, one orienting, in turn, the audience’s perception of it.61 By being the first character to appear on stage after the prologue, alone and pensive, and by depicting a disorienting world in which he has lost his center, Otho powerfully affects the audience’s perception of the remainder of the opera. Since deictics may have, in narratives, the function of effecting the cognitive shift in the audience from the real to the fictional world, Otho’s insistence on them—which Monteverdi emphasizes through his setting—keeps the audience anchored within a disorienting world that must have shocked even the most libertine among the Incogniti; and disorienting it was, this world, not only from the moral point of view but also from the formal one. The multiple threads of the plot, as mentioned above, disrupt the Aristotelian precept of the unity of action. The audience might have been confused, finding cognitive anchoring only in appealing to its memory of the historical knowledge of the events. Otho, as it has been observed, is a character who does not figure prominently in any historical accounts of the facts portrayed on stage, consisting of Poppaea’s successful attempt in having Nero divorce Octavia and then marry her. For this reason—i.e., for his being an “outsider” in the story that the audience would have known—Otho is able to take on a stronger focalizing role. He is the “character the audience would have found most sympathetic and worthy of compassion . . . the one with whom they could most readily identify,” as Giulio Ongaro observes.62 The argomento of the 1656 edition of the libretto, as both Ongaro and Rosand point out, reveals the additional dramaturgical weight that Busenello attributed to this character, in comparison with that assigned to him in the main historical source, Tacitus:  

 

 

 

Nero, in love with Poppaea, who was married to Otho, sent him under pretext of a diplomatic mission to Portugal, in order to enjoy his beloved, and so tells us Cornelius Tacitus. But here we present the facts differently. Otho, desperate and deprived of Poppaea, rants and raves. Octavia, wife of Nero, orders Otho to kill Poppaea. Otho promises to do so, but, lacking the courage to take the life of his adored Poppaea, he disguises himself as Drusilla, who was in love with him. Disguised in this manner he enters the garden of Poppaea. Love interferes and prevents that death. Nero repudiates Octavia, notwithstanding the advice of Seneca, and marries Poppaea. Seneca dies and Octavia is exiled from Rome.63

The staging by Michael Hampe in the production for the 1993 Schwetzinger Festspiele conducted by René Jacobs takes Otho’s perspectival role seriously.64 The director emphasizes Otho to such a point that his production eliminates the



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Figure 13. Claudio Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea, production by Michael Hampe (Arthaus DVD 100–109): act 1, scene 1 (Otho: Jeffrey Gal).  

Prologue, which is the part of the work that, by definition, orients the perspective of the audience.65 After the instrumental overture, Hampe’s Poppea starts with countertenor Jeffrey Gal impersonating Otho in a highly dramatic performance. The set is sparse, the lighting mostly dim, and the stage curved (convex), its ground appearing like marble tile. Set changes are minimal, consisting mainly of an opening in the back wall, out of which Nero and Poppaea in act 1, scene 3 emerge moving toward center stage, showing the couple coming out of Poppaea’s house after their lovemaking. Each character in the opera has to walk on the curved stage, conveying the sense of instability and decenteredness that Otho so well embodies (figure 13 shows the point of view of the audience, to which Otho turns his back). Probably because it otherwise gives so much emphasis to Otho’s role, the production misses the opportunity, offered by the text in act 1, scene 10, to show him in disparte (aside), eavesdropping during the intimate moment in which Poppaea and Nero, unaware of him, kiss and embrace each other, while Poppaea manipulates the emperor by persistently advancing her political agenda. The scenario describes this sensual and powerful scene as follows: “Poppaea and Nero discourse of their happiness. Nero, prey to Poppaea’s beauties, promises to make her empress. Seneca is slandered by Poppaea, and Nero, believing her, angrily decrees his death, and all of this is heard and observed by Otho, unseen, aside” (trans. Alan Curtis). Otho’s narrative role here is that of an internal focalizer, in the terminology used in chapter 6. He is the silent agent standing for the audience and provid-

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ing it with a point of view. Perhaps, then, the audience, viewing the scene from Otho’s perspective, hears the music too as almost unbearably sensual—or, said otherwise, perhaps Monteverdi set the scene in such a way as to portray Otho’s experience of it. Including this scene, the total number of scenes in act 1 in which Otho is present on stage amounts to five out of thirteen (I, 1 and 10–13), making him the main character of the act besides Nero and Poppaea, but one to be gradually replaced by the equally introspective Seneca.  

 

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Otho’s perspective is not the only one offered to the audience of Poppea at the beginning of the opera. Otho, true, focalizes the main plot thread, that of Nero and Poppaea, but he appears indifferent to the one running parallel to it for the first half of the opera, that leading to the tragic death of Seneca in act 2, scene 3. The first, unflattering view of the philosopher, that of a man as corrupt as the rest of the Roman court, is provided in act 1, scene 2 by two soldiers appearing on stage emerging from their sleep, soon after Otho’s lament. The soldiers gossip first about Nero’s neglect of Octavia (and the government) in favor of Poppaea, then about his corruption, to then weigh in on the pedante Seneca, whom they define as vecchion rapace (old vulture), volpon sagace (cunning fox), reo cortigiano (cruel courtier), etc. Then, fearing to be betrayed by each other, they launch into a praise of the eyes, as a metaphor for their relationship as fellow soldiers. The eyes, they say, using a conceit, are wise because they don’t trust each other, yet in looking they always go together. Shifting from duple-time recitative to a tuneful triple-time arioso duet, the soldiers sing: “Impariamo impariamo dagli occhi / a non trattar da sciocchi” (Let us learn let us learn from our eyes / not to deal with things by being silly). Finally, realizing that dawn is approaching and that Nero is about to leave Poppaea’s house, the two soldiers shift back to recitative style, and exit stage. Thanks to the two soldiers, the audience is offered a snapshot of all the main characters of the opera, except for Otho and Poppaea. Monteverdi’s musical emphasis on the metaphor of the eyes points to the soldiers’ focalizing role: it is in their light that Seneca is going to be seen in his first appearance on stage with Octavia in act 1, scene 6. There, as many scholars have noted, the philosopher is presented, in both music and text, as a pompous rhetorician who is unable, and perhaps unwilling, to console the afflicted Octavia.66 Seneca uses the vocabulary of Nothing, discussed above, to persuade Octavia that she should continue to pursue constancy despite her husband’s demeaning treatment of her: Tu dal destin colpita produci a te medesma alti splendori di vigor, di fortezza,



The Possibility of Opera    259 glorie maggiori assai che la bellezza. La vaghezza del volto e i lineamenti che in apparenza illustre risplendon coloriti e delicati da pochi ladri dì ci son rubbati. You, struck by destiny, / produce for yourself high splendors / of vigor and fortitude, / glories that are far greater than beauty. / The charm of face and figure / that in luminous appearance / shine colorful and delicate / is stolen by a few thieving days.

Through her behavior, Seneca claims, Octavia glorifies Vigor and Fortitude, and not Beauty, which is only a “luminous appearance,” a vanitas that disappears with time. To the shining Glories of Beauty—reminiscent of those of Nothing in Dall’Angelo’s Glories of Nothing—Octavia should prefer the superior greatness of Constancy. Octavia’s virtue, Seneca continues after the lines quoted above, defeats “stars, fate, and chance.” All these negative images (beauty, stars, fate, chance) stand for Poppaea, in contrast to Octavia. Monteverdi’s musical setting is pompous, discontinuous, and, as has often been noted, formulaic and uninspired. It undermines Seneca’s sincerity, which is precisely the point of the scene and the reason of his failure in convincing Octavia.67 We thus hear in this scene the pedante Seneca depicted by the soldiers in act 1, scene 2. However, in the next, solo scene Busenello’s and Monteverdi’s portrayal of the stoic philosopher begins to shift dramatically. His vocal line becomes more shaped and continuous, and, importantly for our argument, it follows the continuo line more closely. Seneca’s rhetoric in the preceding scene (I, 6) was expressed through stop-and-go, disjunct phrases, with melodies that often wandered off on their own (as in the awkward melisma on the article “la” in “la bellezza”) or that were rhythmically conflicting with the continuo (“la cote non percossa” and “tu dal destin colpita”). Now that the character is alone and can focus on his inner feelings, his own voice becomes more aligned with the other ever-present “voice,” narratively speaking, that of the continuo. This voice, as we have seen in chapter 6, represents the narrator—“Monteverdi”—as well as his point of view. In the next scene (I, 8), featuring Minerva, Seneca’s vocal lines are well shaped and expressive. The scenario recounts that Minerva promises Seneca that “when the time comes for him to die, she will let him know again through the mouth of Mercury. This she will do”—the scenario continues—“since he is a man of virtue and thus very dear to her.” Now seen through the eyes of Minerva as a virtuous man—no longer the reo cortigiano of the soldiers—Seneca refrains, verbally and musically, from the rhetorical flourishes deployed, albeit unsuccessfully, in the scene with Octavia and the Page. The philosopher’s stoic acceptance of death is emphasized through repetition of keywords, such as “Venga venga la morte,” and  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

260   Staging the Self  

“vincerò vincerò vincerò gl’accidenti e le paure.” His constancy is emblematized by an ostinato bass outlining a descending tetrachord ending with a firm perfect cadence. Ostinato offers, as we have seen in the Lamento della ninfa, the composer’s own perspective, which in this scene of Poppea coincides with Minerva’s. She too is thus an external focalizer, a voice coming “from the heavens” (in aria). Otherwise Seneca’s singing part follows the continuo line fairly closely. In act 2 Seneca’s language emphasizes more the first-person pronoun, signaling his increasingly introspective attitude as he approaches death.68 As with Otho, the recurrent use of the first-person pronoun helps the audience in empathizing with the character, in feeling compassion for him. But this time the audience is also provided with a more cynical proxy: the famigliari, three men “who try to dissuade him [Seneca] from death,” and whom he “orders to prepare the bath in which he shall die.” Their puzzling music is characterized first by a moving chromatic ascent for the words non morir Seneca, then by imitative counterpoint for the words io per me morir non vo, finally by a triple-meter canzonetta for an evocation of the sweetness of life—the sequence then symmetrically reversed in a palindrome. The famigliari’s words may well be uttered by the audience in its mind: Who, after all, would want to die like Seneca? Who would want to be in his situation? Yet, despite these reservations, we do empathize with the philosopher, we somehow feel for him. The famigliari’s puzzling sequence of disjunct musical segments reflects the puzzlement of a public that must have been—and today still is—disconcerted and disoriented by the opera, as well as by the character of Seneca itself. The famigliari, in essence, focalize the philosopher in the same way as the three men in Lamento della ninfa provide, as seen in chapter 6, a point of view on the nymph, projecting an imaginary beam of light on the character and increasing the audience’s involvement. The empathizing strategy, true, is different each time—one stresses exclusively compassion (miserella . . . ), the other displays much more mixed feelings. But the dramatic effect on the audience is the same—we are powerfully drawn into the scene, and emerge from it deeply moved. What the famigliari throw light on, and put under perspective, is, in the end, death itself, that black hole—that punctum—that the Incogniti characterized as Nothing and associated with Beauty and Voice. After Seneca’s suicide, the sentence hor che Seneca è morto (“now that Seneca is dead”) acquires a particular dramatic significance by referring to the philosopher’s death as the central moment of the opera both structurally and dramaturgically (one comparable in this respect to Orfeo’s Possente spirto). The key sentence is used twice at the very beginning of two different scenes, sung by characters who have just arrived on stage. The first scene (II, 5; the setting is “Rome”) features Nero in a musically declamatory passage immediately followed by the celebratory duet in which he rejoices with Lucan. The second scene (II, 10; the setting has changed to Poppaea’s  

 

 

 

 

 

 



The Possibility of Opera    261

garden) features the soon-to-be empress singing the key sentence hor che Seneca è morto on a phrase cadencing on the fifth degree of G minor but soon turning, through an ascending sequence on the word “Amor,” to a bright B-flat major. In this last key Poppaea invokes Love to help her in reaching her aim, to marry Nero—an easier goal now that the emperor, under her suggestion, has removed the final obstacle, Seneca. She will indeed reach her goal at the end of the opera, but everybody in the audience knew that, according to historical narratives (Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio), Poppaea will in turn be killed by Nero, and thus that the triumph of Love is ephemeral.69 The association of Death with Beauty and Voice, argued by the Incogniti in their writings, is emblematized in Monteverdi’s work by the characters of Seneca and Poppaea, who actually never share the stage during the opera. They can be compared, borrowing a geometrical image widely used in Baroque architecture, to the two foci of a dramaturgical ellipse, as the two intrinsically ambiguous characters around whom the plot spirals, and by whom the audience is both attracted and repelled. Fortune and Virtue, as the Prologue claims, succumb to the power of Love (as they also do to the love of Power). But Love, in the Incogniti Weltanschauung, coincides with Death. The argument (an academic one, as it were) is effective because from the beginning of the opera both characters emblematizing it are put into perspective—or focalized—by two distinct agents, respectively Otho and the two soldiers. Poppaea and Seneca come to life well before their appearance on stage, and they continue to live in our memory well after they leave it.  

 

 

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Epilogue Subjectivity, Theatricality, Multimediality

The madrigal was the genre through which Monteverdi was able to experiment with narrative solutions that served him in the new genre of opera. The possibility of creating characters who are either focalizers or focalized—which he consistently used, as we have seen, from Book VI of his madrigals onward—served him in creating characters such as Otho in Poppea, whose point of view conditions that of the audience.  The use of basso continuo  as an autonomous narrating voice, explored from Book V onward, provided operatic characters with a powerful alter ego throughout the work—as in the indecisive stepwise bass motion characterizing Otho’s loss of a psychological center in act 1, scene 1 of Poppea. From the madrigal tradition since Verdelot and Arcadelt Monteverdi absorbed not only so-called madrigalisms and expressive devices, but also narrative strategies: from the composer’s appropriation of the poet’s voice, to the generation of a nonlinear story emerging from the succession of individual pieces, to the creation and individualization of voices and characters through subject-effects, to the flexibility in using an authorial voice ranging in distance from proximity to autonomy from characters. In elaborating these strategies, madrigal composers followed the model provided by their fellow Petrarchist poets, who appropriated Petrarch in works that varied from poetry to spoken plays. As these strategies were then reelaborated in the new multimedia environment of opera, audiences were drawn into new cognitive processes, the madrigal again providing an ideal testing ground. The issue of performative subjectivity for madrigal and opera discussed in this book can also be viewed as one of theatricality, in its variety of meanings and practices involving agency, spectatorship, and multimediality. In moving from  

 

 

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264   Epilogue

the chamber to the stage, any operatic composer after Monteverdi, up until today, has had to deal with similar issues, and, accordingly, he or she has needed to seek appropriate solutions. When, for example, in the late 1970s Philip Glass began to turn his attention from chamber works to musical theater, he too felt the need to turn to the transitional period examined in this book, writing a work called, significantly, A Madrigal Opera (1980). Scored for six voices, violin, and viola, the piece was composed while Glass was at work on Satyagraha, the second opera of his first “trilogy” between Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1984).1 The composer saw the transition from madrigal to opera as a period of freedom— freedom to invent new solutions. “My idea,” he wrote, “was to write a musical/ dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with different narrative content.” 2 Thus A Madrigal Opera needs to be completed by adding words written by different poets for each performance occasion, in the same way in which a danced piece, Glass claims, can be used by any choreographer. Glass suspends, but in this way also emphasizes, the relationship between poet and composer that characterizes madrigal and early opera. In A Madrigal Opera the composer fully exercises his authorial voice but, as in a madrigal book in which pieces can be rearranged by performers to suit different narratives, the poet intervenes only in a second phase to provide a linear narrative, completing a task that composer and librettist normally accomplish by collaborating. As a result, agencies are first split and then deferred—first composer, then poet—to be reunited finally in the life of performance. Glass breaks down the individual narrative elements of opera, not only as far as agency is concerned but also contentwise. In doing so, he shows that assembling these elements in performance is a temporal—indeed a deeply historical—process. The issue of theatricality inevitably raises that of spectatorship. How do narrative strategies such as those explored in this book contribute to spectators’ responses? By assigning a character the function of focalizer—the agent who sees, perceives, and experiences—the composer provides orientation for the spectator, facilitating her absorption in the work. The spectator becomes a silent, internal focalizer. This choice is not only the prerogative of the composer but also of the stage director, focalization being a function of performance, as discussed in connection with Ronconi’s production of Orfeo. Moreover, whenever a character addresses the audience directly, as in theater and opera prologues, the effect is that of increasing participation and absorption. The highly participatory quality of the chamber performance of madrigals was certainly lost in the opera house, with its unbridgeable division between performers and audiences. Thus narrative strategies in operas can be viewed as compensatory ones. During the period under consideration (ca. 1520–1640), the effort to involve spectators was an aspect shared by many arts, as it is today widely explored in connection with often disputed terms such as Mannerism or Baroque. Concerns exposed in  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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today’s performances of Monteverdi’s music help in discerning the issues at stake in the transitional period of which the composer was a protagonist. Two recent sophisticated videos of Monteverdi’s works bring up issues of spectatorship and multimediality that resonate with the artistic concerns discussed in this book. In the 2007 one-hour film The Full Monteverdi, billed as “a unique musicdrama on contemporary love,” six couples meet in a restaurant to discuss the crisis in their love relationships.3 One member in each couple is impersonated by one of the singers of Monteverdi’s Book IV of madrigals, which is performed during the film in its entirety and without interruption. The other member of the couple is an actor/actress (a visual manifestation of the other side of the dialogic self discussed in this book). The six stories are all about separation, appropriately so since they are inspired by a madrigal book characterized by partenze and by a tragic end (according to the “Tasso-script” discussed in chapter 5). But the separation described in the poems by Guarini, Tasso, Rinuccini, and others set to music by Monteverdi is further split and multiplied in the film, the self being shattered into physically and temporally distant fragments. The film begins in the restaurant at dinner time and ends the morning after, each character sitting, alone and pensive, at a table, his or her beloved having abandoned her or him. In the central part of the film, the dramatically agitated discussions in the restaurant are interspersed with flashbacks from the different stories of the couples, mostly of betrayal, which eventually lead to the separations. Interestingly, the film director, John La Bouchardière, initially planned on splitting the screen into different parts to show the superimposed linear stories at the same time. In the final version, however, each story takes the full screen at a particular moment of the madrigals, in accordance with shifts in the poetic text and in the music that we might call audiovisual deictics, since they orient the filmic narrative. Only one character at a time appears to be singing, the others being audible only through the polyphonic concentus. The spectator is therefore able to focalize only one story at a time, together with the character singing in or about it, while all the other stories continue to be narrated musically. The visual character of the focalizing effect is amplified through the media of film, focalization being a function of the performer and of the film director as narrator, as it is in opera that of singers and stage directors. The second video is a thirty-four-minute work by documentary filmmaker François Caillat entitled “Tancred the Crusader” and billed as a “short opera based on Combattimento.” 4 Monteverdi’s madrigal is preserved almost in its entirety but is split into various sections and interspersed with spoken dialogue. The fight is relived by Tancredi in his memory as he sails back from Jerusalem in a ship with other crew, who become spectators of his hallucinations. Testo too is on the ship. From a distance, the ship appears as a digital image within an equally digitally-produced ocean, which symbolizes Tancredi’s tears and the water of

266   Epilogue

baptism. There is no pretense of realism in the film, except when the action takes place within the ship. The spoken text in Italian is made up of a collage of passages from different cantos from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata—the source of Monteverdi’s text (see chapter 6)—interspersed in Monteverdi’s piece, and alternating and overlapping with scripted text in other languages, mainly French. In this video, Caillat then takes a further step in appropriating the composer’s voice compared to La Bouchardière in The Full Monteverdi. When, after the opening titles, Monteverdi’s music starts, we do not hear the setting of the first stanza but the Notte stanza, no. 3 (see appendix 2). This shift signals that the director has effectively taken over as the narrator. He has in effect realized this stanza’s multimedial potential, present in Tasso’s original text, to become a visual prologue (“worthy of a full theater would such memorable efforts be”). After stanza 3, stanza 2 is sung, transitioning seamlessly into stanza 4, the fight simply continuing uninterrupted by Testo’s lyrical moment (stanza 1 is skipped altogether). Caillat thus solves the “problem” of stanza 3, that of having Tancred and Clorinda frozen in time while Testo lyrically reflects on their action—which makes perfect sense in Tasso’s poem but, as seen, presented an issue for Pierre Audi, the director of the video production discussed in chapter 6. In other passages as well Caillat rearranges the preexisting text and writes a new one for the spoken dialogues, as if Combattimento were material for an opera of which he is the librettist. In this way he deconstructs the process of creating an opera, as Glass does in a different way in A Madrigal Opera. The multimedia journey of Tasso’s text used by Monteverdi for Combatti­ mento, from epic poem to semi-staged madrigal to two filmic versions (Caillat and Audi), shows not only the continuation of the chain of appropriations that From Madrigal to Opera traces back to Petrarchism, but also something about opera as a genre: its intrinsic hybridity and porous borders, its blurring of the boundaries among media, its extraordinary capacity to absorb preexisting material at the hands of different agents, its centrifugal tendency to come apart at its constituent seams, its opposite tendency to absorb and incorporate nonoperatic elements; in sum, the genre’s ever changing, protean nature, perhaps the reason for its long-lasting success, presaged four hundred years ago in Monteverdi’s experiments.  

 

 

A ppen di x 1

Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books

Listed below are the contents of the madrigal books and collections discussed in parts 2 and 3 in this book. See also tables 2 (Marenzio, VII a 5), 3 (Marenzio, VI a 5), 4 (Wert, VIII a 5), and 5 (Marenzio, IX a 5) in chapter 5, above. RVF = Petrarch, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere). If poets are not mentioned, the texts are anonymous. C hap t e r 5

Adrian Willaert, madrigals from Musica nova [for four voices] 1. Io amai sempre, et amo forte ancora (RVF LXXXV); 2. Amor, Fortuna e la mia mente schiva (RVF CXXIV); 3. Quest’anima gentil, che si diparte (RVF XXXI); 4. Lasso, ch’i’ ardo, et altri non me ’l crede (RVF CCIII); [for five voices] 5. O invidia, nimica di vertute (RVF CLXXII); 6. Più volte già dal bel sembiante umano (RVF CLXX); 7. Quando fra l’altre donne ad ora ad ora (RVF XIII); 8. L’aura mia sacra al mio stanco riposo (RVF CCCLVI); 9. Mentre che ’l cor da gli amorosi vermi (RVF CCCIV); 10. Onde tolse Amor l’oro e di qual vena (RVF CCXX); 11. Giunto m’ha Amor fra belle e crude braccia (RVF CLXXI); 12. I begli occhi ondi’ i’ fui percosso in guisa (RVF LXXV); 13. Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo (RVF XV); [for six voices] 14. Aspro core e selvaggio e cruda voglia (RVF CCLXV); 15. Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio (RVF CLXXXIX); 16. I’ piansi, hor canto, ché ’l celeste lume (RVF CCXXX); 17. Cantai, hor piango, e non men di dolcezza (RVF CCXXIX); 18. In qual parte del ciel, in 267

268   Appendix 1 quale idea (RVF CLIX); 19. I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi (RVF CLVI); 20. Ove ch’i’ posi gli occhi lassi o giri (RVF CLVIII); 21. Pien d’un vago pensier che mi desvia (RVF CLXIX); [for seven voices] 22. “Quando nascesti, Amor?” (P. Sasso); 23 “Liete e pensose, accompagnate e sole” (RVF CCXXII); 24. “Che fai, alma? che pensi? avrem mai pace?” (RVF CL); 25. “Occhi piangete: accompagnate il core” (RVF LXXXIV). Cipriano de Rore, Madrigali a 5 1. Cantai mentre ch’i’ arsi del mio foco (G. Brevio); 2. Hor che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace (RVF CLXIV); 3. Poggiand’al ciel coll’ali del desio; 4. Quand’io son tutto volto in quella parte (RVF XVIII); 5. Solea lontana in sonno consolarme (RVF CCL); 6. Altiero sasso lo cui gioco spira (F. M. Molza); 7. Strane ruppi, aspri monti, alte tremanti (L. Tansillo or L. Alemanni); 8. La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’hora (RVF CCLXXII); 9. Tu piangi e quella per chi fai tal pianto (A. Tebaldeo); 10. Il mal mi preme e mi spaventa il peggio (RVF CCLXIV); 11. Per mezz’i boschi inhospiti e selvaggi (RVF CLXXVI); 12. Quanto più m’avicino al giorno estremo (RVF XXXII); 13. Perseguendomi amor al luogo usato (RVF CX); 14. Chi vol veder quantunque pò natura (RVF CCXLVIII); 15. Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno (RVF CLVII); 16. Far potess’io vendetta di colei (RVF CCLVI); 17. Amor, che vedi ogni pensiero aperto (RVF CLXIII); 18. Ben si conviene a voi; 19. Hor che l’aria e la terra e ’l vento tace; 20. Da quei bei lumi ond’io sempre sospiro (G. Brevio). Luca Marenzio, Book II a 5 1. Deggio dunque partire; 2. Perché di pioggia il ciel non si distille; 3. Amor, io non potrei (L. Ariosto); 4. Amor, poiché non vuole (G. Parabosco); 5. Quando sorge l’aurora; 6. Fillida mia, più che i ligustri bianca (I. Sannazaro); 7. Al vago del mio sole; 8. Itene a l’ombra de gli ameni faggi (I. Sannazaro); 9. La bella Ninfa mia ch’al Tebro infiora (F. Molza); 10. O voi che sospirate a miglior note (RVF CCCXXXII, stanza 12); 11. Strider faceva le zampogne a l’aura; 12. I’ piango, ed ella il volto (from RVF CCCLIX); 13. Già, Febo, il tuo splendor rendeva chiaro; 14. Mi fa, lasso, languire; 15. Già torna a rallegrar l’aria e la terra; 16. Se ’l pensier che mi strugge (RVF CXXV, for 8 voices). Luca Marenzio, Book I a 4–6  

[for four voices] 1. Ov’è condutto il mio amoroso stile? (RVF CCCXXXII, stanza 3); 2. Se la mia vita da l’aspro tormento (RVF XII); 3. Piango che Amor con disusato oltraggio; 4. Affligger chi per voi la vita piagne (G. Della Casa); [for five voices] 5. Fuggito è ’l sonno a le mie crude notti (RVF CCCXXXII, stanza 6); 6. Senza il mio vago sol qual fia il mio stato (G. Troiano); 7. Senza il mio sole, in tenebre e in martiri (I. Sannazaro, Rime, no. 60); 8. Ben mi credeva, lasso (I. Sannazaro, Rime, canzone LIII, stanza 2); 9. Fiere silvestre, che per lati campi (I. Sannazaro, Arcadia, IV, lines 25–30 [stanza 5 of a sestina]; 10. Ecco che un’altra volta, o piagge apriche (I. Sannazaro, Rime, no. 34);  



Tables of Contents of the Madrigal Books     269

[for six voices] 11. Com’ogni Rio che d’acque dolci et chiare; 12. Valli riposte e sole (I. Sannazaro, Rime, canzone LIX, stanza 1); 13. Interdette speranze, e van desio (I. Sannazaro, Rime, LXXXI); 14. O fere stelle, omai datemi pace (I. Sannazaro, Rime, sestina XXXIII, stanza 3); [for 10 voices] 15. Basti fin qui le pene e i duri affanni (I. Sannazaro, Rime, canzone LXXXIX, stanza 3). C hap t e r 6

Claudio Monteverdi Book III 1. La giovinetta pianta; 2. O come è gran martire (B. Guarini); 3. Sovra tenere erbette e bianchi fiori; 4. O dolce anima mia, dunque è pur vero (B. Guarini); 5. Stracciami pur il core (B. Guarini); 6. O rossignuol ch’in queste verdi fronde (P. Bembo); 7. Se per estremo ardore (G. B. Guarini); 8. Vattene pur, crudel, con quella pace (T. Tasso); 9. O Primavera, gioventù de l’anno (B. Guarini); 10. Perfidissimo volto (B. Guarini); 11. Ch’io non t’ami, cor mio (B. Guarini); 12. Occhi un tempo, mia vita (B. Guarini); 13. Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e le mie cure (T. Tasso); 14. Lumi, miei cari lumi (B. Guarini); 15. “Rimanti in pace” a la dolente e bella (L. Celiano [A. Grillo]). Book V 1. Cruda Amarilli, che col nome ancora (B. Guarini); 2. O Mirtillo, Mirtillo anima mia (B. Guarini); 3. Era l’anima mia (B. Guarini); 4. Ecco, Silvio, colei che in odio hai tanto (B.  Guarini); 5. Ch’io t’ami, e t’ami più de la mia vita (B. Guarini); 6. Che dar più vi poss’io?; 7. M’è più dolce il penar per Amarilli (B. Guarini); 8. Ahi, come a un vago sol cortese giro (B. Guarini); 9. Troppo ben può questo tiranno amore (B. Guarini); 10. Amor, se giusto sei; 11. “T’amo mia vita” la mia cara vita (B. Guarini); 12. E così a poco a poco (B. Guarini); 13. Questi vaghi concenti. Book VI 1. Lasciatemi morire (Lamento d’Arianna) (O. Rinuccini); 2. Zefiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena (RVF CCCX); 3. Una donna fra l’altre honesta, e bella; 4. “A Dio, Florida bella, il cor piagato” (G. B. Marino); 5. Incenerite spoglie (Sestina: Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata) (S. Agnelli); 6. Ohimé il bel viso, ohimé il soave sguardo (RVF CCLXVII); 7. Qui rise, o Tirsi, e qui ver me rivolse (G. B. Marino); 8. “Misero Alceo, dal caro albergo fore” (G. B. Marino); 9. Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, ecco la riva (G. B. Marino); 10. Presso un fiume tranquillo (G. B. Marino). Book VII (Concerto) 1. Tempro la cetra e per cantar gli onori (G. B. Marino); 2. Non è di gentil core; 3. A quest’olmo, a quest’ombre et a quest’onde (G. B. Marino); 4. O come sei gentile (B. Guarini); 5. Io son pur vezzosetta pastorella; 6. O viva fiamma, o miei sospiri ardenti; 7. Vorrei baciarti, o Filli (G. B. Marino); 8. Dice la mia bellissima Licori (B. Guarini); 9. Ah, che non si conviene; 10. Non vedrò mai le stelle; 11. Ecco vicine, o bella tigre, l’ore (C. Achillini); 12. Perché fuggi tra salci? (G. B. Marino); 13. Tornate, o cari baci (G. B. Marino); 14. Soave

270   Appendix 1 libertate (G. Chiabrera); 15. Se ’l vostro cor, madonna (B. Guarini); 16. Interrotte speranze, eterna fede (G. B. Guarini); 17. Augellin, che la voce al canto spieghi; 18. Vaga su spina ascosa (G. Chiabrera); 19. Eccomi pronta ai baci (G. B. Marino); 20. Parlo, miser, o taccio? (B. Guarini); 21. Tu dormi, ah crudo core; 22. Al lume delle stelle (T. Tasso); 23. Con che soavità, labbra adorate (B. Guarini); 24. Ohimé, dov’è il mio ben, dov’è il mio core? (B. Tasso); 25. Se i languidi miei sguardi (C. Achillini, Lettera amorosa); 26. Se pur destina e vole il cielo (Partenza amorosa); 27. Chiome d’oro; 28. Amor che deggio far?; 29. Per monti e per valli (Ballo: Tirsi e Clori). Book VIII A. Madrigali guerrieri  1. Altri canti d’amor, tenero arciero; 2. Hor che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace (RVF CLXIV); 3. Gira il nemico insidïoso amore (G. Strozzi); 4. Se vittorie sì belle (F. Testi); 5. Armato il cor d’adamantina fede (O. Rinuccini); 6. Ogni amante è guerrier: nel suo gran regno (O. Rinuccini); 7. Ardo, avvampo, mi struggo; 8. Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda (T. Tasso); 9. Ballo: Volgendo il ciel (O. Rinuccini); B. Madrigali amorosi  1. Altri canti di Marte e di sua schiera (G. B. Marino); 2. Vago augelletto che cantando vai (RVF CCCLIII); 3. Mentre vaga angioletta (B.  Guarini); 4. Ardo e scoprir, ahi lasso, io non ardisco; 5. O sia tranquillo il mare o pien d’orgoglio; 6. Ninfa che scalza il piede e sciolto il crine; 7. Dolcissimo uscignolo (B. Guarini); 8 Chi vol haver felice e lieto il core (B. Guarini); 9. Non havea Febo ancora (Lamento della ninfa) (O. Rinuccini); 10. Perché te ’n fuggi, o Fillide; 11. Non partir, ritrosetta; 12. Su su, su, pastorelli vezzosi; 13. Ballo delle Ingrate (O. Rinuccini).

A ppen di x 2

Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda Text and Translation

The characters are abbreviated as follows: [ TE ] = Testo; [ TA] = Tancredi; [CL] = Clorinda. The boldface numbers on the left give the stanza number in Monteverdi and, after the slash, the ottava number in Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, canto XII. 1 / 52

[TE] Tancredi, che Clorinda un homo stima vol ne l’armi provarla al paragone. Va girando colei l’alpestre cima ver altra porta, ove d’entrar dispone. Segue egli impetuoso; onde assai prima che giunga, in guisa avien che d’armi suone, ch’ella si volge e grida: [CL] O tu, che porte, correndo sì? [TE] Rispose: [TA] E guerra e morte.

[TE] Tancredi, who believes Clorinda to be a man, wishes to try her in a contest of arms. She circles the mountainous peak, heading for another city gate, where she intends to enter. He follows impetuously, and well before he overtakes her, his armour happens to clatter, so that she turns and shouts: [CL] You—what do you bear that you hurry so? [TE] He answered: [TA] War and death.

2 / 53

[CL] Guerra e morte avrai [TE] disse [CL] io non rifiuto darlati, se lei cerchi, e ferma attendi.* [TE] Né vol Tancredi, ch’ebbe a piè veduto il suo nemico, usar cavallo, e scende. E impugna l’un l’altro il ferro acuto, ed aguzza l’orgoglio e l’ira accende; e vansi incontro a passi tardi e lenti, quai duo tori gelosi e d’ira ardenti.

[CL] War and death you shall have [TE] She said. [CL] I do not refuse to give you death, if you seek it, and death waits. [TE] Tancredi, who has seen that his enemy is on foot, does not wish to use a horse, and dismounts. Each of them grasps his sharp sword, whets his pride and ignites his wrath, and they approach each other with slow, lingering steps like two jealous bulls ablaze with anger.

3 / 54

Notte, che nel profondo oscuro seno chiudeste e nel oblio fatto sì grande, degne d’un chiaro sol, degne d’un pieno theatro, opre sarian sì memorande. Piacciati ch’indi il tragga, e ’n bel sereno alle future età lo spieghi e mande. Viva la fama lor; e tra lor gloria splenda del fosco tuo l’alta memoria.

O night, who enveloped such a great feat in your dark, murky bosom and in oblivion— worthy of a bright sun, worthy of a full theater would such memorable efforts be— may it please you that I draw it forth, and in clear light expose and transmit it to future ages. Long live their fame, and amid their glory may the lofty memory of your darkness shine!

 

 

 

* For this line the partbooks of Monteverdi’s score in Madrigali guerrieri e amorosi . . . libro ottavo (Vincenti, 1638) show an oscillation between lei/la, ferma/o, and attendi/e. My transcription of the text follows the basso continuo partbook.

4 / 55

Non schivar, non parar, non pur ritrarsi voglion costor, né qui destrezza ha parte. Non danno i colpi hor finti, hor pieni, hor scarsi: toglie l’ombra e ‘l furor l’uso de l’arte. Odi le spade orribilmente urtarsi a mezzo il ferro, e ’l piè d’orma non parte; Sempr’è il piè fermo e la man sempre in moto, né scende taglio invan, né punta a voto.

They do not wish to avoid or parry blows; nor to retreat, nor does sophisticated skill have any part here. They use no tricks nor feinted strokes nor cunning: darkness and rage prevent the use of art. You can hear the swords clash horribly at mid-blade, and their feet remain where planted. Feet always firm, hands always in action. No stroke descends in vain, no thrust goes astray.

5 / 56

L’onta irrita lo sdegno alla vendetta, e la vendetta poi l’onta rinova; onde sempre al ferir, sempre alla fretta stimol novo s’aggiunge e piaga nova. D’hor in hor più si mesce e più ristretta si fa la pugna, e spada oprar non giova: dansi con pomi infelloniti e crudi cozzan con gli elmi insieme e con gli scudi.

Shame spurs anger into vengeance and vengeance then renews the shame, so that constantly as they strike, constantly as they hasten, new stimulus is added and new wounds. They close more and more, and more confined becomes the fight, so that their blades are of no use; they hit each other with the pommels roughly and cruelly, they butt each other with their helmets and shields.

6 / 57

Tre volte il cavaglier la Donna stringe con le robuste braccia, ed altre tante poi da quei nodi tenaci ella si scinge, nodi di fier nemico, e non d’amante. Tornano al ferro, e l’uno e l’altro il tinge di molto sangue; e stanco et anelante e questi e quelli al fin pur si ritira, e dopo lungo faticar respira.

Three times the knight squeezes the woman in his mighty arms and each time she frees herself from those binding knots, knots of a fierce enemy, not of a lover. They return to their steel, and each one wets it with much blood, and, tired and panting, each one finally withdraws and takes a breath after long fatigue.

7 / 58

L’un l’altro guarda, e del suo corpo esangue sul pomo della spada appoggia il peso. Già de l’ultima stella il raggio langue su ‘l primo albor ch’è in oriente acceso. Vede Tancredi in maggior copia il sangue del suo nemico, e sé non tanto offeso. Ne gode e insuperbisce. O nostra folle mente ch’ogni aura di fortuna estolle!

They look at each other, resting the weight of their bodies, weak from loss of blood, on their sword pommels. Now the ray of the last star languishes in the first dawn that has lit in the east. Tancredi sees that his enemy has lost more blood and that he himself is not so badly hurt. This pleases and flatters him. Oh, our foolish minds, raised up by every breeze of fortune!

8 / 59

Misero, di che godi? Oh quanto mesti siano i trionfi e infelice il vanto! Gli occhi tuoi pagheran, s’in vita resti, di quel sangue ogni stilla un mar di pianto. Così tacendo e rimirando, questi sanguinosi guerrier cessaro alquanto. Ruppe il silenzio al fin Tancredi e disse, perché il suo nome l’un l’altro scoprisse:

Wretched man, what pleases you? Oh, how sad will be your triumphs and unlucky your boast! If you remain alive, your eyes will pay a sea of tears for every drop of that blood. Thus silently deferring battle, these bloodied warriors ceased for a while. Finally Tancredi broke the silence and said, so that each one might reveal his name:

9 / 60

[TA] Nostra sventura è ben che qui s’impieghi tanto valor, dove silenzio il copra. Ma poi che sorte ria vien che ci nieghi e lode e testimon degni de l’opra, pregoti, se fra l’armi han loco i prieghi, che ’l tuo nome e ’l tuo stato a me tu scopra, acciò ch’io sappia, o vinto o vincitore, chi la mia morte o la mia vita honore.

[TA] It is truly our misfortune that so much valor is employed here where silence covers it. But since an adverse fate comes to deny us praise and witness worthy of our deeds, I ask you, if requests may be made in warfare, to reveal to me your name and rank, so that, whether I lose or win, I may know who honors my death or my life.

10 / 61 [TE] Rispose la feroce: [CL] Indarno chiedi quel ch’ho per uso di non far palese. Ma chiunque io mi sia, tu inanzi vedi

[TE] The fierce woman replied: [CL] In vain you ask for something it is my custom not to make known, but, whoever I may be, you see before you

un di quei due che la gran torre accese. [TE] Arse di sdegno a quel parlar Tancredi: [TA] E in mal punto il dicesti; e ‘l tuo dir e ’l tacer di par m’alletta, barbaro discortese, a la vendetta.

one of those two who burned the great tower. [TE] Tancredi blazed with rage at that speech and said: [TA] You spoke that inopportunely; both your speech and your silence equally incite me to vengeance, discourteous barbarian.

11 / 62 [TE] Torna l’ira nei cori, e gli trasporta benché debili in guerra a fiera pugna, u’ l’arte in bando, ove la forza è morte, ove in vece d’entrambi il furor pugna! Oh che sanguigna e spaziosa porta fa l’una e l’altra spada, ovunque giunga, ne l’arme e nelle carni! e se la vita non esce, sdegno tienla al pett’unita.

[TE] Anger returns to their hearts and carries them into war, although weak, to a fierce fight in which skill is banished and strength already dead, where the fury of both parties fights instead! Oh, what a bloody and roomy gateway each of their swords makes wherever it touches their armor or their flesh! And if their life does not depart, it is because anger fastens it to their breast.

12 / 64 Ma ecco omai l’hora fatal è giunta che ’l viver di Clorinda al suo fin deve. Spinge egli il ferro nel bel sen di punta che vi s’immerge, e ’l sangue avido beve; e la veste, che d’or vago trapunta, le mammelle stringea tenera e leve, l’empie d’un caldo fiume. Ella già sente morirsi, e ’l piè le manca egro e languente.

But, now the fatal hour has come that must put an end to Clorinda’s life. He thrust his blade into her beautiful bosom; it plunges in and greedily drinks the blood, and the garment, beautifully embroidered with gold, that confined her tender, light breasts is filled with a warm flood. Already she feels that she is dying, and her sick and weary feet fail her.

13 / 65

He follows up his victory and threateningly pursues and presses the stricken maiden. She, while falling, giving way to sorrowful utterance, speaks her final words, words dictated to her by a new spirit, a spirit of faith, charity, and hope, virtues that God infuses in her, and if in life she was an infidel, he wants her to be a servant in death.

Segue egli la vittoria, e la trafitta vergine minacciando incalza e preme. Ella, mentre cadea, la voce afflitta movendo, disse le parole estreme, parole ch’a lei novo spirto adita, spirto di fé, di carità, di speme: virtù che Dio le infonde, e se rubella in vita fu, la vol’ in morte ancella.

14 / 66 [CL] Amico, hai vinto: io ti perdon . . . perdona tu ancora, al corpo no, che nulla pave, all’alma sí; deh! per lei prega, e dona baptesmo a me ch’ogni mia colpa lave. [TE] In queste voci languide risuona un non so che di flebile e soave ch’al cor gli scende ed ogni sdegno amorza, e gli occhi a lagrimar l’invoglia e sforza.

[CL] Friend, you have conquered. I forgive you, now please forgive—not my body, which knows no fear but my soul. Please pray for it and give me baptism that will wash away all my faults. [TE] In these languid words there resounds a note so tearful and soft that it touches his heart and stifles all anger and induces and compels his eyes to shed tears.

15 / 67

Not far off, in the hollow of the mountain, a small stream flowed with a murmur. He ran to it and filled his helmet at the source, and returned sadly to his great and pious office. He felt his hand tremble as he freed and uncovered the face that was not yet known to him. He saw her and recognized her, and he remained speechless and motionless. What a sight! What a recognition!

Poco quindi lontan nel sen d’un monte scaturia mormorando un picciol rio. Egli v’accorse e l’elmo empié nel fonte, e tornò mesto al grande ufficio e pio. Tremar sentì la man mentre la fronte non conosciuta ancor sciolse e scoprio. La vide e la conobbe, e restò senza e voce e moto. Ahi vista! ahi conoscenza!

16 / 68 Non morì già, che sue virtuti accolse tutte in quel punto e in guardia il cor le mise, e premendo il suo affanno a dar si volse vita con l’acqua a chi col ferro uccise. Mentre egli il suon de’ sacri detti sciolse, colei di gioia trasmutossi, e rise; e in atto di morir lieta e vivace, dir parea: [CL] S’apre il ciel, io vado in pace.

 

She had not already died, that he gathered all his powers in one point and set them to guard her heart; and, suppressing his anguish, he turned to give life with the water to the one he had killed with the sword. While he uttered the words of the holy rite, she was transfigured with joy and smiled, and, at the point of death, happy and animated, she seemed to say: [CL] heaven is opening, I depart in peace.

Not e s

Introduction 1.  Petrarchism is the “productive activity in literature, art, or music under the direct or indirect influence of the writings of Petrarch, the expression of admiration for him, and the study of his works and of their influence.” See Ernst H. Wilkins, “A General Survey of Renaissance Petrarchism,” Comparative Literature 2 (1950): 327. See also Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Amedeo Quondam, Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini, 1991); and Roland Green, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 2.  On staging subjectivity, but in Mozart’s operas, see Michael Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 18–58. 3.  The literature on modality and the madrigal is extensive, the latest substantial addition being Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), which investigates subjectivity but with no central consideration of Petrarchism. 4.  For perceptive readings of poetic texts focusing on affects and allegories, see Eric Chafe’s groundbreaking Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer, 1992). 5.  Anton Francesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1965) , 16, 36, 70. On Doni, see James Haar, The Science and Art of Renaissance Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 271–352. 6. I lay the ground for this type of textual analysis in my “ ‘Imitar col canto chi parla’: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 383–431. 7.  Amedeo Quondam, La conversazione: Un modello italiano (Rome: Donzelli, 2007).  

 

 

277

278    Notes to pages 4 – 11 8. Monteverdi’s Orfeo was first performed within an academy, itself part of a court; see chapter 1. 9. For the former approach, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and McClary, Modal Subjectivities; for the latter one, a recent contribution in that direction is Elena Abramov-van Rijk, Parlar cantando: The Practice of Reciting Verses in Italy from 1300 to 1600 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). 10.  This early modern subject cannot thus be recovered by analyses focusing almost exclusively on pitch organization, such as those in McClary’s Modal Subjectivities and Chafe’s Monteverdi’s Tonal Language. 11.  Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). 12.  Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13.  For the term subject-effect, see Louis Marin, “Opacity and Transparence in Pictorial Representation,” in EST II: Grunnlagsproblemer i estetisk forskning, ed. Karin Gundersen and Ståle Wikshåland (Oslo: Norges Forskningsråd, 1991), 61. 14. Claudio Annibaldi, “Uno ‘spettacolo veramente da principi’: Committenza e recezione dell’opera aulica del primo Seicento,” in “Lo stupor dell’invenzione”: Firenze e la nascita dell’opera. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Firenze, 5–6 ottobre 2000, ed. Piero Gargiulo (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 31–32. 15. Giorgio de Chirico, Orfeo solitario (1973), Rome, Museo Carlo Bilotti. Aranciera di Villa Borghese. The painting appears on the dust jacket of this book, and may be viewed on the website of the Museo Bilotti: http://en.museocarlobilotti.it/percorsi/percorsi_per _sale/sala_2/orfeo_solitario (accessed July 19, 2011). 16.  Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 17.  Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 18. See the website of the 2011 exhibition Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/stella/ index.aspx; Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, “Interview with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, ed. Cooke and Govan (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997), 22; and, on Koons, Norman Rosenthal, “Circa 2000 like 1600: Another Baroque Age,” in Barock: Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age: Napoli, MADRE, Museo d’arte contemporanea Donna Regina, ed. Eduardo Cicelyn and Mario Codognato (Milan: Electa, 2009), 39–42.  

 

 

Pa r t O n e . La M u s i ca a n d O r feo

1.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Bourgeois Opera,” trans. David J. Levin, in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 33; also in idem, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 21.



Notes to pages 11 – 15   279

2. See the dust jacket of this book, or the website of the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, http://en.museocarlobilotti.it. 3.  The photo appears in Giorgio de Chirico e il teatro in Italia: Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi. Firenze, 23 maggio–31 agosto 1989, ed. Moreno Bucci and Chiara Bartoletti (Florence: Ente autonomo Teatro Comunale di Firenze, 1989), 2–3. The volume was published in conjunction with an exhibition held during the 52nd edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. 4.  Jean Cocteau (scenario, script, and director), Orphée, film (production: André Paulvé and Les Films du Palais-Royal, 1950). 5.  Quoted in Franca Angelini, “Barocco italiano,” in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, ed. Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 2, La nascita del teatro moderno: Cinquecento-Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 215 (“che nulla cosa al mondo / si può trovare eterna”). 6. Gianpiero Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione: Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Florence: Sansoni, 1983), 17, quoting from Ficino’s Commentarium in Convivium, Oratio sexta, XVIII. 7. See Cristelle Baskins, “Echoing Narcissus in Alberti’s Della Pittura,” Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 25–33, citing from Book II of Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura of 1436. 8. Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione, 37–38. See also Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 85 and 90. 9.  Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido, ed. Elisabetta Selmi (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), act 4, scene 8, lines 1032–84. 10. Ibid., act 4, scene 9, lines 1231–393. Excerpts from this pivotal episode were set to music in madrigal cycles by Luca Marenzio, Claudio Monteverdi, and Sigismondo D’India, respectively in Book VIII a 5 of 1598, Book V of 1605, and Book VIII of 1624. 11. See Guarini, Il pastor fido, note on p. 425, citing Angelo Ingegneri’s Della poesia rappresentativa (1598). 12.  Daniel Chua, “Untimely Reflections on Operatic Echoes: How Sound Travels in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Beethoven’s Fidelio, with a Short Instrumental Interlude,” Opera Quarterly 21 (2005): 573. 13. In the literary sources the Echo scene and the enchantment of the animals are placed before the first death of Eurydice; thus Striggio moves it forward in the plot. 14.  Herbert Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), 84, as cited by Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione, 26. 15.  Adorno, “Bourgeois Opera,” 33. 16. Ibid., 26.  

 

 

 

 

 

1. Text, Context, Performance 1.  On verisimilitude in early opera see Nino Pirrotta, “Early Opera and Aria,” in idem and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. 275–80. 2.  Kelley Harness deals with this patriarchal aspect as related to Apollo and Orpheus in “Le tre Euridici: Characterization and Allegory in the Euridici of Peri and Caccini,” Journal  

280    Notes to pages 16 – 17 of Seventeenth-Century Music 1 (2003), www.sscm-jscm.org/v9/no1/harness.html 9 (Apollo and Orpheus are father and son only in some versions of the myth). 3.  Claudio Annibaldi, “Uno ‘spettacolo veramente da principi’: Committenza e recezione dell’opera aulica del primo Seicento,” in “Lo stupor dell’invenzione”: Firenze e la nascita dell’opera. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Firenze, 5–6 ottobre 2000, ed. Piero Gargiulo (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 31–32. 4. Ibid. 5.  Annibaldi, “Towards a Theory of Musical Patronage in the Renaissance and Baroque: The Perspective from Anthropology and Semiotics,” Recercare 10 (1998): 173–82. 6.  Annibaldi, “Uno ‘spettacolo veramente da principi’,” 56. 7. See Tim Carter, “Music and Patronage in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Case of Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602),” in I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 1 (1985): 67 and 65 (reprinted in idem, Music Printing and Patronage in Late Renaissance Florence, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 8.  Preparations had started in December 1604 after Francesco became engaged to Margherita of Savoy; see Susan Helen Parisi, “Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: An Archival Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989), 146. 9. See Sara Mamone, “Le nozze rivali,” in eadem, Dèi, semidei, uomini: Lo spettacolo a Firenze tra neoplatonismo e realtà borghese (xv–xvii secolo) (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003). 10.  For the first wedding, see Claudia Burattelli, Spettacoli di corte a Mantova tra Cinque e Seicento (Florence: Le Lettere, 1999), and Parisi, “Ducal Patronage”; for the second, Tim Carter, “A Florentine Wedding of 1608,” Acta Musicologica 55 (1983): 89–107. 11.  For the diffusion of opera outside the axis Florence–Mantua, see Paolo Fabbri, “Origini del melodramma,” and “Caratteri e funzioni,” in Musica in scena, ed. Alberto Basso, vol. 1, Il teatro musicale dalle origini al primo Settecento (Turin: UTET, 1995), respectively at 76 and 85–90. 12.  For example, Sara Mamone traces a common theme in the 1600 festivities, as related to Maria de’ Medici, who after the festivities had to move to France to join Henry IV: “Her [Maria’s] change of situation, as for any noble ascending to a throne, is not painless, because it implies the deprivation of a good, as suffered from somebody who already has it (in the case of Maria, Florence as her homeland). This change, however, despite the sufferance caused by the deprivation, can be the ‘seal’ to a destiny that makes the person ‘come out’ from her self, in order to elevate her to the divine throne. The overall theme in fact is not of pure and simple glorification, but of a glorification accomplished through a passage, a passage that occurs through a journey. For Cephalus [in Il rapimento di Cefalo], this journey will occur on the chariot of the beloved Aurora; for Maria de’ Medici, it will occur on the superb ship that brings her from Italy to France.” Sara Mamone, Firenze e Parigi: Due capitali dello spettacolo per una regina, Maria de’ Medici (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 1988), 37. 13.  Mamone, “Le nozze rivali,” 129. 14.  James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 152. 15.  As Tim Carter claims, in the first decades of its existence “opera scarcely swept  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 18 – 20   281

the stage.” See Carter, “(Mis)appropriated Genres and Stylistic Appropriations: Some Problems in Early Seventeenth-Century Music Theatre,” in The Influence of Italian Entertainments on Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Music Theatre in France, Savoy and England, ed. Marie-Claude Canova-Green and Francesca Chiarelli (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 4. 16.  This prescriptive function is emphasized by Mamone, who speaks of a Florentine model established in Europe by the 1600 festivities that became a “catalogue of the festival typologies,” as part of a general project involving the consolidation of a “dynastic narcissism” in the seventeenth century (Firenze e Parigi, 19). 17. Saslow goes so far as to say that the occasion itself is a performance. See the chapter “The Wedding as Performance,” in idem, The Medici Wedding. 18. Richard Schechner, “A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy,” Drama Review 36 (1992): 9. 19.  On Italian academies and their creation of a specific space and time through their gatherings, see Amedeo Quondam, “L’accademia,” in Letteratura italiana, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. I, Il letterato e le istituzioni (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 823–98. 20. On Francesco Rasi—the first Orfeo—as musician and nobleman, see Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici: With a Reconstruction of the Artistic Establishment (Florence: Olschki, 1993) and Susan Parisi, “Francesco Rasi’s La favola di Cibele ed Ati and the Cybele Legend from Ovid to the Early Seicento,” in Music Observed: Studies in Memory of William C. Holmes, ed. Colleen Reardon and Susan Parisi (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2004), 361–92. 21.  The definitions are, respectively, by Schechner and Turner. The latter is pertinent to early modern academic settings as well as to festivities such as Carnival. In his discussion of liminal phenomena in his Anthropology of Performance, Turner highlights the aspect of cultural performance that he calls “performative reflexivity” as “a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend or reflect back upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves’.” To do so, persons become both subjects and objects, and the “ ‘self’ is split up the middle—it is something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another.” Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 24–25. 22.  Writing in 1607 to Battista Guarini, who under suggestion of Ercole Udine (of whom more below) had sent him from Venice the manuscript of the play Idropica to be used for the 1608 festivities, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga replied: “mi sono rissoluto che anche si publichi al mondo la sua Hidropica” (“I have resolved that your Idropica be made public to the world”; my italics), the verb “to publish” being used by Vincenzo with the meaning of “to make public” (Parisi, “Ducal Patronage,” 194). 23. See Harness, “Le tre Euridici,” 7.1, and the bibliography cited in nn. 47–49. 24.  The best introduction to Monteverdi’s opera is still Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo, ed. John Whenham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 25.  La favola d’Orfeo rappresentata in musica il carnevale dell’anno MDCVII nell’Accademia de gli Invaghiti di Mantova (Mantua: Francesco Osanna, 1607), reprinted in Angelo  

 

 

 

 

 

 

282    Notes to pages 21 – 24 Solerti, Gli albori del melodramma (Milan: Sandron, 1904; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), 3:241–74, and in Barbara Russano Hanning, Of Poetry and Music’s Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 305–29. 26.  L’Orfeo favola in musica da Claudio Monteverdi rappresentata in Mantova l’anno 1607 & novamente data in luce (Venice: Ricciardo Amadino, 1609; repr. 1615); Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo. Favola in musica. SV 318, ed. Claudio Gallico (Mainz: Eulenburg, 2004). 27. I refer in the following paragraphs to Gérard Genette’s influential views expressed in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 28.  The dedication of Orfeo reads: “The fable of Orpheus, which has already been represented in music under the auspices of Your Highness on a small stage at the Accademia degli Invaghiti, now having to appear in the great theater of the universe to show itself to all men, there is no reason that it should allow itself to be associated with any other name than that of Your Glorious and Fortunate Highness. To you therefore I humbly consecrate it, so that you, who as a benign star were propitious at its birth, with the most serene rays of your grace, will deign to favor the progress of its life” [La favola d’Orfeo, che già nell’Academia de gl’Invaghiti sotto gl’auspitij di V.A. fu sopra angusta Scena musicalmente rappresentata, dovendo hora comparire nel gran Teatro dell’universo a far mostra di se a tutti gl’huomini, non è ragione che si lasci vedere con altro nome signata, che con quello dell’Altezza V. glorioso, & felice, A lei dunque humilmente la consacro, affinch’ella che a guisa di benigna stella le fu propitia nel suo nascimento, con i Serenissimi raggi della gratia sua, si degni di favorir il progresso della sua vita]. 29. Giovan Domenico Ottonelli, Della cristiana moderazione del teatro (Florence: Bonardi, 1652), as cited in Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 11. 30.  Annibaldi, “Uno ‘spettacolo veramente da principi’.” 31. In the Metamorphoses Apollo, after the Bacchantes’ sparagmos, saves Orfeo’s head and lyre, and elevates him to heaven. 32. See Bodo Guthmüller, “Di nuovo sull’Orfeo di Poliziano,” in idem, Mito, poesia, arte: Saggi sulla tradizione ovidiana nel Rinascimento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1997), 145–64. 33.  This last aspect is exemplified in Peter Paul Rubens’s majestic fresco The Gonzaga family worshipping the Holy Trinity of 1604–1605 (Mantua, Ducal Palace). On the lower part it shows three generations of the family (including the young Francesco) kneeling in devotion and gazing toward the upper part, where the sacred vision of the Trinity emerges from a gold tapestry held aloft by a group of angels. Joseph Monteyne, “Patronage and the Visual Arts at the Mantuan Court,” paper delivered at the conference “L’Orfeo at 400,” held at Stony Brook University, Humanities Institute, April 13–14, 2007. 34.  Modern edition as Ercole Udine, La Psiche, ed. Salvatore Ussia (Vercelli: Mercurio, 2004). 35. Ibid., 66. 36. In the translation of the poetic texts, numbers in square brackets refer to lines, slashes separate lines, and double slashes separate strophes. 37. See Gianni Venturi, “Mantova e Ferrara: Due corti al tramonto. Un esempio di  

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 24 – 26   283

geografia culturale,” in Gonzaga: La Celeste Galeria. L’esercizio del collezionismo, ed. Raffaella Morselli (Milan: Skira, 2002), 223. 38.  Claudio Gallico suggests a similar interpretation by writing that, in Orfeo, “the apotheosis of the hero, whom we can imagine as the personification of the prince, is intended as a courtly homage and encomium”; see his Monteverdi (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 64. 39. Reissued in 2006 in DVD format by Unitel-Deutsche Grammophon, MunichHamburg, 004400734163. 40.  “È antico e con l’istesso culto introdotto costume d’offerire a Dio non solo preghiere ma donativi ancora. Ond’io che dall’A.V. (che con Platone posso chiamare umano dio) con qualche segno d’osservanza vorrei farmi conoscer tale quale in effetto mi sono, vengo con questo picciol dono . . . ,” as transcribed in John Lindon, “Dediche monteverdiane,” in I margini del libro: Indagine teorica e storica sui testi di dedica. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, 21–23 novembre 2002, ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli (Rome: Antenore, 2004), 214–15. 41.  The sun is part of a Neoplatonic undercurrent of imagery running throughout the opera; see Jon Solomon, “The Neoplatonic Apotheosis in Monteverdi’s Orfeo,” Studi musicali 24 (1995): 27–47. 42.  The difference between a vocal score and, say, a poetry or theater book was not so great as one might think today, since it was customary for readers to read words aloud or silently move their lips. 43.  Musiche per cantar, e sonar nel chitaron, tiorba, arpicordo, chitarra alla spagnola, e altro simile strumento, item VII: 602, in “Indice di tutte le opere di musica che si trovano nella stampa della pigna di Alessandro Vincenti. In Venetia 1621,” in Oscar Mischiati, Indici, cataloghi e avvisi degli editori e librai musicali italiani dal 1591 al 1798 (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 152. 44. See Jane Glover, “A List of Monteverdi’s Instrumental Specifications,” in Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo, ed. John Whenham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 182–84. 45. Mischiati, Indici, 151, items 571 and 573 (Euridice di Giulio Romano. Euridice di Jacopo Peri ditto Zazzarino). 46. Susan Parisi, “Acquiring Musicians and Instruments in the Early Baroque: Observations from Mantua,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 117–50, and the letters written around the time of Orfeo in Roberta Piccinelli, Il carteggio tra Firenze e Mantova (1554– 1626): Fonti, repertori e studi per la storia di Mantova. Repertori (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2000). 47.  David M. Posner, The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 48. Significantly, in the original score of Orfeo the visual arrangement of the list of instruments runs parallel to that of the characters, using the same font and font size. 49. See, for example, Eric Chafe’s in-depth analysis of the music of Orfeo in chapter 7 of Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer, 1992). 50.  On the issue of text and performance in spoken theater, see Patrice Pavis, “On Faithfulness: The Difficulties Experienced in the Text/Performance Couple,” Theatre Research International 33 (2008): 117–26.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

284    Notes to pages 27 – 36 51.  The difference between madrigal and opera as far as the text/performance argument is concerned need, however, not to be exaggerated. The performance life of madrigals could be very fluid before their printing as well. One thinks, for example, of Monteverdi’s Cruda Amarilli, performed in Ferrara before its publication in Book V and made the target of attacks by Artusi, generating the famous controversy with the composer. 52. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image—Music—Text,  ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–65. 53.  Cf. William B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and idem, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 54. Not satisfied, Ponnelle also shows the coat of arms of the Gonzaga family in a still frame. The next shot, while the Prologue’s instrumental ritornello begins, shows La Musica entering stage; not alone, however, but holding hands with Duke Vincenzo. 55. In distinguishing among text, work, and performance, I follow Roman Ingarden’s The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 56.  Joseph Grigely, “The Textual Event,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 176–77. 57. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976) and Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Definitions of the two regimes can be found on p. 113 and pp. 16–19 respectively. 58. See Genette, The Work of Art, 56–72 and the figure on p. 93.  

 

 

 

 

 

2. Liminality, Deixis, Subjectivity 1.  [Federico Follino], Compendio delle sontuose feste fatte l’anno 1608 nella città di Mantova (Mantua: Osanna, 1608). 2. Ibid., 79–80. 3.  “Fictional” in this context refers to both the material conditions of the representation—the boats and the night time—and the story unfolding in the action to come: the battle with the Turks. As Bruster and Weimann claim, “dramatic prologues traditionally provided information about the plot, theme, genre, and location of the dramatic story, and sought the goodwill of the audience”; see Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (London: Routledge, 2004), 12–13. 4.  Witness the letter that Monteverdi wrote to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in December 1604 in which it can be inferred that the Duke provided him with precise directions regarding the text and the music of a pastoral ballet on the subject of Diana and Endymion (Claudio Monteverdi, Lettere, ed. Éva Lax [Florence: Olschki, 1994], 16–18). 5. In this section, strophe numbers replace line numbers both in the original and in the translation of poetic extracts. 6.  Theater “consists first and foremost in this, an I addressing a you here and now.” Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002), 139. 7. See Nino Pirrotta, “Early Opera and Aria,” in idem and Elena Povoledo, Music and  

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 37 – 42   285

Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 241–45. 8. I use capital letters for major keys and lower case for minor ones. “Key” means, here and in the rest of the book, “tonal focus,” a term first introduced by Karol Berger, who uses it, for example, in his Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 20. Berger’s book includes a stimulating chapter on Orfeo (19–42). 9. In this respect my contextual reading differs from the sophisticated one offered by Eric Chafe in his Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 126–58. 10.  This is one of the ways in which performances do not simply materialize the work but autonomously produce its meanings—hence the importance of studying performances to understand the work. See chapter 1. 11.  The first extended use of this term in musicology was in Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 12. See Luca Zoppelli, Opera come racconto (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), 15–18. Zoppelli borrows from Carl Dahlhaus, “The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera,” in Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 73–150. 13.  John Whenham, in “Five Acts, One Action,” in Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo, ed. idem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45, comments on the theatrical function of the return of the Sinfonia in between acts. 14. Various explanations of the two versions of Possente spirto have been provided in the literature, for example by Tim Carter in Monteverdi’s Musical Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 130–32. 15.  For the relationships between the linguistic concept of discourse and the early modern one of rhetoric, see Mauro Calcagno, “ ‘Imitar col canto chi parla’: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 383–431. 16.  For an overview of the impact of pragmatics in musicology, see David Cram, “Language and Music: The Pragmatic Turn,” Language and History 52 (2009): 41–58. For an inspiring application of pragmatics to opera, especially regarding speech-act theory, see Philip Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 17.  “The utterance containing ‘I’ belongs to that level or type of language which Charles Morris calls pragmatic, which includes, with the signs, those who make use of them.” Emile Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217. 18. I borrow the term from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 19.  Film scholar Christian Metz defines enunciation as “a semiological act through which some parts of a text talk about this text as an act.” Christian Metz, L’Énonciation impersonnelle ou Le site du film (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991), 20. The concept of enunciation goes beyond linguistics to cover a wide range of media, such as literature, art, film, and television. See, respectively, Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

286    Notes to pages 42 – 48 Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Louis Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000), chapter 6. 20.  Dahlhaus, “The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera,” 73 21. Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1990). 22. In the musical examples in this book, original note values are retained for examples 1–6 and 15–19, whereas they have been halved for examples 7–14. My observations on the text and music of Orfeo are based on the facsimile of both libretto (1607) and score (1609) published in 1993 by SPES in Florence (ed. Piero Mioli). Philological studies on the sources of Orfeo appeared only recently: see Tim Carter, “Some Notes on the First Edition of Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’ (1609),” Music & Letters 91 (2010): 498–512 (the copies of the score and the libretto used in my comparisons are termed, respectively, “F” and “1607 A ” by Carter); and Stefano Aresi, “Dai ‘doppi finali’ alle edizioni anastatiche: Alcune considerazioni in merito alla tradizione de L’Orfeo,” Philomusica on-line 8 (2009): 64–90. 23.  This repetition was first highlighted by Gary Tomlinson in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 137, but without reference to deictics. 24.  The first opera companies included actors as well, and the first opera theaters were previously used for comedies. See Nino Pirrotta, “Commedia dell’arte and Opera,” in idem, Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 343–60. 25. Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica et moderna, facs. ed. Fabio Fano (Rome: Reale accademia d’Italia, 1934), 89; translation in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. edited by Leo Treitler (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), 465–66; Peri’s words are from the preface of his Le musiche . . . sopra l’Euridice (Florence: Marescotti, 1600), iii (translation in Strunk, Source Readings, 659). 26. Giulio Cesare Monteverdi’s aesthetic statement—that music should be the servant of oratione—is reported in his preface to Claudio’s 1607 Scherzi musicali. A definition of oratione that refers to speech is that by Gioseffo Zarlino in his Istitutioni harmoniche (1558 ed., 71): “Oration, that is, speaking, which expresses attitudes via the narration of some story, or tale.” 27.  On subjectivity and the madrigal see Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: SelfFashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). My approach to subjectivity as inherently dialogic differs from that of McClary since she views it as monologically instantiated in modality, that is, in a specific technical feature of the musical text. In Part II below, I contextualize dialogic subjectivity within social and cultural practices of early modern Italy, as related to Petrarchism. 28. See Heinrich Besseler, Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1959), and the proceedings of the conference “Music as Heard: Listeners and Listening in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1300–1600)” held at Princeton  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 49 – 53   287

University on 27–28 September 1997 and organized by Rob C. Wegman, published in Musical Quarterly 82 (1998). 29.  Emile Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns” and “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, 223–30. 30. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 31.  Emblematic is, in this respect, Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori of December 10, 1513. The addresser reports of his returning home from work in the evenings, undressing from daily clothes, wearing imaginary courtly clothes, and entering an equally imaginary gathering of ancient men, who warmly welcome him. Machiavelli then engages in a conversation during which he loses himself completely for four hours, forgetting, as he claims, miseries, poverty, and even death. 32. See Paolo Fabbri, “Tasso, Guarini e il ‘divino Claudio’: Componenti manieristiche nella poetica di Monteverdi,” Studi musicali 3 (1974): 238–42; Stefano La Via, “Allegrezza e perturbazione, peripezia e danza nell’ ‘Orfeo’ di Striggio e Monteverdi,” in Pensieri per un maestro: Studi in onore di Pierluigi Petrobelli, ed. Stefano La Via and Roger Parker (Turin: EDT, 2002), 61–93; and Philippe Canguilhem, “Les Sources littéraires de l’Orfeo de Monteverdi,” in Du genre narratif à l’opéra au théâtre et au cinéma, ed. Raymond Abbrugiati (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, 2000), 81–97. 33.  For other instances of deictics in Euridice, see the examples in Howard Mayer Brown, “How Opera Began: An Introduction to Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600),” in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630, ed. Eric Cochrane (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 401–44. 34.  Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido, ed. Elisabetta Selmi (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), 363. 35. See Marco Ariani, “Il ‘puro artifitio’: Scrittura tragica e dissoluzione melica nella ‘Canace’ di Sperone Speroni,” Il contesto 3 (1977): 79–140. 36. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, XII, 75 “Io vivo? Io spiro ancora? e gli odiosi / rai miro ancor di questo infausto die?” Idem, Re Torrismondo, I, 2: “Vivo ancor dunque e spiro e veggio il sole? / Nella luce del mondo ancor dimoro?” 37. La Via, “Allegrezza e perturbazione,” 74. 38. See Sperone Speroni, Canace e scritti in sua difesa, ed. Christina Roaf (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1982), xlv. 39. Tasso’s passage of La Cavalletta in which he cites the composers Striggio (the father of the librettist of Orfeo), Wert, and Luzzaschi is often discussed in the musicological literature, for example, by Alfred Einstein in The Italian Madrigal, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 1:219–21. 40. Torquato Tasso, King Torrismondo, ed. Maria Pastore Passaro (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 70. 41. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York : Columbia University Press, 1992), xiv. 42.  For self-reflexivity as “a special kind of self-referentiality, namely one that serves the cognitive function of ‘reflecting’ on issues that directly or indirectly concern the work or text in question,” see Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 48.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

288    Notes to pages 53 – 58 43. See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 44. Bühler, Theory of Language, 117. 45. Louis Marin, “The Body of the Divinity Captured by Signs,” in Food for Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–25. 46. See Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics; Harald Weinrich, Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971); and John Lyons, “Deixis and Subjectivity: Loquor, ergo sum?,” in Speech, Place, and Action, ed. R. J. Jarvella and W. Klein (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982), 101–24. 47. Lyons, “Deixis and Subjectivity,” 117. 48.  Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” 224–25. 49.  These examples are adapted from Cesare Segre, “Il corpo e la grammatica,” in idem, Notizie dalla crisi: Dove va la critica letteraria? (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 244. 50.  Parts II and III include analyses of texted music according to shifts in deictic orientation. 51. See, for example, William F. Hanks, Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); the entry “Deixis” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and MarieLaure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), and Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, ed. Judith Duchan, Gail Bruder, and Lynne Hewitt (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass., 1995). 52. Ray Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). “ ‘Deictic categories . . . depend for their interpretation upon the relative, and reflexive, positioning of bodies in space and time,” in The Oxford Companion to the Body, ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), s.v. “deixis.” 53. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 74. For an application of deictic analysis to dramatic texts, see Alessandro Serpieri et al., “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text,” Poetics Today 2 (1981): 163–200. 54.  Henri Wallon, Les Origines du caractère chez l’enfant: Les préludes du sentiment de personnalité (Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1934), 30–31, as quoted and translated by Kaja Silverman in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 16. 55. Ibid. 56.  Mieke’s Bal’s “Space Inc.,” which deals extensively with deixis, is included in her Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 129–64 (the quotation is on p. 151). 57. Ibid., 152. 58. Ibid.  

 

 

 

 

 

3. Performing the Dialogic Self 1.  Walter J. Ong, “Voice as Summons of Belief,” in The Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 51. 2. Monteverdi, L’Orfeo, directed by Luca Ronconi, scenes by Margherita Palli, costumes by Vera Marzot; Orpheus: Roberto Scaltriti; Eurydice: Cecilia Gasdia; Concerto



Notes to pages 58 – 68   289

vocale conducted by René Jacobs, Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Florence, Teatro Goldoni, 10–21 March 1998. DVD www.houseofopera.com. At the time of this book’s publication, numerous video excerpts were available on www.youtube.com. 3. Luca Ronconi, today one of the most important European theater and opera directors, produced all three surviving Monteverdi operas for the Florence festival between 1998 and 2000 as part of the celebrations for the four hundred years since the birth of the genre. The nontraditional use of performance space is frequent in Ronconi’s productions since his celebrated staging of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso at the 1969 Spoleto Festival. See Fifty Key Theater Directors, ed. Shomit Mitter and Maria Shevtsova (New York: Routledge, 2005), 113–17. 4. I adapt terminology from Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 5.  By “orchestra space” I am referring to the ground floor of the audience seating area, emptied of all the seats, as distinct from the “orchestra pit,” where the members of the orchestra are seated. My analysis is based on the RAI television production directed by Ronconi himself. 6. See chapter 2: “I am Music,” for text and translation of the prologue. 7. I adopt the classification of gestures into ideational (divided into markers and ideographs), depictive (iconic and pantomimic), and evocative (deictic and symbolic) discussed in Bernard Rimé and Loris Schiaratura, “Gesture and Speech,” in Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior, ed. Robert S. Feldman and Bernard Rimè (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1991), 239–81. This classification is adopted by Patrice Pavis in Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance, and Film (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 70. 8.  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 17. Gumbrecht distinguishes between “presence effects” and “meaning effects,” relating the former to deixis and self-reflexivity. His distinction can be related to Carolyn Abbate’s between “drastic” and “gnostic” in music, to Ståle Wikshåland’s between “rhetorical” and “mimetical,” and finally to Robert Weimann’s distinction, in theater, between presentation and representation. Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 505–36; Ståle Wikshåland, “Monteverdi’s Voices: The Construction of Subjectivity,” Opera Quarterly 24 (2008): 223–45; Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 10. Ibid., esp. chapter 5, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” on pp. 130–55, and the notes on pp. 214–15, 246–51, and 254–75. 11. I expand on this and other issues related to this production in my “Performing the Self,” Opera Quarterly 24 (2008): 247–74, which includes further iconographic documentation. 12. I am grateful to Gundula Kreuzer for pointing this out to me. For the image, see the dust jacket of this book or the website of the Museo Bilotti. 13. In Ronconi’s production, La Musica, Euryidice, and Echo are sung by Cecilia Gasdia, in the first two cases dressed in white.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

290    Notes to pages 73 – 74 Pa r t Two . C o n s t ruc t i n g t he Na r r at o r

4. From Petrarch to Petrarchism 1. I borrow this term from Susan Lanser, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 206–19. 2.  These textual and musical agents of production are complemented, in operatic performance, by visual components such as sets, props, singers’ gestures, and their movements on stage. I focus on these visual aspects in parts I and III. 3.  For the relationships between Petrarchism and sixteenth-century music, see Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Amedeo Quondam, “Sul petrarchismo,” in Il petrarchismo: Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, ed. Loredana Chines (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), 27–92; and Franco Piperno, “Petrarch, Petrarchism, and the Italian Madrigal,” in “Compositor moderno et vago : Perspectives on Luca Marenzio’s Secular and Devotional Music, ed. Mauro Calcagno (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 4.  My interpretation of Petrarch assumes that his poetry belongs to genus enarrativum. It thus runs counter to the modern division among lyric, epic, drama, and the novel, widespread since at least the eighteenth century. See Gérard Genot, “Strutture narrative della poesia lirica,” Paragone 18 (1967): 35–52, and Ronald de Rooy, Il narrativo nella poesia moderna: Proposte teoriche ed esercizi di lettura (Florence: Cesati, 1994). 5.  The original title of Petrarch’s collection is Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, hereafter RVF followed by Roman numerals. I refer to Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). For a discussion of deixis in language, see chapter 2. The first-person pronoun provides the incipit for twenty-four of the 366 poems included in the Canzoniere. For the discourses of subjectivity in Petrarch and Petrarchism, also in relationship to deixis, see Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 17–28; Roland A. Greene, PostPetrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1991); Maria Serena Sapegno, “TU, VOI: A chi si parla?,” in L’Io lirico, Francesco Petrarca: Radiografia dei Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. Giovannella Desideri, Annalisa Manfellotto, and Sabina Marinetti (Rome: Viella, 2003), 93–102; Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere: Ricerche sulla preistoria e la costituzione di un genere (Padua: Liviana, 1979); and idem, I due cominciamenti della lirica italiana (Pisa: ETS, 2006). 6. Sixteenth-century commentator Ludovico Castelvetro noted that the use of voi not governing the verb “shocked” readers, whereas Giulio Camillo Delminio wrote that the voi being “suspended from the verb” (sospeso dal verbo) made readers struggle (ha tenuto faticati molti). Each commentator then explained that Petrarch uses it as a vocative. See Adelia Noferi, “Lettura del sonetto I,” in eadem, Frammenti per i Fragmenta di Petrarca, ed. Luigi Tassoni (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), 24–25, and Giulio Camillo Delminio, L’idea del teatro e altri scritti di retorica (Turin: Res, 1990), 277. My discussion of RVF I is indebted to Noferi’s commentary, as well as to Giovanni Cappello, La dimensione macrotestuale: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca (Ravenna: Longo, 1998) and Giorgio Orelli, Il suono dei sospiri: Sul Petrarca volgare (Turin: Einaudi, 1990).  

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 75 – 78   291

7. Note that io and voi almost form a chiasmus, and that the /v/ sound also plays a role, especially in the second quatrain. The word sono is assonant with sogno, “dream,” the last word of the poem. 8. Santagata (I due cominciamenti) interprets the word Voi as a “sidetracking”: “that suspended ‘you’ seems to say . . . that no addressee indeed feeds the fire of Petrarch’s poetry, the inexhaustible fuel of which is only the poetic I. . . . One can say that Petrarch’s I signals that a new protagonist is entering the lyric scene” (78, 76, 81). 9. See the analysis of RVF I in Ezio Raimondi, Le metamorfosi della parola: Da Dante a Montale (Milan: B. Mondadori, 2004), 194–98. 10.  The effect of these two reversals, as Noferi notes, is that “the language itself of writing (in the psychological dimension of confession) constitutes itself into a meta­ language” (“Lettura del sonetto I,” 23). Greene observes that when poetry is written in the first person the reader identifies herself immediately with the speaker/poet, since it is the reader—the “you”—that also says “I” (Post-Petrarchism, 10). 11. I interpret auctor as the author-narrator and agens as the author-character. Jonathan Culler writes that “the poetic persona is a construct, a function of the language of the poem, but it none the less fulfills the unifying role of the individual subject, and even poems which make it difficult to construct a poetic persona rely for their effects on the fact that the reader will try to construct an enunciative posture.” See Culler, “Distance and Deixis,” in idem, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 199. Culler thus severs any link with the autobiographical author. One must add, however, that in the Renaissance the perception of Petrarch as author-narrator was inseparable from that of the flesh-andblood Petrarch as author. 12. Santagata, in the introduction to his edition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Milan: A.  Mondadori, 1996), describes this split as “an irremediable contradiction: Petrarch could have avoided it only had the Canzoniere been a ‘real’ autobiographical piece of writing, that is, only had it been made up of microtexts truly written now in order to recount a past story. But since this now of which Petrarch is speaking is a point of view added later to material written for the most part then, at the time of the to-be-condemned love, the contradiction was inescapable” (lxxxiv). 13. In classical narratology, the narrator is the agent identifiable by the question “Who speaks?” whereas the focalizer responds to the question “Who sees?” or “Who perceives?” See Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1994). From my discussion of RVF I it is clear that I consider “character” as a useful category for poetry, as do De Rooy, ll narrativo nella poesia moderna; Genot, “Strutture narrative della poesia lirica”; and Serena Fornasiero, Petrarca: Guida al Canzoniere (Rome: Carocci, 2001), among others. 14. See Fornasiero, Petrarca, 59. 15.  Amedeo Quondam, “Dall’‘abstinendum verbis’ alla ‘locuzione artificiosa’: Il petrarchismo come sistema linguistico della ripetizione,” in idem, Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini, 1991), 181–99. See also Nicola Gardini, Le umane parole: L’imitazione nella lirica europea del Rinascimento da Bembo a Ben Jonson (Milan: B. Mondadori, 1997).  

 

 

 

292    Notes to pages 78 – 81 16.  The two quatrains of Gaspara Stampa’s proemial sonnet to her 1554 Rime read: “Voi, ch’ascoltate in queste meste rime, / in questi mesti, in questi oscuri accenti / il suon degli amorosi miei lamenti / e de le pene mie tra l’altre prime,  // ove fia chi valor apprezzi e stime,  / gloria, non che perdon, dè miei lamenti / spero trovar fra le ben nate genti,  /  poi che la lor cagione è sì sublime.” For an English translation, see Gaspara Stampa, The Complete Poems: The 1554 Edition of the “Rime”: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Troy Tower and Jane Tylus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 57–58. 17.  The discourse of sixteenth-century Petrarchism is also characterized by a merging between person (i.e., the real Petrarch) and persona (the narrator). Real person, author, and narrator often converge into one single persona (auctor). After the New Criticism, these roles are usually seen as distinct from one another. In the Renaissance, the creative confusion among them was part of the implicit “contract” between poet and readers. 18.  This, for example, is the question that famously appears in the first paragraph of Edward T. Cone’s groundbreaking The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974): “If music is a language, then, who is speaking?,” 1. More on Cone in chapter 5 below. 19.  Petrarch’s poetics of the self is fully exposed in its many implications in the work of Giuseppe Mazzotta and Thomas Greene, among others. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) and Thomas Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, ed. Thomas Greene, Peter Demetz, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 241–68. 20.  Post-structuralist narratology has, however, gone a long way toward widening the concept of narrative beyond its application to novels and films, which were the original field of structuralist application of the concept. 21. See Luigi Baldacci, Il Petrarchismo italiano nel Cinquecento (Padua: Liviana, 1974). 22.  Claudio Monteverdi, Selva morale e spirituale di Claudio Monteverdi maestro di cappella della serenissima republica di Venetia dedicata alla sacra cesarea maestà dell’imperatrice Eleonora Gonzaga (Venice: Magni, 1640[1]). The five pieces setting Italian texts are: O ciechi, il tanto affaticar perdona (Petrarch), for five voices (CCATB) and two violins, Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono (Petrarch) for five voices (CTTTB) and two violins, È questa vita un lampo (Angelo Grillo) for five voices, Spuntava il dì quando la rosa, for three voices (ATB), and Chi vol che m’innamori, for three voices (ATB) and two violins. All of them feature basso continuo. 23.  “Havendo io cominciato a consacrare alle glorie della Serenissima Casa GONZAGA la mia riverente servitù, all’hora quando compiacquesi il Serenissimo Sig. Duca VINCENZO Genitore della Sacra MAESTA Vostra (felice record.) di ricevere gli effetti della mia osservanza, quali nella mia verde età cercai con ogni diligenza, et co ’l mio talento della Musica per lo spatio di anni vintidue continui di mostrarli affettuosi, non ha mai potuto l’interpositione della terra, et del tempo ecclissare pure un minimo raggio del mio ossequio, per non essere mai restati oppressi dall’oblivione gli honori ricevuti, si dalli Serenissimi Precessori, come anche dalla Maestà Vostra, ma più tosto da essi sempre più io sono stato all’occasione cortesemente ravvivato sino a questa mia matura età. La onde ho preso ardire di dare alle luci questa Selva morale, e spirituale, dedicandola a V.M.”  

 



Notes to pages 81 – 92   293

24. Robert Kendrick notes that the first two pieces of Selva might originally have appeared in inverted order. See his “Monteverdi modello o deviazione? Strutture salmodiche della ‘Selva morale’ nel contesto dell’Italia Settentrionale,” in Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e prospettive. Atti del convegno, Mantova, 21–24 ottobre 1993, ed. Paola Besutti, Teresa Gialdroni, and Rodolfo Baroncini (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 41–56. 25.  “My conviction [is] that the Petrarchan choices represent a hidden and protected Monteverdian Secretum, a screen to the expression of the composer’s personal sentiments.” See Nino Pirrotta, “Monteverdi’s Poetic Choices,” in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 315. 26. Ibid. 27. I thus disagree with Massimo Ossi, who claims that Pirrotta’s view is problematic because “it is seldom, if ever, substantiated with analytical insight,” it does not explain why Monteverdi ignored Petrarch for the first thirty years of his career, and finally because the composer left no evidence that Petrarch was within his “literary frame of reference.” See Ossi, “Monteverdi as Reader of Petrarch,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 665. 28. Lorenzo Bianconi observes that the date of Monteverdi’s dedication of the Selva, i.e., May 1, 1641 (1640 in the title page), “might be an allusion to the ‘dì primo maggio’ as the date conventionally accepted for Petrarch’s love declaration to Laura” (RVF CCXLV), since it appears in the dedication of many sixteenth-century poetic canzonieri. Bianconi, “Il Cinquecento e il Seicento,” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 6: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 328 n. 5. 29.  The metaphors of the composer as “reader” or “exegete” has been used in musicological literature to refer to the interpretation of poetic texts in settings by Dufay, Obrecht, Arcadelt, Willaert, Palestrina, Rore, and Monteverdi (e.g., n. 27 above). 30. Giaches de Wert’s Madrigali del fiore a cinque voci, libro secondo (Venice: Scotto, 1561) were published in modern edition as vol. 2 of this composer’s Collected Works, ed. Carol MacClintock (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1962). 31. Gallus Dressler, Præcepta musicae Poëticæ (The Precepts of Poetic Music): New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations, and Indices by Robert Forgács (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 174–77 (from chapter 12: Concerning the shaping of exordia). In opening the setting of RVF I in his Fourth Book for five voices (1567), Orlando di Lasso unfolds a C major triad by setting the word “Voi” through an isolated g of the tenor followed, in paced rhythm, by the chord c–c'–e' in basso, quinto, and alto, and finally by g' in the canto. Monteverdi’s exordium nudum seems to refer back to Lasso rather than to Wert. 32.  Bernhard Meier, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony: Described according to the Sources, with Revisions by the Author (New York: Broude Brothers, 1988), 260 and 320. 33.  Antonio Minturno, L’arte poetica (1564), facsimile (Munich: W. Fink, 1971), 175. The title of the treatise is: L’arte poetica del sig. Antonio Minturno, nella quale si contengono i precetti heroici, tragici, comici, satyrici, e d’ogni altra poesia: con la dottrina de’ sonetti, canzoni, et ogni sorte di rime thoscane, dove s’insegna il modo, che tenne il Petrarca nelle sue opere . . . (Venice: Valvassori, 1564). 34. Ibid., pp. 354–55. In contrast to Bembo, however, Minturno gives relevance to  

 

 

 

 

 

294    Notes to pages 93 – 98 actual vocal and instrumental music, so that music, in his treatise, appears to be an ideal complement to poetry, not just an intrinsic part of it. 35.  Aristotle reverses the Platonic preeminence of diegesis over mimesis. Genette shows that the distinction between lyric, epic, and tragedy was never one of genre but of mode. The misinterpretation of Plato and Aristotle, he explains, has had far-reaching consequences in the classification of genres until today. See Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and also Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text (London, 1977), 79–124; Paolo Bagni, Genere (Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1997); and Peter De Mejer, “La questione dei generi,” in  Letteratura italiana, vol. 4: L’interpretazione, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 245–82. 36. Norman Friedman, Form and Meaning in Fiction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 134–65. 37. I borrow the term “mimesis effect” from Enza Biagini, Racconto e teoria del romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 30 (citing Castelvetro). 38.  As Biagini observes (ibid.), it is revealing that in the Renaissance the epic genre was called romanzo (poems such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso or Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata). The genre contained all the problematic issues—including the mix of modes of enunciation—later found in prose novels and subsequently discussed by narratologists. 39.  This passage has been discussed by, among others, Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano; Gardini, Le umane parole; Pasquale Sabbatino, Il modello bembiano a Napoli nel Cinquecento (Naples: Ferraro, 1986); and Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 40. See De Mejer, “La questione dei generi,” and De Rooy, Il narrativo nella poesia moderna, 51. 41.  W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 3, from which I cite below. 42. See Margaret Murata, “Image and Eloquence: Secular Song,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. Tim Carter and John Butt (Cambridge, 2005), 380–425, and, in particular, regarding Petrarch, Carter, “Tutto ’l dì piango . . . : Petrarch and the ‘New Music’ in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Il Petrarchismo: Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, ed. Chines, 296. 43. Minturno, Arte poetica, 179–80. 44. Lorenzo Bianconi, “Introduzione” to Iain Fenlon and James Haar, L’invenzione del madrigale italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1992). 45.  “Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse ’l suono / di quei sospir, ond’io nudrii già ’l core,  /  all’or ch’a l’ombra de le belle frondi / d’un verde lauro il duolo mio sfogai / quand’altro in tutt’io fui da quel ch’io sono.” 46.  On Italian pastoral drama see the survey by Richard Andrews, “Pastoral drama,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. C. P. Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 292–98. On the relationships between music and pastoral drama in sixteenth-century Italy, see Giuseppe Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 98 – 103   295

47. See James Chater, “ ‘Un pasticcio di madrigaletti’? The Early Musical Fortune of ‘II pastor fido,’ ” in Guarini, la musica, i musicisti, ed. Angelo Pompilio (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 1997), 139–55. 48. Roberto Gigliucci, “Petrarchismo e favola pastorale,” in idem, Giù verso l’alto: Luoghi e dintorni tassiani (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2004), 36. 49.  Federico Schneider, Pastoral Drama and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010), 81. 50.  Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3–4. 51. Ibid., 71 and 85. See also Roy Sommer, “Drama and Narrative,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 121–22, and Susan Lanser, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder.” 52. See Manfred Jahn, “A Guide to the Theory of Drama,” at www.uni-koeln.de/ ~ame02/pppd.htm. 53. See in Jahn’s “Guide” the diagram at D.2.1. 54.  E.g., Sommer, “Drama and Narrative”; Jahn, “A Guide,” and Brian Richardson, “Drama and Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 55. See Luca Zoppelli, L’ opera come racconto (Venice: Marsilio, 1994); Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1991); Linda Hutcheon, entry “Opera,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory; and Michael Halliwell, “Narrative Elements in Opera,” in Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997, ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Scher, and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 135–53.  

 

 

 

5. In Search of Voice 1.  Concerning spoken theater Anne Ubersfeld speaks of “conjunction of plural voices” among scriptor, characters, and actors; see Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre III: Theatrical Dialogue (New York: Legas, 2002), 58. Seymour Chatman talks about levels of vocal audibility from extreme overtness to scarcely perceptible covertness; see Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), chap. 5. 2.  Howard M. Brown, “A Typology of Francesco Corteccia’s Madrigals: Notes towards a History of Theatrical Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of F. W. Sternfeld , ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3–28. 3.  Jacob Arcadelt, Terzo Libro de i Madrigali di Archadelt (Venice: Scotto, 1539), NV 156. Henceforth the abbreviation NV (standing for “Nuovo Vogel”) refers to the catalogue by Emil Vogel, Alfred Einstein, François Lesure, and Claudio Sartori, Bibliografia della musica italiana vocale profana pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700 (Pomezia: Staderini–Minkoff, 1977–1982). The four madrigals by Arcadelt are discussed by Nino Pirrotta in idem and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge  

 

 

296    Notes to pages 103 – 107 University Press, 1975), 124–25. They are published in Jacobi Arcadelt Opera Omnia, ed. Albert Seay, 10 vols. [henceforth “S”] (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1965–70), vol. 4, nos. 6, 8, 14, and 17. 4.  Martelli’s tragedy La Tullia is published in Le rime volgari (1533). The music manuscript is Modena, Bibl. Est. Ms γ L.11.8 (ff. 29v–30r). See H. Colin Slim, “Un coro della ‘Tullia’ di Ludovico Martelli messo in musica e attribuito a Philippe Verdelot,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ’500 (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 2:499–501. 5.  The score is published in H. Colin Slim, A Gift of Madrigals and Motets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 2:505–507; see mm. 31–36 and 49–54. 6. See Anthony M. Cummings, The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004). Martelli too was a member of La Cazzuola; see Paola Cosentino, “Firenze tra sperimentalismo tragico e ‘prima maniera’ pittorica,” in Lettere e arti nel Rinascimento: Atti del decimo convegno internazionale (Chianciano-Pienza 20–23 luglio 1998), ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Cesati, 2007), 455. 7. I thank Anthony Cummings for first making this point to me in a conversation at the 2002 AMS/SMT meeting in Columbus, Ohio. See also Giuseppe Gerbino, “Florentine Petrarchismo and the Early Madrigal: Reflections on a Theory of Origins,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 607–28. 8. See Mario Martelli, “Firenze,” in Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia. L’età moderna II, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 153–54, and Cosentino, “Firenze tra sperimentalismo tragico e ‘prima maniera’ pittorica,” 454–55. Gerbino observes that one of the differences between Florentine and Bembian Petrarchism consists of the former’s adoption of the ballata, visible in many early madrigals, compared to the latter’s preference for the sonnet. See Giuseppe Gerbino, Orpheus in Arcadia: The Creation of Pastoral Mode in the Sixteenth-Century Madrigal (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2001), 99–100. 9.  Antonfrancesco Doni, Dialogo della musica, ed. Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 1965), 16, 36, 70. Cesare Segre relates the use of daily language in Machiavelli’s comedies to Doni’s taste for bizzarre words in his treatises and to Bembo’s theorizing on the sound of words, all three under the semantic umbrella of a sixteenth-century “linguistic hedonism.” See Cesare Segre, “Edonismo linguistico nel Cinquecento,” in idem, Lingua, stile e società: Studi sulla storia della prosa italiana (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 355–82. 10.  The madrigal opens Verdelot’s Primo Libro de Madrigali (Venice: Antico, 1533), NV 2866. For the sources, both in manuscript and in print, see Piero Gargiulo, “Da Willaert a Merulo: Testi e madrigali nel Primo libro a 4 voci (15332, poi 15379) di Philippe Verdelot,” Philomusica on-line 9 (2010): 54–71. 11.  Pirrotta, “Temporal Perspective and Music,” in idem, Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 134. Pirrotta includes a full transcription of this “Canzone innanzi al Prologo de La Clizia.” 12. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 1:254.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 107 – 110   297

13.  “More important [than justifying singing] was the fact that by its unreality and its music the frame helped to create what we might call the illusion of a temporal perspective”; Pirrotta, “Temporal Perspective and Music,” 128. 14. Ibid., 129. 15. In narratological studies, the extreme compression of the time of the story into that of the representation is termed “ellipsis.” For a theory of dramatic time that reflects on the time between the acts, including references to Machiavelli and Pirrotta, see Piermario Vescovo, Entracte: Drammaturgia del tempo (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). 16.  For the score of Verdelot’s setting, see Slim, A Gift of Madrigals, 2:333–35. 17. The noi in the final published version of the play becomes voi in Verdelot’s score. 18.  David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 14. On deixis Herman quotes from a study in cognitive psychology: “When one reads [or views, or hears] a narrative as it is meant to be read [seen, heard], he or she is often required to take a cognitive stance within the world of narrative. A location within the world of the narrative serves as the center from which the sentences are interpreted. In particular, deictic terms such as here and now refer to this conceptual location. It is this the dectic center. DST [Deictic Shift Theory] is a theory that states that the deictic center often shifts from the environmental situation in which the text is encountered to a locus within a mental model representing the world of the discourse.” Erwin M. Segal, “Narrative Comprehension and the Role of Deictic Shift Theory,” in Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, ed. Judith Duchan, Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 15. 19.  The Comedies of Machiavelli: The Woman from Andros, The Mandrake, Clizia, ed. David Sices and James Atkinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 277. 20.  The madrigal was first printed in Arcadelt’s Primo Libro di Madrigali . . . a quatro (Venice: Gardano, 1539), NV 98. The score is published in S ii as well as in McClary, Modal Subjectivities, 239–41. 21.  The author is bishop Giovanni Guidiccioni, who, however, during his life never published this poem, which is found only, with variants, in a posthumous eighteenthcentury edition of his poetry. Presumably Il bianco e dolce cigno was transmitted exclusively as a text destined to musical settings. 22. Given the Neoplatonic context of the poetry of Bishop Guidiccioni and his Tuscan contemporaries in general, as well as of Il bianco e dolce cigno in particular, interpretations that rely exclusively on sexual metaphors and their related musical expressions have, in my view, no firm contextual basis, death not always being linked to orgasm in ­sixteenth-century poetry. See, among these interpretations, Laura Macy, “Speaking of Sex: Metaphor and Performance in the Italian Madrigal,” Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 1–34; Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59– 67; and Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:724–25. On the Florentine Neoplatonic context of the early madrigals’ poetic texts, see Stefano La Via, “Eros and Thanatos: A Ficinian and Laurentian Reading of Verdelot’s ‘Sì lieta e grata morte’,” Early Music History 21 (2002): 75–116; on Guidiccioni, see Antonino Sole, La lirica di Giovanni Guidiccioni (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987).  

 

 

 

 

 

298    Notes to pages 111 – 118 23. I employ here the word “mannerism” with the meaning of “deviation from the rule”—the rule being that of setting the entire text in all the voices—following Antonio Pinelli’s use of the word as related to Florentine painters active in Arcadelt’s time, such as Andrea del Sarto and Iacopo Pontormo; see Pinelli, La bella maniera: Artisti del Cinquecento tra regola e licenza (Turin: Einaudi, 1993). 24.  The text is by Benedetto Varchi. The madrigal is included in Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 and is published in modern edition in S ii and in the Appendix of James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 25.  Haar’s analysis of Quando il dolce suono is on pp. 72–74 of his Essays on Italian Poetry. For sources and dating see James Haar and Iain Fenlon, The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century: Sources and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 64. 26. See John Shearman, Only Connect … Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Pinelli, La bella maniera; and Fabio Finotti, Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso. Letteratura e scena cortigiana (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 129. 27. I will distinguish, accordingly, between an external, audible focalizer and an internal, silent one, although in this particular case the bass is an external focalizer but is also silent, the result being what one might call a meta-madrigalism. 28.  Commenting on this passage of Quando col dolce suono, and speculating on the hypothesis that Arcadelt might have heard the singer Polissena in Venice, Haar writes: “in the course of this piece . . . occur the words ‘S’udeste Pulissena direste, ben direste, ben d’udir [doppia] Sirena. Io che veduta l’ho vi giuro ch’ella è più che’l sol assai lucente bella,’ which sounds personal enough if the words could be Arcadelt’s [my italics].” See James Haar, “Notes on the Dialogo della Musica by Antonfrancesco Doni,” in his The Science and Art of Renaissance Music, ed. Paul Corneilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 298, n. 48. 29.  Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 72–5, from which I quote. 30. I use the term narrator to signify the narrating agent, whom Cone calls the “complete musical persona.” I intend “narrative” as “the representation of meaningfully related events,” according to Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck in Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 13. 31.  The author of the text is unknown. The madrigal appears in Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 (S ii). 32. Two other madrigals by Arcadelt that highlight visual sensations through the dropping out of the bass voice are Occhi miei lassi and Quanta beltà, both from the I a 4 (S ii). 33.  McClary provides the full score of the madrigal in Modal Subjectivities, 245–48. According to Haar, this madrigal presents a “complete neutrality of expression,” and is part of a group of six (included in MS Magl. XIX, 122–5) in which “repetition is blocklike and undisguised, part of what I think can be described as—in comparison with most of Arcadelt’s music—the general technical roughness of these early works” (see his “Towards  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 118 – 122   299

a Chronology of the Madrigals by Arcadelt,” Journal of Musicology 5 [1987], 36 nn. 28 and 37). In contrast, Claude Palisca praises this madrigal for its “subtle expressive touches,” mentioning aspects of its harmony, such as the “turn from C major to B flat major” in the setting of line 6 (see A History of Western Music, 4th ed. [New York: Norton, 1988], 263). McClary, too, offers positive comments, invoking Lacan’s view of desire (Modal Subjectivities, 73–76). 34.  The text is anonymous; setting in Book I a 4. 35. See Palisca, A History of Western Music (his translation). The letter is also published in Palestrina: Pope Marcellus Mass, ed. Lewis Lockwood (New York: Norton, 1975), 10–16. 36. In theoretical treatises of Arcadelt’s time the bass is considered an important structural element in the music; see Benito Rivera, “Harmonic Theory in Musical Treatises of the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth-Centuries,” Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979): 80–95. In a later article Rivera shows that in Arcadelt’s Book I a 4 the soprano–bass framework governs most of the homophonic sections; see idem, “The Two-Voice Framework and Its Harmonization in Arcadelt’s First Book of Madrigals,” Music Analysis 6 (1987): 59–88. On the role of the bass part in the sixteenth century, see also Bernhard Meier, The Modes of Classical Polyphony Described According to the Sources, with Revisions by the Author (New York: Broude Brothers, 1988), 51. 37. See Thomas Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. P. Demetz, T. Greene, and L. Nelson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 246–49. For a stimulating study of this topic in the madrigal repertoire, see Paul Christopher Schick, “Concordia Discourse: Polyphony and Dialogue in Willaert, Wert and Monteverdi” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1997). 38. See S ii, mm. 10–12, 19–20 (in this case, however, the bass sets the text also before and after withdrawing), and 33–35. 39. S ii, mm. 18–23. 40.  All three madrigals are published in S iii, which includes Arcadelt’s Il vero secondo libro di madrigali, 1539 (NV 151). 41. S ii, mm. 23–35. 42. S iii. 43. S iii, mm. 24 ff. 44.  On the wandering soggetto in early madrigals, see Howard Mayer Brown, “Words and Music: Willaert, the Chanson, and the Madrigal about 1540,” in Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations. Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976–77, ed. C. Smith and S. I. Camporeale (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980), 2:217–66. 45. According to Thomas Bridges “fifty-six editions of Arcadelt’s first book survive. Issued between 1538 and 1654 by twenty-five printers, with perhaps 500 copies per printing, this is the most frequently republished Renaissance music book.” Thomas W. Bridges,  “The Publishing of Arcadelt’s First Book of Madrigals” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982), iii. For the ordering of the madrigals in the editions of Arcadelt’s Book I a 4, see his Appendix A, Tables 3, 5, 6, 7. 46.  Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: UTET, 1966), 341.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

300    Notes to pages 123 – 129 47.  English trans. in Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf Brand Gottfried (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), 33 (the poem is in Book I, chapter 14). 48. S ii, no. 44. The text of line 7 seems to reappear as Tant’è il piacer ch’io sento in the famous madrigal Anchor che col partire by Rore, who at that point clearly imitates Arcadelt’s setting. 49.  Four years earlier, the same Venetian publisher of the Asolani (Aldo Manuzio) issued Bembo’s philological edition of Petrarch’s poems, Le cose volgari, based on the authograph owned by Bembo himself—a landmark in the history of Petrarchism. 50. Luigi Baldacci, Il Petrarchismo italiano nel Cinquecento (Padua: Liviana, 1974), 90. 51.  Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani, 31, 33 (respectively in I, XII and XV; translation modified). 52. See Bembo, Prose e rime, 345; Finotti, Retorica della diffrazione, 130; and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 53. See Paolo Cecchi, “ ‘Delicious air and sweet invention’: The Diffusion and Consumption of Marenzio’s Secular Music in England (ca. 1588–1640),” in “Compositor moderno et vago : Perspectives on Luca Marenzio’s Secular and Devotional Music, ed. Mauro Calcagno (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 54.  Amor, la tua virtute was set to music by Arcadelt in Book II a 4. On Bembo and Arcadelt see Sabine Meine, “Amore sacro e profano: Kulturgeschichtliche Hintergründe des frühen Cinquecento-Madrigals am Beispiel von Pietro Bembo und Jacques Arcadelt,” in Musik, Wissenschaft und ihre Vermittlung: Bericht über die internationale musikwissenschaftliche Tagung der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, 26.–29. September 2001, ed. Arnfried Edler and Sabine Meine (Augsburg: Wissner, 2002), 301–8. On music in Gli Asolani see Stefano Lorenzetti, Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento: Educazione, mentalità, immaginario (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 128 and 177. 55. Finotti, Retorica della diffrazione, 112. 56.  Monteverdi edited Arcadelt’s I a 4 in a publication entitled Madrigali a quattro di Giaches Archadelt di nuovo ristampato, e corretto in Venetia da Claudio Monteverde (Rome: per Paolo Masotti, 1627). 57. See Stefano La Via, “Monteverdi esegeta: Rilettura di ‘Cruda Amarilli / O Mirtillo,’ ” in Intorno a Monteverdi, ed. Maria Caraci Vela and Rodobaldo Tibaldi (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1999), 77–99. 58.  “When one quiet gentleman speaks with another, in what manner he speaks . . . when one of them speaks with one of his servants, or one of these with another [when] the prince [converses] with one of his subjects and vassals; when with the petitioner who is entreating his favor; how the man infuriated or excited speaks; the married woman, the girl, the mere child, the clever harlot, the lover speaking to his mistress as he seeks to persuade her to grant his wishes, the man who laments, the one who cries out, the timid man, and the man exultant with joy.” Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica et moderna, 1581, as translated in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed. edited by Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), 465–66. The passage is drawn from the section “from whom the modern practitioners can learn the imitation of words.” 59.  James Chater, “ ‘Un pasticcio di madrigaletti’? The Early Musical Fortune of Il pastor fido,” in Guarini, la musica, i musicisti, ed. Angelo Pompilio (Lucca: Libreria musi 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 129 – 134   301

cale italiana, 1997), 155. In Chater’s list of the ten most frequently set texts derived from Guarini’s play up to 1605, Ah dolente partita is on top with thirty-seven settings, followed by Cruda Amarilli with twenty-seven, and O Mirtillo with twenty-one. 60. Ibid. 61. Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 92. 62. Stefano La Via, “Origini del ‘recitativo corale’ monteverdiano: Gli ultimi madrigali di Cipriano de Rore,” in Monteverdi: Recitativo in monodia e polifonia (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1996), 28. 63.  Musica nova di Adriano Willaert all’illustrissimo et eccellentissimo signor il signor donno Alfonso d’Este prencipe di Ferrara (Venice: Antonio Gardano, 1559), NV 3001. For its format see Jane Bernstein, Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36. In chapters 5 and 6, abbreviated titles of madrigal books in small caps indicate that the work is discussed extensively and that its table of contents is found in a table or in appendix 1. Full titles appear in the notes. 64.  Bembo’s 1501 edition of Petrarch in Le cose volgari follows this division by starting with the canzone I’ vo pensando. 65. See Brown, “Words and Music.” 66. Gioseffo Zarlino, The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of Le Istitutioni Harmoniche, 1558, ed. Guy A. Marco and Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 51 (trans. modified). 67. Ibid., 87 (III, 41). 68. Ibid., 87–88. 69. In narratological studies, terminology varies: the first level is described as histoire by Gérard Genette, story by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Seymour Chatman, and fabula by Mieke Bal and the Russian formalists; the second level, respectively, as récit, text, plot, story, sjuzhet; finally, the third as narration, narration, discourse, text. 70.  Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), ad indicem: “plot”; Enza Biagini, Racconto e teoria del romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 49–108; and Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 196–98. 71. In the musical examples of parts III and IV of Zarlino’s treatise there are passages from thirteen madrigals from Musica nova, including three among the four dialogue madrigals. See Cristle Collins Judd, Reading Renaissance Music Theory: Hearing with the Eyes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 202–5. 72.  Denis Stevens, “Renaissance Dialogue Techniques,” in Essays on Music for Charles Warren Fox, ed. Jerald C. Graue (Rochester, NY: Eastman School of Music Press, 1979), 217. 73.  David Nutter, “The Italian Polyphonic Dialogue of the Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 1977), 45–80. 74.  Willaert borrows the text of Sasso’s Quando nascesti from Verdelot’s setting. 75. Nutter, “The Italian Polyphonic Dialogue,” 63. 76.  For the third meaning of soggetto in Zarlino as soggetto ben disposto (the listener), see Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of  

 

 

 

 

302    Notes to pages 135 – 148 Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 13 and 45. 77. Nutter claims that the declamatory openings establish that the texts have indeed a “narrative quality and that there is a story to relate” (“The Italian Polyphonic Dialogue,” 64). 78.  Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 79.  Cipriano de Rore, Di Cipriano de Rore i Madrigali a cinque voci, nuovamente posti in luce (Venice: Scotto, 1542), NV 2389. 80. Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice, 266. 81. Ibid., 261, 279, 281, 289. 82.  For example, Jessie Ann Owens, “Mode in the Madrigals of Cipriano de Rore,” in Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris (Sydney: Frederick May Foundation for Italian Studies, 1989), 1–15. 83. Ibid., 7. 84. See above, n. 18. 85. I do not discuss madrigal cycles and madrigal comedies, which would be natural candidates for such investigation, since my aim is to explore musical narrativity in less obvious instances, which more directly pertain to my main case study, Monteverdi’s works. 86. Amedeo Quondam, La conversazione: Un modello italiano (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), 148. 87. Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 199. 88.  Quondam, “Sul petrarchismo,” in Il petrarchismo: Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, ed. Loredana Chines (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), 82. 89. Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 193. 90. Ibid., 196. 91. Doni, Dialogo della musica, 106–20. 92. See Amedeo Quondam, “Le accademie,”in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1: Il letterato e le istituzioni, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 823–98, and Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 93. Quondam, La conversazione, 217. 94.  The court of Urbino, for example, is the “stage” of Castiglione’s dialogue The Courtier. See Amedeo Quondam, “La ‘forma del vivere’: Schede per l’analisi del discorso cortigiano,” in La corte e il cortegiano, ed. Carlo Ossola and Adriano Prosperi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 1:41–54. 95.  The Duke of Sessa is the dedicatee of Giaches de Wert’s Book II a 5 (1563). See Iain Fenlon, Giaches de Wert: Letters and Documents (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 49–50. 96.  The sonnet is reprinted in Tobia R. Toscano, Letterati, corti, accademie: La letteratura a Napoli nella prima metà del Cinquecento (Naples: Loffredo, 2000), 176. See also Toscano’s commentary. Tansillo is the author of the Lagrime di S. Pietro set to music as a cycle by Orlando di Lasso. 97.  By quoting as the last line of his proemial sonnet the first line of Petrarch’s poem, Tansillo gives his sonnet a “spinning,” cyclical character, the reader mentally starting again another text (but by Petrarch) just as he finishes reading one—an example of the voice exchange, or “equivocality,” discussed in chapter 4. Willaert, as we have seen, obtains  

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 148 – 152   303

a similar cyclical effect by beginning Musica nova with RVF LXXXV and concluding it with the sonnet just preceding it in the Canzoniere. 98. Toscano, Letterati, corti, accademie, 147. 99. See Quondam, La conversazione, 69. 100. Castiglione’s The Courtier saw 125 editions from 1528 to 1619, of which fifty are in foreign languages. 101.  Quondam calls Castiglione’s, Della Casa’s, and Guazzo’s books “the three great books [representative] of the Italian model,” a model, that is, for the rest of Europe, established by the conversation as “form of living.” 102. Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini 1993), 1:30; on the term “living voice” see Quondam’s comment in vol. 2, n. 187, pp. 77–78. 103. Ibid., 1:88. 104.  This peak coincides with the increase in madrigal publishing in the 1560s, which in turn climaxes in the 1580s, when the number of Petrarch settings starts to decline. See Paolo Cecchi, “La fortuna musicale della ‘Canzone alla Vergine’ e il madrigale cinquecentesco,” in Petrarca in musica: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. VII centenario della nascita di Francesco Petrarca, Arezzo, 18–20 marzo 2004, ed. Andrea Chegai and Cecilia Luzzi (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 2005), 248. 105.  Publications by Rore, Rampollini, and Lasso feature Petrarch’s name in their title pages. See Piperno, “Petrarch, Petrarchism and the Italian Madrigal,” in Luca Marenzio’s Secular Music, ed. Calcagno. 106. See Lorenzo Bianconi, “Il Cinquecento e il Seicento,” in Letteratura italiana, vol. 6: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 329. 107. Tim Carter, “ ‘Tutto ’l dí piango . . . ’: Petrarch and the ‘New Music’ in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Il Petrarchismo: Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, 1:391–404. 108.  The composer who set the highest number of Petrarch’s texts was Filippo de Monte, with seventy-four settings. Important composers setting a high number of Petrarch’s texts include Adrian Willaert (who, as we have seen, set twenty-four sonnets in his Musica nova), Cipriano de Rore with forty-nine texts, and Giaches de Wert with thirty-four. For Marenzio, see below. 109.  A “collective edition” is a book of madrigals by various musicians composed for the occasion of a specific publication, as opposed to an “anthology” as a compilation of pieces previously published elsewhere. 110.  Quondam defines Petrarchism as a “phenomenology of literary communication” characterized by a “system of repetition.” See Amedeo Quondam, “Nascita della grammatica: Appunti e materiali per una descrizione analitica,” in idem, Il naso di Laura: Lingua e poesia lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (Modena: Panini, 1991), 48. 111.  Quondam, “Sul petrarchismo,” 64. In the period 1500–1700 Torquato Tasso’s texts were set to music 660 times, followed by Ariosto with 494 settings, Sannazaro with 415, and Bembo with 262. Most of these settings were published, however, before 1600. Across the two centuries, Guarini became the most frequently set poet, with 905 settings, followed by Marino with 551, and Angelo Grillo with 360. These data, discussed by Quondam, come from the free online resource Repertorio della poesia italiana in musica, 1500–1700, ed. Angelo Pompilio, at http://repim.muspe.unibo.it.  

 

 

 

 

304    Notes to pages 153 – 159 112.  Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1:27. 113.  This emerges from the correspondence preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Mantua, of which summaries are available at www.capitalespettacolo.it (see, for example, Casette, 11/12/1605—C 1224 The Duke of Mantua Vincenzo Gonzaga to Giovanni Magni). I thank Paolo Cecchi for providing me with this information. 114. Giovan Battista Pigna, Il ben divino, inedito di G. Battista Pigna, ed. Neuro Bonifazi (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965); idem, Gli amori; Discorso sopra “Gli amori,” ed. David Nolan (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1991). 115. Pigna, Gli amori, 165; the rest of the quotations are from the following two pages. 116.  Alessandro Martini, “Amore esce dal caos: L’organizzazione tematico-narrativa delle rime amorose del Tasso,” Filologia e critica 9 (1984): 78–121. 117. See Silvia Longhi, “Il tutto e le parti nel sistema di un canzoniere (Giovanni della Casa),” Strumenti critici 39–40 (1979): 265–300. 118.  My focus here is on the type of the more structured love poetry book modelled on Petrarch. This is a “centripetal,” “Ptolemaic,” or “geocentric” type of canzoniere as opposed to a “centrifugal” and “Copernican” one, which becomes more common at the end of the sixteenth century and later on with Marino (see chapters 6 and 7). Tasso features both types of canzonieri, for Lucrezia Bendidio and for Laura Peverara, respectively. See Guglielmo Gorni, “Il libro di poesia Cinquecentesco: Principio e fine,” in Il libro di poesia dal copista al tipografo, ed. Marco Santagata and Amedeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1989), 40–41. 119.  These connections are explored in Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere: Ricerche sulla costituzione e preistoria di un genere (Padua: Liviana, 1979), from which I borrow the examples. 120. Ilaria Zamuner shows that Marenzio’s Book I a 4, in which nine out of twenty texts are by Petrarch, can be divided into two parts: the first emphasizes sweetness through the repetition of words associated with the adjective dolce; the second part is characterized by a melancholic tone signaled by the repetition of the words pianto and doglia. These two parts refer to the division of Petrarch’s book between rime in vita and in morte. See her “Luca Marenzio centonatore: Selezione poetica tra forma-canzoniere petrarchesca e opera aperta tassiana (1585–1588),” La Cartellina 21 (1997): 29–34. 121. Luca Marenzio, Il secondo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1581), NV 1608. Critical edition in Luca Marenzio, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Alfred Einstein, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1929–31; repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967), vol. 1. 122. See Cesare Segre, “Le isotopie di Laura,” in Notizie dalla crisi: Dove va la critica letteraria? (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 66–80. 123. Newcomb, in The Madrigal at Ferrara, was the first to advance this hypothesis (1:87, n. 129). Marco Bizzarini makes observations similar to mine regarding Books II and III in Luca Marenzio (Palermo: L’Epos 2003), 68, and in chapter 7 of idem, Luca Marenzio: The Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, trans. James Chater (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 124.  Marenzio is one of the composers who participated in a collection of madrigals put together, probably at the beginning of 1579, by the Accademici Filarmonici di Verona  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 159 – 164   305

to honor Laura Peverara (with Ridean già per le piagge herbette e fiori). See Elio Durante and Anna Martellotti, “Giovinetta Peregrina”: La vera storia di Laura Peperara e Torquato Tasso (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 87–90, and Marco Materassi, Il primo Lauro: Madrigali in onore di Laura Peverara. Ms. 220 dell’Accademia Filarmonica di Verona [1580] (Treviso: Diastema Fiori Musicali, 1999). 125.  Anselmo Reulx’s Madrigali a 4 (1543) and Benedetto Serafico’s Book I a 5 (1575) also present the change notte/note. 126.  The examples are from Elena Semino, Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts (New York: Longman, 1997), 141. 127. Ibid., 142. Semino elaborates on the theory of scripts presented in R. C. Schank’s Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 128. Herman, Story Logic, 89. 129. See Richard Cockroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern England: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 15–18. 130. Luca Marenzio, Il settimo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1595), NV 1633. Critical editions: idem, Il Settimo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci (1595), ed. Patricia Myers (New York: Broude Bros., 1980), and idem, Il Settimo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci, ed. John Steele (New York: Editions Renaissantes, 1975). 131. The expression “narrative impulse” is inspired by the dramatically-oriented analyses of Monteverdi’s madrigal books included in Massimo Ossi’s Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Myers, in her “Introduction” to the critical edition of Marenzio’s Book VII a 5, discusses the “meaningful order” of the texts, which follows “with notable sensitivity the progress of the courtship of Amarilli and Mirtillo.” For her, the arrangement of the pieces, including the non-Guarini ones, “is not . . . accidental.” Myers observes that this Book “may be said to occupy an important place between the cinquecento madrigal cycle and the early opera of the seicento.” She also emphasizes Monteverdi’s debt to Marenzio in his Books IV and V. My discussion expands on Myers’s. In dealing with Book VI a 5 I aim, however, at revising her view that, prior to Book VII, “Marenzio’s madrigal collections [with the exception of his Book for 4, 5, and 6 voices] had not been governed by any discernible principle.” See Marenzio, Il Settimo libro de’ madrigali, ed. Myers, xiii and xxiii. 132.  On this madrigal see Massimo Ossi, “Monteverdi, Marenzio, and Battista Guarini’s ‘Cruda Amarilli,’ ” Music & Letters 89 (2008): 311–36. 133. I return here to the division of poems according to their mode of address—I poems, I–you poems, and mimetic poems—first introduced in chapter 4 (“Lyric Modes”) and used throughout chapter 5. 134.  For deictic words in Marenzio see Seth Coluzzi, “Structure and Interpretation in Luca Marenzio’s Settings of Il Pastor Fido” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005), chapter 4. 135.  For the musical terminology used in tables 2 through 5, see Cristle Collins Judd, “Renaissance Modal Theory: Theoretical, Compositional, and Editorial Perspectives,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 364–406, especially on p. 377 in connection with Har 

 

 

 

 

 

 

306    Notes to pages 165 – 171 old S. Powers’s definition of “tonal types” as a combination of system, ambitus (clef), and final. For clef, g2 = g2 c2 c3 c3 F3 (high clefs); c1 = c1 c3 c4 c4 F4 (low clefs). 136.  “Anima mia” is the appellative of Mirtillo in the first lines of the two madrigals nos. 12 and 13, spoken by Amarilli. 137. See Mary Lewis, Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538–1569: A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study (New York: Garland, 1988), 2:123–49. 138. Laura Macy notices that in Al lume delle stelle “Marenzio instinctively distinguished the narrative from the dramatic portions of the text, but not in the way we might expect,” since “the narrative section is set recitationally,” whereas for the lament proper the composer “reverted to canzonetta style. . . . The recitational style”—Macy concludes— “serves here not as an imitation of speech but as a narrative voice”; “The Late Madrigals of Luca Marenzio: Studies in the Interactions of Music, Literature, and Patronage at the End of the Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991), 117. 139.  For a definition of narrative that goes beyond that of events connected in causal and temporal ways, and extending instead to the interaction between reader and text, see Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 13–14. 140.  For the composer as the narrator deriving his story from a preexisting fabula, see the discussion of Zarlino in the previous section. 141. See Seth Coluzzi, “ ‘Tirsi mio, caro Tirsi’: Il pastor fido and the Roman Madrigal,” in “Compositor moderno et vago,” ed. Calcagno. 142.  Battista Guarini, “Annotazioni della seconda scena,” in idem, Il pastor fido (Venice: Ciotti, 1602), 27. 143.  Opinions diverge among scholars about the narrative trajectory in Book VII. Alfred Einstein and Patricia Myers are inclined to see it as culminating in a wedding song, whereas Seth Coluzzi and Maria Teresa Caraci Vela are more skeptical. See Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 676; Marenzio, Il Settimo libro de’ madrigali, ed. Myers, xxiii; Coluzzi, “Structure and Interpretation,” 275–78; Maria Teresa Caraci Vela, “Osservazioni intorno al Settimo Libro dei madrigali a cinque voci di Luca Marenzio,” in Luca Marenzio musicista europeo: Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Federico Mompellio (Brescia: Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana, 1990), 10. 144. See Giuseppe Gerbino, “Marenzio and the Shepherds of the Tiber Valley,” in “Compositor moderno et vago,” ed. Calcagno, and idem, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 362–65. 145. See Roberto Gigliucci, Giù verso l’alto: Luoghi e dintorni tassiani (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2004), 54; and Mauro Sarnelli, “Fra i ‘cigni del Tevere’ accanto al Tasso: Antonio Decio da Orte, Fabio e Virginio II Orsini (con documenti inediti),” in Luca Marenzio e il madrigale romano: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Roma, 9–10 settembre 2005 (Rome: Fondazione Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2007), 15–38. 146. Luca Marenzio, Il sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1594), NV 1629. Critical edition in Marenzio, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Einstein, vol. 2. 147. See James Chater, “Fonti poetiche per i madrigali di Luca Marenzio,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 13 (1978): 60–103.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 171 – 181   307

148.  See Claudio Annibaldi, “Social Markers in the Musical Market: The Patronage of Music in Marenzio’s Age in Light of His Madrigals,” in “Compositor moderno et vago,” ed. Calcagno. 149.  Giaches de Wert, Di Giaches de Wert l’ottavo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, novamente composto e dato in luce (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1586), NV 2990. 150.  Carol MacClintock, Giaches de Wert, 1535–1596: Life and Works (n. p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1966), 111. 151.  Luca Marenzio, Il nono libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1599), dedicatory letter, Rome, May 10, 1599 (“Il sentirmi sopremamente honorato dall’Altezza Vostra Serenissima, mentre alli mesi passati si compiacque comandarmi, ch’io dovessi mandarle alcune delle mie compositioni, ha destato in me qualche opinione, che li frutti del mio basso ingegno non sieno forsi da sprezzarsi in tutto, già che vengono pregiati da Prencipe non meno di stato, che d’intelletto sublime, com’è l’A.V. Et da ciò rincorata la mia povera Musa ha dato fuori, solo a divotione di Lei, alcune poche note, le quali se ben per se stesse humili, aggrandite nondimeno dallo splendore del suo nome Serenissimo non temerano andar in luce alla presenza d’ognuno, sicure, che dall’alto suo giuditio approvate, non sarà chi ardischi malignamente riprovarle”). 152.  Paolo Fabbri, in describing this historical context, concludes that the composer’s hopes to be hired by Vincenzo were transparent. See the Introduction to his critical edition of Book IX in Luca Marenzio, Il nono libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1599) (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1999), i–ii. 153.  Cited in ibid., x. 154.  For a summary of the daring technical features of the madrigals in Book IX see ibid. This Book is a statement of musical avant-gardism also from the rhythmic point of view, as Ruth DeFord demonstrates in “ c and |  in the Madrigals of Marenzio,” in “Compositor moderno et vago,” ed. Calcagno. 155.  The terms grave and piacevole were used by Bembo in Prose della volgar lingua (1525) in his reading of Petrarch according to the balance between these two qualities. For Bembo, Dante’s poetry inclined too much toward gravità, and thus lacked variazione, the desired balance between the two qualities. Between the two qualities, however, Bembo showed a clear preference for piacevolezza, a choice that influenced Petrarchism in its initial phase. See Andrea Afribo, Teoria e prassi della “gravitas” nel Cinquecento (Florence: Cesati, 2001), 13–14. 156.  See Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Il rinascimento dei moderni: La crisi culturale del XVI secolo e la negazione delle origini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), 259. 157.  Torquato Tasso, King Torrismondo, ed. Maria Pastore Passaro (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 70. Tasso also advocates gravità in an oft-quoted passage of his discorso entitled La Cavalletta, in which he condemns musicians for writing music “soft and effeminate,” reminding them of the importance of the grave style. 158.  Luca Marenzio, Madrigali a quattro, cinque et sei voci, libro primo (Venice: Giacomo Vincenti, 1588), NV 1596. Critical edition: idem, Madrigali a quattro, cinque e sei voci, libro primo (1588), ed. Steven Ledbetter (New York: Broude Bros., 1977). 159.  Composers of the third quarter of the century dedicated to Bevilacqua many publications, mostly madrigal books. See Paolo Cecchi, “ ‘Ov’è condotto il mio amoroso  

 

 

308    Notes to pages 181 – 196 stile?’ Poetica e committenza nei madrigali di Marenzio dedicati a Mario Bevilacqua,” Musica e storia 10 (2002): 444–45. 160.  On this issue, see Massimo Privitera, “ ‘Ond’io vo col penser cangiando stile’: Marenzio e Mia benigna fortuna di Petrarca,” in Studi marenziani, ed. Iain Fenlon and Franco Piperno (Venice: Edizioni Fondazione Levi, 2003), 255–76. 161. In the other sestina by Sannazaro from which Marenzio draws—no. 9, Fiere silvestre—two rhyme words are identical to Petrarch, rime and pianto. 162. Finally, datemi pace is lifted from RVF CCLXXIV, 1. 163. See Robert Durling’s introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), 17. 164.  Marianne Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 135. 165.  Cecchi, “ ‘Ov’è condotto il mio amoroso stile?,’ ” 491–92. 166. Nicola Gardini, Le umane parole: L’imitazione nella lirica europea del Rinascimento da Bembo a Ben Jonson (Milan: B. Mondadori, 1997), 78. 167. Luca Marenzio, Il sesto, settimo, ottavo et nono libro, suo testamento, de madrigali a cinque voci (Antwerp: Phalèse, 1609).  

 

 

 

 

Pa r t Th r ee . S tag i n g t he Se l f

6. Monteverdi, Narrator 1. See the quote from W. F. Mackey in “Interference,” Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); online version accessed June 2011. 2.  Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). In Da le belle contrade, in which the narrator is a male and the character a female, we hear her words from his point of view. In the poem the narrator remembers the character saying the words Speranza del mio cor, dolce desio (“Hope of my heart, sweet desire,” etc., line 6). 3.  Manfred Jahn, entry “focalization” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 173. 4. See chapter 1 (“Authorizing Performance”). 5.  “Ben mi lusinga alquanto / dilettandomi il core, / sconsolato cantore, / il tuo pianto e ’l tuo canto.” 6.  An identical perspectival function, we remember, was played by early madrigals since the 1520s, when they were performed between the acts of spoken plays (see chapter 5: “Theatricality and Temporal Perspective”). Thus it is in more than one way that intermedi provided the conditions of possibility for opera to begin as a genre. On the perspective structure of dramatic texts, including “figure-perspectives,” see Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 57–68. 7. See the epigraph to part I. 8.  “Sie einen besonderen Hinweis vom Standpunkt des Sprechenden aus enthalten.” Karl Brugmann, Die Demonstrativpronomina der indogermanischen Sprachen: Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), 5.



Notes to pages 196 – 203   309

9.  Dean Mace, “Tasso, La Gerusalemme liberata, and Monteverdi,” in Studies in the History of Music, vol. 1: Music and Language (New York: Broude Brothers, 1983), 141 (Mace’s emphasis). 10.  Di Claudio Monteverde il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci novamente composto et datto in luce (Venice: Amadino, 1602). 11.  The Petrarchist phase is exemplified by Guidiccioni’s Il bianco e dolce cigno set to music by Arcadelt, which is Mace’s eloquent example (see my discussion in chapter 5), or by Tasso’s own lyric poems set by Monteverdi in his Book II of madrigals. 12. In Italian epic poetry such as Tasso’s Gerusalemme (see appendix 2 for an example), cantos consist exclusively of stanzas in ottava rima, meaning eight eleven-syllable lines rhyming abababcc. I abbreviate ottava as ott. 13. See the discussion of scripts in chapter 5: “The madrigal book as Canzoniere,” pp. 159ff. For “gapping” in narrative sequences see The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, sub voce. 14.  Ezio Raimondi, “Il poeta passionato,” in idem, Rinascimento inquieto (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 345. 15. Ibid., 336. 16. Remediation is “the representation of one medium in another.” See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 45. Bolter and Grusin argue that today’s new visual media “achieve their cultural significance by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning earlier media, as perspective paintings, photography, film, and television” (ibid.). Interestingly, they trace patterns of remediation back to medieval and Renaissance arts. 17.  Claudio Monteverdi, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi con alcuni opuscoli in genere rappresentativo che saranno per brevi episodii fra i canti senza gesto. Libro ottavo di Claudio Monteverde maestro di cappella della serenissima repubblica di Venetia. Dedicati alla sacra cesarea maestà dell’imperator Ferdinando III (Venice: Vincenti, 1638). 18. Idem, Il quinto libro di madrigali a cinque voci di Claudio Monteverdi maestro della musica del serenissimo sig.r duca di Mantoa col basso continuo per il clavicembalo, chittarone o altro simile istromento; fatto particolarmente per li sei ultimi et per li altri a beneplacito (Venice: Amadino, 1605). See appendix 1 for the contents of this book. 19.  Massimo Ossi, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 73. Ossi provides the texts and translations of all the madrigals in Book V on pp. 61–72. 20. See ibid., 77–79. 21.  Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 346–59. 22. Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 214. 23. Ibid. 24. See Ottavio Rinuccini, Poesie (Florence: Giunti 1622), 223–24. My translation is modified from that included in Claudio Monteverdi, Madrigals Book VII (Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi), ed. Gian Francesco Malipiero, pref. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1991), xxviii. Modern transcriptions of the text as it appears in Monteverdi’s  

 

 

 

310    Notes to pages 207 – 214 madrigal inevitably obscure the composer’s reworking of the original poem. I limit my discussion to large-scale differences between the two texts. 25.  The fact that the role of the narrator physically emerges in conjunction with the dancing body of the patron—as in the Ballo delle Ingrate, in which Duke Vincenzo took part in 1608 in Mantua—speaks in visual terms of the chain of authorizations patron– composer–performers discussed in relationship to Orfeo in chapter 1. 26. See Nino Pirrotta, “Monteverdi’s Poetic Choices,” in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 315. To Pirrotta I am also indebted for the notion of the distance between composer and material, developed below. 27.  The best English-language introduction to Marino is still James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 28. Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chapters 6 and 7. 29. In this respect, Monteverdi is indeed the “creator of modern music,” to borrow from the title of Leo Schrade’s Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music (New York: Norton, 1950). 30.  Claudio Monteverdi, Il sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci con uno dialogo a sette con il suo basso continuo per poterli concertare nel clavacembano, ed altri stromenti. Di Claudio Monteverdi maestro di cappella della sereniss. sig. di Venetia in S. Marco. Novamente composti, et dati in luce (Venice: Amadino, 1614). I will discuss Book VI again in the next chapter. 31.  The two lament cycles are the famous Ariadne’s lament (in the polyphonic version) and the sestina Incenerite spoglie. The Petrarch settings are Zefiro torna (RVF CCCX) and Ohimé il bel viso (RVF CCLVII) . See appendix 1. 32. See table 2 in Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 15. 33. Giovan Battista Marino, Rime boscherecce, ed. Janina Hauser-Jakubowicz (Ferrara: Panini, 1991). 34. Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 18, and Eric Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 211. 35. See Hauser-Jakubowicz’s introduction to Marino, Rime boscherecce. For the largescale organization of the Boscherecce see below, chapter 7. 36. Marino, Rime boscherecce, 145. 37.  Monteverdi’s modifications: [4] non so se più seguiva o se fuggiva; [5] Deh mira; [10] e tacque e giacque. 38.  Baroque images that capture Marino’s narrative strategies and are found in contemporary artistic forms are: the spiral, with its endless deferment (as in Borromini’s church of S. Ivo alla Sapienza, Rome); the ellipses, its two foci resulting from splitting the center point of a circle and elongating it (see George L. Hershey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 133–45); finally, the fold, which emphasizes irregular and curved tridimensionality (see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994]). 39.  The confusion regarding where Ergasto starts speaking in the poem (line 1 or line 5?) dates from Marino’s own time. An illustrious victim was the poet Federigo Meninni,  

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 214 – 228   311

an admirer of Marino, in his 1677 treatise Ritratto del sonetto e della canzone (Lecce: Argo, 2002), 16–18; a more modern one is Paolo Fabbri, in Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139, 326. 40.  Monteverdi’s modifications: the first two lines are in indirect speech, with direct speech starting in line 3; [2] convienti . . . t’appresti; [6] foste; [9] Si more lieto; [10] da soave. 41.  Monteverdi’s modifications: [13] e sia quel ch’el ciel vole [14] (dicean)/(dicea). 42. See p. 197. 43. In his madrigals Sigismondo D’India, in contrast to Monteverdi, always matches voice with character. See Andrea Garavaglia, Sigismondo D’India “drammaturgo” (Turin: EDT, 2005). 44. See Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 204. Chafe provides an imaginative but hardly defensible interpretation of the words Lasso, non m’odi as referring to modi. Clori, according to him, would not understand the mode of the piece, hence Ergasto’s affirmation of D minor. This reflects Chafe’s preoccupation with modality/tonality as a general explanatory device, which is present also in Susan McClary’s Modal Subjectivities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). McClary, for example, establishes a highly improbable connection between, on the one hand, the “wide range of modal possibilities” envisioned by Zarlino in his Istitutioni harmoniche and, on the other, a 1524 book entitled I modi consisting of engravings of sixteen sexual positions, made by Marcantonio Raimondi and based on drawings by Giulio Romano, later complemented with erotic sonnets by Pietro Aretino. She proposes that “whenever we hear the word mode in relation to sixteenth-century polyphony, we keep in mind how the word resonates with the title and licentious subject matter of . . . the Kama Sutra of the Italian Renaissance” (Modal Subjectivities, 198–99). 45. Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 206. 46.  This confusion is of course implicit in the names of the two characters Florida and Floro. 47.  Claudio Monteverdi, Concerto. Settimo Libro di Madrigali a 1, 2, 3, 4, et sei voci, con altri generi de Canti, del signor Claudio Monteverde maestro di cappella della Serenissima Republica. Novamente dato in luce. Dedicato alla Serenissima Madama Caterina Medici Gonzaga, Duchessa di Mantova, di Monferrato etc (Venice: Bartolomeo Magni, 1619). See the table of contents in appendix 1. 48. Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 23. 49.  Although published in 1638, Combattimento was composed to be performed at a Carnival evening of 1624 in the Venetian palace of the patrician Girolamo Mocenigo. On Combattimento, see the seldom referenced but perceptive rhetorical analysis of Gérard LeCoat in The Rhetoric of the Arts, 1550–1650 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975), 125–81; also: Fabbri, Monteverdi, 188–91; Stefano La Via, “Le Combat retrouvé: Les ‘passions contraires’ du ‘divin Tasse’ dans la représentation musicale de Monteverdi,” in La Jérusalem délivrée du Tasse: Poésie, peinture, musique, ballet. Actes du colloque, Musée du Louvre, les 13 et 14 novembre 1996, ed. Giovanni Careri (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 109–58; Tim Carter, “Composer as Theorist? Genus and Genre in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” in Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen (Lincoln: University  

 

 

 

 

 

312    Notes to pages 228 – 239 of Nebraska Press, 2002), 77–116; and Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 211–42. The score I refer to is that edited by Malipiero in Monteverdi, Madrigals Book VIII, also reproduced in Music of the Baroque: An Anthology of Scores, ed. David Schulenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44–63. Tomlinson, in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, 203, notes the connection between Marino’s mixed-mode sonnets and Combattimento. 50.  A list and a brief discussion of Monteverdi’s textual modifications of Tasso’s text can be found in Paolo Gallarati, “Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: Monteverdi esegeta del Tasso,” in Torquato Tasso: Cultura e poesia. Atti del convegno, Torino-Vercelli, 11–13 marzo 1996, ed. Mariarosa Masoero (Turin: Scriptorium, 1996), 292–93. 51. I follow Ossi’s tripartite division (in Divining the Oracle, 221) into: Introduction (stanzas 1–3 in Monteverdi), Battle (4–13), and Conclusion: Baptism and Death (14–16). I use “ottave” (abbreviated ott.) for Tasso’s text and “stanzas” for Monteverdi’s setting. 52.  Monteverdi does not set ott. 63. 53. Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Lorna Anderson, Maarten Koningsberger, Adrian Martin; ASKO Ensemble cond. David Porcelijn; directed by Pierre Audi, DVD Opus Arte OA 0972B D. This videorecording comes as a “bonus disc” with the DVD box set entitled “Monteverdi Cycle,” including Orfeo, Poppea, and Ritorno, all directed by Pierre Audi in productions first presented in 1993 at the Amsterdam Muziektheater for the Nederlandse Opera. 54.  David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 14; see note 18 in chapter 5. 55. See Wolfgang Osthoff, “Osservazioni sul canto della stanza che incomincia ‘Notte’ nel ‘Combattimento’ di Monteverdi: Caratteri e radici del genere,” in Monteverdi: Recitativo in monodia e polifonia (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1996), 59–80. On this issue, see Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 102. 56. See chapter 4: “Equivocality.” 57. I would like to thank Tim Carter for this observation. 58.  For the terminology related to the role of the narrator in film, see Manfred Jahn, A Guide to Narratological Film Analysis, at www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppf.htm, at F4.1.2. 59.  Ossi, “Divining the Oracle,” 225.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. The Possibility of Opera 1.  Quoted in Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28. 2.  Parts of this section are included in my “Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Venetian Opera,” Journal of Musicology 20 (2003): 461–97. Historical conclusions identical to mine, particularly with respect to the role played by the Jesuits in the cultural politics of Venice, are reached by Edward Muir in his The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the sexual politics of the Serenissima and the collapse of aristocratic marriage structures in the early modern period, see Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).  

 



Notes to pages 239 – 245   313

3. See Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chaps. 6 and 8. For a complex and fully documented picture of the world of opera production in seventeenth-century Venice, see Beth Glixon and Jonathan Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and his World in Seventeenth-Century Venice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. See Mario Infelise, “Ex ignoto notus? Note sul tipografo Sarzina e l’accademia degli Incogniti,” in Libri, tipografi, biblioteche: Ricerche storiche dedicate a Luigi Balsamo (Florence: Olschki, 1997), 207–23. 5.  Discorsi academici de’ Signori Incogniti havuti in Venetia nell’Accademia dell’Illustrissimo Signor Giovan Francesco Loredano nobile veneto (Venice: Sarzina, 1635). 6.  The discourse appears in Discorsi academici, 267–87. 7.  Le Glorie del Niente discorse dal sig. Marin Dall’Angelo nell’academia dei signori Incogniti di Venezia, in casa dell’illustrissimo sig. Gio. Francesco Loredano (Venice: Sarzina, 1634). The full documentation of the Incogniti polemic is included in the anthology Le antiche memorie del nulla, ed. Carlo Ossola (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1997). Dall’Angelo’s Glorie del Niente is on pp. 190–202. 8.  Il Niente. Discorso di D. Luigi Manzini. All’Illustrissimo ed eccellentissimo signore il sig. Domenico da Molino, recitato nell’academia degl’Incogniti di Venezia, a Ca’ Contarini. Gli VIII Maggio MDCXXXIV, sotto ’l principato dell’illustrissimo signore Angelo Michiele, nobile viniziano (Venice: Andrea Baba, 1634), reprinted in Le antiche memorie, 95–107. 9. See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Prince­ton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 221. 10.  Le antiche memorie, 98. 11. Ibid. 12.  Le antiche memorie, 103. Manzini plays on the word “voci” as meaning both “words” (as, for example, the entries of a dictionary) and “voices.” 13.  Le antiche memorie, 106. 14. Ibid., 120. 15. Ibid., 121. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 122. 18. Ibid., 121. 19.  Ossola speaks of the “progressive dissolution of the referent.” Le antiche memorie, xxiv. 20. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 47–48. 21. See the comments on Poppea, act 1, scene 6 later in this chapter. 22.  For verisimilitude in Venetian opera, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 44–45. 23.  On the debate on unities among Venetian opera librettists, see ibid., 45–50. 24. See Andrea Battistini, Il Barocco: Cultura, miti, immagini (Rome: Salerno, 2000), 203–4. 25.  For an overview of the novel in Venice and the Veneto, including the contribution  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

314    Notes to pages 245 – 249 of the Incogniti, see Quinto Marini, “La prosa narrativa,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Enrico Malato, vol. 5: La fine del Cinquecento e il Seicento (Rome: Salerno, 1997), 1004–1036. See also Paul Renucci, “Gli ‘Incogniti’ e la voga dei romanzi,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 2/2: Dalla caduta dell’Impero romano al secolo XVIII (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 1394–99. 26.  Cento novelle amorose de i signori accademici incogniti. Divise in tre parti, ed. Maiolino Bisaccioni (Venice: Guerigli, 1651). 27. See Il romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 3: Storia e geografia (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). 28. See Dahlhaus, “The Dramaturgy of Italian Opera,” in Opera in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 73–150; the chapter is on pp. 136–38, the citation at 136. 29.  For a summary of these views on “bellezza” in Renaissance Italy, see Stefano Lorenzetti, Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento: Educazione, mentalità, immaginario (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 125–37. In chapter 5 I discuss Il bianco e dolce cigno as a manifestation of a Neoplatonic Petrarchist aesthetics. 30.  Le antiche memorie, 125–26. 31.  “O deadly delight, earthly joy, / how it swarms at once, and at once falls! / Vain pleasure that amuses souls, / born of vanity, vanishes into nothing.” 32.  The lines conclude ottava 95 of the canto. 33.  Paolo Cherchi, “The Seicento: Poetry, Philosophy and Science,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter  Brand  and Lino  Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 308. 34. I quote from Giovan Battista Marino, L’Adone, ed. Giovanni Pozzi, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1976). 35.  “Musica e poesia son due sorelle / ristoratrici dell’afflitte genti,” Adone VII, 1, 1–2. 36.  “Udir musico mostro, o meraviglia, / che s’ode sì, ma si discerne apena, / come or tronca la voce, or la ripiglia, / or la ferma, or la torce, or scema, or piena, / or la mormora grave, or l’assottiglia, / or fa di dolci groppi ampia catena, / e sempre, o se la sparge o se l’accoglie, / con egual melodia la lega e scioglie.” The passage is quoted in many anthologies of Italian literature as epitomizing Marino and Baroque taste. For the relevance for music of both this ottava and canto VII, see Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13–14, and Marco Emanuele, Opera e riscritture: Melodrammi, ipertesti, parodie (Turin: Paravia, 2001), 5–11. 37.  For a discussion of classical sources, see Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–34. 38.  As Segal writes, the song of the nightingale-as-Procne moves away “from verbal utterance to approach inarticulate melody, in order to express a feeling of loss.” See Charles Segal, “The Female Voice and its Contradictions: From Homer to Tragedy,” in Religio Graeco-Romana: Festschrift für Walter Pötscher, ed. J. Dalfen, G. Petersmann, and F. F. Schwarz (Graz-Horn: F. Berger, 1993), 57–75, at 66–67. 39. See appendix 1 for the contents of Monteverdi’s Books VI and VII. 40.  Claudio Annibaldi, “Per una teoria della committenza musicale all’epoca di Monteverdi,” in Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e prospettive. Atti del convegno, Mantova, 21–24  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 250 – 253   315

ottobre 1993, ed. Paola Besutti, Teresa M. Gialdroni, and Rodolfo Baroncini  (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 466–75. 41.  Pliny’s passage is found in the tenth book of his Naturalis Historia (XLII, 81–2). See Pliny, Natural History, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 3:345. 42.  For Guarini’s poem as set by Monteverdi and his contemporaries see Massimo Ossi, “A Sample Problem of Seventeenth-Century Imitatio: Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Turini, and Battista Guarini’s Mentre vaga a Angioletta,” in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 253–69. 43.  “Da lei [poetry] gli accenti impara e le parole, / da lei distinta a scioglier la favella; /  senza lei fora un suon senza concetto, / priva di grazia e povera d’affetto” (68, 5–8). 44. In another reference to the contemporary music world, Marino compares the character of Allurement to the singers Adriana Basile and Virginia Andreini Ramponi— the latter, as it happens, the first protagonist of Monteverdi’s Arianna. 45.  “Lunge fuggite / o di falso piacer folli seguaci! / Non ha sfinge o sirena o più mentite / parolette e sembianze o più sagaci!” (85, 1–4). Even Apollo stops racing his chariot to listen to her singing (89, 5–6). 46.  “E queste fur le lusinghiere e scorte / voci, ov’accolta in aura era la morte.” 47.  “Un lampo è la beltà, l’etate un’ombra, / né sa fermar l’irreparabil fuga.” 48.  “O diletto mortal, gioia terrena, / come pullula tosto e tosto cade! / Vano piacer che gli animi trastulla, / nato di Vanità, svanisce in nulla.” 49. See, among the Incogniti works, Guido Casoni’s ode of 1602 Fulvia, fu la tua vita, published in modern edition in Carmine Jannaco and Martino Capucci, Il Seicento, Storia letteraria d’Italia (Milan: Vallardi, 1966), 185–86. In this poem, the word “voce” is closely associated with twenty-two words related to “figures of Nothing,” each beginning a new line, as in a poetic catalogue. Another Incognito writer who often made use of these “figures” is Ciro di Pers. See his Poesie, ed. Michele Rak (Turin: Einaudi, 1978). 50.  The lines regarding Nothing (nulla, here lines 3–5) are missing from both the surviving scores of Poppea (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Cod. It. IV 439 [ = 9963], and Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio S. Pietro a Majella, Rari 6.4.1), but they are included in the libretto published in Busenello’s Hore ociose (Venice: Giuliani, 1656) as well as in all other known versions of the libretto (interestingly, the libretto published in Naples in 1651 with the title Il Nerone has for lines 3–5 the following version: “se da me diviso, / rimane un vacuo, un nulla, / restituto da’ numeri,” emphasizing vacuum and nothing as separate although related entities). 51.  The association among “centro,” Nothing, and God was common in seventeenthcentury mystic literature; see Sabrina Stroppa, Sic arescit: Letteratura mistica nel Seicento italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1998), 98. The “center” to which Otho is attracted in the first scene of Poppea may have connotations that touch on the semantic areas of God and Nothing. 52. I borrow from, and slightly modify, the English translation included in the booklet of the recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner for Archiv Produktion, 447088–2 (1996), which uses the Naples score.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

316    Notes to pages 253 – 257 53.  These lines are missing from the score preserved in Venice but are included both in the libretto published in Busenello’s Hore ociose and in the score preserved in Naples. 54. See the 1643 scenario on pp. 17–18 (“Dea delle bellezze in Terra”). The scenario is translated at the beginning of each scene in Claudio Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea = The coronation of Poppaea: An Opera in a Prologue and Three Acts, ed. Alan Curtis (London: Novello, 1989). I adopt the measure numbering of this score. 55. In act 1, scene 3, Nero reassures Poppaea that he cannot be without her just as the number one cannot be divided from the zero; or, in another interpretation, as the point, representing their indissoluble union, cannot be separated (“se non si smembra l’unità dal punto”—the music cadences on the unison at the word “punto”). The point is another “figure of Nothing” (“Il punto, limite estremo e termine delle grandezze, è un QuasiNulla . . .”; see Jacques Gaffarel, Nihil, fere Nihil, minus nihilo [Venice: Pinelli, 1634], in Le antiche memorie, 148–65, at 161). 56. See Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 305. 57. See the transcription of Otho’s words as set to music by Monteverdi, ibid., 313–14. 58.  “Ottone s’adira a se medesimo delli pensieri avuti di voler offendere Poppea nel disperato affetto della quale si contenta viver soggetto” (trans. Curtis). 59. Giulio Ongaro, “ ‘E pur io torno qui’: Sixteenth-Century Literary Debates, the Audience’s View, and the Interpretation of L’incoronazione di Poppea.” Unpublished typescript. 60.  For an in-depth discussion of the text and music of the scenes featuring Otho, on which I briefly touch here, see Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 304–27. 61.  For the use of deictics by the other characters in Poppea see my “ ‘Imitar col canto chi parla’: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 383–41. 62.  Another operatic character who has a perspectival function similar to Otho’s and, like him, does not have the same role in the literary source is Iarba in Francesco Cavalli’s Didone (1641). Busenello is the author of the libretto, and again, as in the later Poppea, he very freely adapts the literary source to his own dramatic aims. 63. Trans. Giulio Ongaro. Ongaro observes that this summary does not correspond to the events as they chronologically unfold in the opera. Yet, he adds, “taking away the character of Ottone from this argomento would practically destroy its narrative structure.” 64.  Claudio Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea, directed by Michael Hampe, conducted by René Jacobs. Arthaus DVD 100–109. 65.  This is in stark contrast to other productions, such as the well-known 1979 staging by Jean Pierre Ponnelle directed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt (released in DVD by Deutsche Grammophon), in which the three characters featured in the Prologue—Virtue, Fortune, and Love—appear repeatedly during the opera and provide a perspective on it; and that by Robert Carsen for the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival directed by Emmanuelle Haïm (released in DVD by Decca), in which Love intervenes during many scenes (this last is by far the most thought-provoking staging among those available in a videorecording). By greatly underplaying the allegorical aspect, Hampe’s cut of the Prologue, together  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Notes to pages 258 – 265   317

with the sparse sets and the emphasis on singers’ acting, has the effect of humanizing the characters. 66. See, for example, Wendy Heller, “Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in L’incoronazione di Poppea,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 67, and Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 49. 67. In “Signifying Nothing” (pp. 463–65) I comment on this scene by focusing on an exceedingly long melisma on the word “la” before the noun “bellezza” (see fourth line of the text excerpt). I interpret it as a deliberate antimadrigalistic gesture participating in the discourse of beauty as vanitas typical of the Incogniti. In order to be a rhetorician, even a pompous one, Seneca in fact needs to show off his rhetorical weapons, and thus he can use Incogniti-like sophistry, which is conveyed by Monteverdi by undermining the noun “bellezza” through the melisma. For an extensive analysis of the role of Seneca, revising her prior interpretation, see Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 347–63. 68.  For example, in act 2, scene 1: “A te [solitudine amata] l’anima mia lieta sen viene . . . la Corte . . . insolente, e superba fa della mia presenza anatomia . . . M’assido in grembo della pace mia.” Then, responding to Mercurio: “O me felice . . . hor confermo i miei scritti / autentico i miei studi.” 69.  This is a point emphasized by Carsen in his Glyndebourne production. At the end of the famous final duet “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” (not by Monteverdi, as known), Nero and Poppaea gradually separate from each other as if they had a premonition of the latter character’s tragic historical end. Poppaea (soprano Danielle De Niese) eventually remains alone and pensive on stage for a few seconds after the music is over, looking around bewildered.  

Epilogue 1. Glass’s second trilogy (1991–96) involved a rewriting of Cocteau’s Orphée, in a reflection on the role of the artist similar to that of de Chirico and Monteverdi discussed in chapter 1. 2. Robert Jones and Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 204. 3.  John La Bouchardière  (director), The Full Monteverdi. Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals, performers: I Fagiolini et al., conducted by Robert Hollingworth (Bristol: Polyphonic Films, 2007). 4.  François Caillat (script, adaptation, direction), Tancred the Crusader; performers: Philippe Huttenlocher, Philippe Bardy, Rosemary Hardy, Serge Merlin, et al. Ensemble Baroque de Drottningholm dir. Michel Corboz (West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2008).  



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I n de x

RVF = Petrarch, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere). Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations and appendices. Abbate, Carolyn, 289n8 academies, 4, 103; and conversation 145–51; and madrigal, 145–46. See also Filarmonica di Verona; Incogniti; Invaghiti; Pellegrini; Unisoni “A Dio Florida bella” (Marino). See under Monte­verdi, Claudio: Book VI L’Adone (Marino), 246–52; Allurement’s song in, 251–52; nightingale’s song in, 247–50 address, mode of, 88, 92–97, 101, 108, 136, 141. See also deictic orientation; enunciation Adorno, Theodor W., 11, 14; and Orfeo, 42, 53, 195 Aeneid, 132 Ahimé dov’è il bel viso. See under Arcadelt, Jacques Alamanni, Luigi, 103 Alberti, Leon Battista, 12 Alden, Christopher, 28, 30 Aldobrandini, Cinzio Passeri, 176; Pietro, 153, 177, 209 allocution: and collocution, 148 allographic: and autographic, 28, 30; performance as, 30 Al lume delle stelle (Tasso). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book VII a 5 Altri canti d’amor (Monteverdi), 198–200; —, text of, 199–200

Amarilli, 51, 98, 128, 161, 163, 165–70, 176, 244 Aminta (play), 25, 51, 155, 171 Amor, i’ ho molti (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book IX a 5; sestina Andreini, Francesco: L’alterezza di Narciso, 12 Annibaldi, Claudio, 15–16, 249 Apollo, 14–15, 22–23, 68 A quest’olmo (Marino). See under Monteverdi, Claudio: Book VII Arcadelt, Jacques, 3, 6, 102, 109–27, 131, 133, 143, 149, 263; bass as focalizer, 114; bass as listener, 110; bass as narrator, 116; bass skipping text, 110–11, 113, 115–16, 119–22; and Bembo, 122–126; deictics, 110–15, 121, 123; and diffraction of self, 109–27; listener and performer, 113–14; subject-effects, 112, 114, 116, 118–19, 120, 123, 127 Arcadelt, Jacques, madrigal books —Book I a 4, 109–27, 299n45; Ahimé dov’è il bel viso, 118–20; —, text of, 118; Il bianco e dolce cigno, 109–12, 115, 127, 138, 297n21, 309n11; —, interpretations of, 297n22; —, text of, 109; Chi potrà dir, 116–18; —, text of, 116; Io ho nel cor, 120–21; Quand’io penso al martire, 122–28; —, text of, 122; Quando col dolce suono, 112–16; —, text of, 112; Quanti travagli, 121; Il vago e dolce sguardo, 121  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

319

 

 

320   Index Arcadelt, Jacques, madrigal books (continued) —Book II a 4 (Vero secondo libro): Io mi rivolgo (RVF XV), 121; Io non vo, 121; Se il superchio, 121; S’io pensasse, 121; Dolci parole, 121 —Book III a 4, 103 Arcadia, 97, 108–9, 168, 194 Arianna: opera, 24, 32, 249; Lamento d’, 86, 129, 249. See also Monteverdi, Claudio; Selva morale e spirituale Ariosto, Ludovico, 289n3, 294n38, 303n111 Aristotle, 52, 92–93, 97, 131–32; on favola, 93; on mimesis and diegesis, 37, 93, 294n35; rules of unity by, 107, 257; and verisimilitude, 244 Armida, 176, 197 Artusi, Giovanni Maria, 129, 176, 284n51 Gli Asolani. See under Bembo, Pietro Aspro core e selvaggio (RVF CCLXV): in Willaert, 130, 133 Audi, Pierre, 229, 231–37 Augustine, Saint, 49, 77, 109 autographic. See allographic  

 

 

 

 

 

Badoaro, Giacomo, 239 Bal, Mieke, 56, 301n69 Baldacci, Luigi, 80, 125 La Barbera (Barbera Salutati), 104, 105, 107 Bardi, Giovanni de’, 137 Baroque, 6, 7, 195, 203, 213, 243–46, 261, 264, 310n38 Barthes, Roland, 27 bass (voice): deictic function of, 196; and embodiment, 110, 114; as focalizer, 114, 196; as listener, 113, 110, 116; as narrator, 198–202; as proxy for composer, 116, 119; skipping text, 110–11, 113, 115–16, 119–22; and subjecteffects, 112, 114, 116, 118–19; and subjectivity, 110, 112, 116, 118–20 basso continuo (as narrative agent), 196, 200– 202, 205, 207, 211, 224, 226, 238, 259, 263 Battistini, Andrea, 244 Batto, qui pianse Ergasto (Marino). See under Monteverdi, Claudio: Book VI La bella man (Guarini/Marenzio), 178, 184–87; — , text of, 184 Bembo, Pietro, 104, 168–69, 303n1; Gli Asolani, 122–28, 147–48, 150; O disaventurosa (in Alma cortese), 164–65; Piansi et cantai, 157; Prose della volgar lingua, 92, 126, 145, 179, 186, 307n55 Bendidio, Lucrezia, 153, 155 Benveniste, Emile, 43, 48–50, 53–54  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beregan, Nicolò, 239 Berger, Karol, 285n8 Bertazzolo, Gabriele, 33–34 Bevilacqua, Mario, 181, 185 Il bianco e dolce cigno (Guidiccioni). See under Arcadelt, Jacques Bianconi, Lorenzo, 203, 224 Birdwhistell, Ray, 55, 59 Bisaccioni, Maiolino, 239 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 146 Bodeo, Giovanni, 183 Boito, Arrigo, 174 book of madrigals. See madrigal book Brecht, Bertolt, 99 Brevio, Giovanni, 136 Bronzino, Agnolo, 19, 24 Brown, Howard Mayer, 102–3, 131 Brugmann, Karl, 196 Bühler, Karl, 43–44, 48, 53, 54, 59 Burckhardt, Jacob, 7 Busenello, Giovan Francesco, 208, 239, 240, 244, 252, 256  

 

 

Caccini, Giulio, 16, 32, 39, 43, 50 Caillat, François, 265–66 Callas, Maria, 29–30 Cambio, Perissone, 146 La Canace, 51–52 cantar recitando, 36, 39 canzoniere, 79–80; centripetal vs. centrifugal, 152, 304n118; as education to love, 155; ending poem in, 86, 88, 156; happy-end script, 154, 160–61; —, in Marenzio: 168–69, 173; happy-end and Tasso scripts, 156; madrigal book as, 127, 133–34; 144–88, 198, 206–8, 248–49; in Marino’s Rime, 209; proemial poems in, 77, 79–80, 83, 88, 156, 177–78; Tasso script, 155–56, 160–61; —, in Marenzio, 173, 265; textual associations in, 156–57. See also Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta Carter, Tim, 280n15, 285n14, 286n22 Castiglione, Baldassarre: Il cortigiano (The Courtier), 125, 147–48, 150 La Cavalletta, 52 Cavalli, Francesco, 238, 245 Cecchi, Paolo, 185 Cesti, Antonio, 238 Chafe, Eric, 210, 217–18, 220, 277n4, 278n10, 283n49, 285n9, 310n34, 311n44 Charon (in Orfeo), 38–40, 67; as internal focalizer, 193, 205  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Index   321

Chater, James, 129 “Che fai, alma?” (RVF CL): in Willaert, 133–34 Chiaro segno Amor (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book IX a 5; sestina Chi potrà dir (Arcadelt), 116–18; —, text of, 116 Chirico, Giorgio de, 5, 11, 12, 14, 30, 66, 278n15, 279n3, 317n1 Clorinda, 51, 228–32; as focalized, 234–35; as focalizer, 229, 236–38; in Tancred the Crusader, 266 Cocteau, Jean, 11, 317n1 collective editions (madrigals), 151; defined, 303n109 collocution: and allocution, 148 Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (Monte­ verdi), 6, 143, 166, 198, 207, 228–37, 271–76; alterations of Tasso’s text, 230, 234, 312n50; in Audi’s production, 231–37; deictic shift in, 231; interference in, 229, 236–37; narration and focalization in, 228, 234–35; Notte stanza (no. 3), 231–33; and subject-effects, 231; in Tancred the Crusader, 265–66; text of, 271–76. See also Testo composer: appropriating poet’s voice, 3, 6, 37, 73, 78–79, 83, 86, 88, 92, 101, 116, 128–29, 131, 134–36, 159, 165–70, 174, 176, 193, 198, 208, 237, 263; —, in Cone, 115, 129; and characters (in madrigal), 150, 166, 212, 263; as exegete, 88, 136; as focalizer, 196; as inscribed in work, 159, 173; as ­narrator, 73, 116, 132, 150, 163, 196, 212, 238; as o ­ rator, 88; and patron, 176–77, 184–88; and performer, 101, 193; as playwright, 128, 170; as reader, 88, 293n29 Concerto delle donne, 153, 158–59, 176 Cone, Edward T., 115, 118, 129 Contarini, Francesco, 97–99 conversation, 3, 125, 148; and academies, 145– 46; and music, 146, 150–51. See also Guazzo, Stefano Corsi, Iacopo, 16 Corteccia, Francesco, 102 Così nel mio parlar. See Dante Alighieri Crescenzo, Melchiorre, 209 Cruda Amarilli (Guarini): 301n59; in Marenzio, 161–64, 169; in Monteverdi, 1, 98, 128, 133, 160–61, 163, 284n51 Crudele, acerba (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book IX a 5; Rore, Cipriano de: Book II a 4; sestina  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

La Dafne, 15, 16, 32, 35 Dahlhaus, Carl: on musical dramaturgy, 42; on opera as novel, 245 Da le belle contrade d’Oriente. See under Rore, Cipriano de: Book V a 5 Dall’Angelo, Giacomo, 239 Dall’Angelo, Marin, 240–42, 245–46, 252 Dante Alighieri, 78, 188; Così nel mio parlar (Marenzio), 177, 178, 188 Decio, Antonio, 171 deictic orientation, 54–55, 88, 92–97, 101, 108, 141, 164, 201–2 deictics: and body movements, 55, 56, 60–63; as cognitive shifters, 108–9, 142, 213, 231, 256, 297n18; defined, 42–43; in deictic center, 109, 141; in deictic vs. symbolic field, 44–45; and focalization, 196, 206; and narrative agents, 202; personal, 43, 78, 108; spatial, 43, 108; and subjectivity, 43, 49, 52; temporal, 43, 108; in tense shifts, 43, 108; as textual additions, 45–48; and voice, 43. See also Arca­ delt, Jacques; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; deictic orientation; Incoronazione di Poppea; Marenzio, Luca; Monteverdi, Claudio; Orfeo; Rore, Cipriano de; Selva morale e spirituale; Wert, Giaches de Della Casa, Giovanni, 137, 149, 186 dialogic subjectivity. See subjectivity dialogue madrigal, 133–35, 185, 210; and subjectivity, 134 diegesis, 37, 93 diegetic, 37, 39, 95–96, 99, 103, 127, 134, 143, 191, 196, 229, 231; extradiegetic, 228; homodiegetic, 116, 128; intradiegetic, 132 diffraction of self, 109–27; defined, 126 D’India, Sigismondo, 192, 311n43 D’Indy, Vincent, 30 direct/indirect speech. See mixed-mode director (stage and film): appropriating voice, 7, 193–94, 266; as focalizer, 193–94 discourse, 3; meanings in, 41–42 Domingo, Placido, 29 Doni, Anton Francesco, 3, 107, 145–46, 149 Dressler, Gallus, 89  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Einstein, Alfred, 129, 145–46 Elam, Keir, 55 ellipse, 261, 310n38 ellipsis, 297n15 enunciation (mode of), 41–42, 88, 92–97, 101, 128; defined, 285n19. See also address  

 

 

322   Index equivocality, 73, 107, 167, 170, 302n17 Errico, Scipione, 239 Este (family), 17; Alfonso II, 32, 153, 155, 158, 174, 176, 301n63; Lucrezia, 158–59; Luigi, 153, 158–59 L’Euridice, 2, 26, 32, 35, 44, 50 Eurydice, 2, 13, 22–23, 39, 46, 48, 50; in Ronconi’s production of Orfeo, 66–68 exordium, 89  

 

 

 

Gardiner, John Eliot, 28 Gardini, Nicola, 186 Garrido, Gabriel, 28 Gasdia, Cecilia, 58, 62. See also La Musica gender, 78, 167, 169, 185–86, 203 Genette, Gérard, 30, 50, 116, 294n35, 301n69 genre: lyric, 79–80, 92–96, 99, 294n35; madrigal as, 100, 104–5, 109, 198, 263; opera as, 2–3, 7, 14, 15–17, 20, 26, 30, 36–38, 42, 52, 61, 73, 194–95, 243–45, 252, 263, 266 La Gerusalemme conquistata. See under Tasso, Torquato La Gerusalemme liberata. See under Tasso, Torquato gesture. See movement Giolito de’ Ferrari, Giovanni G., 151–52 Glass, Philip: A Madrigal Opera, 264, 266 Glauco, 211, 249 Gonzaga (family), 17, 22–23, 26, 32–33, 35–36, 46; Eleonora, 81–83, 147, 249; Ferdinando, 249; Francesco, 16–18, 20, 22, 25, 32, 149, 249; Guglielmo, 177; Ludovico, 22; Margherita, 158, 174, 176; Vincenzo, 1, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 35, 51–52, 81, 148, 153, 155, 174, 176–77, 179, 184– 86, 188, 197, 249 Goodman, Nelson, 28, 30 gravità, 170, 179, 181, 185, 307n157; and piacevolezza, 126, 307n155 Greenblatt, Stephen, 146 Gualteruzzi, Ugolino, 120 Guarini, Battista, 12, 13, 32, 50–51, 98, 128–29, 133, 148, 153, 160–61, 163, 166–170, 184–86, 188, 200, 202, 206, 209, 211, 244, 250, 265, 303n111; L’Idropica, 32; Il pastor fido, 12, 50– 52, 63, 98, 128–29, 133, 160–70, 173–74, 206, 244; Rime, 128–29, 179, 209, 211; —, La bella man, 184–85; —, Mentre vaga angioletta, 250. See also Cruda Amarilli; Monteverdi, Claudio; O Mirtillo Guasca, Isabella, 146 Guazzo, Stefano: La civil conversazione, 147; on voice, 148–50 Guidiccioni, Giovanni, 297n21–22, 309n11  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fabula/favola, 93, 98, 128, 133, 163, 169; defined, 131–32. See also soggetto Faustini, Giovanni, 244 Feldman, Martha, 136–37 Fernández de Córdoba, Gonzalo, 147–48 Ferrara, 13, 17, 153, 158–59, 284n51 festivity cycles, 17–18 Ficino, Marsilio, 12, 125 La fida ninfa, 97–99 Filarmonica di Verona (accademia), 181, 304n124 La finta pazza, 239 Florence, 1, 15–17, 26, 32, 33, 151; and early madrigal, 102–9; and Mannerism, 114 focalization: 144, 184–85, 193, 217–28, 252–61, 263, 265; and bass voice, 114, 196; defined, 191–92, 291n13; and deictics, 206; external, 192, 202, 205–6; in instrumental music, 202–3, 227; internal, 192, 202, 205–6, 257, 264; and self, 223; and Marinism, 209; and modernity, 209; as multifocality, 209, 238; narration and, 228, 234–35; in opera, 193, 252–61. See also La Musica; listener; Marenzio, Luca; Monteverdi, Claudio; subject-effects focalizer, 206, 228, 291n13 focalizing effect. See subject-effects Follino, Federico, 33 Franco, Cirillo, 120 Fuggito è ’l sonno (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book I a 4–6; sestina The Full Monteverdi (film), 265 Fusconi, Giovan Battista, 239

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haar, James, 112–14, 298n28, 298n30 Hampe, Michael, 257–58 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus, 24–25, 28, 30 homosexuality, 13, 23 Horace: Ars poetica, 132 Hor che ’l ciel e la terra (RVF CLXIV), 128; in Monteverdi, 207; in Rore, 136  

Gagliano, Marco da, 15, 32 Gal, Jeffrey, 257 Galilei, Vincenzo, 48, 129 Gallico, Claudio, 29, 283n38 Gardano, Angelo, 165 Gardano, Antonio, 79, 130, 151–52

 

 

 

 



Index   323

imitatio, 50–52, 80, 109 Incenerite spoglie (Lamento di Glauco), 207, 211, 248 Incogniti, accademia degli, 208, 239–46, 252, 261; Cento novelle, 245 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 1, 3, 7, 193, 239, 244–45, 252–61; argomento, 256; death in, 260–61; deictics in, 254–56; figures of Nothing in, 252–53, 261; focalization in, 252–61; Prologue of, 252–53. See also Nero; Octavia; Otho; Poppaea; Seneca; soldiers Ingarden, Roman, 284n55 interference, 192, 225; character, 229, 236–37; defined, 191–92, 216; harmonic, 217, 224–25; textural, 216, 218–21, 219, 221 intermediality, 237 Invaghiti, accademia degli, 16, 23, 46, 149 Io amai sempre (RVF LXXXV), 77, 148; in Willaert, 130, 133 I’ piansi, hor canto (RVF CCXXX), 157; in Willaert, 133 “I” poems: definition, 95–96, 127; in early Florentine madrigals, 102–3; in Marenzio, 163; in Rore, 136–37; in Willaert, 130–31, 135. See also “I–you” poems; mimetic poems Istitutioni harmoniche (Zarlino), 131 “I–you” poems: definition, 95–96, 127; in early Florentine madrigals, 102–3; in Marenzio, 163; in Monteverdi, 201; in Rore, 136; in Willaert, 131, 135. See also “I” poems; mimetic poems  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacobs, René, 28, 256 Jahn, Manfred, 99–100 Johnson, W. R., 95–96, 102  

 

Kennedy, William J., 76 key (in music). See tonal focus Koons, Jeff, 7

Lasso, Orlando di, 151, 293n31 La Via, Stefano, 129 Leonardo da Vinci, 14 “Liete e pensose” (RVF CCXXII): in Willaert, 133–34 liminality: in prologues, 34–36; in the Prologue of Orfeo, 65 listener: absorption of, 206, 263, 266; and cognitive scripts, 160–61; as identifying with performer, 113–14; as internal focalizer, 205, 264; of madrigals, 152–53; and memory, 160–61 Loredano, Giovan Francesco, 240–41, 245 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 239 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, 129 Lyons, John, 54 lyric modes, 92–97. See also “I” poems; “I–you” poems; mimetic poems lyric poetry: as narrative, 79–80, 93, 290n4. See also genre  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mace, Dean, 196 Machiavelli, Niccolò: La Clizia, 104–9; La Mandragola, 104, 107–9 madrigal: and opera, 202, 206, 213, 220, 237, 238. See also genre madrigal book: as Canzoniere, 80, 127, 133–34, 144–88, 198, 206–8, 248–49; as gift, 160; as libro delle parole, 153; narrative organization of, 153; and opera, 202; and Petrarchism, 169; as script, 80, 160–61; single-authored vs. collective edition, 152 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 11, 58 Magli, Giovanni Gualberto, 44 Magni, Carlo, 20 Mannerism: in art history, 114, 264; in ­Arcadelt, 103, 111, 298n23 Mantegna, Andrea, 20, 22 Mantua, 1, 13, 15–18, 32–33, 88, 155, 158, 249; Ducal Palace, 20, 22, 24; —, Camera degli Sposi, 22; —, Camerino d’Orfeo, 22; Palazzo Te, 20, 22–24; —, Camera d’Ovidio, 23; —, Loggia delle muse, 22–24 Manuzio, Aldo, 151–52 Manzini, Giambattista, 245 Manzini, Luigi, 240–41 Marenzio, Luca, 3, 6, 102, 129, 153; alterations of text by, 161, 164–65, 168, 170, 173, 185; appropriating poet’s voice, 165–70, 174; deictics in, 164–65, 186; equivocality in, 167, 170; focalization in, 184–85; gravità in, 170, 179, 181,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

La Bouchardière, John, 265–66 Lamento della ninfa (Non havea Febo ancora), 198, 203–206, 212, 216, 223–24, 235, 260; focalization in, 205; Rinuccini’s text of, 204 La Musica (in Orfeo), 1, 4, 35–36, 38, 40–43, 57, 195, 229; as focalized, 195; as focalizer, 194, 238; as narrator, 99, 170, 173, 193–94, 207, 228, 232, 238; and instrumental music, 195; in Ronconi’s production, 58–68; —, and Orpheus, 62–66, 195; and subject-effects, 41–42, 53, 58–59, 64, 206. See also Orfeo; Orpheus  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

324   Index Marenzio, Luca (continued) 185; “I” poems in, 163; “I–you” poems in, 163; sestina project (RVF CCCXXXII), 180–84. Marenzio, Luca, madrigal books —Book I a 4–6: contents, 268; dedication, 181, 185; gravità in, 181, 185; and sestina RVF CCCXXXII, 180–84. works: Basti fin qui, 185; Fuggito è ’l sonno (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181, 183; —, text of, 180; O fere stelle, 159, 181; Ove è condutto (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181, 183; —, text of, 180 —Book II a 5: contents, 268; connecting words in, 157–58; dedication, 159; and sestina RVF CCCXXXII, 180–84. works: Al vago del mio sole, 158; O voi che sospirate (from RVF CCCXXXII), 159, 171, 178, 181, 183; — , text of, 180 —Book II a 6: Nesun visse già mai (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181; —, text of, 180; and sestina RVF CCCXXXII, 180–84 —Book VI a 5, 171–74; contents, 172; organization, 172, 173 —Book VI a 6: Giovene donna (RVF XXX), 183 —Book VII a 5: contents and organization, 162. works: Al lume, 165–66, 177; Ami, Tirsi, 166; Arda pur sempre, 166; Care mie selve, 168; Com’è dolce, 169; Cruda Amarilli, 161, 163–64, 169; Deh, poi ch’era, 161; O disaventurosa, 164–65, 170, 186; —, text of, 164; O dolcezze, 166; O fido, o caro Aminta, 167–68; O Mirtillo, 161; Ombrose e care selve, 168, 170; Quell’augellin, 161; Questi vaghi concenti, 161, 167; Tirsi mio, 168–69 —Book IX a 5, 6, 148, 176–88; contents, 178; dedication, 176–77, 179, 185–86, 188; gravità in, 179, 181; organization, 177, 178, 179; and sestina RVF CCCXXXII, 178, 180–84; and point of view, 184–85. works: Amor, i’ ho molti (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181, 183; —, text of, 180; L’aura che ’l verde (RVF CCXLVI), 179; La bella man, 184–87; —, text of, 184; Chiaro segno Amor (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181, 183; —, text of, 180; Così nel mio parlar, 177–78, 188; Credete voi, 185; Crudele, acerba (from RVF CCCXXXII), 148, 159, 179, 183; — , text of, 180; Parto o non parto? 185; Se sì alto pon gir (from RVF CCCXXXII), 181, 183; —, text of, 180; Solo e pensoso (RVF XXXV), 177, 179 Marin, Louis, 53 Marino, Giovan Battista, 6, 69, 129, 192, 198,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

206, 208–10, 213, 214, 219–21, 223, 226, 228, 239, 244, 246–52; and the Incogniti, 244–46, 252; and Monteverdi, 198–200, 206, 208– 28; and multifocality, 209, 213, 239; Rime: organization, 209; —, Presso un fiume, 211; settings of, 303n111. See also L’Adone; Rime boscherecce Martelli, Ludovico, 103–4, 121 McClary, Susan, 277n3, 278nn9,10, 286n27, 297n22, 298n33, 311n44, 317n66 Medici (family), 1; Cosimo I, 17, 19, 24; ­Eleonora, 16, 24; Ferdinando, 16; Francesco, 17; Giulio, 186; government of, 104; Maria, 16 Meier, Bernhard, 89 Mentre vaga angioletta (Guarini/Monteverdi), 250 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 63–64 Mia benigna fortuna (sestina RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca; Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta; Rore, Cipriano de mimesis, 37, 93 mimetic effect, 133 mimetic poems, 127; definition, 95–96; in Rore, 136; in Willaert, 133, 135. See also “I” poems; “I–you” poems Minturno, Antonio Sebastiano, 92–97, 207 Mirtillo, 51, 98, 128, 161, 163, 166–70, 244 “Misero Alceo.” See under Monteverdi, Claudio: Book VI mixed-mode (in poems), 93–95, 137–44, 206, 210–15, 312n49 modality, 3, 136, 286n27, 311n44. See also tonal focus; tonal type mode of address. See address mode of enunciation. See enunciation Monte, Philippe de, 183, 303n108 Monteverdi, Claudio: appropriating Petrarch, 81–88, 208; bass as narrator in, 198–202; deictics in, 36, 39, 41–48, 54, 83, 85–86, 201–2, 221, 227, 231, 254–56; focalization in, 193, 209, 217–27, 228, 234–35, 252–61; and Guarini, 128–29, 133, 200–202; and Marino, 198–200, 208–28; as narrator, 206–8, 210– 27; and post-Petrarchist aesthetics, 209, 224; and Tasso, 196–98, 228–37. See also Arianna; Incoronazione di Poppea; Orfeo; Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria; Scherzi musicali; Selva morale e spirituale Monteverdi, Claudio, madrigal books —Book III, 196–97, 216; contents, 269; Vattene pur, 197  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Index   325

—Book IV: Ah dolente partita, 128; in The Full Monteverdi, 265; Sfogava con le stelle, 129 —Book V, 200–202; contents, 269; deictic orientation in, 201–2; rearrangement of text, 201– 2. works: Ahi, come a un vago, 201; Amor, se giusto, 201; Cruda Amarilli, 1, 128, 133, 161, 284n51; O Mirtillo, 128, 133, 161; Questi vaghi concenti, 161; Troppo ben può, 201 —Book VI, 192; contents, 269; dedication (absence of), 249; and Gonzaga, Vincenzo, 249; organization, 206–7, 210; topic of death in, 248–49; topic of distance in, 211, 248–49. works: “A Dio Florida bella,” 210–12, 215, 220–21, 248; —, interferences in, 220–21; —, text of, 215; Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, 210–18; —, interferences in, 216–17; —, Marino’s text of, 212; —, Monteverdi’s alterations of text, 212, 310n37; Incenerite spoglie (Lamento di Glauco), 207, 211, 248; Lasciatemi morire (Lamento d’Arianna), 207, 211, 248; “Misero Alceo,” 210–12, 214–16, 218–20; —, interferences in, 218; —, Marino’s text of, 214; —, Monteverdi’s alterations of text, 214, 216, 311n40; Ohimé il bel viso (RVF CCLXVII), 207, 248; Presso un fiume, 211; Qui rise, o Tirsi, 210, 221, 223; —, Marino’s text of, 222; —, Monteverdi’s alterations of text, 224–26; —, intercalations in, 224; —, interferences in, 224; Zefiro torna (RVF CCCX), 207, 248 —Book VII: contents, 269–70; organization, 206–7. works: A quest’olmo, 210, 221, 223, 248; —, text of, 222 —Book VIII (Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi): bass as narrator in, 198–200; contents, 270; dedicatee, 200; organization, 206–7; preface, 198; rearrangement of text in, 199–200, 203. works: Altri canti d’amor, 198–200; —, text of, 199–200; Altri canti di Marte, 198; Ballo delle Ingrate, 24; Hor che ’l ciel (RVF CLXIV), 207; Mentre vaga angioletta, 250; Vago augelletto (RVF CCCLIII), 207; Volgendo il Ciel, 207 (see also Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; Lamento della ninfa). Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare, 25, 137, 249 movement: classifications, 55, 289n7; deictic, 60; distal and proximal, 55; iconic and ideational, 61; of singers, 60–64 multimediality, 6, 198, 237, 285n19, 309n16, 263–66 Museo Bilotti (Rome), 30  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Musica (in Orfeo). See La Musica Musica nova (Willaert), 130–37; as Canzoniere, 133–34; contents, 267–68; “I” poems, 130–31; “I–you” poems, 131, 135; mimetic poems, 133, 135; organization, 130–31. works: Amor, Fortuna (RVF CXXIV), 130; Aspro core (RVF CCLXV), 130, 133; Cantai, hor piango (RVF CCXXIX), 133; “Che fai, alma?” (RVF CL), 133–34; Io amai sempre (RVF LXXXV), 77, 130, 133, 148; Io mi rivolgo (RVF XV), 131; I’ piansi, hor canto (RVF CCXXX), 133; Lasso, ch’i’ ardo (RVF CCIII), 131; “Liete e pensose” (RVF CCXXII), 133–34; “Occhi piangete” (RVF LXXXIV), 130, 133–35; O invidia (RVF CLXXII), 131; “Quando nascesti, Amor?” 133–34; Quest’anima gentil (RVF XXXI), 130  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Narcissus, 12, 13, 63, 66, 68 Nardi, Iacopo, 103 narrative: in drama, 99–100; impulse to, 161, 305n131 narrative effect. See subject-effects narrator: defined, 77, 291n13; and character, 77, 291n11; and dancing body, 310n25; and focalizer, 228, 234–35, 291n13; passionate, 197–98, 216, 234. See also Arcadelt, Jacques; bass; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; composer; La Musica; Monteverdi, Claudio Neoplatonism, 125–27, 146, 246 Nero (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 256 Nesun visse già mai (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book II a 6; sestina Nicolucci, Giovanni Battista (il Pigna), 153–57, 176; Gli Amori, 153–54; Il ben divino, 153 Noferi, Adelia, 77 nothing (philosophy of), 239–52; and Aristotelian unities, 244–45; beauty as, 246, 253, 259; figures of, 241–42; —, in Poppea, 252–53, 259; and language, 242–43; and opera, 243– 45; and verisimilitude, 244 Nutter, David, 133–34  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Occhi piangete” (RVF LXXIV): in Willaert, 130, 133–35 O ciechi (Petrarch/Monteverdi). See under Selva morale e spirituale Octavia (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 245, 258–59 O disaventurosa acerba sorte! (Bembo/­ Marenzio), 164–65, 170, 186; —, text of, 164  

 

 

 

326   Index O fere stelle (Sannazaro), 159, 181. See also sestina Ohimé il bel viso (RVF CCLXVII): in Monteverdi, 207, 248 Ombrose e care selve (Guarini/Marenzio), 161, 162, 168, 170 O Mirtillo (Guarini): in Marenzio, 161, 162; in Monteverdi, 128, 133, 161 Ong, Walter J., 57, 63 Ongaro, Antonio, 171, 179 Ongaro, Giulio, 255–56 opera: and madrigal, 202, 206, 213, 220, 237, 238; as text and performance, 20, 26–31. See also genre oratione, 48, 56, 88, 128; defined, 286n26 oratio obliqua. See mixed mode orchestra space (in theater): defined, 289n5; Ronconi’s use of, 58, 59, 62, 66, 67–68 Orfeo (Monteverdi), 1, 3, 11, 16–31, 35–69, 149, 177, 193–95, 205–6, 238, 249; 1607 libretto, 20, 22, 27; 1607 performance, 20–26; 1609 score, 21, 25–26; —, alterations of libretto, 45–48; —, dedicatory letter, 21, 25, 282n28; deictics in, 36, 39, 41–48, 54; Echo scene, 12, 13, 65, 66–68; focalization in, 193; and patronage, 16–26, 46; Rosa del ciel, 25, 37, 46, 47, 64; as staged by Ponnelle, 25, 28, 30; as staged by Ronconi, 58–69, 193–95, 205, 238; Toccata, 33; Tu se’ morta, 37, 47–48, 50– 52; work, text, performance in, 29. See also Possente spirto; Prologue Orpheus: in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, 2, 11–14, 25, 32, 38–40, 46, 48, 50–51; as mythological character, 2, 5, 11, 13, 14, 18–20, 22–23, 41, 102, 195; in Ronconi’s production of Orfeo, 58, 62–68, 193, 195, 205, 238; — , as focalized, 193, 205, 238; —, as internal focalizer, 195, 238 Orsini (family): Fabio, 171, Virginio, 171 Ossi, Massimo, 201, 210 Otho (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 245, 253– 54, 263; and Drusilla, 255; as focalized, 260; as focalizer, 256; as internal focalizer, 257; in Hampe’s production, 256–57 ottava rima: defined, 309n12 Ottonelli, Giovan Domenico, 21 Ove è condutto (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book I a 4–6; sestina Ovid, 12–13, 35, 41, 66, 246 O voi che sospirate (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book II a 5; sestina  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pallavicino, Ferrante, 245 paratext (Genette): dedicatory letter as, 21, 25, 81; defined, 21; in madrigal books, 170, 173; proemial function of, 80; prologue as, 32– 35, 65, 106. See also canzoniere pastoral play, 97–99; and Petrarchism, 98 Il pastor fido. See Guarini, Battista patronage, 15–26, 158, 249; as I–you dialogue, 148, 171, 176, 184–85; and nobility, 16–20; in Orfeo, 20–26, 46; of performances, 5, 16–20; and Petrarchism, 148 Pazzi, Alessandro de’, 103 Pecorina, Polissena, 112, 114 Pellegrini, accademia dei, 146 Peperara, Laura, 158–59 Peretti, Alessandro (Cardinal Montalto), 153 Peretti, Flavia, 171 performance: as concept, 1–7, 18–19, 22, 26–31; and dialogic self, 13–14, 57–68; etymology of, 19, 22, 196; nobility’s authorization of, 20–26; nobility’s patronage of, 5, 16–20; singer-as-subject in, 42, 54, 57, 73; space, 59; and text, 16–17, 21, 26–31, 284n51; as textualized, 27, 66; and work, 26–31, 285n10. See also Orfeo performer: and composer, 39, 101, 193; and listener, 113–14; role of, 38; as subject, 42, 54, 57, 73 Peri, Iacopo, 16–17, 39, 43, 48, 50 perspective. See focalization Petrarch, 2, 73–100, 120–22, 125, 130, 133–36, 144, 156, 176–84, 186, 188, 207–8, 230, 246; as composers’ poetic choice, 89, 130, 136, 151, 177, 179–84, 188, 207–8; divided self in, 74–78; flexible self in, 120–22, 126–27; narrative effect in, 79; narrativity in, 79–80; as narrator and character, 78, 97, 291n11; and Petrarchism, 5, 144–52; point of view in, 78, 291n12; rhetoric of voice and address in, 76; Secretum, 77; self-reflexivity in, 76; sound and meaning in, 76, 85; Triumphus mortis, 81–82. See also Petrarchism; Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta Petrarchism, 2, 73, 78–79, 92–99, 116, 122–27, 144–52, 160, 164–65, 169, 263; as appropriation of voice, 5, 77–79, 116; definition, 73, 78, 277n1, 303n110; and Regieoper, 7, 193; rhetoric of voice and address in, 5, 88–89, 92–100; and subjectivity, 2, 4; and socialization of self, 144–51, 171; as system of repetition, 152 Pfister, Manfred, 99, 116  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Index   327

Phalèse, Pierre, 188 phenomenology, 56 Philomela, 248 Piacenza, 146 Piccioli, Antonio, 171, 173 Il Pigna. See Nicolucci, Giovanni Battista Piperno, Franco, 151 Pirrotta, Nino, 21, 25, 36, 82, 105, 107, 208 Pisano, Bernardo, 151 Plato, 93, 294n35 Plautus, 104, 109 Pliny the Elder, 250 Plutarch, 248 poetry: as narrative, 290n4 point of view. See focalization Politian (Angelo Poliziano), 22–23 Pona, Francesco, 245 Ponnelle, Jean-Pierre, 24–25, 28 Pontormo, Iacopo, 114 Poppaea (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 245, 253–54, 259, 261 Possente spirto (Monteverdi), 38–40, 65, 193, 195, 205; Ronconi’s staging of, 67–68; —, focalization in, 193, 205; text of, 38. See also Orfeo Powers, Harold S., 306n135 pragmatics (linguistics), 41, 285n16 presence effect. See subject-effects presentational/representational mode (axis), 36, 39, 58 Procne, 248 Prologue (of Orfeo), 3, 35–38, 40–49, 52–54, 57– 66, 94, 194–95, 206; liminality in, 65; as performance, 42–48; as prologue to all opera, 3, 53, 94; ritornello in, 194–95; as staged by Ronconi, 57–66, 194–95; and subject-effects, 41–42, 52–54, 194, 206; text of, 35, 40 La Psiche, 23–24 Psyche (myth of), 20, 24 Pygmalion, 13, 41  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quand’io penso al martire (Bembo/Arcadelt), 122–28; —, text of, 122 Quando col dolce suono (Arcadelt), 112–16; —, text of, 112 “Quando nascesti, Amor” (Sasso/Willaert), 133–34 Quanto sia lieto il giorno (Machiavelli/­ Verdelot), 104–9; text of, 105 questione della lingua, 4, 103–4, 145, 150 Questi vaghi concenti: in Marenzio, 161, 162, 167; in Monteverdi, 161  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qui rise, o Tirsi (Marino). See under Monteverdi, Claudio: Book VI Quondam, Amedeo, 78, 145, 152 Raimondi, Ezio, 197 Rasi, Francesco, 32 recitar cantando, 36, 39 Regieoper, 7, 99, 193 remediation, 198; defined, 309n16 Renzi, Anna, 239 Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (RVF, Petrarch): Amor, fortuna (CXXIV), 130; A pié de colli (VIII), 93–94; Aspro core (CCLXV), 130; Cantai, hor piango (CCXXIX), 133, 157; “Che fai, alma” (CL), 133–34; editions of, 144; Era il giorno (III), 93; Hor che ’l ciel (CLXIV), 128, 136, 207; Io amai sempre (LXXXV), 77, 130, 133, 148; Io mi rivolgo (XV), 131; I’ piansi, hor canto (CCXXX), 133, 157; Lasso, ch’i’ ardo (CCIII), 131; “Liete e pensose” (CCXXII), 133–34; Ma poi che ’l dolce riso (XLII), 157; Mia benigna fortuna (sestina CCCXXXII), 137, 148, 157, 159, 178–87; —, text of, 180; narrative in, 79, 96; “Occhi piangete” (LXXIV), 130, 133–35; Ohimé il bel viso (CCLXVII), 207, 248; O invidia (CLXXII), 131; proemial poems in, 79–80; Quando dal proprio sito (XLI), 157; Quell’antico (CCCLX), 93–94; Quest’anima gentil (XXXI), 130; Solea lontana (CCL), 136; Solo e pensoso (XXXV), 177, 179, 230; Vago augelletto (CCCLIII), 207; Vergine bella (CCCLXVI), 86, 156; Voi ch’ascoltate (I), 74–81, 85–86, 89, 92, 95, 99, 148, 181, 185; —, complete text, 74; Zefiro torna (CCCX), 207, 248. See also Petrarch Re Torrismondo (tragedy), 51–52, 179 rhetoric of voice and address, 5, 76, 83, 88–89, 92–100, 174 Rime boscherecce (Marino): “A Dio Florida bella,” 210–12, 215, 220–21, 248; —, text of, 215; A quest’olmo, 210, 248; Batto, qui pianse Ergasto, 210–18, 248; —, text of, 212; —, text of, alterations, 212, 310n37; “Misero Alceo,” 210–12, 214–16, 218–20, 248; —, text of, 214; —, text of, alterations, 214, 216, 311n40; organization, 210, 248; Qui rise, o Tirsi, 210, 248. See also under Monteverdi, Claudio Rinuccini, Ottavio, 16, 32–33, 35, 44, 203, 265 Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Monteverdi), 3, 239 Rocco, Antonio, 245  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

328   Index Romano, Giulio, 20, 22 Ronconi, Luca, 58, 60, 62–63, 66–68, 193–95, 264 Rore, Cipriano de, 3, 6, 102, 129, 136–44, 152; deictics in, 138, 142–43; focalization in, 144; “I” poems in, 136–37; “I–you” poems in, 136; mimetic poems in, 136; and Petrarch, 303n108; Poi che m’invita, 137 Rore, Cipriano de, madrigal books —Madrigali a cinque voci: 151; contents, 268; Hor che ’l ciel (RVF CLXIV), 136; Hor che l’aria, 136; organization, 136; Solea lontana (RVF CCL), 136 —Book II a 4: Crudele, acerba (from RVF CCCXXXII), 137; —, text of, 180; O sonno, 137; Schiet’arbuscel, 137; Un’altra volta, 137 —Book IV a 5: Di virtù, 137; Quando signor, 137; Se ben il duol, 137 —Book V a 5: Da le belle contrade d’Oriente, 137–44, 166, 191, 206; —, and point of view, 308n2; —, text of, 138 Rosa del ciel. See Orfeo Rosand, Ellen, 253, 256 Rossi, Luigi, 238 Rowling, J. K., 30 Rubens, Peter Paul, 282n33 Rucellai, Giovanni, 103  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sacrati, Francesco, 239 Saint-Évremond, Charles de, 238 Sannazaro, Iacopo: Arcadia, 171; Basti fin qui, 185; O fere stelle, 159, 181; settings of, 303n111 Sarto, Andrea del, 114 Savoy (family), 17, 32, 35; Carlo Emanuele I, 249; Margherita, 17, 32, 249 scene (in cognitive studies), 160–61 Schechner, Richard, 18–19 Scherzi musicali (Monteverdi): dedication, 25 script, 163, 173; defined 160–61; and listeners, 197. See also canzoniere seconda prattica, 4, 48, 88, 128–29, 209 self: appropriation of, 79–92; defined, 2; dialogic, 13–14, 48–52, 54, 57–68, 85, 265; diffraction of, 109–27, 126; divided, 35, 75, 74–78, 115; flexible, 120–22, 126–27; and focalization, 223; fragmentation of, 223; and other, 13, 14, 115; performance of, 13–14, 18; and Petrarchism, 145; shattering of, 223, 265; staging of, 223. See also subject-effects; subjectivity self-reflexive effect. See subject-effects Selva morale e spirituale (Monteverdi), 80, 146–  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

48, 152; dedicatory letter, 81, 249; deictics in, 83, 85–86; O ciechi, 81–88; —, alterations of text in, 82–83; Planctus Mariae (Lamento d’Arianna), 86, 88; Voi ch’ascoltate, 80–89, 92; —, text of, 74; —, word repetition in, 85–86 Seneca (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 245, 258–61; and melisma on la, 317n67; and famigliari, 260 Serra, Richard, 7 Se sì alto pon gir (from RVF CCCXXXII). See under Marenzio, Luca: Book IX a 5; sestina sestina: defined, 182; Mia benigna fortuna (RVF CCCXXXII), 137, 148, 157, 159, 178–87; —, text of, 180. See also Marenzio, Luca; Sannazaro, Iacopo Shakespeare, William, 1, 160, 171 Shapiro, Marianne, 182 Silverman, Kaja, 56 singer. See performer Slim, H. Colin, 103 soggetto: as fabula, 160, 174; in Rore, 144; as wandering (in Willaert), 131, 133–35, 137; in Zarlino, 131–32, 134, 301n76. See also fabula/ favola soldiers (in L’incoronazione di Poppea), 258 Solo e pensoso (RVF XXXV), 230; in Marenzio, 177, 179 spectatorship: and focalization, 264–65. See also listener Speroni, Sperone, 51–52 stage director. See director Stampa, Gaspara, 78 Stella, Frank, 7 Stevens, Denis, 30, 133 Striggio, Alessandro, 12–13, 21, 23, 35, 42, 51–52, 149, 174 Strozzi, Barbara, 240 Strozzi, Giovan Battista il giovane, 171 Strozzi, Giulio, 239 Strozzi, Lorenzo, 103 subject-effects, 4, 41–42, 52–56, 263, 278n13; focalizing effect, 114, 194, 206, 265; —, in madrigal and opera, 206; listener and, 120; narrative effect, 43, 79, 53–54, 108; presence effect, 41, 52–53, 59, 62, 64, 108, 112, 115–16; self-reflexive effect, 42, 52–53, 58–59, 62, 64, 108, 112, 116. See also Arcadelt, Jacques; bass; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; La Musica; Prologue subjectivity, 2–4, 15, 35, 40, 43, 47–48, 62, 64–65,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Index   329

73–75, 110, 112, 116, 118–20, 122, 127, 134, 145, 203, 239, 263; and deictics, 43, 49, 52; dialogic, 13–14, 48–52, 54, 57–68, 76, 85, 265; divided, 74–75, 77–78; and language, 48–50, 52–54, 56; and performance, 88, 203, 263; and Petrarchism, 2, 4, 144–51; and temporality, 50, 110; and theatricality, 263; and voice, 239. See also self; subject-effects symbolic: field, 44; meaning, 45  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tacitus, 256 Tancredi (in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda), 216, 228, 230, 232; as focalized, 234–238 Tancred the Crusader (film), 265–66 Tansillo, Luigi, 147–48 Tasso, Torquato, 6, 25, 51–52, 153, 155–56, 160, 165–66, 171, 176, 179, 196, 265; Aminta, 155, 171; Eclogue III (Festa campestre), 176; Gerusalemme conquistata, 230, 234; Gerusalemme liberata, 51, 128, 166, 174–76, 196–98, 206, 216, 228–37, 266, 271–76; and passionate narrator, 197–98, 216, 234; Il Re Torrismondo, 51–52, 179; Rogo amoroso, 171; settings of, 303n11. See also canzoniere; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; Monteverdi, Claudio Teatro Goldoni (Florence), 58 Teatro Novissimo (Venice), 239 temporal perspective (Pirrotta), 107 Testo (in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda), 216; as focalized, 229, 236–37; as focalizer, 228–29, 234–35; as narrator, 228, 232, 238 text: for Barthes, 27; and performance, 16–17, 21, 26–31, 66, 284n51; and work, 26–31 theatricality, 102–9, 263–66, and Florentine madrigals, 102–9; linking madrigal and opera, 206; and multimediality, 265–66; and spectatorship, 264–65 Tomlinson, Gary, 129 tonal focus, 285n8; in Orfeo, 36–37 tonal type, 162, 172, 175, 178; defined, 305n135 touch (sense of), 57, 64, 67–68, 88, 247 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 145 Turin, 32, 249 Turner, Victor, 19, 281n21 Tu se’ morta. See Orfeo  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vellutello, Alessandro, 80, 145, 173 Venice, 1, 20, 24, 81, 130, 144, 146, 148, 151–52, 209, 239–40, 245, 249, 252 Verdelot, Philippe, 3, 6, 102–9, 131, 133, 263; Chi non fa, 104; Io ho nel cor un gielo, 120; Oh dolce notte, 107–8; Quante lagrime, 103; Quanto sia lieto il giorno, 104–9; —, text of, 105; Sì suave, 104; and subjecteffects, 108 Verdi, Giuseppe, 174 Vergine bella (RVF CCCLXVI), 156; and Monte­ verdi, 86 verisimilitude, 15, 244 Vincenzo Gonzaga (duke). See under Gonzaga (family) Virgil, 13, 22, 132 viva voce (in Guazzo), 149 voice, composer’s. See composer Voi ch’ascoltate (RVF I), 74–79, 95, 99, 141, 148, 181, 185; in Monteverdi, 80–89, 92; text of, 74; in Wert, 89–92

 

 

 

 

Wallon, Henri, 56 Weinrich, Harald, 54 Wert, Giaches de, 3, 6, 102, 129, 153, 174–76; appropriating poet’s voice, 176; and deictics, 89, 92; and Petrarch, 303n108 Wert, Giaches de, madrigal books —Book II a 5 (Madrigali del fiore), 89–92; Voi ch’ascoltate (RVF I), 89–92; —, text of, 74 —Book VIII a 5: contents, 175; Fra le dorate chiome, 176; Margherita Gonzaga in, 176; Non è sì denso velo, 176; Non sospirar pastor, 176; organization, 174, 176; Usciva omai, 176; Vener, ch’un giorno avea, 176; Vezzosi augelli, 176 Willaert, Adrian, 3, 6, 102, 152; appropriating poet’s voice, 134–36; and Petrarch, 130–36, 303n108. See also Musica nova Wöllflin, Heinrich, 7 work: and text, 26–31. See also allographic  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Udine, Ercole, 23–24 Unisoni, accademia degli, 240  

Zarlino, Gioseffo: Istitutioni harmoniche, 131; on soggetto as favola, 131–34; on soggetto as listener, 301n76; on soggetto as numero, 134 Zefiro torna (RVF CCCX): in Monteverdi, 207, 248 La Zinzera (Florentine singer), 107 Zoppelli, Luca, 37 Zurich Opernhaus, 24, 28  

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