From madrigal to opera: Monteverdi's staging of the self 9780520951525, 9780520267688

Citation preview

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

LA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 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. Ds «ein;

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: 30) 105/38 37> 16% 15. -Ta- 15. 2 1G” SO: 164 > Gs CB. Aa Ss In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro1o0o0, 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

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction I 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 - “Iam 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 chascoltate + 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

Notes 277 Index 319

Text and Translation 271

Appendix 2: Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda:

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

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 dor” 65 7. Monteverdi, Orfeo (dir. Ronconi), Act3 67 8. Narrative interference in texted music 192 9. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): m.10 232 10. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “a passi tardielenti” 233 11. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “Misero, di che godi?” —_ 235

12. Monteverdi, Combattimento (dir. Audi): “e se rubellain vita fu” 236 13. Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea (dir. Hampe): act 1, scene1 257 MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act1, Nymph 45 2. Monteverdi, Orfeo: act1, Orfeo 47 3. Monteverdi, Orfeo: Prologue, La Musica 61 4. Monteverdi, Selva morale: opening of O ciechi and Voi chascoltate 84 5. Monteverdi, Selva morale: Voi ch‘ascoltate, mm. 27-29 85

1X

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, I/ bianco e dolce cigno, beginning = 111 10. Arcadelt, Quando col dolce suono, mm. 30-41 113 11. Arcadelt, Chi potra dir, mm. 20-29 117 12. Arcadelt, Ahimé dov’e 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 TABLES 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 a5 (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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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, Iam 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

Xil 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.' 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 with-

out 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 “T” 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, II 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.’ 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.* 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." 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).° 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.° Music fully participated in the “age of conversation” that characterized early

4 INTRODUCTION

modern Italy.’ 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 societa took place in particularly productive contexts for the interaction of words and music: courts and academies.* 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;? 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.'® 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." According to Jerrold Siegel, a broad notion of subjectivity encompasses three dimensions.” 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." 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. 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.’ 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,’'® 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.” 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 Wolfflin, “Baroque.” 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.

This page intentionally left blank

PART ONE

La Musica and Orfeo

This page intentionally left blank

—’

All opera is Orpheus. ADORNO!

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO’S 1973 ORFEO SOLITARIO dates from the last years of

the artist’s life, evoking his long-standing connection with opera.’ 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 1.5 Most of this rehearsal photo is occupied by the set, which shows in the deep background, surrounded by bushes and trees, the facade 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.* 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” (Lalterezza 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.* 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.° 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.’ 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.*

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 (II 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.’ This aspect, however, was absent up to that point in the action of I/ 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.” 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.’" 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.” 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)." 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.” 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 ina 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." Interestingly, Adorno adopts the same qualifier “authentic” for operas such as Freischiitz, Zauberflote, 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.'® 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

aSS 8 ta - 1 Pot ch’al mio so - spi-rar tu__ sO-spi-ra - sti

| he — eel semen lesen ms Naren ree ea)

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 pit 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 pit [mai piu] non tornare, ed io rimango?*?

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

piu points to the fact that, for Orpheus, his identity is inextricably linked to a temporal dimension—one tragically defined by Eurydice’s death.

DIALOGIC SUBJECTIVITY In Orpheus’s Tu se’ morta the “you” of Eurydice is physically absent, a situation that Bihler 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.** The composer embraced Vincenzo Galilei’s invita-

tion to learn from theater actors, and Iacopo Peri’s “imitating in song a person speaking” (imitar col canto chi parla). As known, Monteverdi invoked a seconda prattica in which music follows the text, or, as he put it, harmonia is the servant of oratione.”®

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.” 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.”* 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.”°

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 J 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 “TI” 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 T’ 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.*’ 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.*’ 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.” 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 Iam, 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.*? The second reference in Tu’ se morta inscribes Orfeo in the tradition of pastoral tragicomedy exemplified by Guarini’s I/ 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 Oprimavera, gioventt dell’anno

4 tutorni ben, ma teco non tornano i sereni e fortunati di de le mie gioie; tu torni ben, tu torni, ma teco altro non torna che del perduto mio caro tesoro

10 larimembranza 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.**

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 I] 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.** 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 piu 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).*° 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 di perturba? (what sorrowful sound disturbs this happy day?) sings one of the shepherds, referring to the Messenger announcing Eurydice’s death.” (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.** 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.*? 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.’*° 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. SUBJECT-EFFECTS

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.*! 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, cest moi”).*? 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.** The second subject-effect—which I call presence eftect—is discussed by Buhler, as seen when he emphasizes the “emptiness” of the deictic “I,” as well as by Benveniste, when he claims that language is “the possibility of subjectivity.” “T,” 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. Buhler 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.“* This positioning of the subject at the origin, together with the “here” and “now, emerges in concrete human interaction, since in intersubjective exchanges the “T° involves the presence of a body—in opera, the singer’s body—and consequently a voice. A case of this embodied “T” 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.* 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 Bihlerian 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 erzadhlen, and by John Lyons as one from experiential to historic mode.*® 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.’*’ 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 J 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.”** A consequence of Benveniste’s emphasis on “IT” and “you” as reversible entities is that the “I,” which for Buhler 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 “T” to the “you,” provisionally reverting to the “I.”* This accomplishes a shift in the deictic orientation of texts towards either the addresser, the addressee, or the third person.*° 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.*! In these

LIMINALITY, DEIXIS, SUBJECTIVITY 55

PAST PRESENT FUTURE his, her, he, she,

cee” it, they, them et

his, her, he che: his, her, he, she,

it,: they, them it, they, them I, me, my, mine, . i our, we, us %

DISTANT [ \ DISTANT there, that, & there, that, then, yeste rday \ | tomorrow

~ here, this, /

expression of now, today expression of

past acHOn | Mueule action ee his, her, he, she, ee 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 Buhlerian “I-here-now’ at the center of a graph (see again figure 2).°* 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 ‘T 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.”*? 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’.”** 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.’ 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.*° 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.”*’ 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, ** 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

MUSIC'S “TOUGH

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” (4 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 nota-

tion 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).! 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.? 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.* 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).*

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.° 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

|Ih\, \Yah |:\f).| ,\wii ;]Ty| /|/

PERFORMING THE DIALOGIC SELF 59

\! \\ iz / Jil US \ \, | ( } yy / wa hee ) A fa f)* iF \ AN : YW Yi NS i) iJ ‘\ SRK . * ;| “ly BN AY Iw } AN GA Hs

SONI 9 YAWN VO ARS SENOS AAO a if INS yy “ ct FP , @ ee | O-— WAI f ,

SSeS NAYee ; ms el ZA| Ai hat ere | ISSN EAT] OT ‘aRS | ii cco Al | ees Al : Ht: is= ey (2a) — ess sj |, aced

i| |Sl ji LIP es ay) | eee jibe pte a SS | ae i ; be int x is! ; = Se _— ai

,mina's — | oT = aRSatan I al ae :

Si Reena, li) RCT) | : eS ————— —. en | |: Pa OF ot, eae te. Tk eee |

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 Buhler 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

—" it 9 \ hs ios \

‘|

>\\\ | hy DY | Dal mio permesso amato: mo

avolnevegno | 7) ] ds Hl

i.

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.° 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-

PERFORMING THE DIALOGIC SELF 61 EXAMPLE 3. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo (Venice, 1609), Prologue, La Musica (beginning of first strophe).

e)

Dal mio__ Per-mes-so_a-ma - to a voine ve - geno,

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.’ 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'-bb'-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 ba, 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 perform-

ers 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 orches-

tra 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.”* 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

:

+) ; 7 ‘ J

7a

= ££ Cag

fo la. Mukica ep S eeson,rsA pal : ch’ai dolci accenti

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.? 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." 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” (Jo su Cetera dor cantando soglio), reiterating her own subjectivity after having previously sung, as we remember, the words “I am Music” (Jo 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 dor 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." 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

|}

7 | y ee7 J|

:aA4 f ; |a ny / : )¥ ,

Y

lo su Cétera or, 7 oo L “cantando soglio ——== 1| 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, autonomously, their own meanings (see chapter 1). As noted, the Prologue displays two powerful assertions of subjectivity, starting with the word Jo, 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 Jo 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.’? 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. ECHOES

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

4"

( i So Lk, me hee | Sto T TIT L ——_— : | leibybes’ '

—_ BP = VO a _ he — > : — ~'. Rh —-~ Pep Lie ; ata | ™ = . : . S, (ie - |MERE —ALE a. = Se 1 ee iad A

—' \ | aes? a , x | ™~ 45

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 (Iam 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.’ 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. | 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.

This page intentionally left blank

PART TWO

Constructing the Narrator

This page intentionally left blank

4

~~

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

“T” 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 “T” 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.' 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.” 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.* In his lyric poetry, Petrarch highly problematized the relationships between author, narrator, and character.* His move in this direction was not only consequential for Renaissance Petrarchist poets, but it also provided an opportunity for com73

74 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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.° 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 ‘| core in sul mio primo giovenile errore

4 quand era in parte altr'uom da quel ch’i’ sono del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ‘| van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,

8 spero trovar pieta, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or si come al popolo tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente

11 dime medesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna é il frutto, e ‘| pentersi, e ’] conoscer chiaramente 14 che quanto piace al mondo é 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] Iam 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).° 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 “T” 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 Iam... 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.’ Musically, then, the “you” and the “T” appear to be different sides of the same self, engaged in an inner, sonorous dialogue with itself.

76 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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 io; in line 5: del—va—rio—sti—le_in— ch’io). 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: “T 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 (“TI”) and addressee (“you”), subject and object, become ambiguous.*® 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: “Iam ashamed of myself within me” (di me medesmo meco mi vergogno).? 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.!° 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 “T’ 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 1 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.'' Thanks to the proemial sonnets (and RVF IJ 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.’” 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”).'* This distinction affects the reader of the entire Canzoniere. For example, in lo 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

78 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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." 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 “T” 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.” 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.'° 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.” 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." 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 Niccolo 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.” 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.

APPROPRIATING THE SELF

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 (Si traviato é ‘I 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-

80 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

ern poetry. Petrarch arranged his “fragments” as a sequence featuring some of the elements today often attributed only to the narratives present in novels.” 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).~ 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”).”* 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.*°

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 chascoltate.™ 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? w’ son gli onori? ele gemme e gli scettri e le corone,

84 ele mitre ei purpurei colori? Miser chi speme in cosa mortal pone (ma chi non ve la pone?) e se si trova

87 ala fine ingannato, ¢ ben ragione. O ciechi, il tanto affaticar che giova? Tutti tornate a la gran madre antica,

90 el vostro nome a pena si ritrova. Pur de le mill’é un‘utile fatica, che non sian tutte vanita palesi?

93 Chiintendea vostri studii, si mel dica. Che vale a soggiogar gli altrui paesi e tributarie far le genti strane

96 coglianimial suo danno sempre accesi? Dopo le imprese perigliose e vane, e col sangue acquistar terre e tesoro, 99 vie piu dolce si trova l’acqua e ’] pane, e 'llegno e 'l vetro, che le gemme e loro.

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] Ifanyone 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.” 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 quali-

ties. 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.”®

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 “T° 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. Claudio Monteverdi, Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1641). a. Beginning of O ciechi, il tanto affaticar che giova?

Soprano i)\ 75 a zr IO oaojTTHT"T"__q_H.~--vwrx7NTNee- 328 "OI —_

S .Oprailo ; 2 aon TE—?__$§$§_ Oe eee ppp ee Oe eee, ee eee eee, ee 2 eee @, I]e a $$ —_$_ — 9eee 9) —tee }- —_—_§_pp-__t_}§—_—§

> ey -_ °A]toi Dk 5 ae OW cie-chi cie - chil tan - to_af-fa-ti-car che gto-va

e Sa eter ae Seer eee ee

Tenor apda 4. Oe, Pe ee ee ee 2... ee ee" ee" ee" ee ee ee pe OU is , =Eri—“|

44

°——_}-—__—_—_— Sz SURES ee verse>» EE9»ES ESREE SEY ESET . eee CREE De! Te e 4 >} —ee 9 —— 0eee et 2Nene ee eee ee enor EiaGU— Sy Se ee ee eee ee eeEEeeEEE eeEEE, ee eeFeee" eee eee a j

S Spe - to spe- ro tro-var pie - ta spe - ro tro-var pie -

Violin 7 -—____ $$ 5 Pe 9 SS> 7: . Bl| ...

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

Ae ee i ET ne nn A A, eee) eee Cc; Ss.og eee eenn eee Oe|CR) eSPS ee[car ss ee eee hott. ie eeCee ee Se) 2 ee ee

B | a TT nn na i ee —— —L —= “VTS he ____ fh ______—____~}

Vot ch’a - scol - ta-tein tm - me spar - sil suo - - -

=

> 2 ee Pe ee eee Se ee ee | ee eee [i ee) aeeeee. ae ehee efeefs __ee~~, _ fs se fe", ee A= eeee 2. ee ee ee ee ee. ee 4.

[_ EE hE —ee 6

e)

> HS, sgt ——_ RS)it(o_O . , i Ac. an Fb.

no Di quet sO-sp1- ft on-dio nu-drit - va’l co ‘ re

As weee - ere. ee nr le eee sis aeee ° contrade d’Oriente, mm. 24-59.

Yr Ht HH SS eo et or 24

a 6 = +t o —

DTT — LeeeeSSSSSSsSESCdSCSdSCCC#C#C#SSNW LD __| LO — @ a @ e)

“Spe - ran-za del mio cor dol-ce de-si_ -

2) 2) eee eee (ES | 1 ee ee er) 2) oe ee | ee ee ee ee Pe = Ff OS =f ______s_—Y = _ F_ F.-Y ff Ff _ _ Ff, _ _ |} % —spir ar-dent - te “Spe- ran-za del mio cor, dol - ce de-si -

% -spir ar-dent - te “Spe-ran - za del mio cor, dol - ce de-si -

Bea a i a — _ _ _Y 8 so - spir ar - dent-te “Spe-ran - za del mio cor,

1S),CS ‘CREE fl eee ee Ee es Ee ee Aeeeee ee(eee =" See) eeeeee eeeee ee B EW On eeeeeenn OEee) Ee ee EeeesEee eee eee —spirar-dent - te “Spe-ran - za del mio cor, dol - ce de-si -

e+74 ; ; , %a

$j +--+ +_-#+-[—_______+_-—_____, TT AE eeeee eee ee eee ee ee ee ee ee eee ee eee Bt. OEeeeEe eee ee eee ee eeeee eeCES eeee2eee eeee eeeeeLee aeeeeeee Oeee eee a SC) ES TS aeeeee aeeeT CC eT Se a 30

a A Se es es 2 ss e)

oO, Te’n vai, hai - me, so-la mila - sci, a - di-o.

0ASA) ae WH eeeeSeea ee Se ee ee eS se Ee)eeeseeCS eSee esee eeeee Es o, Te’n vai, hat-me, l’en vat, hai - me, a-di-o.

en ee

_£f. ge CUPL OO SC SSS Ue ee ee eeee aeESeeeS eeee eeeeLULU ee eea CD by eS€) a |ee eeeeeee BE ————— Eee) eee, eee, EF EEE ESS _eeeeeee ee Eee eee a

Oo, [e’n vai, hat - me a-di-o.

iff. ly aDe a edSE i SCee OOP a iee SCee PT ee OP AE Ae Ten vat, hai - me, a-di-o. Che Oe a OPee OSS ee CO eeOss eeaeS a SZ... We ee ee ee ee ee ee 2 eee eee eee ee ee ee ee eee eee

f+ & ss | | gi e6vdELUmUmULULULUdLULLULLULLULUUU Oe ULC SFT

o, Te’n vai hai-me, hat - me, a-di-o.

(continued)

De ee

af )ddoei=OP LL a eelea fi = ee

EXAMPLE 14 (continued)

SS a aDsSS =es CO ee es ee FA es «A Oo” SY a ee Da aSs FS A, Se es A es es Ses 36

Bf. Bae ee ee eee ee eee, ee eee eee ee ee ee ee ee ee eee eee e

Che sa-ra qui di me scu - rae do-len - te? Ahi

ES 2. ye ee) ee eee ee ee ee es ee ee ee es 0 ee eee, es ees Che sa - ra qui di me scu - rae do-len - te? Ahi

eS iLn [ssSL [nn ) 2” ee esS.A eeeSes ee eees eS es eseeSee ee OS aee eS se es ee, eee —————————— eS Che sa-ra qui di me scu - rae do-len - te? Ahi

A SE ce a1oefoAee es eS| esSS — en Oees ee eS SS Ss eee,Ss ee, ns eee

ee, ee es a

— sa-fra qui di me scu - raedo-len - te? Ahi

ESE EEE, ee ey ee Ey ee ee ee eee eeeeeeeeeSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSFFeeeeeeeeee SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSFFeSSSSFd

ee b

te] —_ + > 42

fi @# . ™ | | ££ @# | ecl # ee . Weey ™ee| |est ™ | Ee # .ceee ™ | ee /jeeJj) /] oj2 if GLa BED 2Sed eeecee ee™ Esced ee| cc ee DS..Fe el Ce Ee lee ery ee cet bt ee ee ee e

_ cru-do_A-mor, ahi___cru-do_A-mor,ben son du-bio-se_e cor-te Le tue dol-

LYS ame oe. (é 2EyeloS (é — OF 4aCd ER Sy EL LSes SY Ey EE RS ey _ || aPN FS) CS ET SS) Aeee NaeeS aRa et erSL a re es Ae Aree el

DO EO ce, Ls ee eS| — ctu-do_A-mor, ahi ctu - do_A-mor, ben son du-bio-se_e cor-te Le tue dol-

—F¢—-— I / E—E"G 0 eee eeeee eeeeee ee eee, eee eee eee | FF 4 Te eee ees ee eeEee) ee eee ee eS es eee ee ee eeeeeeee

BE AT SSee Beal SS edEe ee a 0 A ee ee feas ceedeS ce mes eee SS ces esSC ce cedTS et ed)ee ced 2 ee eed — ctu-do_A-mor, ahi ctu - do_A-mor, ben son du-bio-se_e cor-te Le tue dol-

> Eeei!EEE, _ EEE IaesAeee eeeeeeeee eneee I nn Li LL etl f

— ctu-do_A-mor,

ee Ore aCO oe V ee A 0) GR Se_e) eteeee EN, a)ES feeee |Seeee ee aee aeet ee Rers)ES ee CT SSS SS” Se Ser Pee ee ee eeef ee| Ahi_____cru-do_A-mor, ben son du-bio-se_e cor-te Le tue dol-

irr

EXAMPLE 14 (continued)

Se SS TS Sead fey UT esA dC ee SS OOeS tt SEaE >= =ldTs aa Rn OsaesaACUT 48

e) ——

EY og ED ee ed ee ee eee ed ee ed ed es es ed ee ce ee eee eee ed ee ee ee ed eee ee eee eee

yf pp

cez-Zze, poich’ancor_ ti go - di Che_le-stre - mo pia-cer fi - ni -

ayo ee ofceelef See He oa =| ae anT ee SS eeSS ee leAPs ee nd ed et eseeeeee eleled eee Eg RE, TY PET EEET) a)(ARN |eS ESee ENS END] PEee PT aSS a SS ES EPRE ee EN] eePR es eee cez-ze, poi ch’ancor— ti go - diChele - stre - mo pia-cer fi-ni-sca_in

fey" Vee| esff Ol OE dd_, heia __f le BNF iS ee — fe i 8 So| J. _____.§ % > r ?eaeng 44 ” ? —_ ar he ’ :8 mile J EF 4 EE ee ee) ee ed ee ee ees ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee et ee ee ee

cez-ze, pot ch’ancor— ti go - di Chel’e - stre-mo pia - cer fi- ni - sca_in

fey ld Oree lg ee OOee ed ee ee eeeee SS“rsatgeee BY ee] Sn) eee ee ee ey ee ee ee | ee eee ee ee ee ee ee See

LE A)ll llee Loe heSS OU Oe a edee Oe Che le - stre-mo pia - cer fi - ni-sca_in

Ei CH eee 0” eee ee ed ee) et ee eee fee ces eee ee ee ee ee eee ee oe ee ee ee

4} Eenna Ch Sith LN pag pf gg ef ft aweag Od Oe a cez-ze, poi ch’ancor— ti go - di Chele - stre-mo pia - cer fi - ni-sca_in

aBZ...aSeee ee eea ee ee_ee YS oe nn a SS ee ee eePS eee a 55

e)

- scain pian - to.” Né po-ten - do dir piu,

Ce a eS | Os a FS dd BA a MF ee _ 9 SS 8 .Om — eS . —— -ae ———* 8COE 7s SS —__ I DY ES +74

plan - TOK Né po-ten-do dir piu, né po-ten- do dir piu,

SS TS rsee er Se es ssON ee ee ne i,eeCn eeee Fe A eo SeSN NeesPTD eyeseee ee eeae ee ee= a

plan - - to.” Né po-ten-do dir piu, BN nn ie = 8 ef =~ —_-~ 5 - -¢ --74

fey * @> jf “@ .& @ | @ @@+- af | Ji UUUUUUUUULULULULULULULULUDTLULULULULULULULULULULULULULU,ULULULULULUWB

74

pian - - to.” Né po - ten - do dir piu, cin-

aBO A ecA«ne ne »ne SO4 f= SS OO se| ee Ss en i IES ieAO a BsOA” 3 =Oe 8: —-_— ..] 2}. = 5ieee ae 9OS _-. _—___* a Cs so? SM MS SS CS plan - - to.” Né__po-ten-do dir piu, ne po-ten - do dir piu,

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’/"T”). Shifting deictic orientation is a technique that literary scholars consider effective to accomplish the cognitive transition from real to fictional worlds.** 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'—bb'-bh'-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 sara

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 Eb. 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 Eb, 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.* THE MADRIGAL BOOK AS CANZONIERE

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 conjunc-

tion 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.** 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.”*’ 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 chascoltate”). 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 “T’ 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.*®

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.*? 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.?? 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.*! 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 come il vostro al nome mio, / parimenti conforme/a mia voglia non é 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.” 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,’** 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.” 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 Fernandez de Cordoba, Duke of Sessa: 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 133 leggendo i miei sospir, sappiate come io amai sempre et amo forte anchora.”° (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 CCCX XXII, 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).”’

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.’ As we shall see, in his Book IX a5 (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.” 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;'”° Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (posth. 1558), devoted to etiquette; and finally, Stefano Guazzo's The Civil Conversation (1574).

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 (a viva voce), which with miraculous force is imprinted in the mind.""”

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.’”

From Guazzos 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 fea-

tured in Doni’s Dialogo. But the three elements still participate in the same paradigm of verbal exchange and communication accomplished through ofii 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 numer-

ous 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.

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.'4 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.’ Starting with Cipriano de Rore’s Madrigali a 5 of 1542 composers began to publish books mostly or exclusively devoted to Petrarch’s settings.'°° 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.!”’ 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.'

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.’ 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

152 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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.'"° 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 sixteenth-

century 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, 1!

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

IN SEARCH OF VOICE 153

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."”

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).''* 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.

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: I] ben divino, in which “Laura” is the singer and noblewoman Lucrezia Bendidio (hence the title), and a collection

entitled Gli Amori."“ This last was the subject of an extended comment in his own time that also dealt with the arrangement (dispositione) of the poems: “The

154 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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.”!” 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.

IN SEARCH OF VOICE 155

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):'"° 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. g. 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: 145a 6c 6d...10 113. 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.'” 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.'"* 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.’ For example,

IN SEARCH OF VOICE 157

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 ’! 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 lebbe/conobbil io, cha pianger qui rimasi, etc. (12-13) resonate at the beginning of the latter poem as Conobbi, quanto il ciel li occhi maperse. 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.”° 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:"! 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 '] tuo splendor ritorni/ a far seren’i giorni. 3. Amor io non potrei. 4. Amor, poiche non vuole. 5. Quando sorge / aurora, / ridon Vherbette ei fiori, /e i pargoletti amori/van con le Ninfe intorno/al mio bel sole adorno,/ scherzando ad hor’ ad hora, / onde la terra

el ciel se n'innamora. 7. Al vago del mio sole/lucido raggio che ‘| bel Mincio honora, / anzi l'ingemma e ‘ndora, / gitene a schiera a schiera, /lieti scherzando pargoletti Amori/la dove é sempre eterna Primavera, /e giunti fiori a fiori/ di candide viole/ tessete ghirlandette / el 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/saccorderanno e voi di passo in passo/ ite pascendo fiori, herbette e fronde. 9. La bella Ninfa mia ch’al Tebro infiora/co’ pie le sponde e co’ begli occhi affrena/ rapido corso all’hor che discolora/le piaggie il ghiaccio con si 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 piu sorda morte, / porto delle miserie, e fin del pianto.

158 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

11. Strider faceva le zampogne a / aura/il Pastorel di Filli o per Neera,/se pit. 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 florite siepi e d’arborscelli/ uscian cantando mille vaghi augelli. 12. I’ piango; ed ella il volto/con le sue man masciuga; e poi sospira [from RVF CCCLEX, 13. Gia Febo il tuo splendor rendeva chiaro. 15. Gia 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’! 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: / aura, lora, laurea, aurora, in turn generating rhymes in poems nos. 5, 7, and 11 (and, indirectly, in the three Petrarch poems nos. 10, 12, and 16);'”? 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 A! 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 (/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 piu che mai bella e vaga laura 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.'?? 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

IN SEARCH OF VOICE 159

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.'?+ 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).'*° 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 IJ 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-Bb, 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 selfconsciousness 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.

160 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATOR

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.'*° 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.”!”’ 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.’ A script is activated as a “source story” at the moment in which the reader experiences a new story, which becomes the “target story.”!”° 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 § (1595).'°°

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).'*' 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).'** In act 1, scene 1 of II 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 § (Venice, 1595): overview

Title Poetic source System Clef Final Speaker Addressee 1 Deh, poi ch era ne’ fati Guarini, Pastor fido, durus C1 A HE Mirtillo — Tirsi HIMSELF

ch’io dovessi I, 2 (322-27)

2 Quell augellin, che canta ibid., I, 1 durus Cl G HE Linco > Ergasto HIM Silvio —> Tirsi 3 Cruda Amarilli, che col ibid., I, 2 (272-91) durus cl e HE Mirtillo > Tirsi HER Amarilli nome ancora

4 Odisaventurosa acerba sorte! Bembo, Alma cortese, durus cl B HE Bembo > Tirsi HIM Brother > HER Amarilli 74-80

5 Allume delle stelle Tasso, Rime e prose durus g2 A Narrator + HE Tirsi Reader + rr “stelle”

6 Ami, Tirsi, e me ‘I nieghi Anon. durus g2 A SHE Amarilli? HIM Tirsi 7 Odolcezze amarissime d'amore Guarini, Pastor fido, durus g2 c HE Mirtillo/Tirsi HIMSELF II,1

8 Sospir, nato di fuoco Anon. durus g2 e HE Mirtillo/Tirsi? IT “sospir”

9 Arda pur sempre, o mora Guarini, Pastor fido, mollis g2 f HE Mirtillo/Tirsi HIMSELF (Corisca) III, 6

10 Questi vaghi concenti Anon. mollis g2 g HE HIMSELF

L2 Narrator (Ergasto)

11 O fido, 0 caro Aminta Guarini, Pastor fido, mollis g2 A SHE Lucrina—+ Amar.+ HIM Aminta + HIM Mirtillo/Tirsi

12 O Mirtillo, Mirtillo, anima mia ibid., III, 4 mollis g2 G SHE Amarilli HIM Mirtillo 13. Deh, dolce anima mia (A. Bicci) ibid., III, 3 mollis cl G SHE Amarilli HIM Tirsi 14 Com’e dolce il gioire, o vago Tirsi __ibid., ILI, 6 mollis C1 G SHE Corisca + Amar. HIM Tirsi

15 Care mie selve, addio ibid., 1V, 5 mollis Cl D SHE Amarilli IT “selve,” HIM Mirtillo

16 Tirsi mio, caro Tirsi ibid., TV, 5 mollis Cl D SHE Amarilli HIM Tirsi 17. Ombrose e care selve ibid., V, 8 mollis cl F HE Ergasto 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 I/ 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 -you poem.”? 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, “1 will die silently”) that concludes Monteverdi's setting, in Marenzios 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/parlera il mio morire, /e ti dira 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 com-

prehension—that the narrative of Guarini’ 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).'** 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 disaven-

turosa 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).'° 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 Odispietata intempestiva morte! O mie cangiate e dolorose tempre! Qual fu gia, lasso, e qual ora é ‘| mio stato? Tu ’] sai, che, poi ch’a me ti sei celato né di qui rivederti ho pitt 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 [78,] Tu ‘1 sai, anima mia, [78,] che, poi ch’a me miser ti sei celata

[78,] You know it, my soul, [78,] 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.'*° 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 7 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.'*’ 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.'** 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, 0 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 I/ pastor fido Lucrina announces her own death with the words: ... O fido, o forte Aminta, o troppo tardi conosciuto amante, che m’hai data, morendo, e vita e morte, 465 se fucolpa 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: E questo detto, il ferro stesso, ancora del caro sangue tiepido e vermiglio, tratto dal morto e tardi amato petto,

470 ilsuo 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 Ja 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.'? 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."° 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).""' 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.”"* 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 I] 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 Vhai 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."

“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).'** 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.’” 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 VIA 5 (1594) the identities of the dedicatees,

Virginio Orsini and his wife Flavia Peretti.“° 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).!"”

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."*

TABLE 3 Luca Marenzio, Sesto libro di madrigalias (Venice, 1594): overview

Title Poetic source System Clef Final Speaker Narrative 1 Sjio parto, i moro, e pur partir conviene —_ Arlotti, Parnaso mollis cl G Tirsi Separation

2 Clori nel mio partire Anon. mollis cl G Tirsi 3 Donna de l’alma mia, de la mia vita Tasso, Convito mollis C1 G Tirsi

4 Anima cruda si, ma pero bella Guarini, mollis C1 F Clori Pastor fido, 1V, 9

5 Udite, lagrimosi ibid., IIT, 6 mollis C1 A Tirsi 6 Stillo lanima in pianto Ongaro durus C1 E Narrator

7 Ah, dolente partita Guarini, durus Cl A Tirsi Pastor fido, II, 3

8 Ben ho del caro oggetto i sensi privi Caro durus Cl G Tirsi

9 Amor, se giusto sei Anon. durus cl G Tirsi

10 Hor chi, Clori beata Strozzi durus g2 G Tirsi Rapprochement/ intimacy

11 Deh Tirsi, Tirsi, anima mia, perdona Guarini, durus g2 A Clori Pastor fido, I, 4

12 Clori mia, Clori dolce Strozzi durus g2 A Tirsi 13. Mentre qual viva pietra Anon. durus g2 C (Narrator) 14 Voi bramate chio moia Anon, mollis g2 G Tirsi Death 15 “Rimanti in pace,’ a la dolente e bella Celiano (A. Grillo) mollis g2 A All

16 Ecco Maggio seren, chil’ha vestito Strozzi mollis g2 Cc Narrator Life/wedding

17. Cantiam la bella Clori (a 8) Anon. mollis cl F Narrator

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 § (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.'“? 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 é si 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 Mensuration System Clef Final Speaker Topics/Connectives

1 Io non son pero morto Anon. C mollis cl G HE “Donna”

2 Rallegrati mio cor ch ogni dolore Anon. C mollis Cl G HE “Donna”

3 Sicome ai freschi matutini rai Pigna, Amori C mollis C1 G HE “la vostra man”

liberata, XVI, 12 (place)

4 Vezzosi augelli infra le verdi frondi Tasso, Gerusalemme C mollis Cl F Narrator Garden of Armida

5 Fra le dorate chiome Anon. C mollis cl F Narrator + Amarilli’s “capelli,” SHE Amarilli “lacci”

6 Usciva omai dal molle e fresco grembo Tasso, GL, XIV, 1 C durus g2 Cc Narrator Pastoral setting (time)

7 Sovente allor che su gli estivi ardori ibid., VII, 19-20 ¢ durus g2 A Narrator + Lament SHE Erminia

8 “Misera, non credea chagliocchi miei” _ ibid., XTX, 106-107 ¢: durus g2 D SHE Erminia Lament

9 Non ési denso velo Pigna, Amori ¢ mollis g2 f HE Praises lady

10 Qual musico gentil, prima che chiara Tasso, GL, XVI, 43-47 ¢ durus C1 E Narrator + Lament SHE Armida

11 Forsennata gridava “O tu che porte” ibid., XVI, 40 ¢ durus Cl E Narrator + Lament SHE Armida

12 Non sospirar, pastor, non lagrimare Tasso, Eclogue UI C durus cl d SHE Amarilli Pastoral setting

13. Questi odorati fiori Anon. C durus Cl d HE “Donna real”

14 Vener, ch’un giorno avea Anon. C durus C1 d Narrator + “Margherita” “capelli,” SHE Venere “lacci”

15 Con voi giocando Amor, a voi simile Pigna, Amori C durus C1 d HE “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.”’° 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 § (1599) frames the I-you relationship com-

poser/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.”'*! 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.’ 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, ie., 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).'» 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 piu 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. 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 a5 (Venice, 1599): overview

Title Poetic form Poetic source System Clef Final 1 Cosi nel mio parlar voglio canzone stanza Dante, Rime, 103, st.1 durus C1 A esser aspro

2 Amor,i ho molti et molti sestina stanza Petrarch, RVF durus C1 e

anni CCCXXXII,’ st. 10

3 Dura legge d'Amor, ma tercets Petrarch, Triumphus durus C1 d

benché obliqua Cupidinis U1 4 Chiaro segno Amor pose sestina stanza Petrarch, RVF durus cl d alle mie rime CCCXXAIL SES 5 Sesialto pon gir mie sestina stanza —- Petrarch RVF durus = g2 d stanche rime CCCXXXII, st. 11 6 Laura che ’l verde Lauro sonnet Petrarch, RVFCCXLVI = durus g2 A e laureo crine

7 Ilvagoe bello Armillo madrigal Grillo, Rime didiversi* durus g2 C 8 Soloe pensosoi pitt deserti sonnet Petrarch, RVF XXXV durus g2 G campi

9 Vivo in guerra mendico sonnet Ongaro, Scelta dirime> mollis sc d e son dolente

10 Fiume chalonde tue ninfe sonnet ibid. mollis 1 F € pastori

11 Parto o non parto? Ahi madrigal Guarini, Rime‘ mollis ¢2 G come

12 Credete voi ch’i’ viva? madrigal ibid. mollis ¢2 G 13. Crudele, acerba, sestina stanza —- Petrarch, RVF mollis g2 A inessorabil morte CCCXXXIL, st. 2 14 La bella man vi stringo madrigal Guarini, Rime mollis —_ g2 d 1. RVF = Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere). Sestina CCCXX XII begins “Mia benigna fortuna e '] viver lieto.”

2. Rime di diversi celebri poeti dell'eta nostra (Bergamo: Comino Ventura, 1587).

3. Scelta di rime di diversi moderni autori. Non piu 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 Cosi 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 IJ, 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 (gravita) 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 gravita. Contemporary poetic conventions dictated the formal markers of gravita 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.»

In this grave context, Petrarch’s sonnet starting with the sweet-sounding words Laura 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 gravita 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. Marenzioss inclination toward gravita in Book IX is tied to its destination to Vincenzo as a member of high-ranking nobility. In the late Renaissance, gravita

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.’° As such, gravita 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 gravita Marenzio made it a mirror of the nobleman. Tasso made explicit the link between gravita and noble status by relating them to Duke Vincenzo in his dedication of I] 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 gravita of his play and the gravita of Vincenzo, between the tragedy’s perfection and the duke’s perfection (perfettissimo poema and perfettissimo principe).'*’

TABLE 6 Text of Petrarch’s sestina “Mia benigna fortuna,” in Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Canzoniere), CCCXXXIL.

(The underlined numbers indicate the stanzas set by Marenzio in Books Il as, Ila 6, 1a 4-6, and [1X a5.)

1 Mia benigna fortuna e ’l viver lieto, 7 Nesun visse gia mai piu di me lieto, i chiari giorni et le tranquille notti ~_ nesun vive pit tristo et giorni et notti;

e i soavi sospiri e '] dolce stile et doppiando ‘| dolor, doppia lo stile

che solea resonare in versi e ’n rime, che trae del cor si lacrimose rime. volti subitamente in doglia e ’n pianto, Vissi di speme, or vivo pur di pianto, odiar vita mi fanno, et bramar morte. né contra Morte spero altro che Morte. 2 Crudele, acerba, inessorabil Morte, 8 Morte m’a morto, et sola po far Morte cagion mi dai di mai non esser lieto, ch’i’ tornia riveder quel viso lieto ma di menar tutta mia vila in pianto, che piacer mi facea i sospiri e ’| pianto, ei giorni oscuri et le dogliose notti. laura dolce et la pioggia a le mie notti, I mei gravi sospir’ non vanno in rime, quando i penseri electi tessea in rime, el mio duro martir vince ogni stile. Amor alzando il mio debile stile.

3 Ove écondutto il mio amoroso stile? 9 Oravess’io un si pietoso stile ~ A parlar d’ira, a ragionar di morte. che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte, U’ sono i versi, u’ son giunte le rime, come Euridice Orpheo sua senza rime, che gentil cor udia pensoso et lieto; ch’i’ viverei anchor pit che mai lieto!

ove 'l favoleggiar d’amor le notti? Sesser non po, qualchuna d’este notti Or non parlio, né penso, altro che pianto. chiuda omai queste due fonti di pianto.

4 Gia mi fucol desir si dolce il pianto, 1o Amor,i’ 6 molti et molt’anni pianto che condia di dolcezza ogni agro stile, mio grave danno in doloroso stile, et vegghiar mi facea tutte le notti: né da te spero mai men fere notti; or m’é ‘| pianger amaro pit che morte, et pero mi son mosso a pregar Morte non sperando mai ‘| guardo honesto et lieto, che mi tolla di qui, per farme lieto,

alto sogetto a le mie basse rime. ove é colei ch’i’ canto et piango in rime. 5 Chiaro segno Amor pose a le mie rime 11 Se sialto pon gir mie stanche rime, ~ dentro a’ belli occhi, et or l’a posto in pianto, ch’agiungan lei ch’e fuor dira et di pianto,

con dolor rimembrando il tempo lieto: et fa ‘| ciel or di sue bellezze lieto, ond’io vo col penser cangiando stile, ben riconoscera ‘| mutato stile,

et ripregando te, pallida Morte, che gia forse le piacque anzi che Morte che mi sottragghi a si penose notti. chiaro a lei giorno, a me fesse atre notti. 6 Fuggito él sonno a le mie crude notti, 12. Ovoiche sospirate a miglior notti [note],

el suono usato a le mie roche rime, ch’ascoltate d’Amore o dite in rime, che non sanno trattar altro che morte, pregate non mi sia pili sorda Morte, cosi é | mio cantar converso in pianto. porto de le miserie et fin del pianto; Non a’l regno d’Amor si vario stile, muti una volta quel suo antiquo stile,

ch’é tanto or tristo quanto mai fu lieto. ch’ogni uom attrista, et me po far si lieto. 13. Far mi po lieto in una on poche notti: e n aspro stile e ’n angosciose rime prego che ’| pianto mio finisca Morte. TRANSLATION OF THE STANZAS INCLUDED IN MARENZIO’S BOOK IX A S:

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 Aclear 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

Gravita 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 gravita with another, very unusual book that Marenzio composed earlier in his career: BOOK I A 4-6 (1587; see contents in appendix 1).'°* In the dedication of this Book to

Count Mario Bevilacqua, Marenzio claimed that he composed the madrigals ina “manner that is quite different from the past,” one characterized by mesta gravita (“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.'® 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 gravita. 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.' He had used it earlier both in his Book II a 5 in 1581 (see above, O voi che sospirate) and in his Book Il a 6 (Nesun visse gia mai); and he would later use it in Book IX:

STANZA IN RVF DATE OF

CCCXXXII (SESTINA) MADRIGAL BOOK PUBLICATION

12 Il a5, no. 10 1581 7 Il a 6, no. 2 1584

26 I a 4-6, nOS.1,5 1588 1035; 11;2 [X:4 5; NOS; 2,435, 14 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." 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).'° 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 a5, 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 I] 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-FB-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—Il a5, 1a 4-6, Vla 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 CD E F, then f A E B DC, and so forth.’ 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.”'™

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 é ’] sonno) and for the tenth madrigal of his Book Il 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 é 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 a5, 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 a5 (1581) to Book IX a 5 (1599). Petrarch’s collection provided the Script according to which readers or listeners—includ-

ing 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.

5 sia mio, vostro il martire, e non vedete che se questa é la mano che tien stretto il cor mio, giusto é il dolore perche stringendo /ei 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 gravita his Book [X—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 gitt 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.” 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 0 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.” 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.

@) — E A ee ON i es SR Fed

eh NF A p 2 ~ CC aeea

2)? ES Ser eeeES ene en Peee ee Le OO OO OS “a9. ALT ES Se |- ma] - no. Co - me 12

A.

i EE —————_—_

——————— —_——

a5 rr ooo -~nhu ma - : - - no.

DD Ee De ee oO Se ————————————————————— EEE

LNs -—__@-___ j-—__.. _} J — ey — _1 esr e)

tut-to_il gio -1 - re Sia mio, vo-stro_il mar - t1 : re,

SF, ee ee es ee ee ee ee, ee ee eee eee vo - stro il mat - ti - re e non ve -

Re aeee a ea SP a || SPST|[t_|E Se es oe avo-stroilmar-ti - ree ae Aee) 4 ) oy 5 OE es ea ee) ee eee EE ss —————— SE _————————————— EEE vo - stroil_l...- ss mar-ti - ~~ te

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 Cosi 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 Phalese 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).'*’ Phalése’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.

Staging the Self

This page intentionally left blank

6 —2aa 1D qui tre-

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 modi? 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 bb 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.’ 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 dira). 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. Cloris 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 Cosi (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 Bb is introduced in the previous measure for the first time after forty-four measures (as Chafe observes).* 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 laltro (mm. 6771, lines 13,-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 nar-

rator alone but in which her lover Alceo has already musically “interfered” as

\

Ce Os Q Bp

MONTEVERDI, NARRATOR 219

EE Ee eS = ze s ra SS EE SS SS = 5 S ° Bicwes Se 2 SSS SS

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

v Co-si — disse_ilpa-stor Co-si dis-se_ilpa-stor

Co-si — dis-se_il pa-stor

8 con?u-mor_________ del pian - to.” Co-si co-st dis - seulpastordo -

Co-si — disse_il pa-stor

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 Cosi (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).*° 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.

a

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

(- Aw (eee eee 2 Oe ee eee eee ee eee Eee BE a

% oS — ee ee

ate i) a ps Yt] aOT rar rree rr rh Oe eT Co-sisuwl Te - bro a lospuntar del So - le

Q Ups ar te at OO a i rr oe oe Co - si sul Te - bro a lospun-tar del So - le

yi ir rr rr?

a AB EE EEE 6 ee eee = a Ee ee 5

Co - si sw Te - bro a lospun-tar del So - le Quin - cle ON Oe es Se Oe a es2oe oe Ket Ba Aa 2)renSeUre eea aGee eseeeeeeeS 9 Ee 2 er eee eeales 2 eee ee Co - si sul Te - broalospun-tar del So - JeQuin-ct_equin-

A gy fs eg Co - si sul Te - bro a lospun-tar del So - le

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.” 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 bacio 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 BACIO LA SUA NINFA

Qui rise, o Tirsi, e qui ver me rivolse le due stelle d’amor la bella Clori; qui per ornarmi il crin, de’ pit bei fiori

4 alsuon delle mie canne un grembo colse. Qui l’angelica voce in note sciolse, ch’humiliaro i pit superbi tori; qui le Gratie scherzar vidi, e gli Amori

8 quando le chiome dor sparte raccolse. Qui con meco s'assise, e qui mi cinse del caro braccio il fianco, e dolce intorno

11 stringendomi la man, |’alma mi strinse. Qui d’un bacio ferimmi, e ’] viso adorno di bel vermiglio vergognando tinse.

14 Omemoria 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

A quest’olmo, a quest’ombre, et a quest’onde, ove per uso ancor torno sovente, eterno i’ deggio, et avro sempre in mente

4 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. Qui di quel lieto di soave riede la rimembranza: allor che la mia Clori 11 tutta in dono se stessa e ‘| cor mi diede; gia spirar sento erbette intorno e fiori, ovunque o fermi il guardo o mova il piede, 14 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 frag-

mentation 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 toa 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.** 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 piu 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

(8 $f fey el

MONTEVERDI, NARRATOR 225

a a wots

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.

CeO ooo oe ES st ee a 8