MONTEVERDI: Madrigals, Book 4
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Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) Madrigals Book IV Monteverdi's Fourth Book of Madrigals was published in Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1603, a good eleven...
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Madrigals Book IV
Monteverdi's Fourth Book of Madrigals was published
in Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1603, a good eleven
years after his last published work. This period has often
been examined by Monteverdi scholars as it seems
excessively long for a composer whose previous works
had appeared at intervals of no more than two or three
years. The originality of the Third Book of 1592 (Naxos
8.555309) had made it a great success, and by 1644 this
Fourth Book had been reprinted seven times, in Italy and
abroad. What then were the reasons for such an extended
break?
Various events in Monteverdi's life probably
contributed to the delay. In 1594, the year in which both
Palestrina and Lassus died, and Gesualdo's First Book of
Madrigals was published, four of his Canzonettas
appeared in an anthology. The following year he left
Mantua for Hungary with Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga's
court. Vincenzo was keen to join the Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolf II's crusade against the Turks, albeit
with a view to financial gain rather than soldierly
prowess. He took advantage of the crusade to visit such
cities as Trent, Innsbruck, Linz, Prague and Vienna,
where he and his entourage were received with every
luxury. The documents pertaining to this chivalrous
expedition provide us with some fascinating details
about contemporary performance practice. Vincenzo
required a Cappella Musicale comprising four singers,
under Monteverdi's direction. We know that one of
these four was a famous castrato and two were basses
(probably one bass and one baritone, the latter taking the
tenor part), and we also know that Monteverdi himself
was renowned for his singing ability (and was a tenor) as
well as for being "a new Orpheus on the viol [viola da
gamba]". The duke's cappella was therefore entirely
male and was employed both to perform the Catholic
liturgy and to entertain at Vincenzo's frequent and
sumptuous banquets, at which the noble guests "spent
much of the day engaged in amorous pursuits". The
chronicler continues thus: "the singers and organist the
Duke had brought with him performed Vespers during
solemn ceremonies" and "it was also very common for
his most serene highness the Duke to have the same
singers perform for his own amusement".
On his return to Mantua Monteverdi found himself
betrayed by the city, which had offered the prestigious
role of maestro di cappella, left vacant by the death of
Giaches di Wert, to the composer Benedetto Pallavicino.
He therefore turned his attention to Alfonso II of Este,
Duke of Ferrara, a city in the vanguard of cultural and
artistic activity. Unfortunately he was to have bad luck
here, just as he had in Verona and Milan: Alfonso died
in 1597 (as he had no heir, Ferrara was handed over to
the Holy See, bringing to an end a rich and enlightened
moment in history). Furthermore, performances of
Monteverdi's new madrigals led to a notorious dispute
with the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, an aggressive
and inflexible defender of the traditional rules of music
and composition, who was violently opposed to any
attempt to go against them. L'Artusi, overo Delle
imperfettioni della moderna musica, published in 1600,
inveighed against some of Monteverdi's as yet
unpublished madrigals (some would appear three years
later in the Fourth Book, and others even later in the
Fifth), which he had heard performed in Ferrara.
While this battle between the old and the new raged,
as described in my notes for the Fifth Book (Naxos
8.555311), the Duke of Mantua was, in 1598, dedicating
his efforts to a staging of Guarini's Pastor fido which we
know to have been visually magnificent (sadly no report
survives on the music). A few months later, in 1599, he
offered Monteverdi a bride in the shape of his favourite
singer, Claudia Cattaneo, who may also have been his
mistress. The composer then accompanied him on a
journey to Flanders, during which he is thought to have
met Rubens: the painter went on to work for the
Gonzaga family in later years. 1601 and 1602 were
happier years for Monteverdi: he became a father and, a
few years later on Pallavicino's death, "Maestro della
musica del serenissimo signor duca di Mantova" (as he
himself wrote on the frontispiece of the Fourth Book).
This led to his being granted Mantuan citizenship and
lodgings within the Ducal Palace. From that time
onwards, therefore, he was responsible for all the court's
musical activities except for those of the ducal chapel of
Santa Barbara which remained the responsibility of
Giacomo Gastoldi. The dedication of the Fourth Book is
a diplomatic masterpiece -- by offering the work to the
Accademia degli Intrepidi of Ferrara, founded in 1601,
it pays tribute both to the cultural environment in which
the madrigals had initially been commissioned and
performed, and, indirectly, to Mantua and Vincenzo, one
of the Accademia's most eminent members.
The expressive innovation that had characterized the
Third Book is also to be seen in the Fourth, considered
one of Monteverdi's most attractive collections. (The
Fifth too continues along similar lines stylistically,
being in a way both an appendix to the Fourth and its
natural continuation.) Artusi quoted indiscriminately
from the two books, and the setting of so many lyrics by
Giovanni Battisti Guarini in both is clearly related to
Vincenzo's 1598 production of Il pastor fido. During
those eleven years of publishing silence then,
Monteverdi was busy both performing and composing,
and indeed his discernment, commercial and otherwise,
when it came to distributing his works was key to the
success enjoyed by the Fourth and Fifth Books.
If we discount the wonderfully lighthearted and
descriptive Quell'augellin 14, clearly reminiscent of O
rossignuol from the Third Book, the other texts, as noted
by Paol Fabbri (Monteverdi, 1985) deal with
"experiences of the pain, or at least, the yearning caused
by the vicissitudes of love, from the obvious sensual
languors of Sì ch'io vorrei morire 16 ... to the more
exhausting, from the skirmish in Non più guerra 15 to
the the pathos of heartbreaking separations or farewells
in, for example, Longe da te, cor mio 19".
Once again, Monteverdi chose to open (and close)
the book with an especially distinctive work: the first
madrigal here is a remarkable innovative composition,
while the final piece, on a text by Torquato Tasso, is one
of the most charming madrigals ever written. Ah,
dolente partita 1 had already been published in a
German collection of 1597, and its prominent position
here suggests that Monteverdi wanted to pay tribute to
the memory of Giaches de Wert who had set this text to
music and included it in his own Eleventh Book (1597)
alongside Cruda Amarilli, which Monteverdi went on to
use as the opening piece of his Fifth Book. This of
course is another link between the Fourth and Fifth
Books as well as a further reference to the relationship
between Mantua and Ferrara. The slow opening notes
call to mind the solo introductions of the previous book.
Monteverdi surpasses himself here, however: two voices
sing the first few notes in unison, then divide into
separate melodic lines, generating a string of haunting
discords, subsequently taken up and developed by the
other voices which follow their example of dissonant
division. Listeners will be captivated by the sorrowful
effect of bewilderment, so similar to that produced by a
real separation. Here madrigalismo, or word-painting, is
used not to create aesthetically sophisticated plays on
words, but to express pure human emotion: two voices
united in a single melody, travelling the same road in
life, are then forcibly separated. All they (and the
listeners) are offered are alienation, dissonance and
grief.
The compositional device of unison voices,
representing harmony of purpose, dividing from one
another into two stunning, dissonant sounds is used
again at the end of A un giro sol de' belli occhi lucenti
11, a madrigal which evokes the beauty of the natural
world, recalling Ecco mormorar l'onde from the Second
Book (Naxos 8.555308, track 13), and anticipating Or
che 'l ciel e la terra in the Eighth. After some wonderful
depictions of the sea and the wind, dissonance strikes on
the words "certo quando nasceste, / così crudel e ria",
representing the pain of birth and the suffering caused
by being torn from a mother's womb, as well as the
future pain of the man who will love this new being.
While the first madrigal portrays the separation of
Amarilli and Mirtillo, the two protagonists of Guarini's
Pastor fido, the last in this book, Piagn'e e sospira 20,
depicts Erminia's delirious love for Tancredi. In
Fabbri's words, "once again Monteverdi is inspired by
the poetry of Tasso to explore the world of raging
passions, as he was in the Third Book's Armida and
Tancredi cycles ... His desire to express these emotions
leads him to use musical imagery whose relative
conventionality makes it all the more effective and
communicative: e.g. the chromatic ascent on "Piagn'e",
which is broken by the "sospiro" (sigh) of a rest, or the
vocalise on "fuggon" ... The exquisitely artful
polyphonic treatment is further complicated by the
"chaotic" superimposing of melodies, adding to the
tortuous and disjointed intonation."
Another highly original madrigal is Sfogava con le
stelle 4, which aroused and continues to arouse interest
for its novel use of the declamatary style: to set more
words to music Monteverdi used the falso bordone
technique (faburden, or false bass, the notation system
used for psalmodic chanting) which enabled several
words to be declaimed on a single long note. While in
the sacred context the declamation would have been on
a monotone, here an explosion of sounds and words
assails the listener, alternating at times with lively
counterpoint in which the voices take delight in
imitating and following one another in turn.
We also find fugal counterpoint in Io mi son
giovinetta 13, a lovely portrait of the game played by
two young lovers at dawn in early spring. Its conceit is
that of a singing contest (the virtuosic writing on "a quel
canto" and "fuggi" was still rare at that time) between
the upper and lower voices, mirroring the dialogue
between the daring and lovelorn shepherd and the
disdainful shepherdess. Here too, as for all such
moments of drama of that time, "it is a given that these
characters (Mirtillo rejected by Amarilli, Amarilli who
cannot return Mirtillo's love) are never portrayed by a
single voice, but always by the polyphonic texture"
(Fabbri).
The sensuality of Sì ch'io vorrei morire 16 will not
escape the listener. As with some earlier pieces, most
notably Baci soavi e cari 5 from the First Book (Naxos
8.555307), we are led into a scene whose eroticism is
more overt than it might have been earlier, a scene
whose counterparts are to be found in some of the
paintings commissioned by Duke Vincenzo for the
Palazzo Te. There is an erotic charge throughout the
madrigal, with all its sighs and gasps -- we are party to
an explicit act of love-making -- and any ambiguity is
dispelled when we recall the medieval courtly metaphor
of death for orgasm.
In making this recording we have tried to avoid both
textual and musical errors by consulting the latest
musicological research and making use of recently
published and more accurate editions of the madrigals.
Such errors, while taking nothing from the beauty of the
works, arose in the past from problematic areas which
have now been resolved: for example the line in track 4
which for many years was sung as "Sfogava con le stelle
/ un inferno d'amore", but which we now know ought to
be "un infermo d'amore".
As far as instrumentation is concerned, we have
again chosen a basso seguente accompaniment (as in
Books One to Three), which gradually evolves towards
the improvisatory freedom and individuality that would
characterise basso continuo (heard for the first time in
the Fifth Book). Although we have also remained
faithful to the strict doubling of vocal lines typical of
basso seguente, there are a few improvised exceptions to
this rule, be it to link two madrigals, where a text is
divided into two parts, to achieve a greater sense of
unity, or, on certain cadences or long repeated notes
(e.g. Sfogava con le stelle), in order to increase the
impact of the declamatory style so characteristic of this
book.
Marco Longhini
English translation: Susannah Howe
Ah, dolente partita (more info)
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Ah, dolente partita - 04:01
Cor mio, mentre vi miro (more info)
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Cor mio, mentre vi miro - 02:32
Cor mio, non mori? (more info)
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Cor mio, non mori? - 03:54
Sfogava con le stelle (more info)
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Sfogava con le stelle - 04:30
Volgea l’anima mia soavemente (more info)
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Volgea l'anima mia soavemente - 04:16
Anima mia, perdona (more info)
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Anima mia, perdona - 03:26
Che se tu se’il cor mio (more info)
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Che se tu se'il cor mio - 04:05
Luci serene e chiare (more info)
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Luci serene e chiare - 03:59
La piaga c’ho nel core (more info)
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La piaga c'ho nel core - 02:56
Voi pur da me partite, anima dura (more info)
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Voi pur da me partite, anima dura - 04:49
A un giro sol de’belli occhi lucenti (more info)
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A un giro sol de'belli occhi lucenti - 02:46
Ohime, se tanto amate (more info)
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Ohime, se tanto amate - 03:42
Io mi son giovinetta (more info)
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Io mi son giovinetta - 02:34
Quell’augellin che canta (more info)
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Quell'augellin che canta - 02:30
Non piu guerra, pietate (more info)
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Non piu guerra, pietate - 03:30
Si, ch’io vorrei morire (more info)
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Si, ch'io vorrei morire - 04:02
Anima dolorosa (more info)
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Anima dolorosa - 03:54
Anima del cor mio (more info)
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Anima del cor mio - 03:10
Longe da te, cor mio (more info)
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Longe da te, cor mio - 03:36
Piagn’e sospira (more info)
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Piagn'e sospira - 05:21
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