A term in general use to describe madrigalesque entertainment music of the late Renaissance in Italy. In the widest sense of the term, a madrigal comedy consists of a series of secular vocal pieces held together by a more or less well-defined plot or story in which the music is descriptive of the action of the characters or situation.
The origin of the term may be traced to Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso (1597), subtitled ‘comedia harmonica’, or, as it is referred to in the preface, ‘comedia musicale’. The term ‘madrigal comedy’ appears to have been first used by Einstein, who has been followed rather indiscriminately by others. A distinction ought to be made between entertainments organized along the lines of the literary genre of the comedy proper and those of a more purely descriptive nature such as Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato (1567) by Alessandro Striggio (i), Giovanni Croce’s Triaca musicale (1595) and Adriano Banchieri’s Barca di Venetia per Padova (1605); such works have too often been classed together in a single category. Banchieri’s three madrigal comedies belong with his books of three-voice canzonettas and therefore qualify as madrigals only in a generic sense. The generally humorous content of madrigal comedies has led to the erroneous correlation of ‘comedia’ with ‘comic’, ignoring the literary definition of comedy, used by Vecchi, which includes the serious (grave) as well as the light-hearted (piacevole) in the portrayal of scenes and persons ‘imitated from life’.
Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso represents the first attempt at combining the Parnassus of music with that of comic poetry into a unified whole. Its subject matter and its organization of a prologue and 13 scenes grouped into three acts more closely resembles the contemporary farsa or the three-act commedia dell’arte improvised by Massimo Troiano and Lassus at Munich in 1568 than the five-act commedia erudita. Gardano’s beautiful edition of this work contains woodcuts illustrating each scene, suggesting that these were intended to stimulate visually the imagination of the performers (figs.1 and 2); Vecchi also called upon the performers in his preface to fill in mentally any lapses in the action. It is made clear in the prologue that it was not intended to be staged:
the place of this action is the great theatre of the world … know then that the spectacle of which I speak is seen through the mind, into which it enters through the ears, not through the eyes; be silent then, and instead of looking, listen.
Banchieri’s La pazzia senile (1598), Il studio dilettevole (1600), Il metamorfosi musicale (1601) and Prudenza giovenile (1607; republished in 1628 with minor changes as Saviezza giovenile) follow the precedent established by Vecchi. All these works adopt a nearly identical scenario – foolish old men duped by ladies – typical of the giustiniana, of which these comedies are only an extended example. Their dramatic continuity is even less developed than in L’Amfiparnaso, relying on an acquaintance with the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, who need little elaboration beyond the musical sketch to bring them to life. Banchieri clearly had an audience in mind, directing that one of the singers should read aloud the title and argument printed at the head of the single numbers in the partbooks ‘so that the listeners may know what is being sung’. He also directed that a change of clefs indicated an octave transposition up or down depending on whether men or women were being represented, thus allowing for a performance by five singers or three men who sing falsetto as the characterization demands.
Banchieri’s stated purpose in writing his comedies was ‘for no other end than to pass the hours of leisure’, suggesting that they are social diversions no less than the parlour games popular with Italian academies as entertainment during their evening reunions. Vecchi’s Le veglie di Siena (1604) takes its form from the game of ‘imitation’ described by Girolamo Bargagli in his treatise on games played by the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena, the Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usono di fare (1572). In Vecchi’s musical version the leader proposes that one of the company impersonate the speech and mannerisms of a Sicilian, a peasant woman, a German, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a Venetian and Jews. The proposta, for six voices, is followed by the imitazione for three voices in the descriptive style of the villanella; the success of the imitation is then commented upon by the assembled company. The second part of the evening’s entertainment portrays a hunt for Cupid (‘La caccia d’Amore’) and concludes with tongue-twisting word games (bisticci). In the second veglia Vecchi introduced a subject of his own invention, the portrayal of the various ‘humours of modern music’ – madrigals descriptive of the serious moods of love in contrast with the facetious caprices of the first veglia. Gastoldi’s Balletti (1591) has a similar programmatic intent to Vecchi’s ‘humours’, forming an organic whole in which the participants are invited to represent a succession of imaginary characters such as Good Humour, Contentment, Hopeful Love and so on.
EinsteinIM
PirrottaDO
N. Pirrotta: ‘Commedia dell’arte and Opera’, MQ, xli (1955), 305–24
J. Haar: ‘On Musical Games in the 16th Century’, JAMS, xv (1962), 22–34
L. Detenbeck: ‘Dramatized Madrigals’, The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte, ed. D. Pietropaolo (Toronto, 1989), 59–68
M. Farahat: ‘On the staging of madrigal comedies’, EMH, x (1991), 123–44
DAVID NUTTER