(It.).
A general term for settings of Italian devotional texts not intended for liturgical use which became particularly fashionable after the Council of Trent.
A few settings began to appear concurrently with the secular madrigal in the 1520s and 30s (Sebastiano Festa's Vergine sacra from the Libro primo de la croce of 1526 may be the earliest); the absence of the appellation ‘spirituale’ does not exclude their existence as a genre prior to the earliest complete collection, the Veronese Giovanni dal Bene's Musica spirituale (RISM 15637), compiled in the 1550s. Like the secular madrigal the term ‘madrigale sprirituale’ could cover a variety of musical styles and its development closely paralleled that of its secular equivalent. Distinctions between it and other forms of devotional music (canzonetta spirituale; lauda spirituale, seeLauda) were often blurred, though the madrigale spirituale was not normally strophic. Some were simply contrafacta of secular madrigals but the majority were independently conceived compositions, with examples by many of the most important composers of the period. The term was even used for pieces with Latin texts, as in the collection Madrigali de diversi auttori accomodati per concerti spirituali (16168), which contains Latin contrafacta of madrigals by Marenzio, Andrea Gabrieli and others.
Like their secular analogues, madrigali spirituali were principally destined for private performance, often, though by no means always, by cultivated amateurs. Many were written specially for the households of independently wealthy clerics, and were considered particularly suitable for performance during Lent at courts and academies. They were fostered by the Jesuits, to whose members many collections were dedicated during the 1570s and 80s, and by the Oratorians of Filippo Neri. Madrigali spirituali are also known to have been used in confraternity oratories and in other paraliturgical contexts. Some extant sources include printed marginal notes indicating the feasts for which particular madrigals were appropriate; G.F. Anerio's Teatro armonico spirituale (1619), possibly the most extensive collection, contains a repertory for the entire liturgical year intended for performance at the oratory of S Girolamo della Carità in Rome. Rome, as well as Verona, was an important centre for the production of madrigali spirituali: Giovanni Animuccia's pioneering Primo libro de madrigali, a tre voci … con alcuni motetti, et madrigali spirituali (1565) was dedicated to two young adherents of Neri's oratory; it was followed by published collections from Palestrina (two), Marenzio and both Felice and G.F. Anerio. In northern Italy, Rore's setting of Petrarch's canzone Vergine bella was published in 1548; Nasco, Ruffo and Willaert contributed to dal Bene's Musica spirituale; and collections by Asola, Agostino Bonzanino, Leone Leoni, Merlo, Monteverdi, Pellio and Pietro Vinci, among others, followed. Composers such as Luzzaschi and Gesualdo also contributed to the genre, which was taken up outside Italy too, most noticeably by Monte and Lassus.
While some madrigale spirituale texts parodied secular poems, many were originally religious. A particularly prominent role was played by settings of Petrarch's Vergine cycle and his sonnet I' vo piangendo i miei passati tempi. Among contemporary poets who inspired large numbers of musical settings were Vittoria Colonna, Angelo Grillo, Gabriele Fiamma, Luigi Tansillo and Tasso. Many of the texts written in the late 16th century were vernacular paraphrases of biblical or liturgical texts; Grillo's Lagrime del penitente transformed the first two verses of each penitential psalm into a sonnet, and some of the texts of Monteverdi's 1583 collection of madrigali spirituali closely paraphrase passages of the Gospels. Some texts, especially those about the Passion of Christ, elicited musical settings that explored the affective possibilities of the seconda pratica (e.g. Angelico Patto's 1613 collection of monodic contemplations on the wounds of Christ). Cyclic texts such as Petrarch's Vergine bella and Tansillo's Lagrime di S Pietro provided opportunities for extended works unified by motivic or tonal means; Lassus's setting of the Tansillo cycle, a 20-section tonal arch, may mark the high point of a genre that includes some extremely expressive works. A number of sacred dialogues, cantatas and oratorio-like works were originally published as madrigali spirituali (e.g. G.F. Anerio's Rispondi, Abramo and La conversione di S Paolo), and the term remained in use until the 1670s.
VogelB
T. Longo, ed.: Lodi, et canzonette spirituali: Raccolte de diversi autori … ordinate second le varie Maniere de versi (Naples, 1608) [valuable preface and source of text attributions]
D. Alaleona: Studi su la storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia (Turin, 1908, 2/1945 as Storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia)
P. Nuten: De ‘Madrigali spirituali’ van Filip de Monte 1521–1603 (Brussels, 1958)
E. Ferrari-Barassi: ‘Il madrigale spirituale nel Cinquecento e la raccolta monteverdiana del 1583’, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 217–52
W.C. Hobbs: Giovanni Francesco Anerio's ‘Teatro armonico spirituale di madrigali’: a Contribution to the Early History of the Oratorio (diss., Tulane U., 1971)
P.A. Myers: An Analytical Study of the Italian Cyclic Madrigals Published by Composers Working in Rome ca. 1540–1614 (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1971)
A. Ziino: ‘Testi laudistici musicati da Palestrina’, Studi palestriniani [I]: Palestrina 1975, 383–408
J. Kurtzman: ‘An Early 17th-Century Manuscript of Canzonette e Madrigaletti Spirituali’, Studi musicali, viii (1979), 149–71
M.A. Rorke: The Spiritual Madrigals of Paolo Quagliati and Antonio Cifra (diss., U. of Michigan, 1980)
M.S. Lewis: ‘Rore's Setting of Petrarch's “Vergine bella”: a History of its Composition and Early Transmission’, JM, iv (1985–6), 365–409
G. Acciai: ‘La Canzone alla Vergine del Petrarca nell'interpretazione madrigalistica de Cipriano de Rore e Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’, Studi palestriniani II: Palestrina 1986, 167–74
D. Nutter: ‘On the Origins of the North-Italian Madrigale Spirituale’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 877–89
J. Roche: ‘On the Border between Motet and Spiritual Madrigal: Early 17th-Century Books that Mix Motets and Vernacular Settings’, Seicento inesplorato: Lenno, nr Como 1989, 303–17
A. Morelli: Il tempio armonico: musica nell'Oratorio dei Filippini in Roma (1575–1705), AnMc, no.27 (1991)
K. Powers: The Spiritual Madrigal in Counter-Reformation Italy: Definition, Use and Style (diss., U. of California, Santa Barbara, 1997)
K. Nielsen: The Spiritual Madrigals of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1998)
SUZANNE G. CUSICK/NOEL O'REGAN