A form of Italian vocal chamber music of the first half of the 17th century in which the vocal melody of the first strophe is varied in subsequent strophes while the bass is repeated unchanged or with only slight modifications, generally of rhythm; the term itself is modern and was not used by composers or theorists of the period. The sectional nature of works in this form, which are normally secular solo songs or duets, distinguishes them from those built on a ground bass or ostinato over which the music unfolds continuously. Strophic variations undoubtedly originated in variation techniques used in the 16th century in instrumental as well as in vocal music. It is significant that popular melodies dating from that period, such as the romanesca or Ruggiero, were used in the early 17th century as the bass in many strophic-variation settings of ottavas, a schematic type of verse with which they had often been associated. There are several such settings by Antonio Cifra in particular, Sigismondo d'India and other composers of solo songs and duets; the most celebrated is Monteverdi's duet Ohimè, dov'è il mio ben (seventh book of madrigals, 1619).
Whether a bass was traditional or the composer's own, it was common in strophic variations for each pair of lines of an ottava to be set over one statement of it. The equally schematic form of the sonnet was sometimes subjected to a comparable division into four strophes, nearly always over the composer's own bass. Having served as the foundation of the four-line strophes of the octave, an original bass could be adapted to fit the three-line strophes of the sestet more conveniently than could a borrowed bass; Stefano Landi's Altri amor fugge (Arie, 1620), for solo voice and continuo, is a good example of a sonnet set as strophic variations in four sections. Larger and, very rarely, smaller divisions of a poem are also found. It was common for the last phrase of the bass in any section (but especially the final one) to be repeated with new music over it. The texts in each section are not of course genuine strophes but arbitrary, though regular, sections of a complete strophe or poem. Composers sometimes suggested that their music for such a text might be used for other texts identical in structure.
The principle of strophic variation was sometimes applied to settings of genuinely strophic poems, which, however, in early 17th-century Italy (as in other countries and periods) were normally set simply as strophic songs, with the same music for each verse. In some settings of such poems not only does the vocal line change from verse to verse but the bass too changes so much that the songs cannot still be called strophic variations. Conversely, in songs such as Caccini's Ard'il mio petto misero (Le nuove musiche, 1601/2) the changes from verse to verse are so slight that the pieces are virtually written-out strophic songs. Caccini called that song an aria, but most sets of strophic variations are similar in style to solo madrigals (i.e. in common time and with relatively slow-moving basses). Orpheus's great song ‘Possente spirto’ in Act 3 of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) is essentially a set of strophic variations, in which, in the dramatic context, the form is treated with notable imagination and psychological acumen. The ritornellos between its strophes are an element found in some other songs in this form. In the songbooks of the period the first genuine strophic variations on composed basses appeared as late as 1616: examples occur in the collections of songs and duets published in that year by the Florentines Domenico Belli and Domenico Visconti. Rome became the most important centre of them: Landi and G.D. Puliaschi were prominent composers of them, and there are several examples as late as the sonnets of Domenico Mazzocchi's Dialoghi, e sonetti (1638).
By the 1630s, however, the technique of strophic variation was dying out in all parts of Italy, though there are later instances of it in, for example, Roman cantatas of the mid-17th century and certain arias in the operas of Cavalli. In Venice (where Cavalli worked) such composers as Alessandro Grandi (i) and G.P. Berti had begun to apply it from at least 1620 to sectional songs whose repeated basses move more actively, predominantly in crotchets. They called such pieces cantatas, and it is customary to refer to them now as strophic-bass cantatas (see Cantata, §I, 1). Grandi also adopted this technique in motets.
The term ‘strophic variations’ is occasionally used too of music of other periods, for example isorhythmic motets of the 14th century, constructed according to principles similar to those outlined above.
FortuneISS
A. Einstein: ‘Orlando furioso and La Gerusalemme liberata as Set to Music during the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Notes, viii (1950–51), 623–30
N. Fortune: ‘Solo Song and Cantata’, The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, NOHM, iv (1968), 125–217, esp. 169, 181
J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)
S. Leopold: Al modo d'Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik im italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.29 (1995)
NIGEL FORTUNE