Madrigal.

A poetic and musical form of 14th-century Italy; more importantly, a term in general use during the 16th century and much of the 17th for settings of various types and forms of secular verse. There is no connection between the 14th- and the 16th-century madrigal other than that of name; the former passed out of fashion a century before the term was revived. The later madrigal became the most popular form of secular polyphony in the second half of the 16th century, serving as a model for madrigals and madrigal-like compositions in languages other than Italian throughout Europe. It set the pace for stylistic developments that culminated in the Baroque period, particularly those involving the expressive relationship between text and music, and must be regarded as the most important genre of the late Renaissance.

I. Italy, 14th century

II. Italy, 16th century

III. The concerted madrigal

IV. The English madrigal

V. The madrigal outside Italy and England

KURT VON FISCHER/GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO (I), JAMES HAAR (II, 1–6), ANTHONY NEWCOMB (II, 7–13), MASSIMO OSSI (III, 1, 2), NIGEL FORTUNE (III, 3), JOSEPH KERMAN (IV), JEROME ROCHE (V)

Madrigal

I. Italy, 14th century

The origin of the word ‘madrigal’, which appears in various forms in early sources (madriale, matricale, madregal, marigalis etc.), is a matter of dispute. Its derivation from mandra (It.: ‘flock’) by Antonio da Tempo (1332) is probably untenable. Two hypotheses are open to discussion: the word is derived either from materialis (as opposed to formalis), implying a poem without rules and without specified form; or from matrix (in the sense of cantus matricalis, a song in the mother tongue, or of matrix ecclesia – originally an ecclesiastical song or perhaps a clausula-like piece for the organ).

The madrigal, never mentioned by Dante, but used by Petrarch, was mentioned for the first time by Francesco da Barberino (c1313), who defined it as ‘rudium inordinatum concinium’, thus approaching the idea of materialis. In an anonymous early 14th-century treatise from the Veneto (see Debenedetti, 1906–7, 1922), the madrigal is described as a piece with a tranquil tenor part and lively upper voices. This led Pirrotta (1961) to suggest that the madrigal structure derived from a clausula-like matrix. The first detailed description of literary madrigal forms is found in da Tempo, who distinguished two different types – those with and without ritornello (both are in I-Rvat Rossi 215) – and grouped them according to the length of the lines. Da Tempo also referred to monody as well as polyphony in the madrigal. However, all the surviving examples are for two or three voices.

The earliest surviving madrigals are from northern Italy and probably originated in the 1320s (I-Rvat Rossi 215). The texts are mainly arcadian, intended for the north Italian signori. The music often moves freely and improvisatorially in relation to the text. A predominant upper voice, presumably the first to be written (which would preclude a derivation from the clausula), is accompanied by a lower voice which often moves by perfect consonances with it. Crossing of parts occurs almost exclusively in the final section, the ritornello. Although both voices are supplied with text in all the early madrigals, and in most of the later ones too, the melodic style of the lower voice suggests that it was intended originally as a supporting voice.

The trecento madrigal attained its final form in the 1340s in northern Italy: two or three three-line strophes, each known as a ‘copula’ or ‘terzetto’, and having identical music, are followed by a one- or two-line terminating ritornello, usually with a change of time signature. The individual lines normally have seven or 11 syllables for the strophes and 11 syllables for the ritornello. The following example by Giovanni da Cascia has two three-line strophes and a two-line ritornello; all the lines have 11 syllables. The rhyme scheme is ABB ACC DD (text from Corsi, 1970, p.11).

Agnel son bianco e vo belando be
e, per ingiuria di capra superba,
belar convegno e perdo un boccon d’erba.

El danno è di colui, io dico in fé,
che grasso mi de’aver con lana bionda,
se capra turba che non m’abbi tonda.

Or non so bene che di me sarà,
ma pur giusto signor men mal vorrà.

Guido Capovilla (1982) identified 63 further metrical schemes used in the madrigal, with 17 variants. But in the musical repertory two are used more commonly than the others: ABB CDD EE and ABA CDC EE. The musical style was established in the works of Magister Piero, Giovanni da Cascia and Jacopo da Bologna (fl 1340–60): the individual lines are usually separated from each other by cadences, and often also by differences of tonality. Ex.1 shows the beginning of the first line, the whole of the second line, and the beginning and end of the ritornello of Agnel son bianco. The melismatic opening, the ensuing syllabic style and final melisma of each phrase are characteristic. Imitation rarely occurs in the 14th-century madrigal, but there is a canonic type that furnishes a link with the Caccia.

Almost 90% of the 190 or so known madrigals are for two voices, the rest for three. The three-voice madrigal appeared for the first time in the output of Jacopo da Bologna, who also developed a closer relationship between words and music (see Fischer, 1995). The genre continued to be used in northern Italy by Bartolino da Padova and Ciconia, and was also very popular in Florence where composers such as Gherardello, Donato, Lorenzo, Niccolò, Paolo, Landini and others cultivated the madrigal. From the 1360s onwards the number of madrigals declined in favour of the ballata, which had itself become polyphonic. By that time the madrigal usually no longer appeared as arcadian courtly poetry, but rather took the form of autobiographical pieces (e.g. Landini’s Mostrommi amor and Musica son, Zacara’s Deus deorum, Pluto), moralizing poetry (e.g. Landini’s Tu che l’opere altrui), poems written for special occasions (Paolo’s Godi, Firenze, 1406, Antonello de Caserta’s Del glorioso titolo, 1395), and pieces with heraldic or symbolic meanings (e.g. Jacopo’s Sotto l’imperio, Bartolino’s Imperial sedendo, ?1401, Ciconia’s Una panthera, ?1399). The 14th-century madrigal disappeared after about 1415, but instrumental versions still appeared (as in I-FZc 115, dated between 1410 and 1420).

For a madrigal by Giovanni da Cascia see Sources, MS, fig.35.

EDITIONS

N. Pirrotta, ed.: The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, CMM, viii/2 (1960)

W.T. Marrocco, ed.: Italian Secular Music, PMFC, viii (1972)

THEORETICAL SOURCES

Francesco da Barberino: Documenti d’Amore, ed. F. Egidi (Rome, 1905–27/R), ii, 260–5; iii, 144–8 [see also O. Antognoni: ‘Le glosse ai Documenti d’Amore di M. Francesco da Barberino’, Giornale di Filologia Romanza, viii (1882), 78–98]

Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, ed. S. Debenedetti: ‘Un trattatello del secolo XIV sopra la poesia musicale’, Studi Medievali, ii (1906–7), 59–82; repr. in Il ‘Sollazzo’: contributi alla storia della novella, della poesia musicale e del costume nel Trecento (Turin, 1922), 179–84

Antonio da Tempo: Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis (1332), ed. R. Andrews (Bologna, 1977)

Gidino da Sommacampagna: Trattato dei ritmi volgari (1381–4), ed. G.B. Giuliari (Bologna, 1870/R); ed. G.P. Caprettini, Trattato e arte dei rithimi volgari (Verona, 1993)

F. Baratella: Compendio dell’arte ritmica (1447), Delle rime volgari: trattato di Antonio da Tempo composto nel 1332, ed. G. Grion (Bologna, 1869/R), 177–240

Antonii de Tempo ars rithmorum vulgarium, ed. F.A. Gallo: ‘Sulla fortuna di Antonio da Tempo: un quarto volgarizzamento’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, v, ed. A. Ziino (Palermo, 1985), 149–57

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. Li Gotti: ‘L’“ars nova” e il madrigale’, Atti della Reale Accademia di scienze, lettere e arti di Palermo, iv (1946), 4th ser., iv/2 (1942–4), 344–89

E. Li Gotti: ‘Il madrigale nel ’300’, Poesia, nos.3–4 (1946), 44–56; repr. in R. Cremante and M. Pazzaglia, eds.: La metrica (Bologna, 1972), 319–28

N. Pirrotta: ‘Per l’origine e la storia della “caccia” e del “madrigale” trecentesco’, RMI, xlviii (1946), 305–23; xlix (1947), 121–42

N. Pirrotta: ‘Sull’etimologia di “Madrigale”’, Poesia, no.9 (1948), 44–60

W.T. Marrocco: ‘The Fourteenth-Century Madrigal: its Form and Content’, Speculum, xxvi (1951), 449–57

N. Pirrotta: ‘Marchettus de Padua and the Italian Ars Nova’, MD, ix (1955), 57–71

K. von Fischer: Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento (Berne, 1956), 18–35

G. Corsi: ‘Madrigali inediti del Trecento’, Belfagor, xiv (1959), 72–83

G. Corsi: ‘Madrigali e ballate inedite del Trecento’, Belfagor, xiv (1959), 329–40

K. von Fischer: ‘On the Technique, Origin, and Evolution of Italian Trecento Music’, MQ, xlvii (1961), 41–57; repr. in Medieval Music, ii: Polyphony, ed. E. Rosand (New York, 1985), 51–68

N. Pirrotta: ‘Una arcaica descrizione trecentesca del madrigale’, Festschrift Heinrich Besseler, ed. E. Klemm (Leipzig, 1961), 155–61; repr. in Musica tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Turin, 1984), 80–89

M.L. Martinez: Die Musik des frühen Trecento (Tutzing, 1963)

U. Günther: ‘Zur Datierung des Madrigals ‘Godi Firenze’ und der Handschrift Paris, B.N. fonds it. 568 (Pit)’, AMw, xxiv (1967), 99–119

W.T. Marrocco: ‘The Newly-Discovered Ostiglia Pages of the Vatican Rossi Codex 215: the Earliest Italian Ostinato’, AcM, xxxix (1967), 84–91

G. Corsi, ed.: Poesie musicali del Trecento (Bologna, 1970)

K. von Fischer: ‘Zum Wort-Ton Problem in der Musik des italienischen Trecento’, Festschrift Arnold Geering, ed. V. Ravizza (Berne, 1972), 52–62

D. Baumann: ‘Some Extraordinary Forms in the Italian Secular Trecento Repertoire’, La musica al tempo del Boccaccio e i suoi rapporti con la letteratura: Siena and Certaldo 1975, 45–63

F.A. Gallo: ‘Bilinguismo poetico e bilinguismo musicale nel madrigale trecentesco’, ibid., 237–43

F.A. Gallo: ‘Antonio da Ferrara, Lancillotto Anguissola e il madrigale trecentesco’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, xii (1976), 40–45

F.A. Gallo: ‘Madrigale (Trecento)’ (1976), HMT [incl. discussion of theoretical sources]

D. Baumann: Die dreistimmige italienische Lied-Satztechnik im Trecento (Baden-Baden, 1979)

F.A. Gallo: ‘The Musical and Literary Tradition of Fourteenth-Century Poetry set to Music’, Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Wolfenbüttel 1980, 55–76

A. Ziino: ‘Ripetizioni di sillabe e parole nella musica profana italiana del Trecento e del primo Quattrocento’, Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Wolfenbüttel 1980, 93–119

G. Capovilla: ‘Materiali per la morfologia e la storia del madrigale “antico”, dal ms. Vaticano Rossi 215 al Novecento’, Metrica, iii (1982), 159–252

G. Capovilla: ‘I madrigali (LII, LIV, CVI, CXXI)’, Memorie della Accademia Patavina di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere ed Arti, xcv (1982–3), 449–84; repr. in ‘Sì vario stile’: studi sul Canzoniere del Petrarca (Padua, 1998), 47–90

F.A. D’Accone: ‘Una nuova fonte dell'Ars nova italiana: il codice di San Lorenzo, 2211’, Studi musicali, xiii (1984), 3–31

K. von Fischer: ‘A Study on Text Declamation in Francesco Landini's two Part Madrigals’, Gordon Athol Anderson, (1929–1981), in memoriam, ed. L.A. Dittmer (Henryville, PA, 1984), 119–30

K. von Fischer: ‘Das Madrigal Sì com'al canto della bella Iguana von Magister Piero und Jacopo da Bologna’, Analysen: Beiträge zu einer Problemgeschichte des Komponierens: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, ed. W. Breig, R. Brinkmann and H. Budde (Wiesbaden, 1984), 46–56

N. Pirrotta: ‘“Arte” e “non arte” nel frammento Greggiati’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, v, ed. A. Ziino (Palermo, 1985), 200–17

F.A. Gallo: ‘Critica della tradizione e storia del testo: seminario su un madrigale trecentesco’, AcM, lix (1987), 36–45

K. von Fischer: ‘Zur musikalischen Gliederung einiger zweistimmiger Trecento-Madrigale’, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, xlii (1988), 19–30

J. Nádas and A. Ziino: Preface to The Lucca Codex (Codice Mancini) (Lucca, 1990)

P.G. Beltrami: La metrica italiana (Bologna, 1991), 98–100, 281–3

M. Gozzi: ‘Un nuovo frammento trentino di polifonia del primo Quattrocento’, Studi musicali, xxi (1992), 237–51

M.P. Long: ‘Ita se n'era a star nel Paradiso: the Metamorphoses of an Ovidian Madrigal in Trecento Italy’, L’Ars Nova italiana del Trecento, vi, ed. G. Cattin and P. Dalla Vecchia (Certaldo, 1992), 257–67

N. Pirrotta: Preface to Il Codice Rossi 215 (Lucca, 1992)

B. Toliver: ‘Improvisation in the Madrigals of the Rossi Codex’, AcM, lxiv (1992), 165–76

K. von Fischer: ‘Musica e testo letterario nel madrigale trecentesco’, L’edizione critica tra testo musicale e testo letterario, ed. R. Borghi and P. Zappalà (Lucca, 1995), 9–15

A. Ziino: ‘Rime per musica e per danza’, Storia della letteratura italiana, ii, ed. E. Malato (Rome, 1995), 455–529

E. Paganuzzi: ‘Nota sul madrigale “Suso quel monte che fiorise l'erba”’, NRMI, xxxi (1997), 337–42

B. Wilson: ‘Madrigal, Lauda, and Local Style in Trecento Florence’, JM, xv (1997), 137–77

Madrigal

II. Italy, 16th century

After about 1530 the term ‘madrigal’ began to be used regularly in Italy as a general name for musical settings of various types and forms of verse. One of these, a single stanza with a free rhyme scheme and a varying number of seven- and 11-syllable lines, revived the 14th-century poetic term ‘madrigale’. To some 16th-century writers the word ‘madrigal’ meant only this poetic form (along with, perhaps, the 14th-century madrigal itself, a different and less variable form); and one often finds musical settings of Italian poetry called simply ‘canti’. But to many, and certainly to music publishers, ‘madrigal’ was a generic term, like the earlier ‘frottola’; musical settings of sonnets, ballatas, canzoni, lyric and narrative ottava stanzas, pastoral verse, popular and dialect poems were all known as madrigals.

1. Origins.

2. 1525–40: Verdelot, Festa.

3. 1535–50: Arcadelt; the madrigal in Venice.

4. The madrigal in society.

5. The madrigal at mid-century: Rore.

6. 1555–70.

7. The 1570s: hybrid styles.

8. The 1580s: the ornamented style; dissemination of the hybrid madrigal.

9. Expressionistic and recitational styles.

10. Poetry and the madrigal.

11. The 1590s: the rise of the ‘seconda pratica’.

12. The madrigal in society, 1570–1600.

13. The polyphonic madrigal after 1600.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

1. Origins.

Madrigalian verse in the early 16th century owed its style, imagery and even vocabulary to the lyrics of Petrarch, whose poetry enjoyed an extraordinary revival at this time. The Aldine edition of the Canzoniere (Venice, 1501) was followed by numerous reprints, including the pocket-size ‘Petrarchini’ carried everywhere by fashionable young poets for whom Petrarch's canzoni and sonnets were literally and figuratively a source of inspiration. Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), who had edited the 1501 Canzoniere, became the leading Petrarchist of his day. His championing of the ‘classical’ Tuscan language of Trecento writers led him to a poetic theory, fully elaborated in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), in which the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch were seen to embody every desirable characteristic of style. Their use of word accent and rhyme, and especially their ability to create varied effects (as opposed to Dante's greater regularity), in part through free alternation of ‘versi rotti’ (7-syllable lines) and ‘versi interi’ (11-syllable lines) were much admired and much imitated by Bembo and his fellow Petrarchists. Although Bembo's theories had more to do with the sound of words than with subject matter or imagery, poets of the time took these as well from Petrarch. Thus much of the poetry of the early madrigal, though in its way no less ‘poesia per musica’ than the verses set by the frottolists a few years earlier, was reminiscent of Italy's greatest lyric poet; and there were many settings of Petrarch's verse itself.

A traditional view of the origins of the madrigal is that changes in literary taste in the early 16th century led composers away from the half-serious texts, closed forms and soprano-dominated texture of the frottola; that the new use of Petrarchan and Petrarchistic texts called for musical forms as free as the verse, and for a fully vocal, declamatory polyphonic texture as serious as the melancholy love-poems newly in fashion. According to this view the Italian-born frottolists, led by Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara, were unable to meet the challenge thus presented; and Italy turned once more to the ‘oltremontani’, French or Flemish musicians such as Verdelot, Arcadelt and Willaert, in whose hands the madrigal took shape.

This account of the madrigal's origins must be qualified on nearly every point. First, the turn away from frottolistic verse was not sudden but gradual, not complete but partial. In the printed sources of the 1520s and 1530s, Petrarchan settings are found side by side with frottolas, mascheratas and other lightweight verse. Deliberate cultivation of a rustic vein, including use of dialect verse, is to be seen, as in the Venetian–Paduan villotta, during the early years of the madrigal's development (by the 1540s pieces with texts of this kind were usually published separately, and called ‘canzone villanesche’, ‘villanelle’ or another of the names grouped together by Einstein as ‘the lighter forms’).

The contrast between the frottola's fixed repetition schemes and the freedom of the madrigal is real but its importance has been exaggerated. Since the madrigal is usually the setting of a one-stanza poem or of a single stanza from a canzone, ballata, sestina or poem in ottava rima, it naturally lacks the verse–refrain scheme of the frottola. As for internal repetitions like those within a frottolistic stanza, they are not infrequent in the early madrigal; Verdelot, the two Festas and Arcadelt all used a good deal of repetition, sometimes disguised by overlapping phrases and changes of texture. Since these repetitions are often the setting of rhymed couplets that might occur anywhere in a madrigal or canzone stanza, they are less predictable than those of the frottola. The musical repetition so common at the end of madrigals, however, is usually a reiteration of the final line rather than the setting of a couplet.

If the frottola was essentially music for solo voice with lute or other instrumental accompaniment, performance by singers on all four parts being an alternative, the early madrigal was the reverse, primarily vocal polyphony for three to six voices, with solo performance a secondary choice. A transition in Italian music from solo writing to fully texted vocal polyphony has been called a prime factor in the rise of the madrigal (Rubsamen). Such a change did indeed take place, but it cannot be seen very clearly in the frottola itself, despite the increasing number of ‘serious’ poems found in Petrucci's last books of frottolas. A ‘serious’ polyphonic texture, part chordal and part imitative counterpoint but with all voices sharing a more or less equally declamatory style, was cultivated among a new generation of composers working in Rome and Florence rather than in the courts of Mantua and Ferrara. Some of these were northerners, but others were Italians: Sebastiano and Costanzo Festa, the former at least intermittently and the latter steadily working in Rome; and a group of Florentines including the young Francesco de Layolle and Bernardo Pisano (the importance of whose work has been demonstrated by D'Accone). The overlapping of two styles and two generations can be seen in prints of 1520, a year in which Petrucci's Musica de messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha as well as Antico's Frottole libro quarto and the Frottole de Misser Bartolomio Tromboncino & de Misser Marcheto Carra … per cantar & sonar col lauto were published.

Cultural relations between Rome and Florence were close during the reign of the Medici Popes Leo X (1513–21) and Clement VII (1523–34). Some musicians, among them Pisano, divided their time between the two cities; the works of Costanzo Festa, a member of the papal chapel from 1517, show many connections with Florence; and Verdelot, in Florence from the early 1520s, is known to have visited the papal court at the end of 1523. Bembo's residence in Rome (1513–21) as secretary to the papal curia meant that Rome was at this time a centre for Petrarchists. This makes it very likely that conscious attempts to create an Italian musical style possessing the qualities of ‘piacevolezza’ (charm) and ‘gravità’ (dignity), which Bembo found in Petrarchan verse, were made in ‘Bembist’ circles during the second decade of the 16th century.

The frottola, the Florentine carnival song and other Italian secular genres, somewhat lacking in ‘gravità’, could serve only in part as the basis for such a style. French music (ably represented by the many northern musicians in the service of Leo X) offered more appropriate models, in the chanson and the motet. Josquin's late chansons, some of which were surely known in Rome, have the kind of learned texture and attention to expressive declamation that lift the genre far above the ‘light and foolish thing’ it was called by Carpentras, one of Leo X's musicians. In contrast, the lighter but expert polyphony of the developing Parisian chanson showed how much variety was possible in a secular genre. In the motet of this period there is a balance between imitative counterpoint and chordal writing; the contrapuntal fabric is supported by a new harmonic firmness and varied by alternation of vocal parts and change of register.

Application of all these characteristics to the setting of Italian poetry was hardly to be expected of the older frottolists, who had spent their lives cultivating a quite different style. The great Franco-Flemish composers of the turn of the century had on the whole treated Italian pieces in a lightweight manner; and in Leo X's time Josquin was far from Italy, Isaac an old man. The French members of Leo's chapel contributed little, although Carpentras did make a few Petrarchan settings (published in Antico's Frottole libro tertio of 1517). Among Italians in the Roman-Florentine orbit Pisano, the young Layolle and Sebastiano Festa were working towards a new style, but in some ways their music must be regarded as transitional; for instance, Pisano’s settings of single stanzas from Petrarchan canzoni were probably meant to serve for the entire poems, and their style seems a mixed one rather than a firm synthesis. By the mid-1520s such a synthesis was on the way to being achieved, probably by several composers but certainly by one, Philippe Verdelot, whose career as a madrigalist is discussed below.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

2. 1525–40: Verdelot, Festa.

Madrigali de diversi musici: libro primo de la Serena (Rome, 1530) is the first collection of pieces to bear the title ‘madrigal’. Its eight works by Verdelot, one by the Ferrarese Maistre Jhan and two by each of the Festas are characteristic of the new genre but it contains, like the diverse prints of the 1520s, some lighter pieces and even a few French chansons. Individual pieces by Sebastiano Festa were printed as early as 1520, and a madrigal by Verdelot was included in a fragmentary Petrucci print of about 1520, while another, Madonna quando io v'odo, appeared in a Roman print of 1526, Messa, motetti, canzonni … libro primo, discovered by Jeppesen; according to Jeppesen the Libro primo de la fortuna, with two pieces by Verdelot, was probably also printed about 1526. Of the manuscripts (mostly Florentine in origin) containing early madrigals, some date from the late 1520s; these include I-Bc Q21 and US-Cn Case-VM1578 (M91). The latter is an exceptional source for the early history of the madrigal, an elaborate presentation copy of motets and madrigals, many of them by Verdelot, perhaps sent to Henry VIII of England (see Slim, 1972).

In 1533–4 the first two books of Verdelot's four-voice madrigals were printed in Venice. Both volumes were soon reprinted, and a single-volume edition of the two books, issued in 1540, became one of the most popular collections of the time, reprinted a number of times during the next 25 years. Following a practice started with the frottola repertory, the Venetian printer Ottaviano Scotto published, in 1536, Willaert's arrangements for voice and lute of a number of pieces from the first book. A third book of four-voice madrigals appeared in 1537; two books of works for five voices appeared in the late 1530s, and one of six-voice madrigals was printed in 1541. In nearly all these prints there are some madrigals by other composers, identified in the table of contents but usually simply called ‘diversi’ or ‘altri eccellentissimi autori’ on the title-page. Until the publication of Arcadelt's first book (probably in 1538) Verdelot was clearly seen as the leading composer in the new genre. By 1540 Verdelot and Arcadelt were thought of as the two masters of the madrigal (in a painting of a musician by Hermann tom Ring, dated 1547, a copy of what is perhaps Verdelot’s first and second books for four voices is depicted as ‘Di Verdelotto Di Archadelt Tutti li Madrigali del Primo et Secondo libro a Quatro Voci’; see fig.1). Other composers of this first generation include Costanzo Festa, Maistre Jhan, Francesco Layolle, Corteccia, Alfonso dalla Viola, Domenico Ferrabosco and – though much of his work was as yet unpublished – Willaert.

Although Verdelot set texts by Petrarch, he seems to have been more inclined to use poems, often Petrarchistic in style and tone, by contemporary writers such as Machiavelli, Lodovico Martelli and Luigi Cassola. Forms related to the ballata or canzone are common in this poetry, along with some madrigals and a few sonnets.

The dates of publication are really too close to permit the view that Verdelot's four-voice madrigals were his first efforts in the genre and the five- and six-voice pieces were written later. There is, however, a real, if not constant, difference in style, perhaps the natural consequence of differences in vocal texture, between the madrigals for four and those for five and six voices. The four-voice settings are on the whole closer to the style of Sebastiano Festa and the simpler pieces by Pisano: mostly chordal, with clearly marked cadences (sometimes full closes) separating the phrases of text, the whole strongly reminiscent of the French chanson of the period. A more motet-like polyphony, with much imitation, varied scoring and overlapping of phrases, can be seen in the five- and six-voice madrigals. In Verdelot this differentiation is comparatively slight; in the later madrigal it can be of fundamental importance, the four-voice madrigal becoming almost a separate genre in the works of composers for whom writing for five and six voices was the norm.

Costanzo Festa contributed to the establishment of another sub-species of the madrigal, that for three voices. His three-voice madrigals, said in the (?) first edition of 1541 to be newly ‘reprinted’, were surely written a good deal earlier; it is possible that interest in the writing of three-voice madrigals was stimulated by the vogue for three-voice chansons in Rome during the 1520s and 1530s. At any rate Festa's three-voice madrigals, simple and graceful in style, were popular enough to be reprinted several times. A book of four-voice madrigals, printed in 1538, survives only in part; the contents of what may have been another book are in a lone manuscript partbook (I-Pc 3314). Otherwise Festa is represented as a madrigalist by individual pieces in prints of Arcadelt’s and Verdelot’s music and in anthologies of the 1540s. It is thus difficult to assess Festa's position in the rise of the madrigal; his place in the papal chapel, his close connections with the Florentine Filippo Strozzi and the fact that he must have been about the same age as Verdelot nonetheless make him a figure of importance.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

3. 1535–50: Arcadelt; the madrigal in Venice.

According to the Florentine humanist Cosimo Bartoli, ‘Arcadelt then followed in the steps of Verdelot, moving in them with no mean skill at the time of his stay in Florence’. Arcadelt's madrigals, the bulk of which were published in five books for four and one for three voices between 1538–9 and 1544, and a number of which appear in manuscripts alongside those of Verdelot, bear a close stylistic resemblance to those of his older contemporary. His four-voice Primo libro, the first edition of which is lost but which was reprinted over 40 times before the mid-17th century, is perhaps the most famous single book of madrigals ever published. Its contents varied somewhat from one edition to the next, but a group of pieces including the celebrated Il bianco e dolce cigno remained in all the editions. Like Verdelot, Arcadelt chose Petrarchist verse (but comparatively few poems by Petrarch himself), much of it by writers now forgotten but including poems by Bembo, Sannazaro and Michelangelo. Many of the poems, again like those chosen by Verdelot, show a relationship to the ballata and recognizable forms of the canzone; others are free madrigals. Arcadelt's madrigals contain a good deal of imitative counterpoint, but opening phrases and important lines of text are often set in declamatory chordal fashion. In providing this variety of texture Arcadelt blended sound and sense, gravity and charm in a way that translates Bembo's theories literally into music (a good example is the opening of Quando col dolce suono from the first book for four voices).

Through repetition of the text and some overlapping of phrases Arcadelt connected the alternating 7- and 11-syllable lines into a smooth if not continuous musical fabric. In this his style seems a clear advance over Pisano's, perhaps also that of Verdelot's earlier madrigals. Nevertheless the madrigal in Arcadelt's hands was still bound by the form of the chosen text, its musical phrases corresponding to poetic lines. Madrigals of this ‘classic’ type continued to be written for some years, especially in four-voice settings.

With the publication in 1539 of Arcadelt's first four books by Antonio Gardane (later known as Gardano), a Frenchman recently arrived in Venice, a long period of the madrigal's life in print began. Led by Gardane's firm and that of Girolamo Scotto, Venetian printers established themselves as the leading publishers of madrigals by composers from all parts of Italy. They brought out a surprising number of madrigal collections, and reprinted successful volumes, including some originally published elsewhere, to meet what was evidently a great demand. In the 1540s the madrigal became so popular that there was hardly a professional musician in Italy who did not cultivate the genre, and even avowed amateurs had a volume or two (often prefaced with self-deprecating statements about their stature in the musical world) published by Gardane or Scotto. In the course of bringing out new editions of popular collections such as those of Arcadelt, the printers added and subtracted pieces, changed ascriptions and rearranged the order of works – this last sometimes upsetting an arrangement carefully ordered by mode or choice of clefs. By way of compensation later editions sometimes have corrected readings and more precise underlay of text.

There is no proof that either Verdelot or Arcadelt ever lived in Venice, and their influence on the Venetian madrigal after 1540 is only tangential. Petrarchism flourished in Venice in the second quarter of the 16th century, doubtless encouraged by Bembo's return to Padua and then Venice; salons such as those of Domenico Venier were frequented by Petrarchan poets and musicians, and the houses of wealthy patrons like Neri Capponi were centres for the performance of new music. The chief musical figure in Venice, from his arrival in 1527 until his death in 1562, was Willaert, the much revered ‘Messer Adriano’, maestro di cappella at S Marco. He dominated the city's musical life in person and through a circle of admiring pupils, including Girolamo Parabosco, Antonio Barges, Francesco Viola, Perissone Cambio and the theorists Pietro Aaron, Vicentino and Zarlino. Cipriano de Rore, who seems to have lived in Brescia before his move to Ferrara in 1546, may not actually have been a pupil of Willaert's, but his madrigals are certainly ‘Venetian’ rather than ‘Florentine’ in character.

With the exception of a volume of Canzone villanesche alla napolitana (1545), Willaert's madrigals were not printed in collected form until a late date; Musica nova, his celebrated volume of motets and madrigals for four to seven voices, was published with great fanfare by Gardane in 1559 (speculation about the possibility of an earlier edition is unfounded). The contents of this volume must have been written much earlier; pieces from the Musica nova were known and cited in Willaert's circle in the 1540s. According to Francesco Viola's preface to the collection, Willaert revised and reordered his collection before releasing it to a public eager to be delighted and moved by it, as well as to those who wished to imitate its perfections in their own music. Thus the madrigals of the Musica nova may be taken as Willaert's testimony of what he thought the madrigal should be.

In several respects this differs from what Verdelot and Arcadelt had done, even from Willaert's own earlier work. Willaert here set the verse of Petrarch in preference to that of that of 16th-century Petrarchists; he favoured the sonnet, dividing it so that a piece in two sections or partes, like a motet, resulted. Indeed the complex, rather dense polyphony of Willaert's madrigals (the seven-voice madrigals, dialogues in a simpler style, are exceptional in this volume) is much like that of his motets; it is even possible that he intended the two genres represented in Musica nova to have some similarities of style and material. Imitative correspondences among the voices tend in Willaert's madrigals to be freely varied rather than exact, with each voice, as it were, speaking for itself. The mixture of imitative and chordal texture is subtler, more closely interwoven than it is in Arcadelt's style; and the declamatory and syntactic values of the text are adhered to much more closely. Willaert's prosodic exactness is so essential an element of his mature style that it seems almost to replace interest in distinctive melodic patterns.

Willaert's pupils and admirers imitated his style in varying ways and with varying success. For example, the five-voice madrigals of Perissone Cambio (1545 and 1550) show a composer of modest stature doing his best to write in Willaert's vein; on the other hand, Rore's first two books for five voices show total mastery of Willaert's style. In at least one respect Rore's Primo libro was in advance of Willaert; Rore used the newly fashionable notation called ‘cromatico’ or ‘a note nere’ or ‘misura di breve’, which used short (hence black or ‘coloured’) note values under the mensuration sign C, as opposed to the normal use of longer values under the sign C (designated as ‘misura comune’ in Rore's second book for five voices; fig.2).

It is not entirely clear whether this notation, already used in occasional pieces by Arcadelt and Verdelot, was in every case the mark of a new style. It allowed for a widened range of note values, from a quick declamatory patter (seen also in the villanella at this time) and close, nervously syncopated imitative entries to long-held notes useful for setting laments, sighs and invocations; in this respect its presence is a sign of change in the direction of heightened expressiveness. Madrigals written in this notation were seen by contemporaries as something new, a view encouraged by Gardane and Scotto who published anthologies of such pieces throughout the 1540s.

Venetian printers broadened the market for the madrigal during this period. Lute intabulations of popular madrigals, first those of Verdelot and Arcadelt, began to appear with increasing frequency. Collections of two- and three-voice madrigals, some of them (such as the volumes of duos and trios by Jhan Gero) probably commissioned by the publishers, made the genre accessible to small groups of performers and to students. At least a few of these pieces were, like the two- and three-voice chansons of the period, arrangements of existing works. Finally, Gardane and Scotto, as friendly or rival competitors, vied with each other in bringing out new collections by composers within and outside the Venetian musical circle.

During the 1540s Venice was the leading centre of madrigal composition. Music in nearby cities such as Vicenza, Verona and Treviso, where madrigal composers such as Nasco and Ruffo worked, was greatly influenced by Venetian musical culture. Ferrara, closely connected with Venice in many ways, had its own proud musical tradition. Maistre Jhan, in the service of the Este court at Ferrara for a long period ending with his death in 1538, belonged to the earliest group of madrigalists, but can hardly be considered a leading figure in the genre's development. More important madrigalists in Ferrara at this time were Alfonso dalla Viola and Domenico Ferrabosco, who published books of their own four-voice madrigals and are represented in Gardane's anthologies of the early 1540s; Ferrabosco's setting of Boccaccio's Io mi son giovinetta, first printed in an anthology of 1542, became one of the most famous madrigals of the century. Rore's arrival in Ferrara later in the decade marked the beginning of a new period in Ferrarese musical history.

Florence, lacking a central figure of the stature of Willaert, presents a less clear picture in the 1540s. At the beginning of the decade two volumes of canzoni by Francesco Layolle were printed by Moderne in Lyons; though Layolle spent the last 20 years of his life in Lyons, he must be reckoned a Florentine madrigalist. Francesco Corteccia, maestro di cappella to Cosimo I, collected and published (1544–7) three volumes of madrigals written, according to his own statement, some years earlier. A volume of settings of Petrarchan verse by another Florentine, Mattio Rampollini, probably dates from this period although it was published years later. Giovanni Animuccia, a young Florentine soon to move to Rome, published his first book of madrigals in 1547.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

4. The madrigal in society.

Some madrigals, such as Willaert's, may have been performed in an exclusive circle for years before their publication; many others were released to the public as soon as a composer had a collection ready. How publishers acquired these collections is not known, although there are recorded instances of composers being solicited directly; thus Claudio Veggio, a book of whose madrigals was printed by Scotto in 1540, was asked four years later to send new madrigals to the printer so that the composer's admirers could have more of his work to sing. Individual printings of madrigals were probably limited to a rather small number of copies, but the demand for new collections and for new editions of popular works remained steady.

The cantus partbook of Antonfrancesco Doni's Dialogo della musica (RISM 1544²²), an anthology of madrigals and motets, contains a series of anecdotes and conversations which gives a picture of this music performed in company. Doni's interlocutors, some of whom are musicians, talk briefly about the pieces in front of them, and about various musical topics, before and after they pick up the music to sing it. The two sections of the Dialogo describe amateur musical evenings in Piacenza and Venice: a few singers, one to a part, try out a number of new pieces and alternate their performance with some solo singing to lute or viol accompaniment.

One tends to think of madrigals as Doni describes them: chamber music performed by cultivated amateurs for their own enjoyment, and perhaps for the delectation of a select few. The existence of academies (such as the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, founded in 1543), whose members wrote or commissioned madrigals for their own entertainment, confirms this view. But this is not the whole story; from its beginnings the madrigal was also used in connection with dramatic performances and public or private festivities. Texts set by Verdelot include canzoni by Machiavelli (O dolce nocte, Chi non fa prova amore) written for musical performance as intermedi in his plays Clizia and Mandragola, produced in Florence in 1525. Corteccia's second book of four-voice madrigals contains settings of verses from Il furto, a comedy performed in Florence in 1544. Alfonso della Viola, Rore and others wrote madrigals to accompany dramatic performances in Ferrara.

By 1539, the year of Cosimo de' Medici's festive wedding to Eleanora of Toledo at Florence, madrigals were being composed along with motets as ceremonial music. This ‘public’ form of madrigal developed in two general ways, one leading to an increasingly ornate solo style, the other cultivating a rather bland choral idiom. Both styles, ‘monodic’ and choral, were performed with colourful and sometimes elaborate instrumental accompaniment. In Florence this music was usually written to texts on mythological themes, illustrated with rich costumes and scenery, the whole providing a series of tableaux vivants between the acts of a play. An example is the music written by Corteccia and Alessandro Striggio (i) for texts based on the tale of Cupid and Psyche, performed at a Medici wedding in 1565. A substantial amount of music survives for two 16th-century Florentine wedding festivals, the one in 1539, and the marriage of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

5. The madrigal at mid-century: Rore.

Although madrigals in the ‘classic’ style of Arcadelt were still being written in the 1550s, the genre was changing rapidly. There was a wider choice of texts, and poets such as Tansillo and Bernardo Tasso were fashionable. Petrarch was still a favourite poet, but instead of setting individual stanzas composers were now writing large cyclic works in which every stanza of a canzone or sestina was given separate treatment. The popularity of these cycles may be seen in anthologies such as Il primo libro delle muse a cinque voci (RISM 1555²⁵) issued by the composer and publisher Antonio Barrè in Rome, then by Gardane in Venice; this volume contains nothing but cycles, settings of Petrarch and Sannazaro by Arcadelt, Jacquet de Berchem, Ruffo and Barrè himself.

Stanzas from Ariosto's Orlando furioso were set, singly, in pairs or in narrative cycles, with increasing frequency, and with unmistakable references to melodic formulae used for improvised declamation of epic verse. Berchem's set of 93 stanzas from Orlando furioso, published in 1561 but probably written some years earlier, is the most extensive if not the most typical of such cycles. More characteristic are sets of five or six madrigals on continuous ottavas or stanzas of a canzone or sestina, for varying numbers of voices and through-composed, but often with unifying tonal and thematic elements.

Precise declamation of text, already a feature of the madrigal in Willaert's circle, continued to be important, but in different ways. A supple declamatory or ‘narrative’ rhythm, used in a chordal texture, may be seen, particularly in the madrigale arioso; this term was put into circulation by Barrè with his three four-voice anthologies, Libri delle muse … madrigali ariosi (1555–62). Barrè's own madrigals in this style approach a chordal parlando style, nearly free of regular metric stress. A number of contemporary madrigalists, among them Hoste da Reggio and even, on occasion, Rore, used this style. At the same time madrigals with strongly individualized, expressive rhythmic contrast within a polyphonic texture were gaining currency, moving the genre away from the gentle stereotypes of Arcadelt's generation.

Experiments in chromaticism are to be seen in the motet and the madrigal in the 1550s. Again it was Willaert's circle that took the lead. Among Willaert's pupils Nicola Vicentino was the strongest advocate of a new chromaticism based, in theory, on the ancient Greek genera. Such theory was rarely put to practical use, but by 1550 the Venetian madrigal had become more chromatic (with many major root-position triads on secondary scale degrees) than had been characteristic a generation earlier.

In all these innovations (choice of text, experiments in declamation and a new harmonic vocabulary), the works of Rore are of prime importance. He was the leading madrigalist of his generation: his first books for five (1542) and four voices (1550) were among the most often reprinted volumes of the century; his ‘Vergine’ settings form perhaps the most celebrated of all cyclic madrigals; and his masterly handling of any novelty of style or form to which he subscribed made his works models for more than a generation of imitators. Rore's early madrigals show him to have been an associate of Willaert; but in his first book for five voices, with its new, ‘chromatic’ notation, the individuality of his melodic and rhythmic writing is already apparent. His concentration on the meaning of the almost invariably serious texts led Rore to run lines together, to end a phrase in mid-line, even to disregard the formal divisions of Petrarchan sonnets. The high technical finish and distinct individuality of each of his pieces set a new course and a new standard for the madrigal. In his later works, the third book for five voices (1548) and the second book for four (1557), Rore moved into yet newer realms of parlando declamation, highly individualized expressive melody and colouristic harmony. These works begin the later history of the madrigal.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

6. 1555–70.

In 1555 Palestrina and Lassus both published their first collections of madrigals. Palestrina's role in the history of the madrigal was not decisive, except perhaps in the domain of the Madrigale spirituale. Nevertheless the common opinion which dismisses him as a timid follower of Arcadelt seems unfair. He wrote a few famous pieces, including the much loved Vestiva i colli; his name appears with great regularity in anthologies, suggesting that his madrigals were always welcome to singers; and he was a master of the multi-partite canzone and other cyclic forms. Lassus's early madrigals are not much like those of Palestrina; being strongly influenced by both Rore and Willaert, he wrote serious, complex settings of Petrarchan verse and at the same time produced light villanesche like those of Willaert, Perissone and Baldassare Donato. His ability to write in the newer, more chromatic idiom is shown at some length in his Prophetiae Sibyllarum, published late, but certainly an early work. After settling in Munich in 1556 Lassus continued to write madrigals; in the dedication (to Alfonso II of Ferrara) of his fourth book for five voices (1567) he said that he wanted it known that the Muses were encouraged in Germany as well as in Italy. The court chapel at Munich, under Lassus's direction, employed a number of musicians who wrote madrigals; two anthologies of works by these ‘Floridi virtuosi del … Duca di Baviera’ were published (RISM 1569¹⁹ and 1575¹¹).

The most prolific of all madrigalists was another ‘oltremontano’, Philippe de Monte, who produced two books for seven voices, nine for six, nineteen for five, four for four, one for three, and five of madrigali spirituali – a total of over 1000 pieces. Most of this enormous output was written after Monte's move to the imperial court at Vienna in 1568; the first two books for five voices, however, and the first for four date from his Italian period. He had great technical skills, and as a young man had already mastered the progressive styles of about 1550; he was particularly adept in handling the declamatory style of the madrigale arioso.

In Venice the influence of Willaert and Rore remained great even after their deaths. Venetian composers successful at writing both madrigals and villanesche included Donato, a long-lived musician at S Marco, whose first book for four voices (1550), which combined a few madrigals with ‘canzon villanesche alla napolitana’, was popular for a decade. Nearly every composer in Venice, as well as in Italy generally, contributed to the huge repertory of madrigals, and the output of the 1550s and 1560s is too large to be described here in detail. Among composers who had become established figures were Nasco, the first composer employed by the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, and later active in Treviso; and the prolific Vincenzo Ruffo, who served the same academy briefly in 1551–2 and was subsequently maestro di cappella in Verona and later in Milan. Another composer known to have had close connections with various academies was Francesco Portinaro of Padua.

Composers of at least local prominence during this period (the list is far from complete) included Stefano Rossetto and Alessandro Striggio (i) at Florence, Nicolao Dorati at Lucca, Bartolomeo Spontone and Domenico Micheli at Bologna, Hoste da Reggio at Mantua, Pietro Taglia and Simon Boyleau at Milan, Giovanni Animuccia at Rome, Costanzo Porta at Osino and then Padua, Ippolito Chamaterò at Udine, Ippolito Ciera at Venice, Giulio Fiesco at Ferrara, and G.D. da Nola and Francesco Menta at Naples. Much of the madrigal literature of these middle years remains to be edited and studied.

Some of the greatest madrigalists of the later 16th century began their career in this period. In 1566 Andrea Gabrieli returned to his native Venice to become second organist at S Marco and at the same time published his first book of madrigals for five voices. Wert, a northerner who like Lassus spent part of his youth in southern Italy, entered the service of the Gonzaga family as a young man and remained at the Mantuan court for the last 30 years of his life. By 1570 Wert had produced four books of five-voice madrigals as well as his single four-voice volume. Like Lassus he was much influenced by Rore, whose style he developed with virtuoso technique in writing cyclic settings of Petrarch and Ariosto. In flexibility of technique, ability to find a madrigalistic conceit for practically any word or phrase of text, and skill at vocal instrumentation, Wert had few rivals; during his lifetime Mantua and Ferrara, which he often visited, became major centres in the later development of the madrigal.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

7. The 1570s: hybrid styles.

The evolution of the madrigal during the last third of the century involved the amalgamation of previously distinct styles, particularly those of the serious madrigal and its lighter forms. Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Ferretti, whose first editions appeared mainly from the late 1560s to the mid-1570s, were especially influential in this development. Ferretti published only collections with titles such as ‘canzoni’ or ‘canzoni alla napolitana’, although these collections contain some pieces that textually and musically are genuine madrigals (DeFord, 1985; Assenza, 1997). Musically Ferretti took as his point of departure the three- and four-voice canzona villanesca alla napolitana of the 1540s and 50s, from which he borrowed several traits: a reduced and clarified harmonic vocabulary; a dance-like rhythmic style using short, sharply profiled, strongly metrical motifs; and a clarified formal architecture with frequent sectional repetition and emphasis on clear cadential points. He also occasionally used the standard texture of the villanesca: three voices, two of which moved in parallel 3rds or 6ths, and the third of which, quite distinct in range and style, often served as a harmonic bass. This polarized texture, modified and filled out in various ways, grew steadily in importance as the century wore on and led to the ‘trio sonata’ texture of the next century.

Ferretti led the style of the villanesca towards that of the madrigal in several respects, exploiting stylistic possibilities that were to remain important throughout the life of the polyphonic madrigal. He tended to respond to the first stanzas of his strophic texts with the kind of pictorial musical details often called madrigalisms (see Word-painting), for example quick runs or turns for images of flight or happiness, slow motion and low tessitura for images of rest or sleep. He also wrote for a larger number of voices than was usual in the lighter forms; all Ferretti’s published pieces are for the five- or six-voice ensemble characteristic of the madrigal of the last half of the century. Together with the increased number of voices went an increased complexity of texture, especially shown in the frequent use of a certain kind of polyphony, dubbed by recent historians ‘sham polyphony’ (Scheinpolyphonie), which gives an overall impression of being more homophonic than polyphonic. Phrase beginnings are imitative, and the individual voices are motivically animated, but in place of the melodic integrity and individual shape characteristic of each line in the best mid-century polyphony, one hears lines made up of short rhythmic motifs tossed around within the clearly shaped harmonic context typical of the lighter forms. The motifs themselves are often essentially triadic in nature and outline either a single chord or a simple succession of chords.

Just as Ferretti wrote canzoni that became more and more madrigal-like, so Andrea Gabrieli composed madrigals that incorporate features of the lighter forms. An extraordinarily versatile musician, Gabrieli typified his age in that he composed in several distinct styles at the same point in his career, and he mixed these styles in subtle combinations according to the impulse or the occasion. Some of his madrigals are stylistically almost indistinguishable from Ferretti’s canzoni. Normally, however, they are somewhat closer to the traditional madrigal; they show greater polyphonic complexity, freer forms, and reactions to the text that are both more elaborate and more delicate than Ferretti’s. Another feature of Gabrieli’s madrigals, the use of high, transparent textures and bright colours (especially the major triad in certain spacings), seems not to have been borrowed from any separate style. Frequently the listener’s attention is directed to the colour and spacing of simple harmonic progressions as a principal source of interest and effect, and it is symptomatic in this connection that Gabrieli published no madrigal books for four voices. He chose either the flexible, transparent three-voice texture characteristic of the lighter forms or a five- to 12-voice texture in which contrasts of colour and spacing could be more fully exploited.

In his books for five and more voices Gabrieli turned away to some extent from the typical texts of the period before 1570. Petrarch is represented in Gabrieli’s printed works by only about a dozen sonnets and one sestina, all published in early anthologies, in posthumous collections, or in his earliest books in the genre. Of Cassola’s madrigals there are fewer than a half-dozen. Instead of this standard fare there are a large number of public and occasional texts (wedding madrigals, encomiastic texts, prologues and intermezzi for banquets etc.) and many poems that step outside the world of the ‘literary’ Petrarchism of the first two-thirds of the century into either the playful and conventional world of the pastoral lyric, or the sensuous and often vulgar world of the semi-popular canzone.

Many others in the 1570s followed a path similar to Gabrieli’s (in northern Italy one might mention Alessandro Striggio (i), M.A. Ingegneri and Paolo Bellasio), but Gabrieli was the leading composer of Venice, and Venice was apparently the leading centre of the new style. The role played by the patrons and composers of Rome in this stylistic evolution remains an open question. Rome attracted fine performers, especially fine singers, and may have been of primary importance both in the stylistic changes of the 1570s and in prompting the widespread vocal virtuosity of the madrigal in the early 1580s. Il quarto libro delle muse (RISM 1574⁴), the most important Roman anthology of the 1570s, contains the first published madrigals of a new generation of Roman composers (e.g. G.A. Dragoni, Francesco Soriano, G.M. Nanino and Macque), whose production is just beginning to be investigated (Pirrotta, 1985, 1993). The transparent textures and pastoral texts of the new Venetian style are also to be found in the works of these composers, as are many elements borrowed from the lighter forms. The hybrid style, though increasingly widespread in the 1570s, was by no means the only style practised then. In particular, the serious, expressive, even craggy madrigals of Wert from the 1560s and 70s onward carried forward the tradition of late Rore and were to be a profound influence on Monteverdi in the 1590s.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

8. The 1580s: the ornamented style; dissemination of the hybrid madrigal.

1580 saw the appearance of the last of Andrea Gabrieli’s books to be published during his lifetime and the first of 12 books by Marenzio to be published during the next decade. This coincidence may be taken to mark not only the changing of the guard, but also the gradual movement of the centre of progressive influence in the madrigal from Venice in the earlier period, to Rome and the small and contiguous duchies of Ferrara and Mantua in the later. The most important composers of the 1580s were Marenzio, who was employed in Rome but had important connections with Ferrara, and Wert, who was employed in Mantua but likewise had important ties with Ferrara.

According to Vincenzo Giustiniani (Discorso sopra la musica, 1628), Marenzio was one of the leaders in the development of the new hybrid madrigal. Speaking of the period about 1580, Giustiniani emphasized the importance not only of a new style of composition that involved a mixture of madrigal and villanella, but also a new style of singing whose most distinctive characteristic was wide-ranging and technically demanding ornamentation. The success of this style of singing stimulated composers to incorporate some of its novelties into the written polyphonic style. Although Giustiniani mentioned Rome as an early centre of this kind of singing, he also named the courts of Ferrara and Mantua as leading centres where the new virtuosity was incorporated into the polyphonic madrigal during the 1580s. The dukes of each of these small city-states maintained a group of highly trained singers – both men and, extraordinarily, women – specifically to perform polyphonic madrigals, one singer to a part, in the rulers’ private chambers. The Duke of Ferrara seems to have been the pioneer in this movement; his chamber group was founded in 1580, and he is reported to have listened to it for two to four hours every day.

As Giustiniani’s account suggests, many of the boldest and most progressive madrigals of the early 1580s, especially those directed towards the wealthiest centres where fine singers could be expected, became increasingly saturated with ornamental formulae (called diminutions, or divisions). This is of more than passing significance, since the control and manipulation of ornamentation by the composer for his own expressive and structural purposes was to become one of the fundamental elements of the early 17th-century style. The striking degree to which the turns and runs of the diminution manuals (as well as the voices led in parallel 3rds, the clear harmonies and the forthright rhythms of the lighter styles) found their way into the madrigal during the 1580s can be seen in Marenzio’s Rivi, fontane e fiumi (from Le gioie, 1589).

Although Andrea Gabrieli had been a pioneer in the new style, Marenzio went far beyond him in the inventiveness of his tone-painting, in his love for tonal, textural and stylistic contrast, and in his emphasis on virtuosity, both in written-out ornamentation and in far-reaching harmonic excursions.

The style of composition derived from the lighter forms did not always incorporate the new written-out ornamentation, even in Marenzio’s work. The lighter style in the 1580s might still exist without the element of virtuosity and almost always did so when the madrigal was directed at less sophisticated patrons than those of the major courts and academies of Italy. Indeed, in terms of the number of composers and pieces affected, the unornamented hybrid madrigal derived from Ferretti and Gabrieli continued to be the predominant type in Italy and must be regarded as the quantitively dominant style of the end of the century. It spread to the Low Countries and northern Germany, especially in the successful anthologies of the Antwerp publisher Pierre Phalèse (published from 1583 into the early years of the 17th century), and in the late 1580s the style migrated to England, where it took root with astonishing vigour. In the anthologies of the Nuremberg printer Kauffmann and in numerous prints from Venice, it spread to southern Germany, Austria and eastern Europe (Piperno, 1991). At the same time several northern musicians were working in the new idioms, not as teachers but as students of the style. Some of them, such as Peter Philips in Brussels, imitated from afar. Some went south and stayed (Rinaldo del Mel, Bartolomeo Roy, Jacobus Peetrinus, Macque), and others returned home with what they learnt (Mogens Pedersøn from Denmark, Schütz from Germany).

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

9. Expressionistic and recitational styles.

As music director at the court of Mantua and frequent visitor to the neighbouring court of Ferrara, Giaches de Wert was in the vanguard of Italian secular music in the 1580s. Wert’s musical personality, like that of Rore, who may have been his teacher, was both serious and passionate. Although he occasionally wrote in the lighter style, his most important and most distinctive madrigals from the 1560s through the 1580s are settings of pathos-laden texts, for which he designed musical gestures of an unprecedented violence and intensity. His serious, dramatic style, like Rore’s, was one of the most important harbingers of the seconda pratica proclaimed by Monteverdi at the outset of the next century.

In Wert’s madrigals of 1558–95 two major categories of dramatic style can be distinguished, which are valid generally in considering the remaining history of the madrigal without continuo. Pieces of the first category, which might be called expressionistic madrigals, translate extravagant emotions expressed in the text into similarly extravagant musical gestures involving, for example, extremely low or high tessitura, unusual vocal intervals (tritones, 7ths, 9ths, 10ths), abrupt silences and contrasts of tempo (see Wert’s settings of Solo e pensoso and Giunto a la tomba from 1581). Pieces of the second category, which might be called recitational madrigals, clothe the text in a musical dress whose simplicity is in itself extreme. Only an occasional flash of dissonance, chromaticism or polyphony is allowed to provide points of emphasis in an austere chordal texture whose purpose is purely declamatory. This style belongs to a tradition of polyphonic declamation that reaches at least as far back as the beginning of the 16th century and corresponds in many ways to the ideals later expressed by Galilei and Bardi in the Florentine Camerata: almost all complexity in the music is renounced; declamatory rate, effective pauses, pitch and (implied) volume level seem designed to capture the delivery of a highly trained actor or orator (see parts of Wert’s Giunto a la tomba, Qual musico gentil and especially O primavera). Both the ‘expressionistic’ and the ‘recitational’ styles had a profound influence on style in the 1590s. Of the main figures in the refashioning of the madrigal in the 1580s and 90s (Wert, Luzzaschi, Marenzio and Monteverdi) Wert was the only one who had grown up in the heavily theatre-oriented world of Naples and Rome around 1550, and this orientation continued in Mantua, where he worked during the 1560s and 70s. For this reason, Wert brought a unique kind of experience to his colleagues in the last decades of the century.

It would be well to review at this point the stylistic options open to madrigal composers in the late 1580s. They might have chosen the hybrid style of the 1570s, blending elements of the lighter style into the style of the madrigal, usually in setting pastoral lyrics of no great emotional or intellectual weight. Marenzio, G.M. Nanino and Ruggiero Giovannelli often worked in this style, as did countless other composers including G.F. Anerio and Annibale Stabile in Rome, Ludovico Agostini, Paolo Virchi and Giulio Eremita in Ferrara, Benedetto Pallavicino in Mantua, Lelio Bertani in Brescia and the young Monteverdi in Cremona. A few composers in Italy chose to continue a madrigal style directed towards the expression of intense emotion, in either lyric or dramatic settings. Wert had been a leader in the development of this type of madrigal since the 1560s, and he continued to lead this school during the 1580s. He was joined often by Luzzaschi in Ferrara, though in a quite different, less dramatic style, and occasionally by Marenzio (see his Dolorosi martir and O voi che sospirate) and more conservative composers, such as G.M. Nanino. A composer might also have chosen to work in the recitational style, where the clear projection of the text was the primary goal. Although Wert was again the most important figure here, Andrea Gabrieli’s choruses for Oedipus rex offer another example. Or a composer might have chosen to work in the more traditional, rather neutral, motet-like style of the middle of the century. This style predominated in the late madrigals by Lassus, and in many of those by Palestrina and by several younger composers of the Palestrina school, such as G.M. Nanino and Francesco Soriano. Any of these pure or hybrid styles could be decorated by the new written-out ornamentation. Although some composers were specialists, many wrote in any of these styles according to the audience or occasion, or the text that he was to set.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

10. Poetry and the madrigal.

Even composers insensitive to the individual content of a madrigal text were usually sensitive to its style or type, and in this broad sense text and musical style were inextricably intertwined. Normally a composer would not set a Petrarch sestina stanza in the same style as he would a lighter text (compare, for example, Marenzio’s setting of Petrarch’s O voi che sospirate with the other madrigals in his second book for five voices). Thus a few significant changes in style or type of text during the last quarter of the century went hand in hand with changes of musical style; they may even have helped to bring them about.

The first such change, which began with Andrea Gabrieli in the late 1560s, was the movement away from Petrarchan forms and style towards lighter, pastoral or idyllic poems, most often relatively short works in the poetic form called the madrigal (Tasso’s Ecco mormorar L’onde, set by Monteverdi is a fine example of this type of poetry). Such texts usually called for the hybrid style of the 1570s or the ornamented style of the 1580s, and were much set by Marenzio and other progressive composers of those decades. Wert resisted the trend, however, continuing to set texts of the highest literary quality in the traditional forms of sonnet and serious ottava. Even into the 1580s he chose poems by the poets and in the traditional forms set in the middle of the century. For example, in his seventh book of 1581, eight of the 13 poems set are by Petrarch or by well-known poets from the first part of the century such as Angelo di Costanzo, Ariosto and Tansillo. By contrast, in Marenzio’s first three books for five voices (1580–82) 31 of 47 texts are madrigals, almost all of the texts are pastoral in tone and more than half are so indistinctive in tone and in quality that they will probably remain anonymous; only three are by Petrarch.

In his choice of texts as in his musical style, Wert showed a mixture of conservatism and progressiveness. Although he largely avoided the texts typical of the hybrid madrigal of the 1570s and 80s he was the first to set the most important new type of text of the end of the century: the serious dramatic scene. He began by setting dramatic ottavas from Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. After his pathbreaking setting of Giunto a la tomba in 1581 there were six more such pieces in his next book, and his example was quickly followed by Marenzio, Monteverdi and others. The tradition thus established of setting dramatic scenes from Gerusalemme liberata extends to Monteverdi’s setting of the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (published 1638) and beyond.

In the realm of the dramatic scene, ottavas from Tasso’s epic were overtaken in popularity about 1590 by monologues in free verse from an explicit theatre piece, G.B. Guarini’s pastoral play Il pastor fido. It was in the Pastor fido settings from his sixth to his eighth books (1594–8) that Marenzio found his style as a dramatic composer; Wert set four sections from Il pastor fido in his last complete book of 1595; many of the most famous dramatic madrigals from Monteverdi’s fourth and fifth books (Cruda amarilli, Ah dolente partita, Anima mia perdona) are settings of texts from Guarini’s play. During the last decade of the century these texts were the proving ground for the polyphonic progenitors of the stile recitativo.

The other important new style of poetry at the end of the century has nothing to do with the rise of opera. The Ferrarese school of composers (Luzzaschi, Alfonso Fontanelli and Gesualdo) preferred to set contemporary madrigals, usually poetry written by local poets, perhaps under the direct supervision of the composer or patron. Brevity and contrast of imagery were the characteristics of this newer madrigal verse, which was essentially lyric, not dramatic. Such texts continued to be favoured in the polyphonic madrigal after 1600. Many were at best mediocre poetry, for the requirements they had to meet were not conducive to great literature. But they were an ideal textual support for the highly affective style of the composers who chose to set them.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

11. The 1590s: the rise of the ‘seconda pratica’.

These two new types of text brought with them a new style, which caused the Italian madrigal without continuo to have a final period of several decades of splendid bloom. The new style was announced in a series of publications appearing in 1594–9. The most important composers involved at the outset were Marenzio, Luzzaschi and Gesualdo (Wert died in 1596). All the publications in the new style contain settings of emotionally intense texts – settings that attempted to capture and reinforce through musical means the perfervid emotional states expressed in the texts. In responding to the challenges of the text, the composers often used unusual or even forbidden musical means that disturbed the balanced style of traditional Renaissance polyphony. These anti-canonical devices might violate norms of spacing, of rhythmic or melodic structure, of part-writing or of harmonic combination. As justification for the new liberties, the composers (notably Luzzaschi in 1596 and Monteverdi in 1605) pointed explicitly to the need to reflect the style and emotional content of the text.

The text must be master of the music. This was the essence of the new style, which Monteverdi was to publicize in 1605 as the ‘seconda pratica’. The new style was in one sense a reaction against the degree to which the expression of text had been subordinated to motivic animation, luxuriant ornamentation, clear formal schemes and sensuous vocal colours in the madrigal of the 1570s and 80s, and was thus a kind of musico-dramatic reform movement. Yet it was also a purely musical movement, resulting from the desire of bold and restless musicians at the end of the century to enliven the pleasing but perhaps too bland style of the 1580s. The new style incorporated enough musical novelties, especially in the area of dissonance treatment, to provoke a strong attack from the conservative theorist Artusi.

While recognizing the break represented by the seconda pratica, one should remember that it was connected with the luxuriant style of the 1580s by one important factor: both styles involved avant-garde environments and tendencies and a high degree of virtuosity. Both required performers of professional ability and audiences of considerable sophistication, and both were connected with the major courts and centres of patronage rather than with humbler social environments. The seconda pratica, however, originated as a reaction in some circles against what Einstein termed the ‘surrender to hedonism’ characteristic of the madrigal of the 1580s. Tasso, in his dialogue La Cavaletta of 1584–5, issued a plea to the major composers of the day to temper the soft sensuousness of the modern style, and to bring back to the madrigal some of its former emotional weight. Tasso’s plea was not an isolated one in the culture of the time, to judge from the responses of, for example, Luzzaschi and Monteverdi in their dedications of 1596 and 1605 respectively and Marienzo in his Books of 1588 and 1594–9.

The problem of how to respond to this summons was apparently troublesome for all the composers involved, for each of them, normally quite prolific, virtually stopped publishing for several years. Luzzaschi published only a handful of individual pieces between 1582 and 1594; Marenzio, who had published over a dozen books in the first years of the 1580s, published only one between 1588 and 1594; Monteverdi, who was much the youngest of the three, went through the cycle somewhat later, publishing his first three books in 1587–92, then stopping for over ten years. Each man, when he began to publish again, composed in a markedly different style, using bolder harmonies, a higher level of dissonance, and more rhythmic contrast and unusual melodic intervals (compare Monteverdi’s Pastor fido settings from before and after the gap: O primavera on the one hand and Cruda amarilli, Ah dolente partita or Anima mia perdona on the other).

Luzzaschi was the oldest of the composers involved, and in some respects he was, with Rore and then Wert, the prime mover. His avoidance of cadence, his frequent use of discontinuous, highly contrapuntal texture, and his close juxtaposition of intricate counterpoint with declamatory homophony were essential characteristics of the new style pursued first by Gesualdo and Fontanelli, and thereafter by many in the early 1600s. Gesualdo explicitly named Luzzaschi as his mentor, and his style during the 1590s and choice of texts bear this out. But Gesualdo was from the beginning more extreme in every way; his regular use of melodic chromaticism, unusual harmonic successions and extraordinary dissonances led him into areas where Luzzaschi almost never ventured. Marenzio, in his most serious works after 1594 (especially in a long series of settings from Il pastor fido), first adopted the recitational style of Wert, adding to it his own richer harmonic vocabulary. Then, in his last book (1599), he summarized all the achievements of the past decade and went beyond them. He returned to some of the greatest poetry of the Italian heritage, Petrarch and even Dante. In his settings he combined the textural discontinuity and contrapuntal complexity of the Ferrarese style with the textual seriousness, greater coherence and declamatory beauty of Wert’s style, adding a tonal control and harmonic richness all his own. The resulting collection is one of the summits of the madrigal.

By 1597 Monteverdi had already written some of the pieces in the new style that he was to publish in 1603 and 1605. Like the Ferrarese composers, he used unusual dissonance treatment and sharp contrast between simple homophony and complex polyphony; like Wert, he had fine literary sensitivity and treated his texts with care; like Marenzio, he exercised clear control over large tonal design. His version of the new style, however, was a highly personal one: like his now deceased mentor Wert, and more than any of the living composers in the new style, he tried to capture in pitch level and declamatory rhythms the delivery of an impassioned orator or actor; and the influence of the lighter forms showed through more consistently and clearly in his works than in those of any other composer in the new style. His forms and sectional articulations were clear, and his basic harmonic movements, however much they may be decorated by dissonance, were simple and direct. In all this, his style is distinctly different from the Ferrarese/Neapolitan style of Luzzaschi, Fontanelli and Gesualdo.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

12. The madrigal in society, 1570–1600.

The late 16th-century madrigal had two major social functions, one public and one private. The festive madrigal, usually designed for a particular ceremony, added to the spectacle at large public occasions; the chamber madrigal helped to pass the time of more or less cultivated amateurs in their courts, academies or homes. Both of these social functions were as old as the genre itself. The second, the most common one for the printed madrigal in the early and middle part of the century, began to be transformed after about 1580 by the growing virtuosity of musical style, by the replacement of the amateur singer by the professional and by the dramatization of the madrigal. In the most advanced centres of patronage, there was a resulting separation of performer from audience. In such centres the madrigal was evolving from a social game for the pleasure of amateur performers into a semi-dramatic concert piece for the pleasure of a separate, passive audience. The intensely emotional or explicitly dramatic tone of many madrigals in the 1590s was probably a result of this evolution. The situation, while it gave a burst of renewed vigour to the polyphonic madrigal, also intensified the inherent contradictions of the medium (for example, the lament of a single lover delivered in a language of heightened emotional realism by five singers simultaneously), which were to lead to a more consistent solution in opera and to the gradual demise of the madrigal without continuo.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

13. The polyphonic madrigal after 1600.

The polyphonic madrigal without independent instrumental bass was by no means ignored by composers after 1600, however. A particularly vigorous school centering on Naples continued well into the century (Larson, 1985), producing dozens of published madrigal books, some following the style of Gesualdo’s last books (1611 and 1626), some in less extreme styles. Important and productive schools of polyphonic madrigal composition in the early 17th century also existed in Rome (including Felice Anerio, Cifra, Frescobaldi, Mazzocchi and G.B. Nanino), in Tuscany (Bati, Marco da Gagliano, Del Turco, Fontanelli and Pecci), in the Este and Gonzaga domains (Monteverdi in books 4 through 6, Pallavicino, Salamone Rossi and Orazio Vecchi) and in Venice (especially among the cisalpine students of Giovanni Gabrieli such as Schütz, Pederson and Grabbe) (Küster, 1995). The published output of especially the first two groups still awaits careful study. One of the most outstanding composers of the late polyphonic madrigal, Sigismondo D’India, seems to have worked and resided in all of these places (with the possible exception of Venice) at some time in his career, though his longest permanence (1611–23) was in the Savoy court in Turin. Some important examples of the late polyphonic madrigal survive only in manuscript, such as those by Michelangelo Rossi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Lotti. The last two also testify to the survival of the genre late into the century.

Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century

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Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century: Bibliography

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Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century: Bibliography

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S. Boorman: ‘Some Non-Conflicting Attributions, and some Newly Anonymous Compositions, from the Early 16th Century’, EMH, vi (1986), 109–57

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Madrigal, §II: Italy: 16th century: Bibliography

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D. Mace: ‘Pietro Bembo and the Literary Origins of the Italian Madrigal’, MQ, lv (1969), 65–86

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W. Kirkendale: ‘Franceschina, Girometta, and their Companions in a Madrigal “a diversi linguaggi” by Luca Marenzio and Orazio Vecchi’, AcM, xliv (1972), 181–235

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L. Martin: Scipione Dentice: his Place in the Neapolitan School (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1978)

A. Skei: ‘Stefano Rossetti, Madrigalist’, MR, xxxix (1978), 81–94

S. Leopold: ‘Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole di Iacobo Sannazaro’, RIM, xiv (1979), 75–127

J. Haar: ‘The libro primo of Costanzo Festa’, Acm, lii (1980), 147–55

A. Johnson: ‘The 1548 Editions of Cipriano de Rore's Third Book of Madrigals’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 110–24

H. Kaufmann: ‘Francesco Orso da Celano, a Neapolitan Madrigalist of the Second Half of the 16th Century’, Studi musicali, xix (1980), 219–69

M. Balsano, ed.: L’Ariosto: la musica, i musicisti, Quaderni della RIM, v (Florence, 1981) [incl. J. Haar: ‘Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche’, 31–46; M. Balsano and J. Haar: ‘L'Ariosto in musica’, 47–88]

J. Chater: Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577–93 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

L. Martin: ‘A Neapolitan Contemporary of Gesualdo’, Studi musicali, x (1981), 217–39

G. Tomlinson: ‘Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's via naturale alla immitatione’, JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 60–108

T. Bridges: The Publishing of Arcadelt’s First Book of Madrigals (diss., Harvard U.,1982)

D. Butchart: I madrigali di Marco da Gagliano (Florence, 1982)

S. Leopold: Claudio Monteverdi und seine Zeit (Laaber, 1982)

G. Tomlinson: ‘Music and the Claims of Text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini, and Marino’, Critical Inquiry, viii (1982–3), 565–89

R. Agee: ‘Ruberto Strozzi and the Early Madrigal’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 1–17

D. Butchart: ‘The First Published Compositions of Alessandro Striggio’, Studi musicali, xii (1983), 46–59

D. Mace: ‘Tasso, La Gerusalemme liberata and Monteverdi’, Music and Language, Studies in the History of Music, i (New York, 1983), 118–56

B. Mann: The Secular Madrigals of Filippo di Monte, 1521–1603 (Ann Arbor, 1983)

N. Pirrotta, ed.: Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ’500 (Florence, 1983), ii [incl. L. Bianconi and A. Vassalli: ‘Circolazione letteraria e circolazione musicale del madrigale: il caso G.B. Strozzi’, 439–55; H.C. Slim: ‘Un coro della “Tullia” di Lodovico Martelli messo in musica e attribuito a Philippe Verdelot’, 487–511]

N. Pirrotta: Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, MA, 1984) [incl. ‘Willaert and the canzone villanesca’, 175–97; ‘Notes on Marenzio and Tasso’, 198–210; ‘Monteverdi's Poetic Choices’, 271–316]

R. Sherr: ‘Verdelot in Florence, Coppini in Rome, and the Singer “La Fiore”’, JAMS, xxxvii (1984), 402–11

R. Agee: ‘Filippo Strozzi and the Early Madrigal’, JAMS, xxxviii (1985), 227–37

T. Carter: ‘Music and Patronage in Late 16th-Century Florence: the Case of Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602)’, I Tatti Studies, i (1985), 57–104

P. Fabbri: Monteverdi (Turin, 1985; Eng. trans., 1994)

J. Haar: ‘The Early Madrigals of Lassus’, RBM, xxxix–xl (1985–6), 17–32

M. Lewis: ‘Rore's Setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella’, JM, iv (1985–6), 365–409

L. Finscher, ed.: Claudio Monteverdi: Festschrift Reinhold Hammerstein (Laaber, 1986) [incl. R. Hammerstein: ‘Versuch über die Form im Madrigal Monteverdis’, 9–33; I. Hammerstein: ‘Zur Monteverdi-Rezeption in Deutschland’, 175–212]

P. Cecchi: ‘Le scelte poetiche di Carlo Gesualdo: fonti letterarie e musicali’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento, ed. D. d'Alessandro and A. Ziino (Rome, 1987), 47–75

J. Haar: ‘Towards a Chronology of the Madrigals of Arcadelt’, JM, v (1987), 28–53

H.C. Slim: ‘Arcadelt's “Amore tu sai” in an Anonymous Allegory’, I Tatti Studies, ii (1987), 91–106

G. Tomlinson: Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987)

M.A. Balsano and T. Walker, eds.: Tasso: la musica, i musicisti (Firenze, 1988)

R. Agee and J. Owens: ‘La stampa della Musica novadi Willaert’, RIM, xxiv (1989), 219–305

E. Durante and A. Martellotti: Don Angelo Grillo O.S.B. alias Livio Celiano: poeta per musica del secolo decimosesto (Florence, 1989)

C. Elias: ‘Musical Performance in 16th-Century Italian Literature ‘Straparola's Le piacevoli notti’, EMc, xvii (1989), 161–73

M. Feldman: ‘Rore's “Selva selvaggia”: the Primo libro of 1542’, JAMS, xlii (1989), 547–603

M. Feldman: ‘The Composer as Exegete: Interpretations of Petrarchan Syntax in the Venetian Madrigal’, Studi musicali, xviii (1989), 203–38

D. Nutter: ‘Ippolito Tromboncino, cantore al liuto’, I Tatti Studies, iii (1989), 127–74

K. Wettig: Das Madrigal in der Krise: Gesualdo-Studien (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1989)

H.M. Brown: ‘A Typology of Francesco Corteccia's Madrigals’, The Well Enchanting Skill Essays in Honour of F.W. Sternfeld, ed. J.A. Caldwell, E.D. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford and New York, 1990), 3–28

H.M. Brown: ‘Petrarch in Naples: Notes on the Formation of Giaches de Wert's Style’, Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. R. Charteris (Sydney, 1990), 16–50

H.M. Brown: ‘Verso una definizione dell'armonia nel seicesimo secolo: sui “madrigali ariosi” di Antonio Barrè’, RIM, xxv (1990), 18–60

J. Haar: ‘Rore's Settings of Ariosto’, Essays in Musicology: a Tribute to Alvin Johnson, ed. L. Lockwood and E.H. Roesner (Philadelphia, 1990), 101–25

F. Piperno: ‘Il madrigale italiano in Europa: compilazioni antologiche allestite e pubblicate oltralpe’, Il madrigale oltre il madrigale: dal Barocco al Novecento: Lenno, nr Como, 1991, 17–48

S. Schmalzriedt: ‘Manierismus als “Kunst des Überbietens”: Anmerkungen zu Monteverdis und D'Indias Madrigalen Cruda Amarilli’, Festschrift Ulrich Siegele, ed. R. Faber and others (Kassel, 1991), 51–66

N. Baker and B. Hanning, eds.: Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude Palisca (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992) [incl. B. Hanning: ‘Monteverdi's Three Genera: a Study in Terminology’, 145–70; T. Carter: ‘Artusi, Monteverdi and the Poetics of Modern Music’, 171–94]

E. Chafe: Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York, 1992)

B. Lanz: Die Petrarca-Vertonungen von Luca Marenzio (Tutzing, 1992)

M. Ossi: ‘Claudio Monteverdi's Ordine novo, bello et gustevole: the Canzonetta as Dramatic Module and Formal Archetype’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 261–304

M.A. Balsano and G. Callisani: Sigismondo d’India (Palermo, 1993)

L. Buch: ‘Seconda prattica’ and the Aesthetic of ‘Meraviglia’ the Canzonettas and Madrigals of Tomaso Pecci (diss., U. of Rochester, 1993)

S. Cusick: ‘Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Monteverdi-Artusi Controversy’, JAMS, xlvi (1993), 1–25

J. Haar: ‘Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist’, Studi musicali, xxii (1993), 23–59

A. Amati-Camperi: An Italian Genre in the Hands of a Frenchman: Philippe Verdelot as Madrigalist, with Special Emphasis on the Six-Voice Pieces (diss., Harvard U., 1994)

D. Butchart: ‘Luca Bati and the Late Cinquecento Madrigal in Florence’, Musicologia humana Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 251–73

I. Godt: ‘I casi di Arianna’, RIM, xxix (1994), 315–59

M. Privitera: ‘Malinconia e acedia: intorno a “Solo e pensoso” di Luca Marenzio’, Studi musicali, xxiii (1994), 29–71

R. Freedman: ‘Marenzio's Madrigali a quattro, cinque et sei voci of 1588: a Newly Revealed Madrigal Cycle and its Intellectual Context’, JM, xiii (1995), 318–54

M. Mabbett: ‘Italian Madrigal Texts in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Liber amicorum John Steele: a Musicological Tribute, ed. W. Drake (Stuyvesant, NY, 1997), 307–55

L. Macy: ‘Speaking of Sex: Metaphor and Performance in the Italian Madrigal’, JM, xiv (1996), 1–34

A. Newcomb: ‘Wert: a Re-Evaluation of the Early Years in Particular’ (Antwerp, forthcoming)

A. Pompilio, ed.: Guarnini: la musica, i musicisti (Lucca, 1997)

Madrigal

III. The concerted madrigal

From the early 17th century continuo parts were added to ensemble madrigals, but it was some time before genuine concertato music, including pieces for fewer than the conventional 16th-century five-voice group, was common. At the same time there occurred the rather more decisive and radical initiative of writing madrigals for a solo voice with continuo, through which the new Baroque style achieved its widest diffusion in Italy. By the 1630s these parallel developments had eroded the very concept of the madrigal as an independent genre, so that the concertato ensemble madrigal gave place to its heirs, the Dialogue and cantata (see Cantata, §I, 1), and the solo madrigal to the cantata and the usually more schematic aria (see Aria, §2). See also Monody.

1. Introduction.

2. Madrigals for two and more voices.

3. Solo madrigals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Madrigal, §III: The concerted madrigal

1. Introduction.

To judge by the vast majority of 16th-century publications, the Renaissance madrigal might appear to have been an exclusively vocal genre. Contemporary accounts suggest that instrumental participation in the performance of madrigals was widespread, however, and ranged from the doubling of vocal parts to the purely instrumental performances of some vocal lines, including the reduction of a texture to a single vocal part accompanied by either an instrumental ensemble or a single instrument performing an intabulation of the original texture. It is likely that when doubling or replacing singers the instruments did not limit themselves to playing the parts as written but added improvised divisions. Evidence of such practices is found in collections such as Franciscus Bossinensis’s Frottole intabulate (1509–11) and Cristoforo Malvezzi’s publication, in 1591, of the intermedi for Girolamo Bargagli’s play La pellegrina (performed in Florence on the occasion of the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589), and in late 16th-century treatises such as Ercole Bottrigari’s Il desiderio (1594), which describes performances by mixed vocal and instrumental ensembles. Malvezzi’s volume, together with Bastiano de’ Rossi’s official chronicle of the festivities, attests to the great variety of instrumental and vocal combinations used in the madrigals of the intermedi, and contains, in pieces such as Dolcissime sirene, early examples of the ornamented monodic songs with instrumental accompaniment associated with the Florentine Camerata. In particular, the 1589 intermedi, together with records from earlier court spectacles, provide evidence of the increasing prominence accorded to the bass line, which was often doubled by a large complement of foundation instruments, including both single-line bass instruments and strumenti da corpo (Brown, 1973). Finally, the use of instrumental sinfonias to introduce some of the numbers in the intermedi foreshadows the pairing of madrigals with sinfonias in some early 17th-century madrigal books.

The textural variety generated by the ad hoc participation of instruments in madrigal performances, and the increasing tendency of 16th-century composers to use stratified textures may be considered precedents for the reduced textures that characterize the concerted madrigal. The use of divided ensembles contrasting high and low voice groups, a prominent structural element in Josquin’s works, continued to be used in the 16th century to create variety and dramatic immediacy in settings of dialogue texts. An extreme manifestation of this is the cultivation of high-voice ensembles sparked by the concerto delle dame active at Ferrara during the 1580s, a group of female virtuoso singers renowned for its highly ornamented singing style and its repertory of madrigals for one, two and three voices with instrumental accompaniment. The Ferrarese ensemble was the object of emulation in Mantua and Florence; its influence was felt in the preponderance of upper-part duets and trios in the madrigals of composers such as Pallavicino, Wert and Monteverdi. Luzzaschi’s Madrigali per cantare et sonare, published in 1601 long after the group had been disbanded (but composed earlier), provide a sample of what must have been a larger repertory; the keyboard accompaniment shows that, in spite of their elaborate ornamentation, the works performed by the ensemble were essentially five-part madrigals in which the upper parts were supported by an intabulation of the full texture and not by a true basso continuo comparable to that of the monodies in, for example, Caccini’s Le nuove musiche.

Madrigal, §III: The concerted madrigal

2. Madrigals for two and more voices.

Contrary to Pietro Della Valle’s assertion that by 1640 no-one was composing madrigals (by which he seems to have meant the old-fashioned a cappella type), books of madrigals for four and five voices without continuo continued to be published well into the 17th century, primarily as composers’ first books. It is undeniable, however, that after the turn of the century the concerted madrigal – that is, with obbligato instrumental participation – quickly gained in popularity and overshadowed the older type. The earliest true concertato madrigals appeared in Monteverdi’s fifth book (1605); in earlier publications, such as Salamone Rossi’s first and second books for five voices (1600 and 1602), the earliest volumes of ensemble madrigals to include a continuo part, the chitarrone is given an intabulation of the vocal parts, and the composer does not exploit the presence of the instrument for structural or textural purposes. These works, and the many older volumes of a cappella madrigals reissued in updated editions with new, separate continuo partbooks (such as Phalèse’s 1615 edition of Monteverdi’s third and fourth books), may be seen as attesting as much to the rising popularity of the concerted style as to its roots in the informal addition of a supporting basso seguente. Monteverdi himself represented both types in his fifth book: the title page reads ‘with a basso continuo for the harpsichord, chitarrone, or a similar instrument, composed expressly for the last six and optional in the others’. The composer thus drew a distinction between the older type, which makes up the majority of the volume, and the group of madrigals at the end, in which the continuo supports a variety of vocal combinations that range from the short solo refrains of T’amo, mia vita to the extended solo sections that open Amor se giusto sei and the highly ornamented, recitative-like duets of Ahi, com’a un vago sol. Dividing a volume of madrigals into two groups, a cappella madrigals with optional instrumental support and truly concerted pieces with continuo obbligato, proved to be an attractive solution. Volumes of this kind were issued by composers including Monteverdi, whose sixth book (1614) is organized in two cycles, each consisting of a cappella madrigals followed by concerted ones; Sigismondo d’India, whose third book for five voices (1615) requires the participation of supporting instruments for the last eight madrigals; Giovanni Valentini, whose fifth book (1625) contains madrigals for six voices without continuo and scherzi for three and six voices with obbligato accompaniment; and Domenico Mazzocchi, whose madrigals for five voices (1638) are grouped according to whether they are a cappella, require a continuo or are variously concerted.

The availability of new vocal combinations and the presence of the instrumental bass also allowed composers to experiment with new formal solutions, such as the incipient strophic bass organization of Monteverdi’s Ahi, come a un vago sol and Amor se giusto sei, and the refrain structures of T’amo, mia vita and Ahi, come a un vago sol. The option, made available by the presence of the continuo, to isolate one of the parts from the ensemble also lent to the madrigal an added dramatic dimension, making it possible to realize with greater verisimilitude than before the interactions of dialogue and mixed-mode texts: in T’amo mia vita Monteverdi assigned to the canto the beloved’s remembered words, isolating the female voice against the lover’s narrative, which is sung by an ensemble of three low voices. Monteverdi extended this marriage of schematic form and dramatic potential in the continuo madrigals of his sixth book, in which strophic basses, now fully worked out, figure prominently in the service of semi-dramatic texts. The lovers’ dialogue in Marino’s sonnet Addio Florida bella is assigned to the appropriate voice parts while the narration is carried by the full ensemble; Florida’s response to Floro’s opening quatrain is sung to the same bass part that had accompanied his words, transposed up a fifth, emphasizing the lovers’ like-mindedness and, by returning to the original tonal level for the closing narrative tutti, creating a symmetrical harmonic layout (D–A–D). A similar formal symmetry governs the architecture of Misero Alceo, in which Alceo’s solo recitative lament is framed at either end by a five-voice chorus, and is set as a series of strophic variations over a three-fold repetition of the bass; the harmonic structure is also symmetrical (A for the choruses, E for the central lament).

The most significant effect of the introduction of the continuo was to enable composers to focus on previously unavailable vocal combinations, particularly duets, trios and, more rarely, quartets. As Vincenzo Giustiniani remarked (Discorso sopra la musica, 1628), ‘[nowadays] we sing solos, or at most with three voices concerted with appropriate instruments such as the theorbo or the guitar, or the harpsichord or organ’. Of the various ensembles, the duet established itself as the most popular. Although the choice of continuo instrument, as Giustiniani’s comment makes obvious, was left up to the performer in all concerted madrigals, composers were, on the whole, precise about the vocal scoring: equal voice combinations were preferred for duets, with pairs of tenors or sopranos being the most common and duets for altos and basses exceedingly rare; mixed voice pairs, although not unheard of, account for relatively little of the repertory; and alternative scorings, explicitly allowing performance by, for example, either two tenors or two sopranos, are uncommon. Although examples of duets, such as those by Luzzaschi for the concerto delle dame and by Monteverdi in Orfeo, survive from the later 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, and although composers had long isolated duets within larger ensemble madrigals both within and without continuo, it was not until after 1615, the year in which d’India’s Musiche a due voci, Alessandro Grandi’s Madrigali concertati a due, tre, e quattro voci and Marco da Gagliano’s Musiche a una due e tre voci were published, that true continuo duets began to appear as separate compositions, spawning a flowering that reached its peak in the 1620s and lasted well into the middle of the century. Duets were included in a wide variety of collections, from volumes of monodies (which originated mainly in the area between Florence and Naples, with Rome as the principal centre of production, but were also issued by Venetian composers) to madrigal books (which were most commonly published by composers working in northern Italy, especially in and around Venice) (see Whenham, 1982).

The duet repertory can be divided into groups according to musical structure, the two largest categories being strophic duets and madrigalian duets. In the early 17th century strophic duets were most commonly found in monodic collections; from 1619 onwards they also appeared in madrigal collections, although their frequency in monody books declined from the early 1620s. The earliest continuo duets were modelled on the Renaissance three-part canzonetta, and in many, as in Peri’s syllabic, note-against-note setting of Al fronte, al prato (1609), the instrument simply plays a basso seguente doubling the lowest voice. One of the earliest volumes to include a true basso continuo part is Kapsberger’s Libro primo di villanelle (1610), the first of his seven extant volumes devoted to the genre. His setting of Rinuccini’s Non havea Febo ancora (1619), a canzonetta text later treated in highly dramatic fashion by Monteverdi (the Lamento della ninfa, 1638), is characteristic of its type: it is strophic, the declamation is syllabic and the texture is homorhythmic; the phrase structure (two main phrases, each comprising an antecedent–consequent pair, followed by a repeated single-phrase refrain) follows the poetic structure (four lines of settenari, alternating between piani and tronchi, and a two-line refrain in ottonari tronchi). The continuo emphasizes the rhythmic structure of the upper parts, delineating the phrase structure with a clear harmonic layout centring on G.

Like the Renaissance madrigal, madrigalian duets eschew the patterned forms of strophic poetry, setting madrigals and sonnets in through-composed fashion. Whenham (1982) divided the repertory between 1615 and 1643 into two broad categories: small-scale, concise, arioso settings; and more ambitious madrigal-style settings in which the music attempts to match the poetic imagery. In both there is an increasing tendency to incorporate aria-like elements not only in response to text imagery, but also as a means of structural articulation. Alessandro Grandi’s first book of madrigals (1615) contains the earliest published examples of arioso duets, and, although he has been relegated by historians to Monteverdi’s shadow, Grandi is considered by Whenham to be one of the most important exponents of the concise duet type.

Monteverdi’s seventh book of madrigals (1619) is seen as the point of origin for the larger-scale madrigalian duet, although it can be argued that the foundations for the 17 duets of this collection are found in the duet sections of the ensemble madrigals of the fifth book, and in the sacred works such as the motets Pulchra es for two sopranos from the Vespers of 1610, Cantate dominum canticum novum for two ‘canti o tenori’ (1615) and Sancta Maria succurre miseris (1618), that represent his earliest essays in the duet genre. 14 of the duets in the seventh book are through-composed madrigalian settings of substantial proportions, ranging in character from the sombre affect of Interrotte speranze to the light-hearted eroticism of O come sei gentile. Monteverdi’s scorings reflect contemporary preferences: the majority are for equal voice pairs (tenors or sopranos), and only one is for mixed voices (tenor and bass). In these duets, as well as in those of the eighth book (1638) and of the posthumous Madrigali e canzonette a due e tre voci … libro nono (1651), the musical imagery is closely allied to that of the poetry, producing emotionally intense works that often border on the theatrical. One extreme example is his setting of Guarini’s famous portrayal of the musical virtuosity of the Ferrarese concerto delle dame, Mentre vaga angioletta (1638), in which Monteverdi not only matches the poet’s description of the singer’s art point by point, but also conveys, through a variety of means, the poem’s larger theme, the mysterious ways in which music affects its listeners.

Like the ensemble madrigal, the duet also assimilated the schematic forms made possible by the presence of the continuo. Strophic variations were used to unify entire settings, as in Monteverdi’s romanesca Ohimè dov’è il mio ben (1619); and from around the late 1620s and early 1630s, ostinato basses of popular dance origin, such as the ciaccona and the passacaglia, became common accompanimental formulae, not only for singing generic poetic forms (arie per cantar), but also for more elaborate madrigalian settings such as Monteverdi’s ciaccona Zefiro torna (1632), and the middle section of the Lamento della ninfa (1638), Amor, dicea, with its descending tetrachord ostinato, which became established as the ‘emblem of lament’ for much of the 17th century.

Composers began to include other instruments in addition to the continuo, extending and expanding upon the earlier practices of improvising ritornellos between stanzas of strophic songs and of arranging vocal works by doubling and replacing parts with instruments. Instruments were used in two main ways: in passages inserted between vocal sections, variously called ritornellos, sinfonias or, more rarely, sonatas; or as equal participants with the voices in an integrated texture.

Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali (published in 1607 but probably composed around 1600; see Ossi, 1992), a collection of strophic settings of canzonettas mainly by Chiabrera, is the earliest example of true concerted technique in a volume of secular music. The pieces are scored for two sopranos, bass, two violins and continuo, and they present a nearly complete catalogue of possible concerted combinations. As the composer’s instructions make clear, the violins play ritornellos, double the voices in the outer stanzas, replace two of the voices if the inner stanzas are performed by a solo singer, and are even assigned internal ‘bridges’, notated in the vocal parts but explicitly intended for instrumental performance only. In these works instrumental scoring is no longer a matter of performance practice but is integral to the compositional plan.

Monteverdi’s Scherzi represent a relatively sophisticated variation of the simple strophic form with ritornellos, probably most common in improvised performance and occasionally found in printed volumes such as Biagio Marini’s Scherzi e canzonette a una e due voci (1622), a collection of strophic miniatures in which vocal and instrumental elements are kept almost entirely separate. Monteverdi’s own later essays in the genre, such as Chiome d’oro (1619), a canzonetta for soprano duet, further elaborated on the possibilities established in the Scherzi: rather than one ritornello, there are three, all of which are heard at the beginning and are subsequently brought back in rotation between strophes; vocal sections and ritornellos are based on the same bass line, which functions as the backbone for an elaborate set of strophic variations; and the instruments and voices are joined in the final strophe, the instruments having independent obbligato parts rather than doubling the vocal lines. A similar, if less strict, pattern of variations occurs in the ‘sinfonias’ of Galeazzo Sabbatini’s canzonetta Chiome crespe (1630), which may well have been intended to mimic Monteverdi’s composition in subject and structure.

Composers in the early 17th century also devised other sectional forms made up of alternating instrumental and vocal blocks; these are best described as ‘stanzaic’ rather than truly strophic. In Monteverdi’s Questi vaghi concenti (1605), a five-part ensemble of unspecified instruments introduces the madrigal with a ‘sinfonia’ that returns in abbreviated form to divide the setting into two sections. Similarly, in Angelo Notari’s Così di ben amar (1613), an unlabelled instrumental interlude for two violins and continuo separates two recitative-style vocal sections, the first a soprano duet, the second a trio for two sopranos and bass. Giovanni Valentini’s Duo archi adopra (1621) opens with a ‘sonata’ for two violins and continuo that recurs between the four vocal sections, each of which is different from the others and is scored for a variety of vocal combinations, from one to four voices. The violins join the singers for the final section, and are included in the composer’s reckoning of the total number of parts (the piece is labelled ‘a sei voci’: two violins, two sopranos and two tenors. Galeazzo Sabbatini’s Segua i piacer (1630) alternates between ‘sinfonia’ sections, for two violins and continuo, and non-strophic vocal sections; the ‘sinfonia’ is different each time, and the violins occasionally join the vocal ensemble, even before the final tutti section. Four different ‘ritornellos’ separate the vocal sections of Martino Pesenti’s Quel bel foco (1638); each vocal section is different from the others, and, although no single strophic variation principle governs the entire setting, the ‘ritornellos’ are loosely built on the bass lines of the stanzas that precede them.

An early example of the second way in which instruments could be used, as equal participants in the texture of the madrigal, is again found in Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali, where obbligato instrumental parts are included within predominantly vocal passages. This practice was expanded, albeit in a limited way, in the final tutti sections of canzonettas, where the instruments did not merely double the voices but were assigned independent parts. By the second decade of the 17th century, works with full concertante parts had begun to appear in a variety of secular publications. Monteverdi’s Con che soavità (1619) provides an extreme example of the possibilities of mixing voices and instruments: a madrigal for solo voice, it includes three separate instrumental ensembles (‘cori’ of viols, violins and continuo instruments) that provide a variety of accompanimental textures, from expanded continuo support to motivic interplay between voice and upper strings, and even including a written-out orchestral decrescendo. Although Con che soavità remains an isolated example of such elaborate instrumental writing in a vocal work, it can be taken as an indication of the variety of possibilities available to composers and performers as they ‘arranged’ continuo accompaniments for particularly lavish performances, such as might be required for dramatic works (according to contemporary accounts, the climactic lament of Monteverdi’s opera Arianna was supported by an ensemble of ‘viole et violini’). On a much smaller scale, Marini’s scherzo Semplicette verginelle (1622) includes, in addition to a ritornello, a ‘si placet’ violin part as a counterpoint to the vocal line. More typical, however, was the inclusion of two equal instrumental parts, often violins, to create a mixed vocal and instrumental texture, as in Monteverdi’s A quest’ olmo (1619), in which a pair of violins alternates with two ‘flautini o fifare’ in interacting with the six-part vocal ensemble. The violins in such pieces are generally included in the total number of voices: thus Francesco Turini’s Madrigali a cinque (1629) calls for two violins and various combinations of three voices plus basso continuo.

During the 1620s and 30s, in madrigals in which the obbligato instruments are full participants in the contrapuntal fabric and share motivic material in imitation with the voices, ensemble combinations could range from one singer and one violin, as in Marini’s Semplicette verginelle and Francesco Vignali’s Re fa mi sol amore (1640), to larger forces, as in Giovanni Rovetta’s Taccia il cielo (1629) and Io torno amati lumi (1640), scored for six vocal parts, two violins and continuo, and for eight voices, two violins and continuo respectively. A number of works in Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638), such as Hor che ’l ciel e la terra, Altri canti d’Amor, Vago augelletto and Altri canti di Marte, call for similarly large forces. Instrumental ensembles could also be larger than the prevalent violin pairs. Altri canti d’Amor includes an ensemble of four viols, ranging from ‘contrabasso’ to tenor, in addition to two violins and continuo, and Marini’s Gite sospiri, a ‘concerto a dieci’ included in his Concerto terzo (1649), calls for four voices and six instrumental parts: a ‘cornetto o violino primo’, a ‘violino secondo’, two ‘trombone o viola’ (alto and tenor), a ‘trombone o fagotto’ and continuo. Some madrigal books included groups of sinfonias at the end, to be used freely in conjunction with the vocal works that made up the main part of the volume; this is the case with Stefano Bernardi’s Concerti academici con varie sorti di sinfonie (1616), for six voices and continuo, in which the polyphonic sinfonias included at the end of the volume are scored, in keeping with 16th-century practice, for unspecified instruments. More frequently, however, the sinfonia was integrated within a particular madrigal as an introduction, or served to mark an internal division. Rovetta’s Io torno includes, in addition to the extensive use of the violins as concertante instruments, two sinfonias, one at the beginning and one in the middle, as well as an unlabelled instrumental passage that functions as an internal ‘spacer’ exactly as the second sinfonia does. Textural variety and instrumental colour could also serve to establish contrasting sections within a madrigal: Monteverdi’s Altri canti d’Amor opens with an ostinato section for three voices and two violins, which gives way to a long passage in genere concitato for the entire vocal ensemble and the violins; this is followed by an extended bass solo accompanied by all the strings and a ‘spinetta’ in a texture that is reminiscent of the expanded continuo writing of Con che soavità, after which the piece ends with all instruments and voices joining together in a tutti choral section in which the violins participate in the virtuoso music of the voices and the viols function as ripienists. Marini’s Gite sospiri juxtaposes sections for solo voice accompanied by the lower instruments, tuttis, vocal quartets with continuo alone and solo voice with continuo alone.

The introduction of concertato techniques, whether involving the addition of a basso continuo alone or of upper instrumental parts as well, made available to early 17th-century composers a sound world that until then had been primarily the province of the performer. Contrasts of colour and texture and the juxtaposition of instrumental and vocal blocks made possible new conceptions of form in which musical architecture could co-exist with poetic form, sometimes complementing it, and sometimes working independently of it to create abstract forms imposed upon and even contradicting the form of the text. The opening of these new possibilities coincided with the passing, around the middle of the century, of the madrigal as a vital genre; although books of madrigals continued to be published as late as the 1690s, they had acquired an unmistakable air of ‘antiquity’, and the potential of the concerted techniques developed for the madrigal were eventually realized in other genres, such as the cantata.

Madrigal, §III: The concerted madrigal

3. Solo madrigals.

It was primarily through madrigals for solo voice and continuo that wide currency was gained in the first decade of the 17th century for a fundamental reforming precept of the Florentine Camerata and their sympathizers: that the words of a piece of music should be clearly heard – a notion, incidentally, that presupposed an audience, as was not necessarily the case with polyphonic madrigals. Moreover, the doctrine of the seconda pratica enunciated by Monteverdi enjoined the composer to remember that the words were to be ‘the mistress of the harmony’ and not vice versa as in polyphonic pieces. The first published madrigals for solo voice and continuo were the dozen that Caccini included in Le nuove musiche (1601/2), though there had been certain anticipations of them, including the practice of performing the highest part of a polyphonic madrigal as an accompanied solo, the declamatory homophonic writing found in some of the later madrigals of Wert, the appearance in intermedi of one or two solo songs by composers in the orbit of the Camerata, and possibly those published in D.M. Melli's first songbook in 1602.

Solo madrigals are mostly for a high voice, with the realization of the bass played on instruments such as the lute, chitarrone, theorbo and harpsichord; there is a strong polarity between voice and bass. They are almost entirely in common time, and their predominant style can be summed up as melodic arioso. They are settings of the same kinds of poem as polyphonic madrigals (among them a minority of spiritual texts). The musical form is thus very similar too, as is the nature of the melodic lines. The most obvious structural difference is that the successive periods of a madrigal, corresponding to segments of the text, could no longer be bound together by counterpoint, though there are occasional snatches of imitation between voice and bass, even in the madrigals of Caccini, arch-enemy of counterpoint (e.g. in Dolcissimo sospiro in Le nuove musiche). Solo madrigals may thus have seemed easy to compose, and they undoubtedly attracted a few composers – some of them amateurs, such as Flamminio Corradi, who produced little or no other music, others professional composers such as Barbarino and Ghizzolo, who seem to have been more at home in more traditional genres – in whose works a rather dry arioso is enervatingly presented in a succession of short phrases ending with perfect cadences. More significantly, however, the new genre stimulated many composers, both amateurs and professionals – among them Benedetti, Marco da Gagliano, d'India, Peri and Saracini, as well as Caccini – to the composition of music of a high order. Several of them lived in or near Florence. At their best they shaped their settings into longer phrases and used the repetition of phrases and larger units to structural ends; for example, in Benedetti's Ho visto al pianto mio (Musiche … libro quarto, 1617) the reappearance of the opening phrase establishes a cadence in the dominant halfway through, and in Mutis's Non è di gentil core (Musiche, 1613) the short initial motif recurs near the end and is there treated sequentially. The latter piece is thus one of the many solo madrigals in which the closing bars are treated in a climactic way. This is often achieved through expansive writing enhanced by ornamentation, which is in any case a conspicuous feature of many madrigals, not simply at final cadences. Some of the embellishments stemmed from the diminutions of the 16th century, but others, probably prompted by Caccini's fine example, are far subtler and are a principal means of expressing the meaning of the text.

Caccini's madrigals are almost entirely diatonic, with little modulation, as are those by several other composers, among them Barbarino, Bonini and Rasi. On a larger view they can be seen as part of the mainstream of Italian music, for it was through diatonic music (though generally in triple time and especially in the aria and cantata) that secular music developed in Italy during the 17th century. Certain other solo madrigals, among the most interesting and seemingly radical, though in fact a dead end, are, on the contrary, highly charged interpretations of emotive verses, abounding in dissonance and arresting harmonic progressions and displaying discontinuous textures and unstable tonality. Two fine examples are the settings of Marino's Tu parti, ahi lasso by d'India (Le musiche, 1609) and Saracini (Le seste musiche, 1624); Benedetti's Ho visto al pianto mio, mentioned above, is another. But such music, especially in the hands of amateurs like G.S.P. de' Negri, could sometimes sound merely wilful or eccentric.

Several non-strophic solo songs are settings of more schematic texts than madrigals, notably sonnets and ottavas. Composers often set them more schematically too, especially as Strophic variations, in which the music is generally of a madrigalian cast. Other settings, while still divided into well-defined sections corresponding to the octave and sestet or to subdivisions of them, are not founded, as strophic variations are, on recurring basses and are thus closer in their musical form to settings of madrigal verses. A fine example is Gagliano's Valli profonde (in his Musiche, 1615), one of the greatest songs of the period, which displays aforementioned features such as imitation between voice and bass and the reappearance near the end of a phrase from earlier in the piece. Another exceptional work is Monteverdi's Con che soavità (book 7, 1619), his only solo madrigal, which is accompanied by three groups of instruments and is unified by two bass figures.

Some 60 volumes containing solo madrigals appeared in Italy between 1602 and 1617. Several (e.g. Barbarino's two collections of 1606–7) consist only of madrigals, others (e.g. d'India's Le musiche of 1609, a large and unusually fine collection) of solo madrigals and arias. In a number of other volumes, often, like a few solo volumes, called Musiche, solo madrigals were published alongside ensemble pieces, stage music and instrumental pieces (e.g. Gagliano's Musiche, 1615, another notable collection). As regards the declining popularity of madrigals and the growing enthusiasm for arias, a watershed can be seen in Italian solo song in 1618, for that year saw the publication not only of virtually the last book in which all the songs are madrigals, but also of the first in which they are all arias. The same year was also the first in which books containing more arias than madrigals outnumber those containing more madrigals than arias – by eight to three – and the figures for the following years show that this development gathered momentum. A number of distinguished solo madrigals, especially by d'India and Saracini, were yet to appear, but even these two composers published none after 1623 and 1624 respectively. It is not surprising that about this time too madrigals began to be invaded by some of the characteristics of the developing aria. While Vincenzo Calestani's Tornat'o mio Licori (in his Madrigali et arie, 1617) seems to be the only solo madrigal in triple time throughout, there are many others in which triple-time passages occur. It is particularly significant when they do so at the end of a madrigal, for such pieces herald the future recitative and aria. An instance occurs as early as 1606 in Domenico Brunetti's O miei pensieri (in his L'Euterpe). There are examples in the Amorosi concetti of 1612 and 1616 by Cecchino, but perhaps the most significant instance in these earlier years is Falconieri's Deh dolc'anima mia (in his Musiche … libro sexto, 1619), which is virtually in the form of a double recitative and aria. Collections published in 1633 by Benedetto Ferrari (Musiche varie) and Sances (Cantade, first set) show that by that date the madrigal and aria were virtually indistinguishable. For example, in Ferrari's madrigal Amor, com'esser può the first ten lines of text occupy 54 bars of 4/4 arioso, and the last three are spread over 72 bars of 3/2 aria-like writing; this piece is thus almost identical in form to the aria Ahi! traditor ingrato in the same book. Rinuccini's madrigal text Filli, mirando il cielo lends itself to treatment as a recitative and aria, which is how Sances set it, whereas Caccini's setting (1602) simply consists of undifferentiated arioso. Sances also published settings of madrigal texts that include aria sections founded on ostinato basses surrounded by syllabic recitatives; such a piece is Misera, hor sì ch'il pianto.

It is no accident that Sances's 1633 volume, like his duet volume of the same year, is entitled Cantade, for solo madrigals, like those for larger forces, were not only being supplanted by arias at this period but were merging with them and also with the more extended form of the cantata. Though they set madrigal texts, Sances and other progressive composers of the time probably did not consider that they were thereby composing madrigals. While the ensemble concertato madrigal enjoyed a somewhat longer life because it was sufficiently distinct by virtue of its larger forces from the all-conquering aria and cantata, very few solo madrigals appeared after the early 1630s. On the whole they either were strongly influenced by other genres or were by minor composers clinging to an outdated style.

Madrigal, §III: The concerted madrigal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

FortuneISS

ISS

E. Schmitz: ‘Zur Geschichte des italienischen Continuo-Madrigals im 17. Jahrhundert’, SIMG, xi (1909–10), 509–28

N. Fortune: ‘Italian Secular Monody from 1600 to 1635: an Introductory Survey’, MQ, xxxix (1953), 171–95

F. Mompellio: Sigismondo d'India, musicista palermitano (Milan, 1957)

G. Rose: ‘Agazzari and the Improvising Orchestra’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 382–93

G. Rose: ‘Polyphonic Italian Madrigals of the Seventeenth Century’, ML, xlvii (1966), 153–9

D. Arnold: Monteverdi Madrigals (London, 1967)

C. Gallico: ‘Emblemi strumentali negli “Scherzi” di Monteverdi’, RIM, ii (1967), 54–73

N. Fortune: ‘Solo Song and Cantata’, NOHM, iv (1968), 125–217

H.M. Brown: Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: the Music for the Florentine Intermedii (Dallas, 1973)

H.M. Brown: Embellishing 16th-Century Music (Oxford, 1976)

S. Leopold: Monteverdi und seine Zeit (Laaber, 1982; Eng. trans., 1991 as Monteverdi: Music in Transition)

J. Whenham: Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, 1982)

N. Pirrotta: ‘Monteverdi's Poetic Choices’, Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, 1984), 271–316

P.E. Carapezza: ‘“Quel frutto stramaturo e succoso”: Il madrigale napoletano del primo seicento’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento. Naples 1985, 17–27

N. Fortune: ‘Monteverdi and the seconda prattica, ii: From Madrigal to Duet’, The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1985), 198–215

E. Strainchamps: ‘The Life and Death of Caterina Martinelli: New Light on Monteverdi's “Arianna”’, EMH, v (1985), 155–86

J. Whenham: ‘The Later Madrigals and Madrigal-Books’, The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1985), 216–47

J. Steele: ‘The Concertato Synthesis: Monteverdi's Beatus Primo’, Claudio Monteverdi: Festschrift Reinhold Hammerstein, ed. L. Finscher (Laaber, 1986), 427–34

D.P. Walker: Musique des intermèdes de ‘La Pellegrina’: les fêtes de Florence, 1589 (Paris, 1986)

G. Tomlinson: Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987)

M. Ossi: ‘L'armonia raddoppiata: on Claudio Monteverdi's ‘Zefiro torna’, Heinrich Schütz's ‘Es steh Gott auf’, and Other Early Seventeenth-Century Ciaccone’, Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 225–53

J. Kurtzman: ‘What Makes Claudio Divine? Criteria for Analysis of Monteverdi's Large-Scale Concertato Style’, Seicento inesplorato: Lenno, nr Como 1989, 257–302

M. Mabbett: The Italian Madrigal, 1620–55 (diss., U. of London, 1989)

M. Ossi: Claudio Monteverdi's Concertato Technique and its Role in the Development of his Theoretical Thought (diss., Harvard U., 1989)

R. Holzer: ‘Sono d'altro garbo … le canzonette che si cantano oggi': Pietro della Valle on Music and Modernity in the Seventeenth Century’, Studi musicali, xxi (1992), 253–306

M. Ossi: ‘Claudio Monteverdi's ordine novo, bello et gustevole: the Canzonetta as Dramatic Module and Formal Archetype’, JAMS, v (1992), 261–304

J. Kurtzman: ‘A Taxonomic and Affective Analysis of Monteverdi's “Hor che'l ciel e la terra”’, MAn, xii (1993), 169–95

M. Ossi: ‘L'ordine novo e la via naturale all'immitatione: struttura e rappresentazione nei madrigali concertati del Quinto Libro di Monteverdi’, Claudio Monteverdi: Mantua 1993

S. Leopold: Al modo d'Orfeo: Dichtung und Musik in italienischen Sologesang des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, AnMc, no.29 (1995)

M. Ossi: ‘A Sample Problem in Seventeenth-Century Imitatio: Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Turini, and Battista Guarini's “Mentre vaga angioletta”’, Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. J.A. Owens and A. Cummings (Warren, MI, 1996), 253–69

M. Ossi: ‘Between Madrigale and Altro genere di canto: Elements of Ambiguity in Claudio Monteverdi's Setting of Battista Guarini's “Con che soavità”’, Guarini e la musica, ed. P. Fabbri and A. Pompilio (Florence, forthcoming)

M. Ossi: Divining the Oracle: Aspects of Monteverdi's Seconda prattica (forthcoming)

M. Ossi: The Italian Concertato Madrigal in the Early Seventeenth Century (forthcoming)

Madrigal

IV. The English madrigal

In the 1580s and 90s a lively offshoot of the madrigale arioso and the ‘light’ madrigal style of Ferretti and Gastoldi (see §II, 7 above) took root in England. Several impressive composers of madrigals emerged, and for a short time nearly all native composers seem to have interested themselves in the new style. The English madrigal development is of interest for its startlingly frank embrace of foreign models; in this respect it marks something of a watershed in the history of English music. The extent of the development – about 50 printed editions between 1588 and 1627, including nine of Italian music in translation or transcription – is also notable, by the standards of local musical activity at the time. It is well to bear in mind, however, that Monte wrote more madrigals and Marenzio published more editions than were produced by all the English madrigalists together.

1. Origins.

2. The 1590s: Morley, Weelkes and Wilbye.

3. After 1600.

4. Later history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Madrigal, §IV: The English madrigal

1. Origins.

Italian madrigals circulated in manuscript in England from as early as the 1530s, though apart from a few specialized sources, their appearance in manuscripts up to the 1590s is scant compared to motets and chansons. In the 1560s and 70s a colourless but prolific Italian madrigalist, Alfonso Ferrabosco (i), held a prominent position at Queen Elizabeth’s court and built up a great local reputation (see §II, 3 above). However, the composition of madrigals in the vernacular was unthinkable until poets could conceive of English verse at least approximately comparable in form and content to Italian madrigal poetry. One could not write madrigals to the lyrics in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) or The Paradyse of Daynty Devises (1576), which are for the most part stiff, stanzaic, alliterative and still ‘courtly’ in the late medieval tradition.

A favourable literary situation developed in the 1570s, when Spenser, Sidney and other ‘new poets’ undertook a comprehensive reform of native poetry along Italian lines. The English madrigal development was an accurate reflection of an important literary movement. The decade of the 1590s which saw the greatest concentration of madrigal composition was also the heyday of the English sonnet sequence. A leading literary figure, Thomas Watson, issued the first of the sonnet sequences, Hekatompathia (1582), and a set of Italian madrigalls Englished (1590). Essentially a Marenzio collection, this anthology seems to have been conceived as propaganda for the fashionable italianate current in music, letters and manners that was seeping through late Elizabethan England.

Musica transalpina (1588) was a larger and more influential anthology of translated madrigals. This book stemmed, as its extremely interesting preface tells (fig.7), from a group of ‘Gentlemen and Merchants of good accompt (as well of this realme as of forreine nations)’ who met at the home of Nicholas Yonge, a London lay clerk, for ‘the exercise of Musicke daily used’. Thus it appears that in their social settings, too, the English and the early Italian madrigal were broadly analogous. The later Italian development away from amateurism and towards professional, virtuoso singing found no echo across the Channel.

Most of the translations, according to Yonge, were made ‘five yeeres agoe’, that is, in 1583, which is the date of Musica divina, the first important madrigal anthology issued by the Antwerp publisher Phalèse. Musica divina provided much of the contents for Musica transalpina, as well as a model in general layout and in stylistic orientation. The music ‘daily used’ by Yonge’s circle was fairly up-to-date but conservative, in the mixed style of the late 1570s (see §II, 7 above). Favourite composers were Ferrabosco and Marenzio, the latter represented by the most popular of his very early work. And broadly speaking, this marks a stylistic terminus for the English madrigal development which was soon to follow. Native composers did not adopt the so-called ‘expressionistic’ and ‘recitational’ styles practised by Wert and Marenzio in the mid-1580s, still less the radical maniera pioneered in the 1590s at Ferrara.

There was demand enough for three more of these anthologies in the 1590s. As a result, more translated madrigals were published in London than pieces by any single native madrigalist. Furthermore, the anthologies became an important source of poems for resetting by English composers – who in many cases also modelled their work on the music that lay so obviously at hand. In two ways, then, the anthologies played a central role in the domestication of the Italian madrigal style.

The madrigal is intimately associated with the first important period of London music printing, which began in 1588 under Byrd’s monopoly. Musica transalpina includes a consort song by Byrd on Ariosto’s La verginella, ‘brought to speake English with the rest’ (and provided with words in all the five parts). For Watson’s anthology Byrd wrote two madrigals in praise of Queen Elizabeth, one of them related to a ‘six Virgins Song’ performed at the elaborate entertainment at Elvetham (1591) put on for the queen by the Earl of Hertford. Other madrigals dealing with the queen and various court figures (Bonny Boots, Dorus, Carimel) were published during the 1590s, up to The Triumphes of Oriana in 1601. Court interest may have contributed decisively to the English development; like the Dukes of Mantua and Ferrara, Queen Elizabeth could have seen in the madrigal style an ideal vehicle for celebrating the Renaissance prince. As a further speculation, this might have dawned on her first in 1591–2, when in the face of falling popularity she resumed her progresses. But madrigals seem to have circulated widely – not only at court and among amateur musicians in London, but also elsewhere in the nation, as dedications to patrons ranging from Norfolk and Suffolk to Cheshire and Derbyshire show.

Madrigal, §IV: The English madrigal

2. The 1590s: Morley, Weelkes and Wilbye.

Byrd, who by this time was past 50, drew back from the madrigal style after his initial experiments with it. 19th-century scholars called his secular compositions to English words ‘madrigals’, but Byrd himself never did so. His Psalmes, Sonets & Songs (1588) are all consort songs for voice and instruments (see Consort song), though words are adapted to all the parts, possibly in response to the new madrigal fashion. The secular pieces in his later songbooks (1589, 1611) remain resolutely un-italianate, though madrigal ideas increasingly invade them.

Morley, a younger musician temperamentally much more closely attuned to Italy, became the guiding force of the whole English madrigal development. As a pupil of Byrd and a well-connected Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, as the monopolist of music printing after 1596 and as the learned ‘Master’ of A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), Morley occupied a position of considerable prestige and power. He published more madrigals, canzonets and balletts than anyone else, mostly at a time when no-one else was publishing them. His books were almost the only ones to require more than a single edition (though other publications of the time have been shown to exist in several impressions, with the type partly or fully reset but without a new title-page date). Morley established the stylistic norm that was followed, at least in the first instance, by all later English madrigalists.

His first two books are similar in style: the Canzonets or Little Short Songs to Three Voyces (1593) (more accurately, light madrigals) and Madrigalls to Foure Voyces (1594). To Petrarchistic or pastoral verse of trivial quality, Morley adjusted a skilful compound of canzonet and light madrigal ideas, following the words carefully without ever surrendering to them. Counterpoint is employed rather more regularly than with the contemporary Italians, in a simple, clearly harmonic idiom. Morley’s smooth, lively, italianate writing must have caused something of a revelation in the sober world of the Elizabethan consort song.

For his next two books (1595) Morley turned to even lighter models. The Balletts to Five Voyces and Canzonets to Two Voyces consist largely of free transcriptions of the popular ballettos of Gastoldi (see Balletto, §2) and four-voice canzonets by Felice Anerio; Morley’s sets were actually issued in London in parallel English and Italian editions. Derived (or ‘parody’) compositions turn up in his other publications, too, the models ranging from the Domenico Ferrabosco classic Io mi son giovinetta to Giovanni Croce’s Ove tra l’herbe e i fiori from Il trionfo di Dori (1592), which provided the impetus for The Triumphes of Oriana. Then Morley edited two more Italian anthologies, of four-voice canzonets (1597) and five-voice madrigali ariosi (1598). In the latter, it is Ferretti and Giovanelli, not Marenzio, who share pride of place with Ferrabosco.

The late 1590s saw the publication of three pleasant books (by Farnaby, Farmer and Bennet) of four-voice light madrigals inspired by Morley’s 1594 set. But evidently Morley was not the man to lead the way in naturalizing the more serious variety of Italian madrigal for five and six voices. His own examples are few and not always notably successful. The task was left for composers of another new generation, George Kirbye, Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, who first published in 1597–8. It is no doubt significant that Kirbye and Wilbye, with John Ward, were the only madrigalists who seem to have been in the private service of members of the English gentry. Ward’s single madrigal book shows that he was indebted to Wilbye’s serious style and also more conscious of literary values than any other English madrigalist.

In their more serious work, these composers leant further towards the style of Marenzio in the early 1580s. They reacted to words more variously and sensitively than Morley, but at the same time they always seemed to keep purely musical considerations well in mind; they were rarely so concise or mercurial as Marenzio. Effective essays in pathetic expression involving chromaticism, such as Weelkes’s O care thou wilt dispatch mee (1600) and Wilbye’s Oft have I vowde (1609), also reveal a lively appreciation of current Italian practice. In general, though, these composers are less frankly italianate than Morley, less derivative, more imaginative and much more individual. Wilbye must be ranked very high among English composers of the time, in spite of his very small output.

Around 1600 nearly all English composers (except Byrd) seem to have become fascinated by the madrigal style. Farnaby, a virginalist, tried his hand at it, and lutenists such as Thomas Greaves and Michael Cavendish, a gentleman amateur, included some feeble efforts in books of lute ayres. Canzonets were appended to Holborne’s Cittharn Schoole (1597) and in 1601 21 English composers wrote madrigals in praise of their queen for Morley’s The Triumphes of Oriana. With this brilliant exercise in public relations Morley unforgettably implanted the idea of an ‘English madrigal school’ – though some of the contributors had only the faintest idea as to what constituted a madrigal. The Triumphes is a tribute not only to Queen Elizabeth but also to Morley and his successful transformation of the light Italian style into a form that was immediately appealing and viable at home.

Madrigal, §IV: The English madrigal

3. After 1600.

Two years later Morley and Queen Elizabeth were both dead and the madrigal was in decline, a victim of what has been called ‘the disenchantment of the Elizabethans’. A growing mood of pessimism, realism and discipline brought with it a literary and musical reaction against Petrarchism. With the circulation of the early poems of John Donne, literary taste turned against the sonnet sequence and the elegant artificiality of italianate verse. And whereas Morley in A Plaine and Easie Introduction had eulogized the madrigal at considerable length, without so much as mentioning the lute ayre, Campion now prefaced his First Booke of Ayres (1601) with a sharp attack on music ‘which is long, intricate, bated with fuge, chaind with sincopation, and where the nature of everie word is precisely expresst in the Note … such childish observing of words is altogether ridiculous’. The lute ayre, indeed, more natural and more native, was the musical genre that suited the new times (see Air, §2). Dowland’s ayres were published and republished from 1597 onwards, and in the decade 1600–10 more books of lute ayres were issued than madrigal sets. Some popular sets were still reprinted (as also were popular sonnet sequences) and some new composers appeared, but they contributed no real new energy to the madrigal’s development.

The history of the later madrigal, then, comes down to the study of small bodies of work by a number of minor figures. Few of the English madrigalists ever wrote much. Weelkes wrote two books of light music, the Balletts (1598) and Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites (1608), and two more serious books (1597, 1600). Michael East produced four (1604, 1606, 1610, 1618) but they are not exclusively madrigalian. Wilbye produced only two (1598, 1609) and only Bateson (1604, 1618) and Pilkington (1613, 1624) matched him. One book was the limit for Kirbye (1597), Farnaby (1598), Farmer and Bennet (1599), Jones (1607), Youll (1608), Lichfild and Ward (1613), Vautor (1619), Tomkins (1622) and Hilton (1627). There are many charming light madrigals in this later repertory, and some striking serious ones, along with many others that ring endless changes of the stock of formulae laid down by Morley. Elements from the consort song, the anthem and the lute ayre are increasingly in evidence. By the time of the essentially non-madrigalian sets of Peerson (1620, 1630) and Walter Porter (1632), the lute ayre and ‘recitative musicke’ had marked the madrigal as an irretrievable thing of the past.

Throughout the period of the English madrigal certain composers published secular part-music that adheres in one way or another to older, more abstract traditions. These composers apparently ignored or resisted or did not understand the madrigal – its characteristic type of text, its treatment of words, musical texture and harmonic style. Some of the music is very fine; Byrd’s songbooks have already been mentioned, and another prime example is Gibbons’s set of Madrigals and Mottets (1612; the title is revealing). With the decidedly gauche efforts of John Mundy (1594), Carlton (1601) and Alison (1606), too, one hesitates to use the word ‘madrigal’ at all. In fact, some four-part ayres by Dowland better deserve the name.

Madrigal, §IV: The English madrigal

4. Later history.

The later history of the English madrigal has an interest of its own. In the 18th century, in spite of Burney’s snobbish disapproval, madrigals were sung regularly by the catch and glee clubs and by the Madrigal Society, founded in 1741. Antiquarians actually reprinted three sets in full score (with ‘the customary graces’) around 1810, at a time before any publications by such composers as Byrd, Palestrina or Lassus had received similar treatment. A line of enthusiasts starting with Oliphant and Rimbault made the madrigal into the Victorians’ favourite genre of old music. ‘There can be little doubt’, wrote E.H. Fellowes in 1913, ‘that the English Madrigal writers of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period constitute our finest School of national composition’. His famous blue-covered edition The English Madrigal School was one of the first successful musical Gesamtausgaben to be published in Britain.

Since that time, sophisticated musical taste has turned towards other ‘schools of national composition’, and Fellowes’s judgment now seems over-enthusiastic. Now is the Month of Maying, April is in My Mistress’ Face, Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis, The Silver Swan and one or two others are sung happily by many choral groups in Britain and America, whatever their level of accomplishment, but the ‘early music’ movement and its recording arm have generally not been kind to the English madrigal.

Madrigal, §IV: The English madrigal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KermanEM

T. Oliphant: La Musa Madrigalesca (London, 1837)

E.H. Fellowes: English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632 (Oxford, 1920, enlarged 3/1967 by F.W. Sternfeld and D. Greer)

E.H. Fellowes: The English Madrigal Composers (Oxford, 1921, 2/1948/R)

A. Einstein: ‘The Elizabethan Madrigal and “Musica Transalpina”’, ML, xxv (1944), 66–77

A. Obertello: Madrigali italiani in Inghilterra (Milan, 1949)

D. Arnold: ‘Croce and the English Madrigal’, ML, xxxv (1954), 309–19

D. Arnold: ‘Gastoldi and the English Ballett’, MMR, lxxxvi (1956), 44–52

C.A. Murphy: Thomas Morley Editions of Italian Canzonets and Madrigals, 1597–1598 (Tallahassee, FL, 1964)

G.D. Spearritt: ‘The Consort Songs and Madrigals of Richard Nicholson’, Musicology, ii (1965–7), 42–52

L.M. Ruff and D. Wilson: ‘The Madrigal, the Lute Song, and English Politics’, Past and Present, xliv (1969), 3–51

F.J. Fabry: ‘Sidney's Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs’, Renaissance Quarterly, xxiii (1970), 237–55

J. Roche: The Madrigal (London, 1972, 2/1990)

C. Monson: ‘George Kirby and the English Madrigal’, ML, lix (1978), 290–315

H. Wilcox: ‘My Mournful Style: Poetry and Music in the Madrigals of John Ward’, ML, lxi (1980), 60–70

R. Charteris: ‘Newly Identified Italian Madrigals Englished’, ML, lxiii (1982), 276–80

J. Cohen: ‘Thomas Weelkes's Borrowings from Salamone Rossi’, ML, lxvi (1985), 110–17

L.R. Hamessley: The Reception of the Italian Madrigal in England: a Repertorial Study of Manuscript Anthologies, ca. 1580–1620 (diss., U. of Minnesota, 1989)

K.-S. Teo: Chromaticism in the English Madrigal (New York, 1989)

R.K. Duncan-Jones: ‘Melancholic Times: Musical Recollections of Sidney by William Byrd and Thomas Watson’, The Well Enchanting Skill: Essays in Honour of F.W. Sternfeld, ed. J.A. Caldwell, E.D. Olleson and S. Wollenberg (Oxford and New York, 1990), 171–80

J. Caldwell: ‘Secular Vocal Music, 1575–1625’, Oxford History of English Music, vol i (Oxford, 1991), 389–459

L.R. Hamessley: ‘The Tenbury and Ellesmere Partbooks: New Findings on Manuscript Compilation and Exchange, and the Reception of the Italian Madrigal in Elizabethan England’, ML, lxxiii (1992), 177–221

L. Macy: ‘The Due Decorum Kept: Elizabethan Translation and the madrigals Englished of Nicholas Yonge and Thomas Watson’, JMR, xvii (1997), 1–21

Madrigal

V. The madrigal outside Italy and England

The Italian madrigal never became ‘naturalized’ in Spain as it did in other European countries such as England, but there otherwise existed many opportunities for Italian influence on Spanish secular music: political connections with Naples, the port of Barcelona (a centre of trade with Italy) and the fact that Spanish composers travelled abroad (e.g. Mateo Flecha (ii)). The italianate madrigal gained popularity simultaneously with a revival of classical Latin as a literary language, and though Vasquez, a Sevillian, protested against its dullness, there was a tendency for later 16th-century composers such as Mateo Flecha (ii), Guerrero and Brudieu to write such pieces. The library of the Duke of Medinaceli in Madrid furnishes a source of the italianate madrigal in Spain (see Cancionero), while the macaronic ensaladas of Mateo Flecha (i) represent an early example of the parody of madrigal idiom. The Villancico was the genre most similar to the Italia Madrigal, adopting a four-part chordal, syllabic style, a musical structure that abandoned the refrain, and texts sometimes written by the greatest poets (e.g. Lope de Vega). The spiritual madrigal was an Italian type also cultivated in Spain, and well suited to the expressive intensity typical of some Spanish music: Guerrero wrote some fine examples.

In Germany from the 1540s the leading printing centres, Nuremberg and Munich, provided an outlet for Italian madrigal publications. The great era of the German polyphonic lied had passed, and some native composers were preoccupied with the Lutheran chorale; the way was open for influence from Italy on German composers of secular music. Many composers working in Germany set Italian texts as well as German, for example Lassus, Monte and Schütz, and lesser figures such as Leonhard Lechner, Handl, H.L. Hassler, and Scandello, whose Canzoni napoletane of 1566 were the first settings of Italian texts to appear in Germany. The influence of the Italian canzonetta and light madrigal was specially important in the works of Regnart. Both the lighter forms and more complex structures appear in Hassler's secular music, to German or Italian texts: the pieces in the four-part Canzonette of 1590 recall the works of Orazio Vecchi in style and use characteristic refrain schemes such as AABCC; those in the 1596 Madrigali are more akin to Marenzio's in manner, though not so deftly written; a double-choir German piece, Mein Lieb will mit mir kriegen, is utterly Venetian in spirit, as befits the work of one who went to Italy to study with Andrea Gabrieli. The latter's nephew Giovanni taught a later generation of northerners, including Johann Grabbe from Westphalia, around the turn of the century. Grabbe's madrigals exhibit a semi-concertato style: Ardo sì begins with a lengthy passage stressing the polarity between two treble parts and the bass.

Antwerp, as a main publishing centre, was the principal outlet for Italian madrigals in the Netherlands. Hubert Waelrant's publication of 1558 included 18 Italian madrigals (as well as French chansons), but a more active period for Netherlandish madrigalists was 1596–1623, when anthologies of works mostly by Italians also included madrigals by Verdonck, Schuyt and Sweelinck (all three are represented in Phalèse's collection Nervi d'Orfeo, 1605). Sweelinck's Rimes françoises et italiennes of 1612 contains two- and three-voice ‘madrigaletti’ whose somewhat earnest style recalls Lassus's sacred bicinia rather than Morley's canzonets. Two impressive six-part madrigals by Sweelinck appear in another Phalèse anthology, the Ghirlanda di madrigali of 1601.

The court of King Christian IV of Denmark was cosmopolitan in outlook, and at the beginning of the 17th century three of its musicians, Melchior Borchgrevinck, Mogens Pedersøn and Hans Nielsen, were sent to study with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. Their studies bore fruit in collections of madrigals published in 1606–9, which reveal that, though their teacher insisted on a self-sufficient five-part scoring without continuo, they were quite abreast of the most modern Italian expressive techniques – even those of Monteverdi's fourth and fifth madrigal books. The madrigals are full of vivid contrasts, impassioned melodic leaps, dramatic silences and bold chromaticisms and harmonic juxtapositions.

In Poland during the reign of Queen Bona, after 1522, numerous Italian musicians arrived to serve at the Polish court, and this contact with Italian music effected a change in the Polish secular vocal texts towards a more intimate style. An early Italian madrigal idiom is discernible, for instance, in Aleć nade mna Wenus, in the tablature of Jan z Lublina, a source which also includes many intabulations of Italian madrigals. The late 16th-century Kraków Tablature contains many Polish madrigal texts, the discovery of which has made possible the reconstruction of other works in this genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Arnold: ‘Gli allievi di Giovanni Gabrieli’, NRMI, v (1971), 943–72

J. Roche: The Madrigal (London, 1972, 2/1990)

S. Schmalzriedt: Heinrich Schütz und andere zeitgenössische Musiker in der Lehre Giovanni Gabrielis (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1972)

N. Bolin: ‘Heinrich Schütz's dänische Kollegen’, Concerto, v (1984), 45–61

F. Piperno: ‘Polifonisti dell'Italia meridionale nelle antologie madrigalistiche d'oltralpe (1601–1616)’, La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento: Naples 1985, 77–92

K.K. Forney: ‘Antwerp's Role in the Reception and Dissemination of the Madrigal in the North’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, i, 239–53

B. Smallman: ‘Pastoralism, Parody and Pathos: the Madrigal in Germany, 1570–1630’, MMA, xv (1988), 6–20

M. Morell: ‘Georg Knoff: Bibliophile and Devotee of Italian Music in Late Sixteenth-Century Danzig’, Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles and Contexts, ed. J. Kmetz (Cambridge, 1994), 103–26

R.A. Rasch and T. Wind: ‘The Music Library of Cornelis Schuyt’, From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders, ed. A. Clements and E. Jas (Amsterdam, 1994), 327–53