The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 24 (2018) No. 1

Rethinking Claudio Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals (1619) via Giovan Battista Marino’s La lira (1614)

Federico Schneider*

Abstract

This essay proposes to rethink Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals via the poetics of a literary work that is prominently featured in the collection: Giovan Battista Marino’s La lira. Despite its fragmented and heterogeneous matter, Marino’s collection of love poetry is an apparently organic work where, within a conceptual groundwork (the love-war theme), an established generative principle (the love-war-weapons-of-love trope) informs a masterful use, re-use, and even fruitful abuse of the canzoniere form. Such idiosyncratic approach to Petrarchan form arguably provides a context for finding further meaning in the music and poetry featured in the Seventh Book.

1. Introduction

2. Marino’s Idiosyncratic Petrarchism

3. La lira: The Love and War Theme Introduced

4. La lira: Continuity and Unity

5. Monteverdi’s Seventh Book: The Significance of Its Proem

6. Monteverdi’s Seventh Book as a Marinist Musical Canzoniere

7. Monteverdi’s Marinist Strategy in Con che soavità

Acknowledgements

Examples

Table

References

1. Introduction

1.1 In a well-known passage of his epic L’Adone (published in 1623), the poet Giovan Battista Marino paid tribute to the celebrated performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s Arianna that had taken place in Mantua in 1608, for the nuptials of Margherita of Savoy and Francesco Gonzaga:^[1]

E ’n tal guisa Florinda udisti, o Manto,
là ne’ teatri de’ tuoi regi tetti
d’Arianna spiegar gli aspri martiri
e trar da mille cor mille sospiri. (7.88)^[2]

(Thus you, Mantua, heard Florinda there in theaters of your royal city sing of Ariadne’s bitter trials and from a thousand hearts move a thousand sighs.)

Without in any way diminishing the merits of the greatest among Monteverdi’s lost works, one could also read this passage as Marino’s belated token of gratitude to a composer who had made him a central figure in his musical production. Monteverdi’s artistic encounter with the Neapolitan poet can be traced back to around 1610, when he was working on his Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614). That work marked the beginning of a relationship that lasted for at least thirty years and inspired many of the composer’s future madrigalistic enterprises.^[3] Particularly significant is the Seventh Book of Madrigals (1619), which features a conspicuous number of settings—a total of six—based on texts from Marino’s La lira (1602–1614).

1.2 In the late twentieth century, some music historians argued that, in the Seventh Book, Monteverdi’s subscription to Marino’s poetics entailed a move toward a less inspired interpretation of the text than in his earlier madrigals, and even an intentional break of the tie of music to poetry. Nino Pirrotta and Gary Tomlinson (albeit each in his own way) maintained that the encounter of Monteverdi with Marino’s poetry signaled the beginning of a superficial mode in the composer’s creativity. As a starting point for this argument, Tomlinson drew a stark divide between, on the one hand, poets who emphasized soul-searching introspection and spiritual dilemma in the tradition of Petrarch, and, on the other, Marino and his followers, more interested in sensory experience, tactile delight, and a superficial and witty play of ideas accomplished with metaphors and epigrams.^[4] Pirrotta saw the glittering and shallow context of “marinismo” as a convenient means for the composer to conceal a sensitivity that, in his new position as the maestro di cappella of St. Mark’s, could have been too revealing—hence the move from a more expressive style that Pirrotta called cantar recitando to the more restrained recitar cantando, and also the return to madrigalism, which the composer had put on hold in order to develop his theatrical style.^[5] Tomlinson held that compared to the elegiac mode of the Sixth Book, most of the texts in the Seventh Book are “carefree ruminations on Cupid’s pleasures.” Tomlinson thus characterized the Marinist poetic vision as a “flight from deep introspective expression” and argued that Monteverdi’s encounter with such poetics compelled him to create a musical language that vividly conveyed the ornamental hedonism of the Marinist texts. This language, most effectively displayed in the melismatic duets, incorporates animated and reiterated declamation achieved through repeated eighth-note patterns—usually associated with a walking bass—and the quick alternation of short motives in the top voices.^[6] Finally, Laura Davey saw an increasing tension between poetic and musical forms in the late madrigals of Monteverdi, and argued that this would eventually cause the sisterly tie of poetry and music to break.^[7]

1.3 In the ensuing decades other musicologists have approached Marino’s contribution to Monteverdi’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Books of Madrigals from other points of view, often taking a more positive approach to the music-text relationship in Monteverdi’s Marinist works.^[8] They have delved into Marino’s poetic imagery and its classical sources, finding new meanings (whether psychological or aesthetic) in Monteverdi’s musical responses. They have considered Marino’s often intentionally ambiguous approach to narration and voice, showing this to be a rich vein for Monteverdi to exploit. Finally, in direct response to Gary Tomlinson, Roseen Giles has argued that Marino’s poetry inspired Monteverdi to create a new musical language that did not merely translate poetic images into music but “created a dynamic relationship between poetry and music”: “Poetry and music resemble one another in their capacity for beauty and wonderment, but are perpetually in competition with one another, each attempting to outwit the other at every turn.”^[9]

1.4 Yet for all the progress that has been made toward a more sympathetic understanding of Monteverdi’s Marinism, the belief that Marino’s approach was anti-Petrarchan has gone unchallenged by musicologists.^[10] This essay will offer a new critical perspective on Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals—not, however, a deductive one, which moves to the music from a general notion of Marinism,^[11] but rather one that moves from the particular: specifically, from the one work by Marino that the Seventh Book directly references and which, as will be pointed out, arguably inspires Monteverdi’s choice and musical treatment of poetic texts. In short, we need to rethink Monteverdi’s seventh collection of madrigals via the love poetry of La lira—or better, via an understanding of the poetics underlying that poetry: Marino’s idiosyncratic approach to Petrarchan form. This means embracing a scholarly perspective that considers La lira not as a rejection of Petrarchist ideology but rather as Marino’s unique way to engage creatively with that ideology. This essay starts with an analysis of Marino’s La lira (Chapters 2–4 below) and then turns to Monteverdi’s Seventh Book (Chapters 5–7).

2. Marino’s Idiosyncratic Petrarchism

2.1 Marino’s La lira is a large body of poems—mostly love poems—in three parts. The first two, Rime: Parte prima and Rime: Parte seconda (henceforth Rime 1 and Rime 2) were first published in Venice in 1602, by Giovan Battista Ciotti; they were subsequently heavily edited by Marino and republished by Ciotti in 1614, with an additional third part, Della lira: Parte terza (henceforth Lira 3).^[12]  Although Marino generally claims that his lyric poetry serves the sole purpose of titillating the “appetites” of readers (“gli appetiti del mondo”),^[13] before long one realizes that what is taking place in La lira is actually far from mere titillation.

2.2 Some scholarship addressing this issue in the last few decades has convincingly linked La lira to the great Italian lyrical tradition rooted in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (hereafter RVF) and his Triumphi.^[14] Ottavio Besomi, for instance, traces Marino’s inventive and varied use of pairs of images and ideas, often in antithesis, to Petrarch’s practices. He traces the metaphors of love—Cupid as a fisherman, the beloved as a songbird, Cupid hidden in the eyes of the beloved, and so on—from Petrarch to Marino by way of a long literary tradition. This scholarship in turn has raised reasonable doubts regarding Marino’s relevance for the seventeenth-century Italian literary avant-garde movement that bears his name (“Marinism”) and has led to a revision of earlier characterizations of him as a markedly “Baroque” or bizarre or anti-Petrarchan poet.

2.3 Subsequent efforts have tried to further nuance the Petrarchan quality of La lira: by situating its overabundant, heterogeneous, and fragmented content in the context of an unorthodox approach to Petrarchist poetics (in particular with regard to inventio and dispositio); by warily using the Petrarchist qualifier (hence the more cautious labeling “postpetrarchista”); and by recognizing that there is also a definite anti-Petrarchan quality to Marino’s poetry. Alessandro Martini presents Marino as the master of the epigrammatic sonnet, the madrigal, and the canzonetta—all relatively new genres—but at the same time “hyper-Petrarchan” in his handling of stanza structure in certain lengthy poems. In an extended discussion of Marino’s ideas and verbal expression, Martini carefully points out a number of instances in which Marino’s perfect imitation of Petrarch’s language actually serves a parodic or subversive, and even blasphemous, function. As for the overarching structure of the Petrarchan canzoniere (cyclic poem collection), he writes that Marino splinters it to the point that no unified narrative remains.^[15]

2.4 Martini, then, provides a preliminary explanation of the anti-Petrarchan aspects of La lira in the context of a formalistic play between micro- and macrotext, along with useful terminology—such as hyper-Petrarchism and post-Petrarchism—to describe such play.^[16]  Yet I contend that La lira is an organic Petrarchan work. This idea might seem counterintuitive, especially in view of Lira 3, whose patent diversity with respect to the whole led Emilio Russo to evaluate Rime 1 and Rime 2 separately from Lira 3.^[17] Nonetheless, the discussion that follows attempts to understand La lira as a coherent three-step poetic program articulated through Rime 1, Rime 2, and Lira 3, under the aegis of a Petrarchan ideology.

3. La lira: The Love and War Theme Introduced

3.1 A first important observation in this respect concerns the first proem,^[18] “Altri canti di Marte, e di sua schiera,” and more specifically the well-known antithesis between love and war suggested by the juxtaposition of the theme of war (first quatrain) with that of love (second quatrain and first tercet).^[19] What has so far gone unnoticed, however, is the fact that this antithesis is actually belied at the syntactic level, where, instead, the languages of war and love are repeatedly linked through a subject/verb relationship. This happens in the second quatrain (line 7)—guardo (love) / vinse (war), crin (love) / prese (war)—and at the beginning of the first tercet (lines 9­–10)—occhi (love) / trafitta giacque (war):

[1] Altri canti di Marte, e di sua schiera
gli arditi assalti, e l’onorate imprese,
le sanguigne vittorie, e le contese,
i trionfi di Morte, orrida e fera.

[5] I’ canto, Amor, da questa tua Guerriera
quant’ebbi a sostener mortali offese,
come un guardo mi vinse, un crin mi prese:
istoria miserabile, ma vera.

[9] Duo begli occhi fur l’armi, onde trafitta
giacque, e di sangue in vece amaro pianto
sparse lunga stagion l’anima afflitta.

[12] Tu, per lo cui valor la palma e ’l vanto
ebbe di me la mia nemica invitta,
se desti morte al cor, da’ vita al canto. (Rime 1, no. 1)

(May someone else sing of Mars and his troops’ brave assaults and honorable deeds, bloody struggles and victories, triumphs of horrible and savage Death. // I sing, god of Love, of this she-warrior of yours whose many mortal offenses I had to endure, how her gaze conquered me, her tresses ensnared me: a story miserable and yet true. // Two beautiful eyes were the weapons that pierced and left my afflicted soul shedding bitter tears instead of blood, for a long time. // You, whose valor gave proud victory over me to my fierce, invincible enemy, you, who killed my heart, now give life to my song.)

If, then, there is a juxtaposition of love and war in this poem, one must conclude that, contrary to what was previously thought, its function is to unify love and war.

3.2 In this respect, it is important to note that the anti-epic quality generally attributed by scholars to this seminal sonnet (and in turn to Marino’s love poetry as a whole) rests exactly on the perceived antithesis between love and war and (by extension) between the kinds of poetry for which love and war stand: lyric poetry and epic respectively. As has just been demonstrated, however, the juxtaposition of love and war in this sonnet actually serves to unify the two; that fact in turn challenges the supposed anti-epic quality of the first proem and suggests a much closer link between Marino’s La lira and Petrarchan poetics. As early as the 1520s, Petrarch’s love-romance, as described in RVF, was read as a battle of epic proportions, of the soul against vice; Petrarch’s canzoniere was even compared to the Iliad and the Aeneid. Of course, this observation includes Petrarchist poetry (Petrarchism being the ideology responsible for the survival of Petrarchan poetics in the sixteenth-century), whose epic aspirations are well-known.^[20] That notwithstanding, there is also an undeniable anti-epic pose in the first proem of La lira that will have to be factored into Marino’s poetics.

3.3 It is also important to note that in “Altri canti di Marte” love and war are unified not just at the syntactic level but also through an all-encompassing love-war metaphor: the “gaze” by which the poet was “conquered,” the “tresses” in which he was “ensnared” (line 7); and finally the “eyes” by which he was “pierced” (lines 9–10). At first, one might be led to think (especially given the importance of the proemial sonnet in the canzoniere form) that Marino here capitalizes on the conspicuous repertoire of love-war metaphors that can be found in Petrarch’s RVF.^[21] Marino, however, goes back to the source of the conceit informing such metaphors—the love-war topos of Ovid’s Amores 1.9, including its occasional extension into the conceit of the wounding weapons of Cupid;^[22] moreover, he creatively elaborates that topos, according to the tenets of concettismo (as such witty word-play was called), into an expanded love-war-weapons-of-love trope: from assaults and deeds, struggles and victories (war: lines 2–3) to a gaze, tresses, and two beautiful eyes (weapons of love: lines 7, 9).^[23] This is a meaningful aspect of inventio and needs to be carefully considered, because it suggests far more than the well-known fact that La lira owes a debt to Ovid’s erotic poetry—a debt that is self-declared^[24] and honored with a conspicuous tribute: Marino’s choice of Amori as the title for one section of La lira.

3.4 The juxtaposition of love and war in the proem, then, serves first and foremost to set the stage for a new poetic principle—not just the Ovidian love-war theme but the concettista elaboration of that theme. As the typology in Table 1 shows, this principle systematically informs the well-known unfettered exponential multiplication of erotic images that characterizes La lira as a whole.^[25] That is, the love-war-weapons-of-love trope in its manifold variations (physiognomic, material, psychic, and aural) is the poetic means of choice driving and informing such multiplication.^[26] It is, then, a generative poetic principle. The extraordinary result is an erotic and playful canzoniere, but with a cognitive function (as opposed to just a titillating one).

3.5 In this light, one may argue that the juxtaposition between love and war in the proem serves to usher in a legitimate Petrarchan (or better, Petrarchist) poetics, if also an idiosyncratic one, for it is a poetics free from the traditional moralizing intentions (which explains the anti-epic pose) that instead allocates its moralizing aspirations to an erotic-cognitive sphere. For moralizing (in a Petrarchan sense) is not what Marino has in mind. His goal, rather, is to incorporate the cognitive aspirations of concettismo into Ovid’s erotic poetry, thus creating something new.^[27] The point not to be missed here (so as to fully grasp the import of Marino’s genius and its possible influence on Monteverdi) is that there is a huge difference between rehashing the Ovidian love-war theme and effectively upgrading that theme so as to meet the lofty aspirations of late sixteenth-century Petrarchist poetics: the former amounts to little more than an anti-Petrarchan swerve; the latter suggests an extraordinary experiment in Petrarchan form.

4. La lira: Continuity and Unity

4.1 “Altri canti di Marte, e di sua schiera,” then, as one would expect from a proem, is a programmatic piece introducing the generative principle pertaining to Marino’s canzoniere.^[28] This alone, however, would hardly suffice to provide a sense of coherence and continuity to the whole La lira, with its overabundant, heterogeneous, and fragmented content, and its rather different three parts, especially Lira 3. That is why the poetic principle resurfaces at other strategic points in the collection, in order to reinforce the coherence of each part with the whole.

4.2 A case in point is the last poem of the collection of love poems (the Amori section) in the final volume of La lira: the lengthy Ovidian canzone “Amore incostante” (Lira 3, no. 136).^[29] Here—at the very end of the Amori collection, and in perfect symmetry with the opening sonnet of the Rime amorose collection, the proem of Rime 1—one finds an Ovidian flair, as well as an extensive catalog of the wounding weapons of love, clearly reiterating the love-war-weapons-of-love trope and thereby reinforcing its generative function. Thus, the beautiful physical forms of a lady are snares (lines 32–34). The beauty of youth, and especially the eyes, prick and captivate, and the beauty of old age does the same with its solemn demeanor (37–42).

[31] Quante forme repente
offre l’occhio a la mente,
tante son lacci ed ami
perch’io vie più sempr’ami:
or per una languisco,
or per altra mi struggo, e ’ncenerisco.

[37] Me la fresca beltate,
me la più tarda etate
infiamma e punge e prende.
Quella però che ’ncende
con le grazie e co’ lumi,
questa con gli atti gravi, e co’ costumi.

(The sudden forms the eye offers to the mind are so many traps and hooks to make me love much more and more: now I languish for one woman, now for another am destroyed and turned to ashes. // Fresh beauty or maturer age inflame and spur and take me: the former sets me on fire with her graces and her eyes, the latter with her stately gestures and her ways.)

The laughter of a lady is a dart (85–86). Her tears are, metonymically, a wound (87–88); and even if she neither smiles nor cries, she kills still (89–90).

[85] Se ride un’Angeletta,
quel suo riso è saetta.
Se piange, a la mia vita
quel suo pianto è ferita.
Se non piagne né ride,
senza stral, senza piaga ancor m’uccide.

(If an angelic little creature laughs, that [laugh] of hers is an arrow; if she weeps, her weeping is a wound in my life; if she neither weeps nor laughs, without arrow, or wound, she still kills me.)

The hand of a lady playing a string instrument ensnares and wounds (97–102). A well-clad and graciously dancing lady ensnares (103–108). Finally, a lady reciting poetry wounds with the lines she recites and with the looks she gives, and then heals with the very same means (109–14).

[97] Ove fra lieta schiera
fanciulla lusinghiera
batta con dita argute
dolci fila minute,
qual alma non fie vaga
d’aver da man sì dotta e laccio e piaga?

[103] Veder per piagge o valli
giovinetta che balli
in vago abito adorno
portar con arte intorno
il piede e la persona,
e qual rustico cor non imprigiona?

[109] Se m’incontro in bellezza
a star tra ’l coro avezza
de le nove Sirene
di Pindo e d’Hippocrene,
con gli sguardi e co’ carmi
può ferirmi in un punto, e può sanarmi.

(Where an alluring girl in a gay company strikes the sweet, fine cords with subtle fingers, what soul would not desire to be caught and wounded by so expert a hand? // See a young girl dancing by bank or valley, graceful in a fair dress, who skillfully whirls body and foot; and what rustic heart does she not imprison? // If I meet a beauty that can take her place beside the nine sirens of Pindus and Hippocrene, with her looks and songs she can wound me and, at the same time, heal me.)

In this great catalog, any other phenomenon of love not directly described as a specific weapon may still be associated with one, at least metonymically, given the consistent use of the metaphor throughout.

4.3 The proem of Lira 3 provides perhaps an even more convincing case in point. As a matter of fact, saying that this particular sonnet (which, by the way, also appears as the proemial composition of Monteverdi’s Seventh Book) merely rehearses the Ovidian love-war theme would be an egregious understatement. Rather, this is yet another instance in the collection where the love-war theme undergoes a concettista elaboration. This time, however, the elaboration takes place at the level of the signifier: almost in an attempt at creating a phonetic emblem of the concettista trope itself, Marino focuses on just its two key syntagms—AMOR and ARMI: love and weapons—and turns them into the generative “musical” cell of the entire sonnet:

[1] Tempro la cetra, e per cantar gli onORI
di Marte, alzo talor lo stile, e i cARMI.
Ma invan la tento, ed impossibil pARMI
ch’ella gaimai risoni altro ch’AMORI.

[5] Così pur tra l’arene, e pur tra’ fiORI
note AMORose AMOR torna a dettARMI,
né vuol ch’io prenda ancora a cantar d’ARMI,
se non di quelle ond’egli impiaga i cORI.

[9] Or l’umil plettro ai rozzi accenti indegni,
Musa, qual dianzi, accorda, in fin ch’al vanto^[30]
de la tromba sublime il Ciel ti degni.

[12] Riede ai teneri scherzi; e dolce intanto
lo Dio Guerrier, temprando i feri sdegni,
in grembo a Citherea dorma al tuo canto. (Lira 3, no. 1)

(I temper my lyre, and to sing the praises of Mars, I at times elevate the style and rhymes, but in vain are my efforts, and it seems impossible that [my lyre] may ever sing of something other than love. // So, whether in arenas or flowery meadows, the god of Love still dictates notes of love to me and does not want me to sing of any weapons but those he uses to wound hearts. // Now the humble plectrum and rugged accents attune, o Muse, as before, so that in the end heaven may make you worthy of a sublime trumpet. // Meanwhile, to playful games may the warring god go back, tempering with sweet the fierce, and may your song lull him to sleep on Venus’s lap.)

This, then, is not just a sonnet whose relevance is manifest in the prominent position it occupies in the collection; it is not even just the opening sonnet of what Marino must have eventually deemed to be the most noteworthy part of the collection—thus the significant change of title (from the former Rime to La lira) that coincides with the belated publication of Lira 3 in 1614. Rather this sonnet, by means of its two key syntagms (AMOR and ARMI), actually turns out to be a “musical” endorsement of the entire collection’s generative principle: the love-war-weapons-of-love trope.

4.4 To make sure that the reader will not miss that, Marino attaches a dedicatory letter, stating that he is now finally ready to publicly display what he calls “the sound of his style (il suono del suo stile).”^[31] A sample of such style follows at the end of the letter, where the poet first establishes a crucial phonetic kinship at the level of the signifier—between himself (MARINO), the birth place of Venus (MARE), and the matter over which she presides (AMORE), which in turn is also the poet’s primary source of inspiration—and then links that kinship to the DORIA family, whose power and might come from the sea (MARE):

Et avendo (come si è detto) la casa DORIA tanta potestà sopra le cose marine, essendo questa opera del MARINO, essendo la Dea d’Amore nata dal Mare, et essendo poesie la maggior parte amorose, o almeno essendole per amore dedicate, a niuno meglio si convenivano ch’a V.S. Illustrissima …

(And the house of DORIA having (as it is said) such power over maritime matters, this work being by MARINO, the Goddess of Love being born in the Sea, and these being mainly love poems, or at least poems inspired by love, they are suited to none better than to Your most illustrious Lordship …)

This playful set of phonetic and semantic relationships hinges on two main pivot points: the sea, related to the poet phonetically and the patron politically (MARE-MARINO, MARE-DORIA); and love, linked semantically (in that it is the matter of poetry) to the patron and phonetically to the sea (AMORE-DORIA, AMORE-MARE) and thus joining the poet to his patron (MARINO-AMORE-DORIA).^[32] Combining these linkages results in a significant “musical” progression, MARINO–MARE–AMORE–MARE–DORIA, which (given what has just emerged in this discussion) is probably instrumental in orienting the careful reader, not just with respect to the dedicatee of Lira 3 (and more generally with respect to Marino’s new witty musical playfulness), but also with respect to an intelligent reading of the proemial sonnet of Lira 3 in the context of the entire collection.

4.5 Rime 2, subtitled Madrigali e canzoni,^[33] while somewhat different in content from the volumes framing it, plays its part. Along with appearances of other love-weapon conceits, the metaphor of the voice as a weapon is pervasive throughout the volume. The opening madrigal makes direct reference to the “cantatrice crudele” (the cruel female singer)—the Circe-like figure who unleashes the power of the voice-weapon in these madrigals and canzones, which are delightful yet dangerous forms of poetic wooing. Also noteworthy is the well-known cycle Marino devotes to the kiss, which he characterizes as Cupid’s sweet and deadly wounding weapon.^[34]

4.6 All things considered—the three poems discussed here in detail, the word-play in Marino’s dedicatory letter, the metaphors in Rime 2, and the systematic typology presented in Table 1—one may conclude that La lira, despite its fragmented and heterogeneous matter, is an apparently organic work where, within a conceptual groundwork (the love-war theme), an established generative principle (the love-war-weapons-of-love trope) informs a masterful use, re-use, and even fruitful abuse of the canzoniere form. Therefore, if (as Martini suggested) La lira reflects a protean whim sweeping through the canzoniere form,^[35] we may now add that there is also a distinct element of continuity and unity that can be detected in that work: it consists in the generative concettista love-war-weapons-of-love trope that runs throughout (i.e., in all three parts that constitute La lira); and the aforementioned “musical” AMOR-ARMI pun—another “verbal image” in its own right^[36]—may be its belated poetic seal.^[37] This key factor allows us to understand La lira as the result of a coherent poetic program, which one may dub Marino’s idiosyncratic Petrarchism.

5. Monteverdi’s Seventh Book: The Significance of Its Proem

5.1 Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of Madrigals was published in Venice in 1619. The composer entitled the volume Concerto—not just a reference to the concerted style but also a way to designate a miscellany, bringing different genres of music and poetry together.^[38] The book displays a great variety of musical textures and poetic types, giving it enormous expressive strength.^[39]

5.2 That publication date is only five years after the first integral publication of Marino’s collection of love poetry, with its new title: La lira. It is quite likely that such a substantial publication,^[40] by someone who was considered a rising star in the Italian Parnassus (and already quite a controversial one, too), might have been the editorial event of the year, if not of the decade. That could certainly help explain the conspicuous presence of six poems from La lira in Monteverdi’s Seventh Book.

5.3 In light of the discussion presented in the first part of this essay, however, one may want to elaborate further on Marino’s influence on the Seventh Book. A good place to start is Monteverdi’s setting of Marino’s proem for Lira 3 (discussed above), Tempro la cetra, e per cantar gli onori. Monteverdi’s choice and placement of this poem, along with his musical setting, clearly suggest an endorsement of Marino.^[41] This sonnet setting opens Monteverdi’s collection; in a culture that understood madrigal books as canzonieri,^[42] the first song in the book had the important role of a proem. In support of that point, in this case Monteverdi’s setting mimics an operatic prologue: a first-person declaration, set as strophic variations for a solo voice over continuo, the segments framed by a sinfonia and separated by ritornellos.^[43]

5.4 In understanding the programmatic function of this madrigal—i.e., its role in introducing the collection—Paolo Fabbri focuses on its apparent rejection of the elevated epic in favor of a lyrical and erotic middle ground: the speaker tries to sing the praises of Mars but is able to sing only of love. What follows is indeed a book of love songs. “If one can again follow a hint from the title, the choice of texts here [mostly by Marino and Giovanni Battista Guarini] provides a ‘concerto’ of very diverse elements related to the dominant theme of love.”^[44]

5.5 Yet we now know that an additional layer of meaning is present—that the poetic text of that composition is actually programmatic in its own right, in Marino’s original work. More specifically, we know that the encrypted AMOR-ARMI pun featured in that poetic text captures emblematically, in its phonetic essence, the generative principle that informs Marino’s innovative Petrarchist poetics in La lira. (See above, par. 4.3.)

5.6 In considering how that poetic layer of meaning plays out in Monteverdi’s madrigals, we might naturally wonder how the composer understood Marino’s poems. Did he discuss them with anyone? Equally to the point, did people associated with Monteverdi understand the poetry as I have presented it here? We know that Monteverdi retained a strong relationship with the ducal house of Mantua even after his move to Venice in 1613—indeed, the Seventh Book is dedicated to the duchess, Caterina de’ Medici—and that the duke, Ferdinando Gonzaga, was a personal friend of Marino, whom he held in great esteem.^[45] The composer had also begun to develop relationships in Venice, a city with a vibrant academic and intellectual life. Yet beyond that, anything we might say is pure hypothesis. Still, as I shall argue here, the content of Monteverdi’s book suggests that he understood and adopted Marino’s program, whether on his own initiative or at someone else’s prompting. In short, I propose that we place the following discussion in the framework of Monteverdi’s poetic choices or (maybe even better) Monteverdi’s poetic presences.^[46]

5.7 We may, then, want to consider, at least as a hypothesis, that Monteverdi’s choice to use the programmatic sonnet of La lira as the proem of his Seventh Book was neither simply a tribute to Marino’s fame nor just a means of introducing a book of love songs, but rather an open endorsement of Marino’s idiosyncratic Petrarchist approach embedded in that programmatic sonnet. The following discussion intends to show that embracing this hypothesis may offer a new outlook on a number of poetic and musical features in the Seventh Book; perhaps most importantly, it may help us to understand the Marinist quality of this collection in the broader context of Monteverdi’s own experiments with the very concept of the book of madrigals as musical canzoniere.^[47]

5.8 The first hint that Monteverdi’s Seventh Book subscribes to Marino’s poetic agenda in La lira is found in the instrumental portions of the proem. The opening sinfonia, comprising three phrases in a slow duple meter, has the character of a dignified pavan, here evoking a lyrical theatrical entrance. Its last phrase is then used as a ritornello, punctuating the vocal segments. After the final vocal cadence, the sinfonia returns in its entirety, but this time with a surprise after the third cadence: the sudden introduction of proportio sesquialtera and an entirely new musical idea with the character of a lively dance—fifteen short phrases (which are then repeated), all identical in rhythmic profile. After that remarkable change in musical affect, the original meter and mood return, for one final statement of the three principal phrases. (See Example 1.)

5.9 While not a textbook example of stile concitato, the lively contrasting section—with its triadic melodies and its simple, repetitive rhythms and harmonies—does evoke that style, calling to mind Monteverdi’s triple meter sections that (as Tomlinson puts it) “capture the poet’s metaphor of love-as-war in bellicose repeated chords and fanfare like triadic melodies.”^[48] With Marino’s poem in mind, listeners can easily perceive the lively instrumental section as a reference to war (“to sing the praises of Mars”) and the slow and lyrical instrumental theme as a reference to love. Thus, the entire concluding sinfonia is a cogent musical expression of the war-love theme: “Meanwhile, to playful games may the warring god go back, tempering with sweet the fierce, and may your song lull him to sleep on Venus’s lap.” Moreover, while the love affect dominates the instrumental framework as a whole, Monteverdi ultimately juxtaposes it with war and unifies the two themes tonally (both of them centered on G), and he consolidates that unifying effect by transitioning in and out of the war affect: love–war–love.^[49] In light of Marino’s love-war-weapons-of-love trope, which the sonnet emblematically captures by means of its AMOR-ARMI pun, the concluding sinfonia may be understood as a summing up: a musical structure that is entirely coherent with the sonnet it sets, one that also juxtaposes love and war precisely to unify them.^[50] The reprise of the sinfonia thus does not merely stage the love-war theme but gives it a particular nuance, which Marino’s original poem emblematically captures, and which informs the poetic principle of La lira. That in turn allows us to contemplate the sinfonia as both an integral musical piece and an effective agent of Marinist meaning.

6. Monteverdi’s Seventh Book as a Marinist Musical Canzoniere

6.1 Monteverdi’s proem, then, might provide a recognizable seal, in both its text and its music, for a collection of madrigals aspiring to the status of a Marinist (i.e., idiosyncratic Petrarchist) canzoniere modeled after La lira. Support for this hypothesis may be found in Monteverdi’s choice of texts for the book as a whole. The texts he sets to music in the Seventh Book, whether by Marino or by other authors, are mostly clustered not just around the theme of love-war but rather around the Marinist theme of the wounding weapons of love,^[51] often the very same weapons that are found in La lira.

6.2 For example, in O come sei gentile, which is not by Marino but by Guarini, the similitude of the lover and the bird brings forth the issue of love-captivity, which appears among the “psychic” weapons of love in Marino’s La lira (see Table 1). The poet-lover, like the bird in the cage, laments his imprisonment. The analogy, however, turns into a surprising antithesis in the last conceit, where the bird is said to live to sing its sorrow, whereas the poet dies: “vivi cantando, ed io cantando moro” (“singing you live, whereas I die while singing”). This last line of the madrigal, to which Monteverdi devotes more than one-fourth of the whole composition, playfully (yet significantly) challenges a commonplace of the idealistic code of courtly love: the servitude of love is here turned into a lethal captivity of love—one that is a far cry from Petrarch’s love-death theme, in that it is completely without any edifying quality. Moreover, the envoi quoted above directly recalls the programmatic madrigal Questi vaghi concenti in the Fifth Book—where the speaker, imagining himself able to grieve as sweetly as birds do, wishes that his sorrows were eternal because their musical expression (“il dolce languire”) would delight his beloved^[52]—and yet this is another viable moralizing remedy O come sei gentile seems to rule out. As a matter of fact, here the window of opportunity for an analogy between the bird and the lover, and thus for an idealized or courtly view of love (and maybe of song too), has definitely expired,^[53] and all that is left is the awareness of a captivity of love that has been turned into a pathological state: a wounding weapon of love, here playfully denounced. The obsessive repetition of the refrain in Monteverdi’s setting is a well-rehearsed stylistic feature, underscoring the pain inflicted by this particular weapon of love.

6.3 In fact, the “psychic” weapons category is Monteverdi’s main focus. The “love-captivity” theme is found again in Soave libertate, albeit here approached through the classicist detachment and linguistic restraint of Gabriello Chiabrera. Another of Cupid’s psychic weapons is addressed in the diptych Ah che non si conviene and Non vedrò mai le stelle (both of which are anonymous), where Monteverdi focuses on betrayal. The bold declaration of everlasting loyalty in the first (“e viver vostro e morir vostro i’ voglio”) enhances by contrast the grief of the betrayed lover in the second (“tradir amante sotto fe’ d’amore”). Interestingly, the repetitive, close imitative writing of the two tenors that characterizes Monteverdi’s setting of these passages seems to corroborate at the musical level their thematic relatedness. Ecco vicine o bella tigre (by Claudio Achillini) is centered around the popular theme of the lover’s departure, another source of grievance widely present in contemporary lyric poetry; it also inspires Se pur destina (by Ottavio Rinuccini), one of the two love letters set by Monteverdi in the Seventh Book. Parlo miser o taccio (by Guarini) is devoted to the forced silence imposed on the frustrated lover by a courtly decorum that seems (at least from the perspective of the speaker) more hypocritical than ethical, while Tu dormi (by an anonymous author) is centered around a frustrated lover’s restless nights. Interrotte speranze, which Guarini addresses to “a woman who prides herself on giving death to him who loves her,” features a number of psychic weapons (broken hope, eternal faith, silence) that by means of a final, icastic metaphor become bundles of wood—symbolizing the beloved’s coercive power—to be laid at the poet’s burning stake.^[54] Finally, special mention should be made of Guarini’s Con che soavità, labbra adorate, because this is where Monteverdi focuses on the utmost weapon of love—unrestrained desire—which, as Marino suggests in a famous sonnet, begets the amorous thought that makes the lover’s soul restless.^[55] It is a ravenous desire, which no sense of pleasure or satisfaction—not that of words or kisses or both—may be able to satiate, as Monteverdi’s brilliant setting (to be examined shortly) implies.

6.4 Monteverdi does include some important instances of “physiognomic” weapons of love. The anonymous canzonetta Chiome d’oro enumerates several: hair that binds, mouth that bites, eyes that torture when they laugh. Perchè fuggi, Tornate o cari baci, and Eccomi pronta ai baci form a Marinist triptych on the kiss, which, as already mentioned, is Cupid’s sweet and deadly wounding weapon.^[56] From a swift kiss stolen from an unwilling beloved, we escalate all the way to a “biting kiss” (“bacio mordace”) given to a beloved who demands kisses, outlining a significant ascending trajectory of sexual desire with increasing wounding potential.

6.5 Such an extensive catalog of the wounding weapons of love indicates that the presence of the love-war-weapons-of-love trope is not incidental but pervasive in the Seventh Book—so much so that said trope acquires, as in the case of La lira, a generative function across the entire book of madrigals, no matter the author of the poetry. In short, the poetry featured in the collection arguably not just plays out the war-love theme. Rather, it plays out the AMOR-ARMI pun that is found in the proem of the collection. That in turn provides another good reason for placing the Seventh Book in a broader context: one that goes beyond the well-known random erotic ruminations of the collection (whether carefree or with some psychological depth) and the traditional approach to formal procedures. Such context is arguably that of Marino’s concettista experiments with the canzoniere form.

7. Monteverdi’s Marinist Strategy in Con che soavità

7.1 Further evidence for the Seventh Book’s status as a Marinist canzoniere may be found in another of its prominent musical settings. Con che soavità, labbra adorate, the last of the madrigals in the collection (preceding the group of pieces “in other genres”), is an extraordinary piece, scored for two string choirs in addition to solo voice and continuo—a scoring associated more with the theater than with concerted madrigals. In a wide-ranging analysis, Massimo Ossi demonstrates that these performing forces allow for an interplay of different styles and textures that, coupled with harmonic procedure, underscores the rhetorical effects and discursive nature of the poetry.^[57] As the following discussion aims to show, one can also argue that this madrigal is a brilliant Marinist piece, where Marinist content is achieved through savvy musical means.

7.2 Let us start with Guarini’s poem—a playful attempt at staging a lover’s ideal desire for ultimate pleasure: simultaneously kissing the lips of the beloved and hearing the sweet words those lips utter, thus simultaneously enjoying the pleasures of both kisses and speech.

Con che soavità, labbra adorate,
e vi bacio e v’ascolto:
ma se godo un piacer, l’altro m’è tolto.
Come i vostri diletti
s’ancidono fra lor, se dolcemente
vive per ambedue l’anima mia?
Che soave armonia
fareste, o dolci baci, o cari detti,
se foste unitamente
d’ambedue le dolcezze ambo capaci,
baciando i detti e ragionando i baci.

(With what sweetness, adored lips, I both kiss you and listen to you! But if I enjoy one pleasure, the other is denied me. Why do your delights kill one another, if my soul lives sweetly for both? What delicate harmony you would create, o dear kisses, o sweet words, were you capable of both sweetnesses both at once: kissing words and discoursing kisses.)^[58]

Such wishful thought ends with a proposition that may seem a paradox. From the speaker’s perspective, however, the pleasures of kissing and speech are only potentially mutually exclusive and are eventually reconciled through synesthesia: words that might kiss and kisses that might speak. Synesthesia is a prominent rhetorical figure in Guarini’s poetics; he uses it to convey a hedonistic, yet highly spiritualized sense of pleasure that unites rationality and sensuality.^[59] Moreover, the emphasis on both pleasures is redoubled in the penultimate line by the purposefully immoderate rhetorical figure of anaphora: “se foste unitamente / d’ambedue le dolcezze ambo capaci.” It is this lack of restraint that underlies the claim made above (par. 6.3) that this poem is about unrestrained desire.

7.3 Such a delightful fulfillment of unrestrained desire, although perfectly coherent with Guarini’s poetics, sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of a Marinist collection centered around the idea of the wounding weapons of love. Monteverdi’s apparently incongruent choice of text, however, might well be strategic: it sets the stage for a musical setting that appears to be parodic with respect to Guarini’s poem, and which as a result may be read as a Marinist manifesto.^[60]

7.4 The composition starts in the style of a monodic madrigal (lines 1–2 of the poem, mm. 1–20). (For a complete score see Example 2.^[61]) The plucked continuo instruments then drop out briefly and only the upper string choro accompanies line 3 (mm. 21–28, ending with a decorative cadence on A). At this point (upbeat to m. 29) the plucked continuo returns, joining the voice and upper strings, and a strong contrast is introduced: bellicose fast repeated notes in all the parts for the reference to the delights “killing one another” (lines 4–5 with repetition). Slower-moving chords are introduced as the next clause begins (with an enjambment: “se dolcemente / vive,” lines 5–6, mm. 34–37), but the bellicose music returns, interrupting the new idea. On the second try, the gentler phrase is allowed to continue, arriving at a highly decorative cadence on D (lines 5–6, mm. 41–47). The progression from monody to fuller instrumentation, the “discontinuity of texture” (to borrow a phrase from Ossi),^[62] the stylistic contrast between sweet and bellicose, and the insistent repetition all work together to emphasize the imaginary fight and annihilation of the two conflicting pleasures taking place in a lover’s heart as well as the sweetness for both in his soul. This degree of textual emphasis is certainly not required by the original meaning of the poem and thus constitutes a deliberate choice by the composer to further stress the conflicting aspects of the poem and, in turn, of the musical setting. How or whether this hyperbolic relishing of opposites might affect the outcome remains to be seen.

7.5 As the next section begins, Monteverdi rewrites the text to accentuate the uniqueness of the two sensual pleasures, touch and hearing, almost turning them into dramatic antagonists:

Guarini:
Che soave armonia
fareste, o dolci baci, o cari detti.

Monteverdi:
Che soave armonia
fareste, o cari baci.
Che soave armonia
fareste, o dolci detti.^[63]

Monteverdi sets these two couplets sequentially, the first (mm. 48–60) cadencing on G and the second (mm. 61–72) on A.^[64] He uses parallel scoring: in each case the voice is at first accompanied only by the lower string choro, and then by the full complement of instruments, and finally by continuo alone for the important words “cari baci” and “dolci detti.”

7.6 After a tutti declaration of Guarini’s anaphoric words in a chordal texture (original lines 9–10, mm. 73–82), ending with a strong cadence on G, the last line of the poem is introduced (mm. 83–89); it is stated twice here, to a simple, relatively fast-moving melody (slightly varied on the repeat), each time over a simple homophonic accompaniment, lightly scored. Now the tutti heard a moment ago returns (mm. 90–99), making a resolute anaphoric statement. It seems that the alternation will continue, for the final line of poetry returns, stated twice much as before (mm. 100–106), but in fact Monteverdi introduces subtle variations, such as ascending lines where the earlier instance had descending ones. From this point forward, the only words will be those of Guarini’s final line—the climax of the poem—reiterated several times, with ever-increasing musical variation. First the melody ascends by step, covering a sixth (mm. 100–102). The second time it starts with a stepwise ascent (just a fourth now) and concludes with a descending leaping figure (mm. 103–106). The third and fourth times the descending leaping figure begins the verse, on sequentially rising pitches (see mm. 107 and 110), so that a final stepwise ascent can arrive at a climactic cadence to D, the principal tonal center of the piece (m. 115). Monteverdi scores this final passage in a way that gradually erases the homophonic texture, which is first weakened—when chordal accompaniment by one of the instrumental choirs (mm. 100–102) drops down to just the plucked continuo (mm. 103–105)—and then practically disappears in the subsequent iterations of the last verse. Starting in m. 107 the two string choirs are integrated, so the soprano viola and violin can make imitative figures with the voice—as Ossi points out, the only such passage of integrated counterpoint in the entire madrigal.^[65] Moreover, the descending leaping figure in the melody, consisting of sequential descending fourths, creates a subtle cross-rhythm—“ba-cian-do i det-(ti)”—against the principal declamation, and thanks to the contrapuntal texture, that rhythmic effect is reiterated several times by the instruments.

7.7 In sum, Monteverdi exacerbates textural, melodic, and rhythmic variety and complexity; he does so progressively and even systematically. Yet this rich, sonorous, polyphonic interplay is hardly coherent with the climactic last verse of Guarini’s poem—where the speaker imagines simultaneously enjoying potentially mutually exclusive pleasures (of both kisses and speech) that are reconciled through synesthesia. In fact, it could be argued that Monteverdi provides a setting of Guarini’s climactic verse that undercuts the original meaning of the text. Such a procedure would be entirely consonant with our understanding of Monteverdi’s late madrigal style, where he does not merely “paint” texts but engages with them and interprets them.^[66] If the composer voids the option for an idealistic fruitful conflation of sensual and rational pleasures proposed at the end of the original poem, it could be argued that he upholds the conflicting and antithetical nature of the two pleasures described at the beginning—a position prefigured in his bellicose and reiterative setting of the rhetorical question, “Why do your delights [of kisses and words] kill one another?” The composer’s setting eventually ratifies this reading of Guarini’s poem by means of one final repetition of the climactic verse, in the plagal coda that follows the final structural cadence (mm. 116–21). Here the verse is fragmented—“e ragionando (e ragionando) i baci”—implying that one of the two delights (“baciando i detti”) has actually been killed.

7.8 In short, Con che soavità may be read as a parodic setting, aimed at overturning the original outcome of Guarini’s poem. Here unrestrained desire ends without the desired conflation of pleasures. This extraordinary final madrigal in the collection is thus a musical emblem of unrestrained desire as Marino presents it: as the ultimate wounding weapon of love. When taken together with Monteverdi’s musical treatment of the love-war theme in the proem and the extensive presence of other weapons of love in the poetry chosen for the Seventh Book, Con che soavità may be understood as an exquisite component of a musical canzoniere that seems to appropriate the revolutionary way to sing about love invented and masterfully cast into Petrarchan form by Marino. The reading presented here may provide a stepping stone for rethinking the Marinist quality of this madrigal collection not just in terms of musical form and ornament and of the psychological ramifications and classical allusions of the poetry but also in terms of the Petrarchist poetics of La lira.^[67]

Acknowledgements

It took me twenty years to find the right way to pitch an interdisciplinary intuition I had in graduate school. Interdisciplinarity is easier said than done. My sincere thanks go to Salvatore Silvano Nigro and Ellen Rosand for fostering my initial intuition, and to Lois Rosow for allowing some of its musicological implications to come to full fruition. I am also grateful to Beth Glixon, Marco Bizzarini, and Marco Corradini for their advice. As for the anonymous readers who reviewed this article both recently and at an earlier stage, I trust they will recognize their own input in my work and consider that as a sign of my appreciation.

Examples

Example 1. Claudio Monteverdi, Tempro la cetra, final sinfonia

Example 2. Claudio Monteverdi, Con che soavità, labbra adorate

Table

Table 1. A typology of the weapons of love featured in La lira