We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2009
This article examines the Ferrarese cultural context surrounding the virtually unprecedented choice of a text from Dante's Commedia for setting in Luzzaschi's Second Book of Madrigals of 1576. A particular focus is the quarrel in literary criticism of the early years of the 1570s over the place of Dante in the Italian literary firmament, and the position of the influential Modenese critic and philologist Lodovico Castelvetro in this quarrel. I speculate that Castelvetro, a subject of the duke of Ferrara, may have had a role in the choice of text. I also speculate that the disastrous Ferrarese earthquakes of the early years of the decade may have resounded for Ferrarese culture in the particular lines from the Commedia. Finally, I propose that the musical style chosen by Luzzaschi for this setting was an extraordinary and retrospective homage to the late style of his teacher Cipriano de Rore, another artistic figure intimately connected with the Este court. Both Rore and Castelvetro may be seen as icons of Ferrarese cultural prestige in the ongoing battle for precedence between the Este and the Medici.
1 ‘Scelte poetiche di Monteverdi’, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, 2 (1968), pp. 10–42, 226–54. English translation, ‘Monteverdi's Poetic Choices’, in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 271–316.
2 Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance; Middleton, Wis., 2003–), 4 vols., the last of which, containing the First and Second Books, is in press.
3 For example, three texts in Book 1 can now be attributed to Pigna. They are found in a manuscript collection only recently brought to light and edited in modern edition. See G. B. Pigna, Gli amori, ed. David Nolan and Alan Bullock (Scelta di curiosità letterarie, dispensa 282; Bologna, 1991). I consider it likely that significantly more of the texts from Luzzaschi's First Book are by Pigna, since Pigna was the most prominent and influential poet-courtier at the Ferrarese court of the time (he died in 1575). I have not, however, been able to do a thorough search in the manuscript sources of his poetry.
4 Il Primo Libro de' Madrigali (Ferrara: Franceso de' Rossi, 1571), dedicated to Lucrezia d'Este, sister of the reigning duke; Secondo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1576), dedicated to Leonora d'Este, sister of the reigning duke.
5 Translation adapted from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. R. and J. Hollander (New York, 2000), p. 43. They note (pp. 53–4) that ‘this first sense impression of the underworld is exclusively aural’ and that the last phrase in the passage is thought to refer to the beating of breasts.
6 On settings of Dante in the sixteenth-century madrigal, see A. Einstein, ‘Dante im Madrigal’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 3 (1921), pp. 405–20, including a transcription of the settings of Quivi sospiri by Luzzaschi and Domenico Micheli; id., ‘Dante, on the Way to the Madrigal’, Musical Quarterly, 25 (1939), pp. 142–55; id., The Italian Madrigal, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1949), i, pp. 201–4; F. Degrada, ‘Dante e la musica del Cinquecento’, Chigiana, 22 (1965), pp. 257–75. The setting of 1562, in an expressively neutral imitative style, is by the minor Roman composer Giovanni Battista Montanaro, and appears in Il primo libro delle muse a tre voci (Venice: Scotto, 1562). Jane Bernstein speculates that this publication may be a re-edition of a publication from the previous decade by the Roman printer Barré (Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press, 1539–72 (New York and Oxford, 1998), pp. 604–5). The 1562 print survives complete in the British Library, a copy not registered in RISM, series A. The only other published piece by Montanaro is in Francesco Soriano's Second Book for Five Voices of 1592, where Soriano identifies Montanaro as his teacher. On the Roman environment out of which Montanaro's setting may have come, see S. Campagnolo, ‘Il Libro Primo de la Serena e il madrigale a Roma’, Musica Disciplina, 50 (1996), pp. 95–133, 121–5. A now lost setting of the lament of Count Ugolino (Inferno, xxxiii. 4–75) by Vincenzo Galilei is reported by Pietro de' Bardi some fifty years after the fact to have been performed in the house of Count Giovanni de' Bardi (see A. Solerti, Le origine del melodrama (Turin, 1903; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), p. 145. Palisca places this performance in 1582; see C. Palisca, ‘Galilei, Vincenzo’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 2001), ix, p. 437. The evidence for the date comes from a letter of 13 March 1582 and is summarised in Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven, 1989), p. 6.
7 The settings are found in: Giulio Renaldi, Madrigali et canzoni alla Napolitana a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1576); Giovanni Battista Mosto, Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Scotto, 1578); Lambert Courtois, Madrigali a cinque (Venice: Heredi di Francesco Rampazetto, 1580); Domenico Micheli, Il quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1581); Francesco Soriano, Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1581); Pietro Vinci, Il sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Scotto, 1584; the dedication is signed by Vinci in October 1581).
8 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961, repr. 1974). See chs. 16 and 17, esp. ii, pp. 829–76.
9 Ibid., ii, p. 875. In this context one might also speculate about the resonance of this kind of debate in Ferrara as a centre of the development of the modern pastoral play, where Tasso's Aminta was apparently premiered in 1573 and where Guarini's Pastor fido would be drafted during the coming decade.
10 Modern edition with commentary, Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. W. Romani, 2 vols. (Bari, 1978).
11 See R. C. Melzi, Castelvetro's Annotations to The Inferno (The Hague, 1966), pp. 31–2. Also Luisa Avellini in A. Asor Rosa, Letteratura italiana, vii: Storia e geografia, pt. 2, L'età moderna (Turin, 1988), pp. 575–6 and V. Marchetti, ‘Castelvetro, Lodovico’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, xxii (Rome, 1979), pp. 8–21, at pp. 9–10. On the role of the Modenese academies of the mid-century in the formation of Castelvetro and as a seat of potential heresy, see D. Dalmas, Dante nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento italiano: Da Trifon Gabriele a Lodovico Castelvetro (Manziana, 2005).
12 Letteratura italiana, ed. Asor Rosa, vii, pt. 2, pp. 575–8, at p. 577.
13 One should recall that Alfonso was married to Maximilian's sister, Barbara d'Austria, from 1565 until Barbara's death in September 1572.
14 A. Vallone, L'interpretazione di Dante nel Cinquecento (Florence, 1969), pp. 227–40. See also the closely related pages in id., Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo (Storia letteraria d'Italia, ed. A. Balduino; Padua, 1981), iv, pt. 1, pp. 319–25, 423–9. The most detailed study of Castelvetro's criticism as a whole is A. Roncaccia, Il metodo critico di Lodovico Castelvetro (Rome, 2006).
15 C. Dionisotti, ‘Castelvetro, Lodovico’, Enciclopedia dantesca (Rome, 1970, 19842), i, pp. 867–8: ‘Non stupisce che con tutte le sue pecche, il “poema epopeico” di Dante “narratore civile e filosofico” [both phrases about the Commedia quoted by Dionisotti from Castelvetro] gli apparisse, contro il giudizio del Bembo, superiore a ogni opera moderna, a quella del Petrarca in ispecie, e solo paragonabile ai modelli omerici … Non solo dal C[astelvetro] ma anzi tutto e principalmente da lui, dipende il ritorno a D[ante], caratteristico del Tasso e dell'età sua.’ Paolo Procaccioli, ‘Castelvetro vs Dante: Uno scenario per il Castravilla’, in Massimo Firpo and Guido Mongini (eds.), Ludovico Castelvetro: Letterati e grammatici nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento (Florence, 2008), pp. 207–49, 214–18, gives a summary of the most recent scholarship on the subject of Castelvetro's position on Dante. He goes on to speculate that Castelvetro may have changed his position in the unfinished manuscript commentary on the Inferno, on which he was working apparently in the last year of his life. This manuscript would not have been available to or known by Luzzaschi, however, since Castelvetro was far from Ferrara at this time. Luzzaschi would have had access to the influential Poetica of 1570 and the Correttione of 1572.
16 (Correction of certain things in the Dialogo delle lingue of Benedetto Varchi, and an Addition to the first book of the Prose [della vulgar lingua] of M. Pietro Bembo in which one discusses the vernacular tongue) (Basel, 1572). The Giunta was first published in 1563. There is a modern edition of Castelvetro's 1572 publication edited by V. Grohovaz (Padua, 1999), which unfortunately does not include the lengthy dedication to Alfonso d'Este by Castelvetro's brother. I have consulted the dedication in the copy of the original edition in the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, call number PC 1073 V3C28.
17 See Melzi, Castelvetro's Annotations, pp. 11–25.
18 One might recall that the text of Rore's thoroughly chromatic humanist motet, Calami sonum ferentes of 1555, is by Pigna. See E. E. Lowinsky, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and other Essays, ed. B. J. Blackburn (Chicago, 1989), ii, pp. 595–626, at pp. 605–6.
19 On the struggles over precedence between the Este and the Medici, particularly in the decade 1565–75, and their further effects on the musical world of the time, see D. Moroney, ‘Alessandro Striggio's Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), pp. 1–69, at pp. 16–28 and the literature referred to therein. On Castelvetro's long-standing anti-Florentine position, see Roncaccia, Il metodo critico di Lodovico Castelvetro, p. 295: ‘Castelvetro non accetta, in definitiva, né l'arcaismo trecentesco proposto in senso stretto da Bembo, né il suo uso strumentale in chiave politica, funzionale all'affermazione di una superiorità fiorentina.’
20 P. Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, Book II, ch. 20, ed. C. Dionisotti (Milano, 1989; orig. Turin, 1966), esp. pp. 175–8. See also M. Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 141–2 and 146; and ead., ‘Rore's “Selva selvaggia”: The Primo libro of 1542’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), pp. 547–603, where she sees even Rore's First Book as a reaction against Bembist decorum and notes (p. 595, n. 71) a specifically Ferrarese side of the anti-Bembist reaction even in the 1540s.
21 Modern edition in A. T. Romano Cervone, Gli eccentrici del Rinascimento (Caltanissetta-Roma, 1979), pp. 67–134, at p. 88.
22 ‘vuol egli [Dante–Luzzaschi] derivarlo dalla imitazione di quelle parole, che egli imprende a figurare con le sue note. E per conseguir questo suo fine, non teme durezza, non fugge asprezza, né schifa l'istessa dissonanza, contra l'arte artificiosa, sol che egli rappresenti con gli armonici suoi concetti, spiegati dall'accoppiate figure, che sono le sue rime e i suoi versi, e con essi quasi dipinga tutto ciò che significano le parole.’
‘il quale [Petrarch–Marenzio] ne' suoi figurati componimenti con la dolcezza e con la leggiadria va spargendo il diletto, studiandosi sovra ogni altra cosa di non offender l'orecchie, con isquisita soavità lusingandole’. Ibid.
23 ‘Dunque lasciarem da parte tutta quella musica la qual degenerando è divenuta molle ed effeminata, e pregheremo lo Striggio e Iaches e 'l Lucciasco e alcuno altro eccelente maestro di musica eccelente che voglia richiamarla a quella gravità da la quale traviando è spesso traboccata in parte di cui è più bello il tacere che 'l ragionare.’ Quoted from T. Tasso, Dialoghi, ed. G. Baffetti, 2 vols. (Milan, 1998), ii, pp. 727–8.
24 Romano Cervone, Gli eccentrici, p. 101: ‘è ben degno che il [recte ‘al’?] grandissimo Dante gli si assomigli; perciocché sdegnando egli una cotal diligenza squisita, che sente dell'effeminato e del molle …’.
25 ‘Menò tanto strepito che, aggiunto alle dolorose voci delle genti, parve precipitasse il mondo’. From the diary of the procuratore ferrarese Ippolito Roberti, quoted in E. Guidoboni, ‘I terremoti del territorio ferrarese’, in Storia illustrata di Ferrara, ed. F. Bocchi (San Marino, 1987), ii, pp. 631–5, 631–2.
26 By stopping before the beginning of the following terzina, ‘facevano un tumulto’, Luzzaschi's text makes all these ‘phonograms’ depend on the verb ‘risonavan’.
27 ‘l'origine dei terremoti è attribuita da D[ante] al vapore secco e denso che, imprigionato nelle viscere della terra, ne provoca lo scuotimento ogni volta che tenta di sprigionarsi da essa’ (the reference is to Purgatorio, xxi. 52–7). Enciclopedia dantesca, v, p. 713, A. Niccoli, ‘tremoto’. For other classical sources of this idea circulating in the Renaissance, see G. Passannante, ‘The Art of Reading Earthquakes’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61 (2008), pp. 792–832, at pp. 795 and 808.
28 ‘le abbondanti fuoriuscite di metano che accompagnarono questi terremoti’, quoted in E. Guidoboni, ‘Demografia e mondo rurale, XV–XVI secolo’, in Storia illustrata di Ferrara, i, p. 260.
29 ‘Finito questo, la buia campagna / tremò sì forte, che de lo spavento / la mente di sudore ancor mi bagna. / La terra lagrimosa diede vento, /che balenò una luce vermiglia’ (ll. 130–4). The chronicler cited in n. 25 above writes about the Ferrarese earthquakes of late 1570: ‘le repliche [the aftershocks] continuavano, la nebbia della notte si accese d'una luce rossastra’. Castelvetro's manuscript commentary on the first twenty-nine cantos of the Inferno spends considerable time on the two descriptions of earthquakes in the Commedia (though he makes no specific comments on the tercets beginning ‘Quivi sospiri’). See n. 31 below and Roncaccia, Il metodo critico, pp. 252–3.
30 Storia illustrata di Ferrara, n. 25 above, ii, p. 635.
31 Sposizione di Lodovico Castelvetro a XXIX canti dell'Inferno dantesco ora per la prima volta data in luce da Giovanni Franciosi (Modena, 1886), p. 58. To give an idea of the rather literalist style of Castelvetro's Sposizione, I quote the original a bit further: ‘Ora altri si potrebbe imaginare che questo tremuoto si facesse ogni anno in quel punto in rammemorazione del tremuoto, che avenne pure in quel punto nella morte di Cristo, o si potrebbe ancora imaginare che, si come il monte del purgatorio trema per rallegrarsi della liberazione dell'anima dalle pene [at the end of Canto XX of Purgatorio], cosi lo 'nferno trema per contristarsi che alcuno vivo venga in inferno, ricordandosi della venuta di Cristo, che spogliollo di molte anime; ma sono imaginazioni di fuori, e non procedono dalle parole del poeta.’ Castelvetro is castigating Dante for not explaining why or what caused the earthquake at the end of Canto III, since, basing himself on Aristotle's Poetics, he believed firmly that poets, though they invent things (which distinguishes them from historians), should invent things that are believable, that are consonant with what he calls the logic of our experience.
32 For a summary idea of Luzzaschi's style, see the ‘Introductions’ to any one of the volumes of my edition of his madrigals: L. Luzzaschi, Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals. Before this edition, the unaccompanied madrigals generally available in modern edition were those published by A. Einstein in ‘Dante im Madrigal’, and The Golden Age of the Madrigal (New York, 1942), both of which publish Quivi sospiri; and id., The Italian Madrigal, iii, pp. 257–64, where Dolorosi martir from Book Four of 1594 and Itene mie querele from Book Six of 1596 are published (the latter with a serious error in the verbal text). These three pieces are among Luzzaschi's relatively few experimentally chromatic pieces. Four other largely non-chromatic pieces were published in modern edition in the rare Dodici madrigali della scuola ferrarese su testi di Torquato Tasso, ed. R. Nielsen (Bologna, 1954).
33 The passage in which this is least true is the setting of the text fragment ‘diverse lingue’, where the staggered declamation of the various voices implies a musical metaphor considerably subtler than that adopted by Renaldi and Mosto in the settings discussed below.
34 S. La Via, ‘Origini del “recitativo corale” Monteverdiano: Gli ultimi madrigali di Cipriano de Rore’, in Monteverdi: Recitativo in monodia e polifonia (Rome, 1996), pp. 21–58, 27–8, 35–8, points out the same balance of opposing musical claims in Rore, in particular in the five-voice pieces, which permit more variety of vocal groupings.
35 The only such madrigalism in Luzzaschi's setting might be the contrast of tessitura for ‘e fioche’ (and faint, feeble) in the final line of the text.
36 One should recall that Rore was Luzzaschi's teacher, as evidenced in the affidavit written by Luzzaschi to accompany the ‘cartella’ in Rore's hand given him, Luzzaschi says, when Rore left Ferrara in 1557 [recte 1558?]. See J. A. Owens, ‘The Milan Partbooks: Evidence of Cipriano de Rore's Compositional Process’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), pp. 270–98. On the meaning of ‘cartella’, some sort of erasable material on which one could draft musical sections, see ead., Composers at Work (New York and Oxford, 1997), pp. 74–107. Note that Luzzaschi would have been only twelve or thirteen years old at the time of Rore's testimonial gift. Rore was clearly not only a fine composer but a fine judge of musical talent as well.
Another resonance of the style, and one appropriate to the culturally elevated status of Dante's text and of the presence of Virgil in the Commedia, is the severely homophonic, though not harmonically wide-ranging, style of setting of passages from Virgil's Aeneid such as, for example, those by Arcadelt and Rore from around 1560, published in modern edition in Fünf Vergil-Motetten, ed. H. Osthoff (Wolfenbüttel, [1955]).
37 The pieces by Rore to which I refer in this essay can be found in modern edition in Cipriano Rore, Opera Omnia, ed. B. Meier (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 14; [Rome], 1959–77), vols. iv and v. For an exemplary analysis of most of these pieces and their texts, see S. La Via, ‘Cipriano de Rore as Reader and as Read: A Literary-Musical Study of Madrigals from Rore's Later Collections (1557–1566)’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1991); id., ‘“Natura delle cadenze” e “Natura contraria delli modi”’, Saggiatore musicale, 4 (1997), pp. 5–51; id., ‘Origini del “recitativo corale”’.
Lassus's first and third five-voice books of 1555 and 1563, containing pieces clearly written under Rore's influence and pieces that James Haar argues convincingly were written before Lassus's departure for the North in early 1555, also include a number of chromatic pieces (e.g., Amor, che vedi ogni pensier and Se sì alto pon gir mie stanche rime from the Third Book); J. Haar, ‘Le Muse in Germania, Lasso's Fourth Book of Madrigals’, in I. Bossuyt, E. Schreurs, A. Wouters (eds.), Orlandus Lassus and his Time (Peer, 1995), pp. 49–72, at p. 49. But Lassus's textures in these chromatic pieces are not nearly as homophonic as those in the above-mentioned pieces by Rore or Luzzaschi. For both Lassus and Wert, the high point of this chromatic style seems to have been in their Third Books for Five Voices, both from 1563, which suggests that, for them at least, the fascination with the possibilities of the new chromatic style was waning by the end of the 1560s.
38 The following list gives representative examples, without claiming to be exhaustive. I will use the following shorthand in referring to the original publications: I.4 = First Book for Four Voices. Tudino I.4 (1554), Piango cantando ogn'hora, Altro che lagrimar; Fiesco I.4 (1554), Bacio soave; Taglia I.4 (1555) Com'esser può, Il mal mi preme; Manara I.4 (1555), S'altra fiamma giammai; Rossetti, I.4 (1560), Mentre che 'l cor dagli amorosi vermi; Giulio Severino in Vinci I.5 (1561), Mentre che 'l cor dagli amorosi vermi; Caimo I.4 (1564), Piangi colle sacrato, Piangete valli.
The main locus of this chromatic-homophonic style in these early years seems to have been the four-voice madrigal. Considering this, it is surprising that Giaches Wert's only book of four-voice madrigals, published in 1561, contains a good deal of homophonic arioso writing, but only a brief moment of chromatic-homophonic experiment: in the sonnet Dolci spoglie, felici e care, an imitation of ‘Dulces exuviae’ from the Aeneid (4. 651 ff.), at the words ‘or vo' nell'altra vita’ and ‘Felice, ahimè’ (bb. 33 and 48–9), the first passage sliding abruptly from a C major chord to a B minor chord, and the second extending the same descending half-step move even to an F sharp minor chord.
Modern editions of these respective publications: W. M. Kivell, ‘The Four-Voice Madrigals of Cesare Tudino (1554)’ (MA thesis, University of Minnesota, 1983); G. Fiesco, Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci, ed. Jessie Ann Owens (Sixteenth-Century Madrigal, 12; New York, 1996); F. Manara, Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci, ed. Jessie Ann Owens (Sixteenth-Century Madrigal, 17; New York, 1994); S. Rossetti, Il primo libro de madregali a quattro voci, ed. A. B. Skei (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 26; Madison, Wis., 1977); P. Vinci, Il primo libro di madrigali a cinque voci, ed. M. R. Adamo and P. E. Carapezza (Musiche Rinascimentali Siciliane, 5; Florence, 1985); G. Caimo, Madrigali and Canzoni for Four and Five Voices, ed. L. E. Miller (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 84–5; Madison, Wis., 1990): G. di Wert, Opera Omnia, ed. C. MacClintock, vol. 15 (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 24; n.p., 1972), pp. 45–9. To these may be added the well-known settings of the Sibylline Prophecies by Lassus, thought to have been written in these same years though published much later. Modern edition in O. Lasso, Prophetiae Sibyllarum, ed. J. Therstappen (Das Chorwerk, 48; Wolfenbüttel, [1937]). It is significant that the later books of the Ferrarese composers Fiesco and Manara (1567, 1569, and 1580) contain no chromatic experiments. See L. J. Waisman, ‘The Ferrarese Madrigal in the Mid-Sixteenth Century’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988), pp. 455–86.
39 The theoretical stimulus and foundation for this series of chromatic experiments is the treatise L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555) by Nicola Vicentino, like Rore employed by the Este family in those years. See the English translation, N. Vicentino, Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice, with introduction and notes by M. R. Maniates (New Haven, 1996).
40 J. Haar, ‘The “Madrigale arioso”: A Mid-Century Development in the Cinquecento Madrigal’, Studi musicali, 12 (1983), pp. 203–19. H. M. Brown, ‘Verso una definizione dell'armonia nel sedicesimo secolo: Sui “madrigali ariosi” di Antonio Barré’, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 25 (1990), pp. 18–60.
41 In addition to the several homophonic-declamatory settings in Rossetti's book, each explicitly labelled ‘madrigale arioso’, the chromatic version of the homophonic-declamatory style appears in the concluding bars of Rossetti's setting of Petrarch's ‘Mentre che 'l cor dagli amorosi vermi’, on the words ‘e pianger di dolcezza’ (and weep with sweetness). See Rossetti, Il primo libro, pp. 87–8. On this passage see C. Palisca's review of E. Lowinsky's Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 16 (1963), pp. 85–6. Palisca suggests, quite reasonably in my opinion, the omitting of all the editorial flats in the last three and one-half measures of the piece. The concluding measures of Giulio Severino's setting of ‘Mentre che 'l cor’, cited above, seem clearly to be related to the setting of ‘e pianger di dolcezza’ in Rossetti's setting: see the modern edition in P. Vinci, Il primo libro, pp. 81–2.
42 One might also argue, as Don Harrán has done in private correspondence with me, that the melodic lines of the opening of Luzzaschi's piece in Canto, Tenore, and Basso suggest a centring on G. The contradiction here may point to the difficulty of trying to account for either Luzzaschi's or Rore's piece in traditional modal terms.
43 For a clear definition and analysis of these cadence types as they occur in sixteenth-century music, see S. La Via, ‘Eros and Thanatos: A Ficinian and Laurentian Reading of Verdelot's Sì lieta e grata morte’, Early Music History, 21 (2002), pp. 75–116, at pp. 111–16.
44 Haar, ‘The “Madrigale arioso”’, pp. 215–19.
45 See Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, p. 203 and Degrada, ‘Dante e la musica’, p. 267. Renaldi, who died in the summer of 1576, was considered important enough to have one of his pieces imitated in fellow Paduan Lodovico Balbi's Musicale esercitio (Venice: Gardano, 1589), to have a passage from his setting of ‘Quivi sospiri’ quoted by Thomas Morley (see n. 47 below), and to appear posthumously in a few anthologies: see E. Vogel, Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens … mit Nachträgen von Prof. Alfred Einstein, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, 1962), i, p. 127 and the references there to contemporary anthologies. The Basso part of Example 3 is taken from the transcription made by Alfred Einstein, now located in the Smith College Archives: vol. 76, pp. 87–90. The copy of the Basso partbook, formerly in Danzig, has not surfaced since the Second World War.
46 In a nice structurally rounding detail, Renaldi's entire setting of ‘voci alte e fioche’ in line 6 of the text recalls the earlier passage for ‘alti guai’ in line 1.
47 See the incipit in original notation given at the beginning of part 2 of Example 3. The passage by Renaldi is quoted by Morley in A Plain and Easy Introduction. See the modern edition, Thomas Morley, A Plain & Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. A. Harman (1952, repr. New York, 1973), pp. 58–60.
48 Renaldi (or his printer) is the only person to divide the setting of the text into two parts, probably because it was too long to fit on a single page.
49 My film of the sole surviving copy of Mosto's print is quite difficult to read, because of the thin paper and much show-through from the recto page. With the expert help of Jesse Rodin of Stanford University, I hope to have made coherent sense of Mosto's ‘diverse’ mensuration signs in the various voices of his passage for ‘diverse lingue’. I might mention that Einstein, in his transcription of Renaldi's setting among his transcriptions of thousands of madrigals now in the Smith College Archives, gives only the original notation of this passage.
50 Soriano, in dedicating his Second Book of Madrigals for Five Voices (Rome: Francesco Coattini, 1592) to the important patron of the arts Scipione Gonzaga, acknowledges as his teacher Giovanni Battista Montanaro, the author of the first printed setting of a text from Dante's Commedia (1562; cf. note 6 above). Soriano also points to Montanaro as the source of the ‘grave e dotta’ element in his madrigals. Might this ancestry have influenced his decision to set a passage from the Commedia eleven years before?
51 There is one more isolated setting of a different text from the Commedia, by the Paduan Lodovico Balbi in his Capricci for six voices (Venice: Gardano, 1586). This setting, Stavvi Minos, of lines 4–12 of Canto V of Inferno, is, as Einstein remarked (Italian Madrigal, i, p. 203), ‘a composition so neutral, so devoid of any tendency to “painting”, to chromatic extravagance (though with special tone colors: three sopranos are opposed to three low basses), that one might think it intended merely as ground-color or background music for an intermezzo or tableau vivant’. It also has nothing of the declamatory homophony and the direct projection of the text that marks Luzzaschi's setting.
52 See note 6 above.
53 Galilei's setting is reproduced, as it appears in separate parts in his treatise, in F. Rempp, Die Kontrapunkttraktate Vincenzo Galileis (Cologne, 1980), p. 160. It is put in score format in Istituzioni e monumenti dell'arte musicale italiana, iv: La camerata fiorentina, ed. F. Fano (Milan, 1934), pp. 277–8. Galilei changes the fourth word of Dante's incipit from ‘parlar’ to ‘cantar’. (Does he intend with this change to signal a move from a quasi ‘recitar cantando’ to a quasi ‘cantar recitando’? See Nino Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge, 1982), p. 244, for this distinction. I want to thank Don Harrán for this suggestion.) Like Luzzaschi in Quivi sospiri, Galilei cuts across Dante's syntactic and poetic structure, setting only the four lines of the first piede and the first line of the second four-line piede of the canzone stanza, stopping in mid-sentence and mid-poetic unit. His abbreviated text, like Luzzaschi's, can still be seen to make sense.
54 Rempp, Die Kontrapunkttraktate, p. 159: ‘Voglio hora affine che le Dissonanze piu del dovere non s'insuperbischino, mostrare in qual maniera senza l'uso di esse far si possa una Cantilena dura et aspra, piu forse che con l'uso loro’ (I want now, in order that dissonances not become more than necessarily haughty, to show the way in which, without the use of said dissonances, one can make a cantilena severe and harsh – indeed perhaps more so than with the use of them). One might recall here Luzzaschi's avoidance of dissonance as an expressive tool in Quivi sospiri and the adjectives ‘duro’ and ‘aspro’ used to describe Luzzaschi's and Dante's style in the dialogue of Alessandro Guarini quoted above (see n. 22).
55 H. M. Brown, Instrumental Music Printed before 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 205, entry 1563/7.
56 I want to thank John Griffiths of the University of Melbourne for confirming my transcription and assessment of this piece. To quote Griffiths, ‘It is much more a child of its times, not at all chordal, with much duet writing, completely imitative, with no chromatic inflections.’
57 This would connect Galilei to the world of G. B. Montanaro, the author of the first known setting from the Commedia published in 1562 and perhaps to the earlier Roman world of defenders of Dante sketched by S. Campagnolo, in ‘Il Libro primo de la Serena’ (see n. 6 above).
58 Most recently S. La Via, ‘“In tale stella presi l'esca, e gli hami”: Petrarchismo e musica all'Accademia degli Elevati di Ferrara’, in G. Fornari (ed.), Album Amicorum Albert Dunning (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 155–87, at 157, 187.
59 A. Newcomb, ‘Marenzio and the Ferrarese Seconda prattica’, in I. Fenlon and F. Piperno (eds.), Studi marenziani (Venice, 2003), pp. 241–53.
60 Marenzio in his setting of Crudele acerba inesorabil morte was far from abjuring the temptations of polyphony as Galilei had done in Così nel mio cantar and as Luzzaschi did (until the brief concluding bars) in Se parti [sic], io moro'. Thus Marenzio makes no direct reference to the homophonic-declamatory elements in Rore's setting of ‘Mia benigna fortuna / Crudele acerba inesorabil morte’.
