Monteverdi’s relationship with Torquato Tasso (1544–95) is typically associated with the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624; pub. Eighth Book, 1638): a spectacular musical scena drawn from Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata, in which the crusader knight Tancredi battles the Saracen heroine Clorinda. But Monteverdi’s introduction to the musical possibilities of the Gerusalemme began decades before, just as his experiments with the musical lament long predated the opera Arianna (1608). This chapter examines Monteverdi’s earliest settings of Tasso’s epic – the lamentations of Tancredi and Armida in the Third Book (1592) – as musical representations of lament through not the verisimilitude of opera but rather the artifice of five-voice madrigals. Monteverdi’s initial engagement with Tasso’s Gerusalemme catalysed the composer’s early experiments with the musical lament, a topos that occupied an important space both in opera and in madrigals.

Kisses have an uneasy relationship with time. They are ever desired, withheld, stolen, and multiplied because they create more longing than they satiate. The kiss is both sensual and spiritual, direct and oblique, unifying and dividing – it is the embodiment of the erotic paradox. From its origins in the Song of Songs and Catullus, to the Basia of Secundus and the baci mordaci of Marino, the tradition of kiss-poetry conveys the pleasurable frustration of talking about love instead of making it: the necessity of speech acts in bringing about the physical act of kissing, and the impossibility of simultaneity between the two. Monteverdi’s engagement with the poetic conceit of kisses – mouths uttering delights by actions, words, and song – dates to his introduction to the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) during his final years in Cremona. This chapter traces the history of kiss poetry to focus on Monteverdi's earliest interactions with kiss poetry, the madrigals from his Second Book of 1590.

The poetic mode most often associated with the marvellous is epic: an inherently hybrid form of poetry that combines narration with enactment. In his Discorsi del poema eroico (1587; pub. 1594), Torquato Tasso (1544–95) conveyed his own understanding of meraviglia, which in epic poetry is essential as long as it is tempered, in his view, by verisimile (verisimilitude). This chapter explores the transformation of epic from poem to madrigal to reveal how musical setting recalibrated the representational balance achieved in epic poetry. Following the lead of Giaches de Wert (1535–96) and Luca Marenzio (1553–99), Monteverdi would bring epic poetry in ottava rima – particularly musical settings of Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581) – into the lyric-dominated world of the madrigal book.