Prima le parole: La Bella Italia in words and music

The beauty of the Italian language is well known. It is ‘the singers’ language’ and sometimes considered to be ‘The Language of Love’. Italy was also the birthplace of the Renaissance and even though Renaissance music was truly international, many leading composers from across the continent lived and worked in Italy, and spoke Italian. Our title means ‘The words come first’ and throughout the 16th century in Italy, composers and theorists argued and experimented with how exactly words and harmonies should interact. This concert will revel in the Italian language itself, with the music being either sung in Italian or inspired by Italy and Italian-ness! Interspersed with beautiful, lyrical music from Renaissance Italy will be readings in Italian (and English) about music, beauty, and la bella vita!

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Concert programme

Benvenuto
Philippe Verdelot - Italia mia

Monteverdi: Maestro delle parole
Claudio Monteverdi - Messa a quattro voci da capella (1650)
      Kyrie
      Gloria

Gli inizi del madrigale
Jacques Arcadelt- Ahimè, ahimè dov'è'l bel viso
Cipriano de Rore - O sonno
Nicola Vicentino - L'aura che'l verde lauro et l'aureo crine

Claudio Monteverdi - Messa a quattro voci da capella (1650)
      Credo

— INTERVAL —

Madrigali spirituali
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Vergine chiara
Orlando di Lasso - from Lagrime di San Pietro
      Veduto il miser

Claudio Monteverdi - Messa a quattro voci da capella (1650)
      Sanctus & Benedictus

Madrigalisti superiori
Carlo Gesualdo - Asciugate i begli occhi
Claudio Monteverdi - Anima mia, perdona

Claudio Monteverdi - Messa a quattro voci da capella (1650)
      Agnus Dei

Programme note

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Italia! The land of great food, lovely weather, amazing architecture, and the birthplace and spiritual home of so much of European culture for centuries. As singers, and as lovers of Renaissance music, we owe a great debt to the Italians. The Renaissance itself was begun here in the early 15th century, and Italy led the rest of Europe through the many advancements in all of the arts that characterise this fascinating time. Being singers, we are constantly confronted with the one defining difference between us and instrumentalists: we not only make harmonies with our voices, but also communicate using words. Blending these two things together, the Italian language itself and how it was set to music during the Renaissance, we find endless possibilities to indulge in our favourite things and by concentrating on the language, we gain a new insight into how Renaissance music can be sung, be expressive, and even be ‘modern’.

Our concert tonight is dedicated to exploring the magnificent Italian language in Renaissance music. The most obvious place to start is with the madrigal, a genre of composition that developed and reached its zenith during the Renaissance. Madrigals are the descendants of simple, repetitive 15th-century secular songs called frottolas, more similar to what we might think of as late mediaeval folk songs, and are the ancestors of 17th and 18th century opera. The depths of psychological insight and emotional expression we find in Handel or Mozart owe more to Cipriano de Rore and Claudio Monteverdi than often is acknowledged. Coupled with our brief tour of the world of madrigals, we will concentrate on the language itself and how it sounds, as the text of each piece will be read aloud before it is sung. We also will hear poetry by the two most influential and canonical Italian poets of the late Mediaeval and Renaissance, Dante and Petrarca.

In its culturally and politically dominant position, Italy acted as a magnet for top musical talent from around the continent. Perhaps ironically, many of the musical innovations that took place in Italy actually were done by foreigners employed there. Our first piece, Italia mia, was written by Philippe Verdelot who was a Frenchman but spent most of his career in Italy, in Florence working for the powerful Medici family and collaborating with Machiavelli. He is sometimes referred to as the ‘father’ of the Italian madrigal, and was the first to gain fame by publishing this repertoire. We start our concert with Italia mia because it is by Verdelot, but also because the text is about Italy itself and it was authored by one of the most important Italian poets for composers of madrigals, Francesco Petrarca.

Shifting quickly from the beginning of the madrigal’s journey to almost its end, our first reading is a text by the undisputed master of the genre in the 17th century, Claudio Monteverdi. As now, there was a robust culture of music criticism in 16th-century Italy and even Monteverdi was not immune, especially given his penchant for audacity and experimentalism. A famous quarrel took place in print between Monteverdi and a theorist called Giovanni Maria Artusi, from which sprung a very important phrase in the history or how words and music fit together: ‘Seconda Pratica’. In three readings this evening, we will hear first from Monteverdi himself about what this phrase means and then from his brother Giulio Cesare Monteverdi who takes up his famous brother’s cause and fleshes out his ideas. Monteverdi’s bold innovation, here expressed in his own words and those of his brother, is that the definition of ‘modern’ music in the 17th century was one in which the words were in charge, and the job of a composer was to create harmonies and rhythms that conformed to the meaning of the words. Our concert title ‘Prima le parole’ is related to this idea: The words come first.

Another thread winding its way through our programme tonight is how the relationship between words and music being defined in the madrigal eventually found its way into sacred composition and even to other languages other than the vernacular. We intersperse the five movements of Monteverdi’s late mass setting from 1650, Messa a quattro voci da capella, throughout our concert to show how Monteverdi was able to modernise the genre of the mass using all of the ideas he and his contemporaries had worked out writing madrigals while still adhering to the principles laid down for a mass setting many decades, if not centuries earlier.

Madrigals were always an experimental genre, even from the very beginning. Because of the breadth of different texts used and the lack of a liturgical function to satisfy, composers found they had the room to try new musical ideas. One such early experimenter was Nicola Vicentino, a theorist and composer active in the middle of the 16th century. The second of our readings this evening is a passage from his famous treatise L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient music adapted to modern practice) from 1555. In this work he details many extravagant ideas about the complexity of chromatic music theory and how he saw them relating to ancient Greek music theory, only just being rediscovered. Vicentino’s work on harmonic and chromatic experimentation was to influence later composers such as Carlo Gesualdo.

We continue our journey through the history of the madrigal with works by Jacques Arcadelt (Ahimè, ahimè dov'è'l bel viso) and Cipriano de Rore (O sonno). Both of these men also came from northern Europe and built their careers, and found international fame, in Italy. Both contributed enormous numbers of madrigals to the growing tradition and Rore in particular epitomised the state of the art in the middle of the 16th century. Our final madrigal of the first half is an example of one of Vicentino’s brave experiments with chromaticism and bold harmonic strangeness. It is also yet another setting of a poem by Petrarca, this time published some 40 years after Arcadelt’s. The continued setting of Petrarchan verse by madrigal composers throughout the 16th century is a hallmark of the genre.

The second half of our concert opens with two pieces that showcase an expansion of the madrigal genre. The madrigale spirituale is a sacred piece, but one that sets a vernacular text and, importantly, something not meant to be performed during a church service. Here, therefore, composers were able to treat religious themes with the same musical flair and experimentation they would otherwise reserve for setting love poetry or other secular texts. The intensity, therefore, of these settings is remarkable. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is most known for his perfect, shimmering, clear harmonies and unassailable Counter-Reformation certainty, but in his Vergine chiara, part of a much larger group of madrigals he wrote again setting Petrarchan sonnets in praise of the Virgin Mary, he indulges in a sort of contrapuntal ambiguity that reveals a human side, a subjectivity and intimacy. Lassus’ Lagrime di San Pietro (The Tears of St Peter) madrigal cycle is considered by many to epitomise the height to which both he and Renaissance composition as a whole had risen by the end of the 16th century. The fidelity to the words and the depth and seriousness with which Lassus approaches his subject matter (the three-fold denial of Christ by Peter) is truly astonishing here. These are no trite exercises in word painting, but display expressions of both empathy and disgust, contain careful characterisations of individual people in the story, and avoid flinching when the real horror of Peter’s situation becomes clear.

As we’ve seen, Petrarca’s poetry provided a rich seam of material for madrigalists throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries. We thought it fitting, however, given that this concert is in praise of the Italian language to let some of these wonderful texts speak for themselves. The three poems which will be read this evening, both in Italian and English, were famously set by Marenzio, Lassus, Giaches De Wert, and Monteverdi himself - and others - and all come from Petrarca’s large collection of Italian lyrics, Il Canzoniere.

We finish our brief and varied tour of the world of madrigals in this evening’s concert with two composers who stretched the genre as far as it could go. Gesualdo did this harmonically and Monteverdi did it by moulding madrigals into mini operas. Gesualdo is famous for his audacious and tortured harmonic style and Asciugate i begli occhi does not disappoint! Gesualdo is able somehow to throw notes and entries around almost at random and yet always tie them together in a recognisable cadence. This extraordinary freedom is showcased in the second part of this madrigal, in which he fixates on the words ‘m’uccide’ (it kills me).

Monteverdi has featured heavily in this programme, both theoretically and in the music of his mass. However, his undisputed mastery of the madrigal necessitates that he get the last word. His Anima mia, perdona is an example of what Monteverdi is able to do that no other composer can. There is passion, there is dissonance, and there is expression. But Monteverdi also creates a story and leads the listener on an emotional journey. This madrigal, as with so many that Monteverdi wrote, has a progression with each section perfectly judged to lead to the next. By the end, the convoluted text has almost strangled itself but in Monteverdi’s hands the result is something of wild, but intelligible anguish, deeply personal and relatable. His is not an academic experiment or an insane oddity. Monteverdi somehow understands and is able to articulate purely and with power the truth of being alive.

Programme note by Greg Skidmore
June 2024

Texts and Translations