Monteverdi S Voices

"Ah, alas!" The "faithful shepherd" Mirtillo's woeful sigh of unrequited love, delivered with outrageous musical dissonances, has rung through the ages since the first publication of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigal "Cruda Amarilli" in 1605. But there is far more to the composer's nine books of madrigals than dissonant progressions--they are an integral part of the intellectual, artistic, and practical worlds of creation and performance in Italian musical and literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While Monteverdi is also recognized for his operas and sacred works, it is no surprise that the madrigal dominated his output through his long career in Cremona, Mantua, and Venice. Author Tim Carter illustrates how the composer's wonderfully witty settings of Italian verse ran the gamut from compositions in the traditional polyphonic style for five unaccompanied voices to those in more modern idioms for one or more singers and instruments. Their poets included the major figures of the day--Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini, and Giambattista Marino--as well as the classics, not least of all Petrarch, with texts that embraced all the current literary genres from lyric through epic to dramatic. Monteverdi also repeatedly asked and answered the fundamental question of any musical setting of poetry concerning the relationship between poetic and musical voice(s). Carter offers a more holistic perspective than has been adopted in the partial studies of Monteverdi's madrigals to date and moves far beyond conventional views of the composer and his work. He considers how Monteverdi engaged with poetry, with sound, and with the performers for whom he was writing. As Carter shows, Monteverdi was irascible, exasperating, and prone to error. Yet his astonishing musical mind was also inventive, playful, and capable of the most extraordinary wit--producing madrigals that continue to invite new approaches both to their study and to their performance.

Monteverdi's Voices provides a comprehensive account of the musical madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. Author Tim Carter sheds light on how these wonderfully witty works played a key role in music-historical development, offering offer key insights into the cultural, social, and intellectual life of Europe on the cusp of modernity, and shows why they continue to be cornerstones of the repertory for performers of early music.

Claudio Monteverdi is now recognized as the towering figure of a critical transitional moment of Western music history: relentless innovator in every genre within chamber, church and theatre music; self-proclaimed leader of a 'new dispensation' between words and their musical expression; perhaps even 'Creator of Modern Music'. During recent years, as his arrestingly attractive music has been brought back to life in performance, so too have some of the most outstanding musicologists focussed intensely on Monteverdi as they worked through the 'big' questions in the historiography and hermeneutics of early Baroque music, including musical representation of language; compositional theory; social, institutional, cultural and gender history; performance practices and more. The 17 articles in this volume have been selected by Richard Wistreich to exemplify the best scholarship in English and because each, in retrospect, turns out to have been a ground-breaking contribution to one or more significant strands in Monteverdi studies.

"The object of the present volume is to combine the story of Monteverdi's life with a critical study of his works. In spite of long and patient research in Italian archives, it has been possible to add here relatively little new material to the biography of the Master. On this subject, all that matters has been published long since. The investigations of Padre Caffi (1858), Padre Canal, S. Davari (1885), Angelo Solerti, Ademollo, Picenardi, and Emilio Vogel have provided documents which permit of a complete reconstitution of the life of the great musician, and it is in view of such a reconstitution that the author has considered Monteverdi as far as possible in relation to the artistic circle in which he moved, among the composers contemporary to him, and that the author has dwelt upon the life of the courts and cities in which Monteverdi's passionate life was lived, in which his talent was formed and matured." --Foreword.

This is the first English-language edition of Leopold's acclaimed 1982 study of Claudio Monteverdi. Avoiding a standard life-and-works approach, Leopold examines Monteverdi's music as a whole, focusing on the technical details of his style as they appear throughout his oeuvre and illustrating them with numerous musical examples. This approach not only offers fascinating insights into the connections, links, and interrelationships in Monteverdi's works (many of which are not apparent in a discussion by genre), but it also illustrates how a major musical figure approached composition at a time when musicians had rejected polyphony and turned to a monodic style.

"Monteverdi in Venice also contains a discussion of performance practice, shedding light on the odd distortions of the composer's musical habits produced by today's fads and fashions. His vocal works, meant to be performed one or two voices to a part, are consistently given by massed choirs. His music is willfully transposed, although there is not a shred of evidence to prove that they were ever interfered with. Most of the instruments used in modern renderings are hopelessly wrong from a tonal point of view."--BOOK JACKET.

Explores the path-breaking interaction between language and music in Monteverdi's madrigals through the provocative poetics of the marvellous.