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Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance
Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminates the state of Italian music, poetry, and ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- GenresMusicHistoryRenaissance
292 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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February 10, 2021
An excellent study of the development of the secular side of Monteverdi's art. Tomlinson looks in detail at a number of madrigals from books 1 through 8, with particular emphasis and appreciation for the blossoming of the composer's mastery between books 3 and 5. He gives close scrutiny to the ways in which Monteverdi found musical means of supporting and reinforcing the syntax and rhetoric of the poems he chose to set. In these books, Tomlinson distinguishes three different types of musical language: the heroic, used in setting narrative passages, particularly those from Gerusalemme liberata; the epigrammatic, epitomized by the settings of Guarneri, in which musical form and expression is shaped by the rhetorical structure of the poetry; and musical speech, derived from the stile rappresentativo of stage music, which presents a partially dramatized setting of a poem's scenario.
Tomlinson also looks at the operas, though here he has less considerably less material from which to produce a narrative of development. As a result, I feel that he places undue weight on the single surviving number from L'Arianna, which is forced to represent an otherwise unknowable whole.
The book is in 10 chapters. The first and last are synoptic, placing Monteverdi in a broad historical context of intellectual, social, historical, and artistic trends in the Italy of the late 16th century and first half of the 17th century. The first chapter positions Monteverdi as representing humanist values of the late Renaissance as opposed to the lingering scholastic influence of the middle ages.
The middle chapters, by far the bulk of the book, are a detailed look at Monteverdi's development from the first madrigal book to the final operas; here biography and history are largely ignored in favor of concentration on the specifics of the verses and music. Tomlinson sees the music, reflecting the poetry, as moving away from a concentration on portraying interior emotional states to a more superficial concern with incidental detail and musical form largely divorced from that of its poetic subject. He ties this change in musical priority to the poets the composer set: from Tasso, Guarini, Petrarch, and Rinuccini to Marino, Badoaro, and Busenello; his shorthand for these opposing aesthetics are "Petrarchan" and "Marinist". Like all such divisions, this rather oversimplifies matters and there is, to some degree an interpenetration of the two tendencies: while adapting to new tastes in poetry and music, Monteverdi never completely abandoned the emotional expressiveness he achieved in his earlier works, building his new style on an occasionally audible foundation of the old. Tomlinson admits as much in the overview of Monteverdi's career in the final chapter, though my feeling is that, in the more technical section of the book, he is excessively critical of the "Marinist" influence on the 8th book of madrigals, which does, after all, contain two Petrarch sonnets among its settings.
I found the discussion of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea in the penultimate chapter quite illuminating; as with the madrigals, Tomlinson starts with the operatic texts (it is perhaps too early to refer to libretti) and examines how the musical settings variously reinforces and transforms their meanings. The final chapter looks at a variety of historical reasons for the turn toward more superficial types of artistic expression, specifically Italy's loss of economic supremacy and the decreased tolerance for intellectual independence by the counter-Reformation Catholic church.
Tomlinson also looks at the operas, though here he has less considerably less material from which to produce a narrative of development. As a result, I feel that he places undue weight on the single surviving number from L'Arianna, which is forced to represent an otherwise unknowable whole.
The book is in 10 chapters. The first and last are synoptic, placing Monteverdi in a broad historical context of intellectual, social, historical, and artistic trends in the Italy of the late 16th century and first half of the 17th century. The first chapter positions Monteverdi as representing humanist values of the late Renaissance as opposed to the lingering scholastic influence of the middle ages.
The middle chapters, by far the bulk of the book, are a detailed look at Monteverdi's development from the first madrigal book to the final operas; here biography and history are largely ignored in favor of concentration on the specifics of the verses and music. Tomlinson sees the music, reflecting the poetry, as moving away from a concentration on portraying interior emotional states to a more superficial concern with incidental detail and musical form largely divorced from that of its poetic subject. He ties this change in musical priority to the poets the composer set: from Tasso, Guarini, Petrarch, and Rinuccini to Marino, Badoaro, and Busenello; his shorthand for these opposing aesthetics are "Petrarchan" and "Marinist". Like all such divisions, this rather oversimplifies matters and there is, to some degree an interpenetration of the two tendencies: while adapting to new tastes in poetry and music, Monteverdi never completely abandoned the emotional expressiveness he achieved in his earlier works, building his new style on an occasionally audible foundation of the old. Tomlinson admits as much in the overview of Monteverdi's career in the final chapter, though my feeling is that, in the more technical section of the book, he is excessively critical of the "Marinist" influence on the 8th book of madrigals, which does, after all, contain two Petrarch sonnets among its settings.
I found the discussion of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea in the penultimate chapter quite illuminating; as with the madrigals, Tomlinson starts with the operatic texts (it is perhaps too early to refer to libretti) and examines how the musical settings variously reinforces and transforms their meanings. The final chapter looks at a variety of historical reasons for the turn toward more superficial types of artistic expression, specifically Italy's loss of economic supremacy and the decreased tolerance for intellectual independence by the counter-Reformation Catholic church.
Displaying 1 of 1 review