Program Notes


	Like most beginnings in the arts, the genesis of the Renaissance
madrigal is somewhat obscure.  It first appeared in publication in 1530, 
and quickly achieved an enormous and enduring popularity, developing 
continuously and creating diverse varieties and personalities.  By the early
decades of the seventeenth century it had evolved into the opera, having
drawn along in its wake virtually the entire development of both vocal and
instrumental music, and having thereby created a new musical epoch.
	Although the madrigal has clearly identifiable musical antecedents
in the frottola, and to a lesser degree, the chanson, it may well have 
received its greatest formative impetus from poetry.  For it was the extra-
ordinary, cult-like revival, around the turn of the sixteenth century, of
the sonnets of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), that appears to have demanded
a music that was equal in subtlety, elegance, and expressive force.
	It has been estimated that as many as 30,000 compositions may have
been created during the life of this genre.  The aristocracy and the 
bourgeoisie, in pursuit of a finer and more cultivated leisure, made it a
part of everyday life.  The gathering of four or five musically accomplished
men and women around a table, reading from part books, and singing in voices
hardly louder than normal speech, occurred innumerable times over many decades.
During the height of the phenomenon, it must have seemed that people had always
indulged in this exalted undertaking, and that surely they always would.

	Monteverdi's sixth book of madrigals, published in 1614 but mostly 
composed five years earlier, contains a setting of Petrarch's celebrated 
sonnet, Zefiro Torna.  The innocent exuberance of Springtime's return, 
celebrated in dancing triplet figures, is interrupted at the words "Ma per me
lasso", with a plunge into darkest despair: for the speaker, whose beloved
had departed this world, there can be no such renewal, and the sweetness of
the season becomes for him a cruel torment, expressed in a sequence of grinding
dissonances on "deserto".  It is possible that for the composer this piece 
was something of a personal testament, as it was written barely a year after
the loss of his beloved wife, the singer Claudia Cattaneo, in 1607.
	The text of Ah, dolente partita is taken from the third act of Guarini's
Il pastor fido, the reknowned pastoral drama whose verses proved so enormously
appealing to Monteverdi's generation of madrigalists.  The opening unisons of
the two highest voices, separating into anguished seconds on "partita", and the
scalewise descending figures that follow--these elements, repeated and combined
in various ways, and later with new material, produce music of the utmost
elegance and gravity.
	Also from his book IV, of 1603, but in total contrast, is Io mi son
giovinetta, based on a poem by Boccacio.  The format, a dialogue between a 
sheperdess and her slightly-too-bold admirer, is set forth in passages of 
contrasting high and low vocal groupings bridged by narrative and illustrative
sections for the full ensemble.  Levity and gentle mockery are in command here:
from the mildly exaggerated naivete of the opening declaration, and its echo,
sounding slightly silly later on when the protagonist speaks, to the pompously
heavy laughs ("rido"), and the busily running fast notes for "fuggi".  At the
final "put-down", the high voices merrily "flee" in eighth notes while the 
lower voices descend dejectedly in longer notes.


	The "Tears of the Lover at the Sepulchre of the Beloved" is a commem-
morative piece commissioned by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, in observance
of the tragic loss in 1608 at the age of eighteen, of a revered singer, 
Caterina Martinelli, called "Signora Romanina", who had lived and studied music
in her early teens in the Monteverdi household.  (It was for her voice that the
famous Lamento D'Arianna had been intended).  The text, written by a young
nobleman, Scipio Agnelli, is cast in the form of a sestina, an elaborate and
contrived poetic form of six six-line stanzas closed by a three-line "envoy".
The final words of each line of the first stanza: "tomba", "cielo", "terra",
"seno", "pianto", and "Glauco", are emphasized through repetition in varying
order at the ends of the lines of the latter five stanzas as well as in the
envoy.  This poem, not deemed by critics to be of especially high quality, may
have presented the composer with even greater a challenge than the Lamento,
with which it shares the greater part of Book VI, and with which it is often 
compared.  It is closely governed by the rigid circularity of its formal scheme,and lacks much of the Lamento's extroversion and violent emotional contrasts--
elements so appropriate to the madrigalist's emotively expressive art.
	However, the composer's creative resources are sufficient to raise this
rather mediocre poem to art of the highest level, while taking it basically 
on its own terms.  (Great composers do not necessarily require great librett-
ists.)  Monteverdi, through the most subtle and inspired harmonic planning, 
fashions a kind of cantata in six movements, a progressively unfolding, 
emotionally unrestrained meditation on bereavement and longing.  In this, the
longest organically conceived madrigal composition, the composer demonstrates
a developed mastery of a more extended form than the traditional madrigal.

	Giaches de Wert was a member of the last generation of Netherlanders
to be imported as musicians into Italy during the Renaissance.  He was Mon-
teverdi's illustrious predecessor in Mantua, and composed hundreds of madrigals,very many of the highest quality.  Vezzosi Augelli is a delightful and wholly
lighthearted evocation of the air as animated by birds and gentle breezes.  
Gioseppe Caimo's Mentre il cucolo also invokes birdsong, imitating the voice
of the cuckoo in a broadly jocose vein.
	Luca Marenzio was a prolific and celebrated composer of madrigals, whose
fame reached even to remote England.  He has many musical personalities, and
Gia torna exemplifies his pastoral aspect at its most gracious.  (A pang of
heartache at the words "Et io piango" only briefly darkens April skies.)  This
work, however brief, abounds with examples of his detailed musical illustration 
of every nuance of the text.

	Although most of the really interesting anecdotes about composers
usually turn out to be spurious, or at least exaggerated, Carlo Gesualdo
defies the norm: he actually did discover his wife and her lover of two years,
the Duke of Andria, "in flagrante delicto di fragrante peccato", and had them
murdered (better if he had done it himself, though), along with an infant whose
paternity he had come to doubt.  There were all kinds of scandals: his wife and
the Duke had been carrying on quite openly for years, and she had been his
first cousin anyway; there was an enormous and sustained outcry at the injusticeof the murders; and the prince, very much in the mold of the morosely brooding
melancholic, may have been troubled by doubts about his virility.  Certainly
he attempted for years to conceal his consuming passion for music, believing it
might reveal him as feminine and weak.  But after travels through Northern 
Italy he married Eleonora d'Este, settling for some time in Ferrara before 
returning eventually to Naples, where he died.
	Gesualdo's music, especially that of the later books, shows a quite
unmistakable personal stamp, and there is much beauty, however strange and
exotic, in the better compositions.  In evidence: the rich umbral sonorities
of Occhi del mio cor vita; the chromatically upward-oozing opening of Tu
m'uccidi o crudele, and the abrupt, fragmentary juxtapositions later on; and 
the extravagant "stage sighs" in the beginning of Io pur respiro, with the
wonderfully controlled, yet on first hearing utterly unpredictable "dying"
at the end.  The posture of anguished asceticism, the rarefied atmosphere
of pain and morbidity, and the notorious "decadence" are not evidence of 
empty pretentiousness or a vitiated talent, as some have suggested.  They are
rather the psychological underpinnings of a unique and artistically poised 
and resourceful genius.

	Our program closes with two works that are representative of the
lighter forms associated with the madrigal.  Orazio Vecchi's Fa una canzona,
by the evidence of both the original notation and the text, was originally
meant to be a slow, dreamy piece, but has become popular in our own time as
a fast one, due to its somewhat frisky, dancelike rhythms.  It is filled
with musical/verbal puns.  Finally, Adrian Willaert's Vecchie Letrose, based
on a satirical, risque text in Venetian dialect, is also becoming a modern
favorite.
						-- Joel van Lennep