Academic literature on the topic 'Madrigal italien'

Heinrich Schütz gilt in seiner Madrigalkonzeption als konservativ, weil er bei Giovanni Gabrieli nicht das moderne konzertierende Madrigal kennen gelernt habe. Madrigale in kleinen Besetzungen waren jedoch um 1610 in Italien noch nicht üblich; und die Texte, die Schütz wählte, legten auch noch länger eine mehrstimmige Vertonung nahe. Eine Durchsicht der Parallelvertonungen zeigt zudem, dass keine Sammlung erhalten ist, die ihm mehrfach als satztechnisches Vorbild gedient hätte; auch die Madrigale von Ascanio Mayone zeigen ein anderes (und dabei konventionelleres) Bild. Das durch Schütz repräsentierte Madrigalverständnis wurde also in Italien erst wenig später überwunden. (Autor)
 Quelle: Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums online

Résumé Cet article, qui analyse un madrigal polyphonique italien de 1539, contextualise le thème de la mort dans la chanson italienne du xvie siècle dans la vie philosophique, sociale, politique et religieuse des cours de Ferrare et Florence entre 1520 et 1550. En s’appuyant sur les concepts psychanalytiques de « jouissance » et de « chose », il aborde la manière singulière dont le madrigal traite de la mort à travers un anéantissement voluptueux et rémissible du sujet, et dans un rapport initiatique privilégié à l’au-delà.

The Italians had conflicting sentiments regarding the visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in Italy in 1355: from the enthusiastic expectations of the impact the Emperor would have on the local political life to contemptuous scepticism and even to overt disdain. Two Italian Trecento madrigals have traditionally been considered to refer to this visit: (1) the three-voice polytextual madrigal Aquil altera/Creatura gentil/Uccel di Dio by Jacopo da Bologna, seen as related to Charles’s coronation with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Milan; and (2) the two-voice madrigal Sovran uccello by Donato da Firenze, considered a celebratory piece for Charles’s coronation as well. This essay explores the relevant historical contexts, Milanese for Jacopo’s madrigal and Florentine for Donato’s, with a view to placing both pieces.

Abstract The label ‘Ars Nova’ is not easily applicable to Italian 14th-century music, since its main characteristics, such as isorhythm, diminution, pre-existing tenors, and so on, are practically absent, with a few exceptions, from Italian musical compositions, even Italian motets. Yet, isorhythm and diminution were used in the madrigal Povero zappator by Lorenzo da Firenze. What was the reason for using these devices just in this madrigal, whose poetic text about a lone sailor in a tempestuous sea at first glance seems to be a poem typical of Trecento madrigals? This article contends that this text, which so far has attracted little scholarly attention, is derived from Petrarch’s canzone Ne la stagion che ’l ciel rapido inchina. This provides not only a clue to understanding Lorenzo’s intentions, but, in a larger perspective, it also discloses the perception by Italian Trecento musicians of the musical thinking of their transalpine colleagues.

As a composer of secular music, Giovanni Maria Nanino seems to have published only three books of madrigals and one of canzonettas, yet he contributed numerous pieces to anthologies, and his madrigals were often reprinted. Scarcely an important anthology appeared in these years without a contribution by him. Indeed in the fifteen years before the death of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in 1594, Nanino rivaled him as the most esteemed of Roman composers; in the decade after Palestrina’s death, Nanino was the undisputed head of the large and important Roman school. By certain measures Nanino was the most often represented composer in anthologies printed between 1570 and 1620. In this area he surpasses not only Palestrina, but also Luca Marenzio, Philippe de Monte, and Alessandro Striggio. Despite Nanino’s immense prestige among his contemporaries, in modern histories his secular music is scarcely discussed, with just a passing mention in Alfred Einstein’s voluminous The Italian Madrigal. This article establishes Nanino’s leadership in defining the new Roman style of madrigal in the late sixteenth century, outlines its musical characteristics, and suggests paths for future research into this as yet little studied school.

One difficulty in understanding the poetic texts of Trecento madrigals is that the language they use is often that of allegories and symbols, which requires a key for deciphering their true meaning. It is widely accepted, based on the interpretation of birds as heraldic symbols, that the madrigal Aquil'altera (Proud eagle) by Jacopo da Bologna was written either for a wedding or for a coronation ceremony. In this essay, however, I show that Aquila's content and literary style echo ideas and images that were circulating in the literature of the time, and especially in bestiaries and bestiary-inspired Italian poetry. Since these sources were well known to every educated person of the time, we may assume that its symbolic content, which is actually a praise of the human intellect, would have been understood by listeners and readers. This madrigal in turn provides a stimulus for tracing its ideas in other musical compositions of the Trecento, the madrigals Musica son by Francesco Landini and Se premio di virtù by Bartolino da Padova. These compositions are examined in the context of a specific cultural phenomenon in Italy of this period, namely, tenzoni, or correspondence in poetic forms – a practice that was the natural domain of the phenomenon we know as intertextuality.

Text painting is a defining characteristic of the sixteenth-century madrigal style, especially in association with references to height. Whereas composers cannot have given musical illustration to every such reference contained within the text of a madrigal, the question of whether or not the music that accompanies a particular reference to height constitutes an actual example of text painting is sometimes unclear. To explore this problem empirically, the frequency with which musical excerpts from a corpus of 201 madrigals composed by the Italian composer Luca Marenzio satisfied three proposed definitions of height-related text painting was measured. The three definitions required a vocal part to contain either a large leap, stepwise motion, or an extreme of pitch. Positive correlations were observed between the appearance of music conforming to each of the respective definitions and the presence of height-related imagery in the text, yet only in passages that satisfied more than one definition. The research suggests that no single definition is a reliable indicator of height-related text painting, and that most legitimate examples rely on multiple compositional devices.

The article examines Baroque references in three Trajkovic?s compositions: Arion, Le nuove musiche per Chitarra ed Archi op. 8 (1979), Le retour des z?phyres ou ?Zefiro torna? op. 25 (2001) and solo song Renoveau from the cycle Cinq po?mes de St?phane Mallarm? op. 29, in its version for voice, flute and piano (2003), all these compositions being unified by the idea of modernity and novelty, metaphorically contained also in the idea of renewal of nature, which connects music of the moderns from the beginning of the 17th century and Trajkovic?s search for new paths in music, opposite to ?gothic? tangles of the Avant-garde. Complex and multi-layered, the references to the Baroque era in Trajkovic?s works reflect fundamentally generic, arche-textual relations. Compositions Arion and Zefiro torna are set upon explicit references to Italian origins of the Baroque epoch, in theoretical, as well as in the creative domain (to Caccini?s collection of madrigals - Le nuove musiche, 1601, and Monteverdi?s madrigal Zefiro torna, 1614, after Petrarch?s sonnet). Zefiro torna, with a primarily French title and subtitles of the ?scenes? given after antique mythological sources, indicates, again, a twofold generic relation: to the Italian madrigal tradition (including another Monteverdi?s madrigal with the same title composed after Rinuccini?s sonnet, from 1632) and the French tradition of opera/ballet, additionally mediated by references to the opuses of Debussy and Ravel. Multiple literary and musical trans-historical relations can be observed in the solo song Renouveau. However, from these compositions, implicit generic relations, far more than explicit para-textual references, with the whole corpus of themes, forms, texts, discourses as well as crucial poetic concepts of the 17th century music can be inferred.

In the 1580s Ruggero Giovannelli and Luca Marenzio published a series of madrigals drawn from the pastoral book Arcadia (1504) by the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro. There was something unusual about this choice. The texts featured sdrucciolo lines, a verse type that was traditionally excluded from the Petrarchist canon and, consequently, from the repertory of the musical madrigal. In the dedication of his first book for four voices to Ferrante Penna, Giovannelli justified his decision to publish an entire collection of sdrucciolo as an homage to Sannazaro, to whom he referred as the pride of the kingdom of Naples. He clearly meant to capitalize on a distinctively southern sense of cultural identity that took pride in Sannazaro's poetic legacy. Why, in Rome in the 1580s, did it become so important, and potentially remunerative, to reaffirm the glory of a Neapolitan poet of the caliber and popularity of Sannazaro? Why did this celebratory act focus on such a specific aspect of his poetic output (namely the cultivation of sdrucciolo lines)? And above all, why did it take the form of a musical offering? By tracing the musical reception of Sannazaro's Arcadia in the 16th century, this article investigates the relationship between deviation from the norm and regional pride in the musical culture of the 1580s. Concomitantly, it aims at demonstrating that the study of the musical fortunes and misfortunes of Sannazaro's text has something distinctive to contribute to an understanding of the rhetoric of stylistic selection that surrounded the development of the Italian madrigal.