FIG. 17-6 Cipriano de Rore, anonymous portrait in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The direct imitation of tortured speech, evoking a single subject’s extreme personal feeling by the use
of extreme musical relationships, is as far from the aims of the ars perfecta as can be imagined. The
musical means employed, judged from the standpoint of the ars perfecta, are full of bombastic
exaggeration and distortion—in a word, they are “baroque.” But Rore’s exaggerations and distortions
only begin to suggest the violence that the last generations of madrigalists, working around the turn of the
century, would wreak on the consummate musical idiom their fathers had perfected.
PARADOX AND CONTRADICTION
Just as it was in the realm of Catholic sacred music, when the generation of Willaert gave way to that of
Palestrina, so it was in the realm of the madrigal: native Italian talent gradually took possession of the
elite genres. The first of the great Italian-born madrigalists was Luca Marenzio (1553–99), who spent
most of his career in Rome, with short forays in other Italian centers and, at the end of his rather short life,
at the royal court of Poland. He published nine books of madrigals over a period of nineteen years
beginning in 1580; his reputation was so far-reaching by the time of his death that all nine books were
reissued together in a collected memorial edition, published in Nuremberg in 1601.
Solo e pensoso (“Alone and distracted,” Ex. 17-16), from Marenzio’s ninth and last book (1599), has
for its text a famous verse by Petrarch himself, one that was frequently set by the madrigalists. Marenzio’s
setting of the opening couplet, a stroke of “nature-imitating” genius, illustrates another possibility for
“painting” a text musically, one to which the late generation of madrigalists had increasing recourse.
Music “moves,” and in its movements it can analogize physical movement, even physical space. The
opening image of the poem is that of numbly wandering “with slow and halting steps.” The steady tread of
semibreves in the accompanying voices suggests the steps pretty clearly. But what are they
accompanying?
EX. 17-15 Cipriano de Rore, Dalle belle contrade d’oriente, mm. 26–48