Wert portrays the poet’s distraction by the use of crazy intervallic leaps that utterly mock the smooth
recuperative gestures of “perfected art.” The madrigal’s opening motive (Ex. 17-17) proceeds through
two successive descending fifths, a rising major sixth (an interval for which you’ll search all of Palestrina
in vain), a falling fifth, a falling third, and two rising sixths. And by beginning with a point of imitation,
Wert contrives to have the word solo actually sung “solo.” But when the other parts enter, the illusion of
solitude is broken even more decisively than in Marenzio’s setting, because the five voices move so much
more independently of one another. No way out.
EXTERIOR “NATURE” AND INTERIOR “AFFECT”
A particularly vivid example of antithesis, and of the audacities the use of musical metaphors could
sanction, is A un giro sol (“At a single glance”), first published in 1603 in the fourth madrigal book by
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The long-lived Monteverdi had a multifaceted career that included
pioneering work in genres that properly belong to the seventeenth century; we will review his biography
and survey his output in a later chapter. Here we will consider him as a late madrigalist exclusively, who
attracted particular hostile attention from proponents of the ars perfecta who saw him as a particular
threat precisely because his work was so persuasive.
The poem on which Monteverdi based his madrigal is cast in an unusual form that mirrors its
rhetorical content. Its eight lines divide into two quatrains in differing rhyme schemes (abab vs. aabb)—
but that is the least of their differences. The first quatrain is an “objective” nature description, and a
cheerful one; the second is a subjective internal portrait, and miserable. The two quatrains are linked by a
play on the word occhi (eyes). In the first, the eyes are the sun’s, a metaphor for rays of light. In the
second, the eyes are those of the poet, shedding tears.
This particular outer/inner antithesis—all the world is happy; only I am miserable—was a veritable
madrigalian cliché because it was so perfectly suited to musical imagery of every kind. The “objective”
description in the first part employs devices of the simpler sort. There is straightforward onomatopoeia in
the “laughing” melismas. There are metaphors of motion and direction: the wavelike undulation of the sea
—a spatial metaphor that would have a long musical life indeed—is portrayed at first at a leisurely pace,
then more lively in response to the wind (Ex. 17-18a). And there is a slightly more complex analogy to
qualities of light (the brightening day) by means of shared attributes: as the sun rises, so does the vocal
tessitura.
EX. 17-17 Giaches de Wert, Solo e pensoso, opening point