when we do keep this fact in mind, then we have a new way of understanding the importance Caccini
attached to his madrigals, the songs in which, egged on by the Camerata, he experimented along
neoclassical lines and discovered the stile recitativo, the style that, better than any other, could muovere
l’affetto dell’animo: “move the soul’s affection,”^7 or as we might put it now, move the listener
emotionally.
So Caccini claimed or boasted in the preface, where he says the great discovery had taken place some
fifteen years earlier, in the mid-1580s (as indeed it would have had to in order to be associated with the
Camerata). His claim of priority was hotly disputed by Cavalieri, and need not detain us, since Galilei
was probably there first anyway. But Caccini’s madrigals are indeed the place to look first to see
“monody” in action.
Amarilli mia bella (Fig. 19-5 [facsimile]; Ex. 19-2 [transcription of the first couplet]) has for a text a
typical love lyric from Guarini’s Pastor Fido, long a major quarry for madrigal verses. Setting it was a
programmatic or polemical act—proof that only monody could really do a madrigal’s job. And yet it is a
madrigal without “madrigalism.” Not a single word is “painted.” There is no rapid scale to show the
arrow’s flight. There is no thumping throb to show the beating heart. There is only speech, delivered at
something close to normal speech tempo and restricted to something like normal speech range: the whole
vocal part is confined to an ambitus of a ninth but really an octave since the high note is reached only
once, near the end—an obvious correlation of range with rhetorical emphasis.
And that rhetorical emphasis is the whole purpose of the song. Everything is correlated with it,
including the harmonies specified by the early figured bass. The figures show only what cannot be taken
for granted; as time went on, and as habits were established, fewer and fewer figures became necessary,
and those that remained became more conventionalized. The first figure, 6 over the bass F#, denotes what
we now call the position, a term that actually reflects and recalls the old figured bass notation. (We also
call such a harmony a triad in “first inversion,” but the concept of chord roots and inversions would not
enter musicians’ vocabulary for another hundred years or more.) Note, however, that by the fourth
measure an F# is allowed to imply the same harmony without a figure, since by then (or so the composer
assumed), the reader will have caught on that leading tones (or indeed any sharped note) in the bass
normally required a sixth rather than a fifth (in addition to the always implicit third) to complete their
harmony.