There was also a negligible tendency on the part of some sixteenth-century musicians to experiment
with complete circles of fifths as another way of encompassing the totality of chromatic pitch space. This
tendency, too, demanded a radical revision of tuning systems if it was to work. It produced some curious
little pieces, in particular a motetlike composition by the German composer Matthias Greiter (ca. 1495–
1550) that transposed the beginning of a song called Fortuna desperata (“Hopeless fortune”) twelve
times by fifths in order to symbolize the rotation of Dame Fortune’s wheel. But it, too, came to nothing.
The chromaticism of the madrigalists came to something because its purpose was communication (or
representation) of feeling, not pure (or mere) research. It was at first something that only unaccompanied
voices, able to adjust their tuning by ear, could effectively perform.
FIG. 17-7 Enharmonic keyboard comparable to Vicentino’s, by Vito Trasuntino (Venice, 1606), now at the Museo Civico
Medievale in Bologna.
Yet in its very realism, the expressivity of the madrigal contained the seeds of its own undoing. The
opening couplet of Marenzio’s setting of Solo e pensoso is miraculously precise in depicting the poet’s
pensive distraction, but can an ensemble of five voices represent his solitude? One makes allowances for
convention, one can easily answer, but in that case why the chromatic experimentation? Its purpose,
clearly, was to surmount convention in the interests of expressive exactness. It was a literary, not a
musical exactness that was sought, and it exposed a contradiction between literature and music, the two
media that madrigal composers were trying to fuse. The motivating “literary” idea brought literalism in its
train; and once literalism was admitted, absurdity had to be confronted. There was no way out of the bind.
Another composer who set Solo e pensoso to music was Giaches (originally Jacques) de Wert (1535–
96), an Antwerp-born composer who was taken to Italy as a child, became a naturalized citizen of
Mantua, and grew up to all intents and purposes an Italian composer. A very prolific madrigalist, he
published eleven books by the time of his death, and a twelfth was issued posthumously in 1608. Solo e
pensoso, from his seventh book, was published in 1581, when Marenzio was only beginning his career. It,
too, is full of the sort of expressive distortion music historians sometimes designate as “mannerism,”
borrowing a term from art history (think of El Greco’s blue-skinned elongated saints).