The pictorialism in Ward’s first quatrain show an enormous affinity for those in Monteverdi’s. It is the
second quatrain, the affective one depicting the wounded cupid, that suggests the difference between the
English madrigalists as a school and their Italian counterparts. Or rather, it reinforces our sense of that
difference, amounting, it could almost be said, to a deficiency or a blind spot on the part of the English.
Compared to the Italian, the English madrigalists deliberately curbed emotional intensity (here, for
example, by deflecting love, as suffered subjectively, to “Love” as objectified in the adorable,
unthreatening form of Cupid), and avoided any but jocular references to sex. In other words, what had
fueled the most powerful moments in the most serious Italian madrigals, and in particular provided the
impetus for the most extreme chromatic experiments, was anxiously relegated by the English madrigalists
to the lighter vein.
A typical example is the coy double entendre in Fair Phyllis, a mock-pastoral by the minor
madrigalist John Farmer (and yet another glee-club perennial), in which the shepherd “wanders up and
down” in search of the shepherdess, finds her, kisses her, and then, because of a repeat sign, “wanders up
and down” and “finds her” again. No need for chromaticism here, thank you; and there is generally far
less interest in chromaticism among the English than among the Italians, which more than anything else
hints at what all that Italian chromaticism really meant.
Was this reticence a national characteristic? It certainly did not arise out of religious scruples alone
(for all that Weelkes and Ward were churchmen by profession). The church to which the Italian composers
confessed was assuredly no less officially censorious of illicit sex than the Church of England. Was it
“purely musical” conservatism? Or was it (as Joseph Kerman suggests) “a fundamental dislike of
stopping the composition abruptly for the purpose of momentary word-painting”?^18 But if so, why?
Kerman, ostensibly restating the same proposition more succinctly, may in fact suggest the reason: the
English, he writes, “saw chromaticism as a disruptive force and tended to reject it accordingly.”^19 But of
course Gesualdo, too, saw chromaticism as a disruptive force—and embraced it enthusiastically. Was it
only musical continuity that the English saw as threatened? Now that chromaticism has been established
as both a musical and an expressive resource, it will be something to watch—indeed to monitor—as time
goes on.