Roseen Giles (Duke University)

Epic Laments: Tasso, Monteverdi, and the Madrigal

Claudio Monteverdi's relationship with Torquato Tasso is typically associated with the magnificent Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624): the spectacular musical scena drawn from the Gerusalemme liberata in which the crusader knight Tancredi battles the Saracen heroine Clorinda. Despite being published in the Madrigali guerreri et amorosi (1638)— Monteverdi's final book of madrigals published during his lifetime—the composer's musical response to Tasso's ottava rime was decidedly dramatic; it employed impassioned recitative in the genere rappresentativo coupled with staging more akin to the nascent genre of opera than to the traditional madrigal. But Monteverdi's introduction to the musical possibilities of the Gerusalemme did not begin with the Combattimento, just as his experiments with the musical lament long predated the famous cries of his heroine from the opera L'Arianna (1608). In Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1592) Monteverdi included musical settings of laments in epic verse for both Tancredi (the aftermath to his Combattimento) and for the sorceress Armida (who curses her fleeing lover Rinaldo). This paper examines Monteverdi's earliest settings of Tasso's epic as musical representations of lament not through the verisimilitude of opera, but through the artifice of five-voice madrigals. Monteverdi's initial engagement with Tasso's Gerusalemme catalyzed the composer's early experiments with the musical lament, a topos which occupied an important space both in opera and in madrigals and was defined by its subject matter as much as it was by its formal characteristics. The Gesusalemme settings of Monteverdi's third book of madrigals are some of the most important precedents not only for the laments of the operatic stage, but for the epic laments of the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi: Tasso's Combattimento and Rinuccini's Lamento della ninfa.