Madrigal (music) 1 Madrigal (music) A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six. Madrigals originated in Italy during the 1520s. Unlike many strophic forms of the time, most madrigals were through-composed. In the madrigal, the composer attempted to express the emotion contained in each line, and sometimes individual words, of a celebrated poem. The madrigal originated in part from the frottola, in part from the resurgence in interest in vernacular Italian poetry, and also from the influence of the French chanson and polyphonic style of the motet as written by the Franco-Flemish composers who had naturalized in Italy during the period. A frottola generally would consist of music set to stanzas of text, while madrigals were through-composed. However, some of the same poems were used for both frottola and madrigals.[1] The poetry of Petrarch in particular shows up in a wide variety of genres.[1] The madrigal is related mostly by name alone to the Italian trecento madrigal of the late 13th and 14th centuries.[2] In Italy, the madrigal was the most important secular form of music of its time. The madrigal reached its formal and historical zenith by the second half of the 16th century. English and German composers, too, took up the madrigal in its heyday. After the 1630s, the madrigal began to merge with the cantata and the dialogue. With the rise of opera in the early 17th century, the aria gradually displaced the madrigal.[3] History Origins and early madrigals In the early 16th century, several humanistic trends converged which allowed the madrigal to form. First, there was a reawakened interest in use of Italian as a vernacular language. Poet and literary theorist Pietro Bembo edited an edition of Petrarch, the great 14th century poet, in 1501, and later published his theories on how contemporary poets could attain excellence by imitating Petrarch, and by being carefully attentive to the exact sounds of words, as well as their positioning within lines. The poetic form of the madrigal, which consisted of an irregular number of lines of usually 7 or 11 syllables, without repetition, and usually on a serious topic, came into being as a result of Bembo's influence.[2] [4] [5] Second, Italy had long been a destination for the "Oltremontani", superbly-trained composers of the Franco-Flemish school, who were attracted by the culture as well as the employment opportunities at the aristocratic courts and ecclesiastical institutions – Italy Pietro Bembo in a painting by Titian. Madrigals came about in part was, after all, the center of the Roman Catholic Church, because of Bembo's advocacy of the Italian language as a vehicle for the single most important cultural institution in Europe. poetic expression. Madrigal (music) 2 These composers had mastered a serious polyphonic style suitable for setting sacred music, and also were familiar with the secular music of their homelands, music such as the chanson, which differed considerably from the lighter Italian secular styles of the late 15th and very early 16th centuries.[2] Third, printed secular music had become widely available in Italy due to the recent invention of moveable type and the printing press. The music being written and sung, principally the frottola but also the ballata, canzonetta, and mascherata, was light, and typically used verses of relatively low literary quality. These popular music styles used repetition and soprano-dominated chordal textures, styles considerably more simple than those used by most of the resident composers of the Franco-Flemish school. Literary tastes were changing, and the more serious verse of Bembo and his school needed a means of musical expression more flexible and open than was available in the frottola and its related forms.[2] [5] The first madrigals were written in Florence, either by native Florentines or by Franco-Flemish musicians in the employment of the Medici family. The madrigal did not replace the frottola right away; during the transitional decade of the 1520s, both frottole and madrigals (though not yet in name) were written and published. The earliest madrigals were probably those by Bernardo Pisano, in his 1520 Musica di messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha, which was also the first secular music collection ever printed containing only the works of a single composer. While none of the pieces in the collection use the name "madrigal", some of the compositions are settings of Petrarch, and the music carefully observes word placement and accent, and even contains word-painting, a feature which was to become characteristic of the later madrigal.[2] The first book of madrigals labeled as such was the Madrigali de diversi musici: libro primo de la Serena of Philippe Verdelot, published in 1530 in Rome. Verdelot, a French composer, had written the pieces in the late 1520s, while he lived in Florence. He included music by both Sebastiano and Costanzo Festa, as well as Maistre Jhan of Ferrara, in addition to his own music. In 1533 and 1534 he published two books of four voice madrigals in Venice; these were to become extremely popular, and indeed they were, in their 1540 reprint, one of the most widely printed and distributed music books of the first half of the 16th century. They sold so well that Adrian Willaert made arrangements of some of these works for single voice and lute in 1536. Verdelot published madrigals for five and six voices as well, with the collection for six voices appearing in 1541.[6] Particularly popular was the first collection of madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt. Originally published in Venice, in 1539, it was reprinted throughout Europe for many years after, becoming the most often reprinted madrigal book of the entire era.[7] Stylistically, the music in both Arcadelt's and Verdelot's books was more akin to the French chanson than either the Italian frottola or the sacred music of the time, such as the motet. This may be unsurprising considering that the native language of both Arcadelt and Verdelot was French, and both had written chansons themselves when in their homeland; however, they were carefully attentive to text setting, in keeping with the ideas of Bembo, and they through-composed the music, writing new music for each line of text, rather than using the refrain and verse constructions that were common in French secular music.[8] Mid-century madrigal While the madrigal was born in Florence and Rome, by mid-century the centers of musical activity had moved to Venice and other cities. The mercenaries of Charles V sacked Rome in 1527, and a period of related political turmoil in Florence, culminating in the Siege of Florence (1529–30), in which Verdelot himself may have perished, reduced that city's significance as a musical center. In addition, Venice was Europe's center of music publishing; the grand Basilica of St. Mark's was just beginning the period in which it attracted musicians from all over Europe; and Pietro Bembo himself had returned to Venice in 1529. Adrian Willaert and his associates at St. Mark's – younger men such as Girolamo Parabosco, Jacques Buus, Baldassare Donato, Perissone Cambio, and Cipriano de Rore – were the primary representatives of madrigal composition at mid-century. Willaert preferred more complex textures to Arcadelt and Verdelot; often his madrigals were similar to motets, with their polyphonic language, although he varied texture between homophonic and polyphonic passages as necessary to highlight the text. For verse he used Madrigal (music) 3 Petrarch in preference to Petrarch's 16th-century imitators; many of his madrigals set Petrarch's sonnets.[6] [9] [10] Cipriano de Rore was the most influential of the mid-century madrigalists after Willaert. While Willaert was restrained and subtle in his text setting, striving more for homogeneity than sharp contrast, Rore was one to experiment. He used extravagant rhetorical gestures, including word-painting and unusual chromatic relationships, a trend encouraged by visionary music theorist Nicola Vicentino.[7] [11] It was from Rore's musical language that "madrigalisms", so distinctive of the genre, first came about; and it was also with Rore that five-voice texture became the standard.[12] The madrigal from the 1550s to the 1570s The later history of the madrigal begins with Rore. All of the different trends in madrigal composition, which by the early 17th century had diverged into many different forms, are present in embryonic form in Rore's enormously influential output.[6] [13] Many thousands of madrigals were written in Italy in the 1550s; the entire repertoire is yet to be studied exhaustively. Some famous names of the period, besides Rore, are Palestrina, who wrote some secular music early in his career; the young Orlande de Lassus, who wrote many well-known examples, including the highly experimental and chromatic Prophetiae Sibyllarum, and who, on moving to Munich in 1556, began the history of madrigal composition outside of Italy; and Philippe de Monte, the most prolific of all madrigal composers, whose first publication dates from 1554.[6] [14] In style, the madrigals of the 1550s varied from the conservative and elegant style of Palestrina and some of the others working in Rome, to the highly chromatic and expressive work by Lassus, Rore, and others working in the cities of northern Italy. Late in the 16th century, while "classic" madrigals continued to be written throughout Italy, different styles of madrigal composition developed somewhat independently in different geographic areas. In Venice, composers such as Andrea Gabrieli continued to write madrigals in the classic tradition, but with the bright, open, polyphonic textures for which he was famous in his motets and other works.