The (un)Natural Baroque: Giambattista Marino and Monteverdi's Late Madrigals

The early decades of the seventeenth century saw an important aesthetic shift in Italian secular music. The madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) have often been seen to bridge the gap between the Renaissance and the Baroque since they introduced instrumental writing and operatic elements into a traditionally vocal genre. There is an unmistakable change in Monteverdi’s approach to madrigal composition at the beginning of his Venetian period (ca. 1613), and his revised approach to Italian poetry in his later books of madrigals produced some of the most opulent yet splendidly complex music. Although Monteverdi is best known for having broken the rules of sixteenth-century counterpoint in order to unify text and music—what he called the seconda pratica—poetry and music are often at odds in his late secular works. It is this discord between music and poetry that has resulted in the generally negative view of Monteverdi’s late madrigals. Gary Tomlinson has argued that the primary impetus for the change in Monteverdi’s musical approach to text and form arose from the deadening influence of “Marinism,” the poetic movement inspired by the sensual, baroque, and at times controversial poetry of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In challenging the view that Marino’s poetic style indicated artistic decline, I propose that Marinism inspired a new madrigalian aesthetic which reflected the particular artistic climate of the early Seicento. Monteverdi’s settings of Marino’s verses—found in his last three madrigal books (1614–38)—had artistic aims different from those of his earlier madrigals. Because Monteverdi revised his approach to madrigal composition at the time of his arrival in Venice, his secular works from this period require a different analytical approach, one developed for and tailored to the repertoire’s unique aesthetic. By examining the literary and societal atmosphere of the early seventeenth century, this dissertation seeks to explain the stylistic change in Monteverdi’s madrigals by showing that it reflects a similar shift in the literature of the early Seicento.

Department dc:contributor.department

Music

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Giles, Roseen Hasmig

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Johnston, Gregory S

• Claudio Monteverdi
• Giambattista Marino
• Italian poetry
• Late Renaissance
• Seicentismo
• Seventeenth-century Italy

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/73002

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/73002