As a preface to the exposition and application of my own system of analysis to come in the following chapters, I will first give a brief overview of the major works in modern Marenzio scholarship. This will be followed by a detailed look at a recent case of what I describe above as the audacious scholar to illustrate the potential perils that may come of a loud and influential voice when combined with a lack of historical-theoretical consideration. There is, of course, little harm done when an irresponsible analysis is left without a reader, and even a lesson that may be learned when the loud, uninformed voice comes up against sensitive and critical ears. Yet, for Susan McClary’s 2004 study of the madrigal, Modal Subjectivities, recently awarded the 2005 Otto Kinkeldey Award for outstanding work of musicological scholarship, neither of these seems to be the case: she has a trusting, attentive audience, as well as a loud voice.
In the preface to Alfred Einstein’s The Italian Madrigal, published in English in 1949 after many years of preparation, Marenzio’s name appears before any other. In the opening paragraph, Einstein writes, “I was carried away by masters like Luca Marenzio, and began to inquire into the sources of their art.”6 Einstein’s subsequent discussion of Marenzio’s life and musical output greatly dwarfs that of any other composer in the vast study, even Claudio Monteverdi, who is discussed alongside Marenzio and Gesualdo as
one of the three “great virtuousi,” as well as in the final chapter devoted solely to the discussion of Monteverdi’s developments in the madrigale concertato. In terms of Einstein’s profound command of the sixteenth-century secular repertory and his
subsequent ability to contextualize Marenzio’s work within the tradition of the madrigal at large, Einstein’s 80-page exposition is still today one of the most comprehensive and insightful sources in Marenzio scholarship.
While the studies of the following decades by Hans Engel, Denis Arnold, and Steven Ledbetter focus chiefly on piecing together the scant clues surrounding
Marenzio’s biography, Einstein looks primarily at the works themselves, and he does so in quite some detail. Each book of madrigals is dealt with in succession, and its general musical style and literary leanings are scrutinized against what had come before in Marenzio’s own oeuvre and in the works of his contemporaries and forebears. All the while, the works are considered in light of Marenzio’s given state of patronage and whereabouts, pointing out possible trails of influence and taste that might have had an effect upon Marenzio’s work. Einstein’s impression of the composer as paramount among his peers remains transparent throughout the study, as scarcely a page passes without mention of the word “virtuoso.”
Before focusing on the music, Einstein paints a picture of Marenzio as the romantic of the Renaissance madrigalists. Despite being employed through most of his life in Rome under the patronage of two prominent cardinals, Marenzio has come to be recognized as perhaps the first truly secular composer in Western music, given that the overwhelming bulk of his output consisting of madrigals and villanellas, supplemented by his Madrigali spirituali (1584) and a smaller corpus of sundry sacred works composed
presumably on demand throughout his career. Einstein’s depiction of Marenzio would also prove suitable as an introduction to the present study of his later Guarini settings:
Marenzio is the embodiment of artistry in its purest form; one imagines him, not at an organ or as directing a choir, but as a dreamer and a
sensualist under the cypresses or beside the rushing fountains of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli; at his desk before one of the high windows in the
Vatican; in the Palazzo Cesarini, filled with ancient art and the portraits of beautiful Roman women; or among the participants in the accademie in the apartments of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini…
He has an innate love of the sensual and of its opposite, the austere; he has an innate feeling for nature, for landscape, for the Roman countryside…No other musician unites such contradictions as he does, no other is so catholic in his literary taste. Marenzio is indeed far more “literary” than any of his contemporaries in the second half of the century, more so than Lasso and even Palestrina, and he has an even more personal relation to his poets than Wert.7
While the historical weight afforded to Marenzio in The Italian Madrigal has been for the most part forsaken for a landscape dominated by his contemporaries, Lasso, Wert and Monteverdi, many of Einstein’s judgments of Marenzio as a composer and of specific works stand to this day as general axioms and have been taken up in much of the scholarly work that followed.
Though published seven years after Einstein’s history of the madrigal, Hans Engel’s biography Luca Marenzio (1956) was, like The Italian Madrigal, the product of several decades of preparation. Both studies, in effect, were underway concurrently yet independently, and despite Engel’s exclusive focus on Marenzio in comparison to Einstein’s century-wide scope, Engel’s study stands alongside—rather than supersedes— Einstein in terms of depth and comprehensiveness in dealing with Marenzio specifically.
Engel, too, leaves no question as to his view of the composer’s stature in the madrigal tradition. On the opening page he writes:
Ai piedi di questa catena di colline, a sud-est, si trova la piccolo località di Coccaglio dove nacque il più grande maestro del madrigale, Luca
Marenzio.8
The book deals in two separate parts with La vita and Le opere, allowing the discussion of the music to depart from chronology and to focus instead on particular compositional and literary trends, drawing upon works across Marenzio’s entire oeuvre for examples. One of the most valuable aspects of Engel’s study, however, is its compilation of records pertaining to Marenzio’s employment, travels, and daily life, and of Marenzio’s works, which has served as a significant foundation for future studies. While much of Engel’s presumptions have been amended by later studies, in particular Steven Ledbetter’s Luca Marenzio: New Biographical Findings (1972),9 the organization and publication of documents and chronologies in Engel’s biography remain an important resource.10
Denis Arnold’s 1965 monograph Marenzio is in many ways a more accessible, pared down retelling of Einstein and, to a lesser extent, Engel. Arnold begins by reiterating the need for a complete edition and concludes with the observation that “Marenzio is still underrated.”11 But despite his efforts to rally scholars in elevating
8 Engel, Luca Marenzio, 3.
9 Ledbetter, Luca Marenzio: New Biographical Findings, Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1972.
10 These include a list of “il più notevole rappresentazioni con musica” of 1571–1599, transcriptions of known letters pertaining to Marenzio and complete lists of published editions of Marenzio’s secular and sacred compositions.
11 Denis Arnold, Marenzio, Oxford Studies of Composers (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 40.
Marenzio to his due position in history, many of Arnold’s judgments, when later taken out of context and unjustly interpreted, have proven to be a shot in the author’s own foot. The most notorious of these is the opening sentence: “Marenzio is the Schubert of the madrigal.”12 While a purely innocuous statement meant to compare the two composers’ mastery of text-setting, and the “charm” and “vein of serious melancholy” in their later works, it has been taken as an adage attesting to Marenzio’s secondary role in the musical canon—much as Schubert is often seen as sitting in a furrow between Beethoven and nineteenth-century masters such as Brahms, Wagner, and Verdi (which is perhaps more than anything a symptom of our tendency to value certain genres, such as the symphony and opera, over others, like the Lied).
Einstein’s statement that Marenzio is “one of Monteverdi’s immediate
forerunners” has similarly been taken out of its context—where it refers specifically to the musical and literary style first apparent in the Sixth Book of 1594—and applied to Marenzio’s role in history at large. Any sensible reader of The Italian Madrigal, as well as the biographies of Engel and Arnold, however, would soon recognize how inaccurate such generalizations are, and how their broad acceptance might have played a part in our conception of the musical canon.13 In reassessing these and similar judgments, we may be forced to reevaluate altogether the conventional teleological portrayal of the late-
12 Arnold, Marenzio, Prefatory Note(no page reference). Interestingly, two decades earlier Einstein refers to Marenzio rather as “the true Mozart of the madrigal” (The Italian Madrigal, 205).
13 Einstein is, in fact, careful to distinguish Marenzio’s pursuits as a madrigalist from the pursuits of the Florentine Camerata, despite other ways in which Florentine influence might have become manifest in his music after 1589. Pertaining to the Seventh Book, for example, Einstein points out: “The whole book is full of hidden drama, but the presentation of the actual scene or monologue is always
Cinquecento madrigal, and in turn Marenzio’s position as a Renaissance madrigalist (rather than, for instance, a pre-Baroque quasi-monodist).
In more recent years, three particularly important studies have arisen in Marenzio research, each taking as a point of departure a specific aspect of the work of Einstein and Engel. Following Einstein’s integrative approach to dealing with biography, text, and music is Laura Macy’s The Late Madrigals of Luca Marenzio (1991). Macy deals chronologically with the period in Marenzio’s life following the death of his principal patron, Cardinal Luigi d’Este, in 1587, looking principally at the effects of patronage and cultural milieu on the composer’s work.14 While ambitious in its examination of
biography and general stylistic elements of the music and text, Macy stops short of delving into the fundamental workings of the pieces. The focus instead lies in the
elucidation of the artistic interests and personalities of Marenzio’s patrons and peers, and in the composer’s shifting literary predilections.
Looking at the earlier part of Marenzio’s career is James Chater’s 1981 Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577–1593.15 In a style akin to the second part of Engel (Le opere),Chater’s study serves very much as a reference source in its highly systematic cross-section of Marenzio’s compositional approaches. On a deeper and more expansive scale than Engel, Chater characterizes and categorizes the general procedures in Marenzio’s text-setting. Each chapter deals with a specific aspect of the compositional process, such as “Treatment of the Individual Word,” “Treatment of the Line or Phrase,”
14 Laura Macy, The Late Madrigals of Luca Marenzio: Studies in the Interactions of Music,
Literature, and Patronage at the End of the Sixteenth Century,Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991.
15 Chater, Luca Marenzio and the Italian Madrigal, 1577–1593, Studies in British Musicology, ed., N. Fortune, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1981); this is a revision of the author’s doctoral thesis (Oxford University, 1980).
and “Treatment of the Section,” which is divided into narrower subsections, citing along the way a copious number of examples from Marenzio’s earlier repertoire.
Again like Engel, one of the most indispensable features of Chater’s work is its organization of information pertaining to the composer’s work. There are numerous charts, tables, and appendices enumerating, among other things, Marenzio’s poetic choices, the “Position of the Quinto in the Five-Voice Madrigals,” and a publication history that lists also settings of the same texts by other composers. The tradeoff for presenting such a vast amount of sorted information is that the study becomes more a cataloguing of general musical devices and features than a detailed analysis; while nearly all of Marenzio’s madrigals from 1577–1593 are mentioned in some capacity, often illustrating a minute detail, none is examined in depth or at length.
Most recently, building upon the first part of Engel’s study (La vita) and Ledbetter’s New Biographical Findings,comes Marco Bizzarini’s meticulous
biographical study Luca Marenzio: the Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.16 While referring to the music only occasionally in its relation to biography, Bizzarini does a great service in fitting more pieces into the scant and patchy record of Marenzio’s life, offering compelling theories as to the motivations behind the erratic eccentricities of his musical style.
With the considerable work that has been accomplished in Marenzio research in the aforementioned studies and others, there is yet an unmistakable lack of literature dealing extensively and intensively with the music itself. While the past century has witnessed numerous studies devoted entirely to the analysis of the works of Monteverdi,
Palestrina, Wert, Monte, and other late-Renaissance madrigalists, similar analysis of Marenzio’s music has been limited for the most part to studies looking at a selection of works of various composers.17 Yet even in these cases, it is furthermore only a narrow set of pieces that tend to garner analytical attention—Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi,
Tirsi morir volea, O voi che sospirate a miglior note, and Crudele, acerba, inesorabil morte, in particular—leaving the rest of Marenzio’s output in the dark.
McClary’s most recent study, Modal Subjectivities, is but one example of this as well as other major pitfalls in early-music analysis today. Modal Subjectivities illustrates many of the failures of current scholarship in reconciling issues such as mode,
subjectivity, interpretative potential, and historical context in Renaissance music in general, and specifically in the sixteenth-century madrigal. A close scrutiny of
McClary’s approach will therefore serve well as a foreword to the study of Marenzio’s
Pastor fido madrigals, and to the analytical methods set forth therein.