RINALDO OPERISTICO

Speranza

After its release in 1581, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata became one of the most popular epics in Renaissance Italy.

Not only did painters mine the poem to depict its various heroic and romantic moments, but composers also found it a rich source for madrigal texts and would later transform sections into operatic librettos.

Since the first settings in both music and painting, artists have continuously focused on the romance narratives found within the larger epic (especially Rinaldo and Armida).

The sections of epic verse within Gerusalemme liberata are often too regular, emotionally bland, and homogenous in poetic structure to be set to music and as Tim Carter observe,

“This explains why when madrigalists did set Tasso, they tended to opt for specific moments of emotional intensity, such as rage or lament; in so doing, they may well have exaggerated the effect beyond the poet’s intentions.”

This “emotional intensity” can be heard from the outset in Giaches Wert and Claudio Monteverdi’s early settings from Gerusalemme liberata, where they derive most of their stanzas from Armida’s abandonment by Rinaldo in Canto 16 or Tancredi’s insanity over killing Clorinda in Canto 12.

Such sections of “emotional intensity” allowed for a high degree of musical extravagance and contrasting affects that appealed to listeners of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

By examining composers’ poetic selection from Gerusalemme liberata in the context of Tasso’s literary criticism, what emerges is a paradigm that can appear antithetical to his theories of epic and romance narratives.

That is, by focusing on the romantic and pastoral interludes throughout Gerusalemme liberata, composers and painters downplayed the larger narrative—the recapturing of Jerusalem.

However, composers did not ignore the larger epic and misread Tasso all together; they found means of referring and alluding to the larger epic and the dialectic between romance and epic inherent in the poem. First, this paper will outline Tasso’s literary theory and the role of romance in Gerusalemme liberata. Second, by assessing parallel art historical developments and the cultural context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this paper will shed new light on the manner in which composers Wert and Monteverdi allude to Tasso’s larger epic narrative.

Tasso’s theory of epic versus romance narrative arises from his critiques of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato.

Using the poetic theory of Aristotle, chiefly the dictum of unity in epic poetry, Tasso attacks Ariosto and Boiardo for the profusion of plots that infiltrate the poem:

"If the plot is single, his purpose will be single; if there are many and diverse plots, there will be many and diverse purposes. However, since diverse purposes distract the mind and hinder labor, he who sets himself to a single goal will work more effectively than the imitator of a multitude of actions."

In his Discorse dell’arte poetica (1567), Tasso responds to the defenders of Ariosto who claim, “The romance (as they call the Furioso and other poems like it) is a poetic genre different from the epic and unknown to Aristotle. Therefore, it is not bound by the rules that Aristotle gave for the epic.”[3] To answer this claim, Tasso asserts that,

"epic and romance imitate the same actions, the illustrious…[additionally] Romance and epic imitate in the same manner: the person of the romance appears in both; both tell stories, they do not reenact them…. They imitate by the same means: both employ plain verse without making use of rhythm and harmony, which belongs to the tragic and comic poet."[4]

Tasso is not completely dismissive of the diversity of plots within epic poetry. According to him not only can variety accentuate and ornament the plot outline, it can also capture the attention of readers, especially those of lesser learning:

"Variety is, by nature, extremely delightful; and greater variety appears in multiplicity, than in unity of plot. Nor do I deny that variety gives pleasure; to deny that would contradict the facts of our feelings, since we perceive that things unpleasant in themselves become pleasant through variation…. I maintain that variety warrants praise until it becomes confusing and that up to this point unity of plot is as capable of variety as is multiplicity."[5]

For Tasso the perfect poem is one in which,

"variety of matter is one; its form and its plots are one; and all these things are brought together in such a way that one thing shows consideration for another, one thing corresponds to another, and through either necessity or verisimilitude one thing depends on another in such a way that by removing a single part or by changing its place, we destroy the whole."[6]

Therefore, variety and diversion are acceptable in Tassian narrative structure as long as they are held together by a unified plot outline. In Gerusalemme liberata the unifying narrative is the recapturing of the Jerusalem by the Christian armies led by Godfrey; they are freed of this bond when Godfrey kneels at the tomb of Christ. The divergent plot structures, according to Tasso’s added Allegory of the Poem,represent the various difficulties they must endure in order to attain their goal. Here Tasso singles out Tancredi and Rinaldo as characters who stray from, but return to their true enterprise:

"As for the internal impediments—the love that caused Tancredi and the other knights to behave like fools and abandon Godfrey, and the indignation that led Rinaldo to stray from the enterprise—these signify the strife between the rational faculty and the concupiscible and irascible faculties, and how these two rebel."[7]

The pagan character of Armida appeal to the irrational faculties in order to incite rebellious longing in the knight Rinaldo.

Tasso’s “Allegory” justifies why divergent amorous narratives exist within this Christian narrative; by justifying their place in the narrative, he allows himself certain poetic freedoms to add sumptuous and passionate interludes that break from the direct, epic language of the Crusades. Such interludes in the Gerusalemme liberata comment on the human tendency to give in to excessive passions and deceptive forces, only to return to the righteous path laid out by God.

Focusing on the narrative of empire in Tasso’s epic, David Quint notes in Epic and Empire: “within the Virgilian dichotomies between West and East that Tasso revives, romance becomes a deliberate stratagem used by the female Easterner [Armida and Clorinda] to impede the progress of the Crusade.”[9] Though he did not want to eliminate romance from his epic, Tasso’s literary concern is to bring romance under the service of epic. The theme of deliverance, according to Andrew Fichter, is one of the methods by which Tasso turns romance into epic: “Tasso’s notion of deliverance, or redemption, is itself an aspect of his impulse to reconcile opposites, to see continuity in what once seemed discontinuous, or concord in what once seemed discordant.”[10] Looking specifically at Rinaldo and Armida’s narrative, which becomes the focus for many painters and composers, Fichter points out that, “Romance…is constructed as an integral component of the Christian epic.”[11] With tangential romantic interludes impeding upon Rinaldo’s true quest to recapture Jerusalem, he performs the “itinerary of the Christian hero: he must lose himself in order to find himself.”[12]

As the literary critiques of Quint and Fichter demonstrate, the romance narratives were both dangerous, causing knights to stray and halt the development of the plot, and essential, displaying the ability of Christianity and epic narrative to control and pacify the pagan “others”. Tasso codifies the hierarchy of epic to romance through the literal hierarchy of the older Godfrey (rational control) to Rinaldo (passion—later brought under the control of reason). This hierarchical structure is depicted clearly in a 1590 painting, The Liberation of Jerusalem (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) by Lodovico Cardi, ‘Il Cigoli’. According to Charles Carman, the painting is based on the Christian siege of Jerusalem in Canto 18:

Conforming with the poem’s epic nature, Cigoli suggests events that lead up to and, by implication, extend beyond their current activity. Godfrey looks back anticipating the arrival of the Egyptians, and at the same time he gestures forward towards the walls and Rinaldo, who is on the threshold of victory."[13]

To establish Godfrey’s authority over the situation, Cigoli places him on horseback in the foreground, holding a scepter with a dove on top to signify the divine purpose of the mission.[14] Rinaldo, released from Armida’s grip, can be found immersed in battle, firing his arrows at the enemy. The reclining female figure in the forefront represents Armida. Her out-stretched, open hand symbolizes her eventual release from sorcery at the end of the poem; additionally, the reclining position hints at her submission to Western authority.[15] Carman states that, “Cigoli, like Tasso, conceives the subject within the historical terms of the Counter Reformation.”[16]

Whereas Cigoli reinforces Tasso’s narrative hierarchy by focusing on the battle, other painters focused more on the amorous subplots. The art historian Rensselaer Lee points out that painters,

"resolutely eschewed the serious main action of the poem that had to do with siege and capture of Jerusalem under the crusader Godfrey of Boulogne, and chose for the most part only those amorous and idyllic episodes wherein the lyric element is strong, and Tasso’s idiosyncratic vein of tender melancholy finds unfettered expression."[17]

For example, Julian Brooks discusses Andrea Boscoli’s illustrations the “Loves of Gerusalemme Liberata” (approximately 1590s), which depict Rinaldo and Armida, and Erminia amongst the shepherds. The illustrations, though not the first to deal specifically with the amorous subplots and pastoral interludes of the main narrative, represent,

"an important step in the history of the illustration of Gerusalemme Liberata…. Over the course of the next century these sub-plots became increasingly dislocated from the main text, and were precisely the episodes used by later baroque artist such as Guercin, Domenichino, and Poussin."[18]

What made these divergent narratives popular for artists was the lyrical and sensual qualities they imbued, as Lee observes:

"These subjects were immediately popular not only for their intrinsic beauty and human interest, but also because they had behind them a long tradition of pastoral art and literature extending back into antiquity…."[19]

ISOLA FORTUNATA

The appeal of RINALDO Rinaldo for painters is to depict the “languorous voluptuousness” of Tasso’s enchanted garden.

Annibale Carracci, who was the first to paint this scene, captures Rinaldo’s inaction and sublimation in Armida’s arms.

Yet, Carracci, like later painters, hints at the larger epic in the background.

Rinaldo languishes in the lap of his mistress, Armida, with Carlo and Ubaldo spying upon the lovers in the background.

The two warriors are about to pull Rinaldo out of his sensual enchantment and “restore him to the Christian army.”

Annibale Carracci, Rinaldo and Armida Naples, Museo di Capodi-monte

Overall painters, aware of Tasso’s literary theories, found means of depicting both the sensual aspects of the poem, while referring to the larger epic.

The seventeenth-century painter, Nicolas POUSSIN, illustrated EIGHT distinct episodes from the epic poem.

Except for the illustration Victory of Goffredo of Boullion, these pictures represent the divergent narratives throughout the poem.

Poussin was deeply indebted not only to Gerusalemme liberata, but also to Tasso’s theoretical writings as well.

Tasso’s precepts on the election of subject matter, ideal imitation, poetic delight, verisimilitude, and the relationship of poetic invention and history herald Poussin’s understanding of these concepts in his formal theorizing, in composing his works, and in their critical evaluation.

With deep understanding of both the poetry itself and the poet’s theoretical musings, Poussin executes depictions that focus on the romance narratives in and of themselves, while alluding to the larger epic as a whole.

Poussin accomplishes this, according to Unglaub, by representing the sudden shift from history into myth and then its sudden reversal.[23]

Unglaub singles out the works the “Abduction of Rinaldo” and the “Abandonment of Armida” because,  "these works chart the sudden transformation from myth into history, from episode to action, or vice versa…. In the “Abduction”, Armida conducts her prize from the realm of history to the idyll of myth. In the “Abandonment”, this traversal will be reversed, definitively, to signal the fulfillment of the peripeteia, and the final resolution of history."[24]

Though the two works are still confined to the divergent narratives, they are able to make connections outside their frames to the larger Christian epic.

Fig. 3: Nicolas Poussin, Abduction of Rinaldo Berlin, Staatliche Museen

Fig. 4: Nicolas Poussin, Abandonment of Armida Paris, Musée du Louvre

Turning to Wert’s early settings of Gerusalemme liberata, a similar interpretation of the poem takes place.

Setting stanzas from the romance narratives, while alluding to the overarching epic narrative.

Wert’s settings of stanzas from Canto 16, a description of Armida’s enchanted island and her later abandonment, demonstrates this paradigm.

Vezzosi augelli, for example, is a descriptive ottava rima about the singing birds in Armida’s pleasure garden (Example 1).

Example 1: Vezzosi augelli

Wert mimics the song of birds with a continuously moving sixteenth-note motive that is passed around to all the voices. The light homophonic texture of the madrigal pulls the listener away from the larger epic and into a sensual dream world. When this madrigal is placed in the context of Wert’s other settings from Canto 16, what emerges is similar narrative to that of the Poussin illustrations—the movement from the mythical realm back into the larger epic.

Carol MacClintock observes, “Taken together the three compositions form a perfect dramatic cantata: the opening lyrical and graceful, the middle portion anguished, impassioned and the third the summing up and resolution, the catharsis, of the emotional situation [sic, her italics].”

Wert chose stanzas that move from third person description of place and setting to first person narration of emotions and actions. Wert highlights the shift from third person to first person with a change in musical texture. Beginning with the lyrical introduction, which creates space for the character to speak, the piece then shifts to a more declamatory/syllabic setting and the poem moves into first person narration.[26] This textual shift mimics the dialectical relationship between epic and romance, as discussed by David Quint:

"the romance narrative bears a subversive relationship to the epic plot line from which it diverges, for it indicates the possibility of the other perspectives, however, incoherent they may ultimately be, upon the epic victors’ single-minded story of history."[27]

Taking Quint’s examination of Gerusalemme liberata and applying it to Wert’s madrigals, the composer’s lyrical introduction parallels the relationship of romance to epic: as romance allows the “impeding other” to speak, so Wert’s introduction creates an aural surrounding that allows these same characters to sing. And where the “impeding other” can garner sympathy from the Christian soldiers, Wert fashions an introduction that can both entice the listener, and illustrate their “otherness” and subversive relationship to the entire epic. Additionally, it is during the third person narration that Wert alludes to the larger epic on a whole. That is, during these moments of lyrical expression, the text gives him a certain degree of freedom for musical exaggerations so that he might paint both emotional and physical scenario of the situation.

This effect is telescoped in his setting of the stanza Forsennata gridava (Example 2). In the introductory first three measures, the music introduces Armida’s speech with the repeated leap of a major tenth. Even though the text is simply the narrator stating “forsennata gridava” (Madly she cried), Wert immediately pulls the listener into a completely foreign world. Additionally, coming after Vezzosi augelli, the leap breaks the listener away from the mythical realm and points back to the larger narrative.

Example 2: Forsennata gridava

This grotesque leap highlights Armida’s “otherness.” When the poem moves to her first person narration, the texture changes to a declamatory setting. Again using this introductory section to allude to Armida’s place in the larger epic, he creates for the listener the character’s “otherness” and antithetical nature toward the Christian epic. By mainly focusing on sections in which the “other” speaks, Wert makes musical exaggerations that can both distance the listener, as in Forsennata gridava or entice and seduce the listener like Vezzosi augelli.

Where Forsennata gridava immediately betrayed Armida’s “otherness,” in the introductory stanza Qual musico gentil (Example 3), she tries to regain control of herself:

As cunning singers, just before they free

Their voices into high and brilliant song,

Prepare the listener’s soul for harmony

With sweet notes sotto voce, low and long

So in the bitterness of sorrow she

Did not forget the tricks and arts of wrong,

But gave a little prelude of a sigh

That his soul might be more deeply graven by

The text shifts away from the first person narration to third person description in which Armida is compared to a musician preparing to sing. Falling back on her magical arts, she attempts to seduce Rinaldo from leaving with her alluring and enchanting voice. The introductory phrase languishes between the harmonies A and D, as if Rinaldo hesitates and his thoughts still lingering on Armida’s blissful paradise. Because of the third person narration within Qual musico gentil, Wert allows himself a certain freedom with word and phrase repetition. The continual web of motives enraptures the attentive listener like Armida’s magical spells and portrays Rinaldo unable to leave the sorceress. Before Armida begins her magical speech, she first lets out a “sigh”, sospir, so that she can move Rinaldo’s pity and hold his attention. Similarly, Wert breaks up the motive on the word sospir with a rest, which disrupts the continuous flow of music, and, like Armida, forces the listener’s pity—her grief has left her gasping for air. This small sigh, however, is overshadowed by the following long melisma on the words voci im prima that holds her enchantment over both Rinaldo and the listener.[29]

Ex. 3a: Qual musico gentil introduction

Ex. 3b: “sospir” from Qual musico gentil

Moving away from the third person description in Qual musico gentil, Wert sets Armida’s first person narrative in a much more syllabic and declamatory manner. He allows for small madrigalisms here and there, but the expressiveness of the text is carried more in the harmonic language or in staggered vocal entrances. For example, in the third stanza, Se m’odii e’n cio diletto alcun, Wert has all the voices declaiming together Armida’s hatred of the Christian state, “Anch’ io le genti Christiane odiarnego” (I too have detested the Christian nation): all the voices move in lockstep with each other, highlighting the unified Christian army (Example 3c).

Ex. 3c: Se m’odii e’n cio diletto alcun

Starting on a C harmony, the voices move via a hard hexachord to F to show her recovery and growing hatred. As Armida’s hatred grows, the voices lose their unity and enter in fragmentary response to each other.

With Wert’s straightforward declamatory setting of the first person narrative, he still highlights important words to add a higher degree of emotional intensity to the work. This is especially apparent in the last stanza, Sia questa pur tra le mie frodi, e vaglia (Example 3d). It is at this point in the narrative structure that the listener perceives Armida’s resolve to follow after Rinaldo. This resolution is created, not so much through melodic invention, but through a rhythmically driven text setting. The voices move in close unison with each other, while also eliding cadences to keep the music moving forward. The tenor first suggests the final action “Vattene” at the end of m. 10 into m. 11; the other voices then affirm this action on the next beat: The music moves into a quickly declaimed passage in which Armida remarks “Go sweat and toil and fight across the seas, / destroy our faith—I’ll even help you flee.”[30] With its forceful declamation, Wert pushes the listener back into the historical epic of Gerusalemme liberata. This external push is then followed by an internal reflection on the part of Armida, as she asks herself “Our faith? Not mine, not now.”[31] To represent this turn, Wert changes the harmony, moving it away from C at the end of m. 14 towards the softer hexachord of F. Her internal question is then transformed into action, realizing “my cruel one, you [Rinaldo] are my faith, my idol—you alone.”[32] Whereas word repetition was used sparingly before, here Armida’s constant repetition of “Fedel/ sono a te solo, idolo mio crudele” (my cruel one, you are my faith…) represents her inability to give up Rinaldo. The staggered entrances of all the voices demonstrate her frantic state of mind. Ending on E, instead of A where the first stanza started, the change of mode symbolizes Armida’s desire to move forward and rejoin the overarching narrative of Gerusalemme liberata.

Ex. 3d: “Vattene” from Sia questa pur tra le mie fordi, e vaglia

Ex. 3d continued: “Che dico nostra?” from Sia questa

Ex. 3d continued: “Fedel” from Sia questa

Ex. 3d conclusion: “Idolo mio crudele” from Sia questa

Armida’s movement from the romance interlude to the epic whole marks an important shift in the context for which Wert composed this large-scale madrigal.

The Este family at Ferrara, to whom Wert dedicated his eighth book of madrigals, believed themselves to be the offspring of Rinaldo and Armida.

Tasso specifically mentions this connection in Gerusalemme liberata through the mouth of Peter the Hermit to Rinaldo

Their arts will be to put the arrogant down, and lift the poor, punish the workers of impiety and shield the innocent. Past the sun shall fly the eagle of the Este family.

Additionally, Wert’s connections to the court of Ferrara meant he and Tasso knew each other very well.

1581 -- CRONOLOGIA.


Wert even received selections of Gerusalemme liberata from the poet before the work was published-- hence, the appearance of “Giunto alla tomba” in his Book 7 of madrigals in 1581, when Tasso’s poem was published.

With the connection between the composer and poet, noted above, it should not be regarded that the composer’s setting was a misreading of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. 

Tasso may not have been over-pleased to see isolated stanzas from his Gerusalemme set to music.

In his discussion of literary genres Tasso say the epopeia or heroic verse has no need of music.

Wert’s poetic selections and musical settings were influenced not only by the poet himself, but also by the performers at his disposal.

 

With Wert’s strong connections to the Ferrara court, his style was greatly influenced by the concerto delle donne.

 

As the concerto delle donne grew in popularity (along with other professional female singers) at other Northern Italian courts, it made sense for women to be singing female characters or men acting in a “womanish” manner.

 

Wert’s lament of Armida became part of the long history, in both the madrigal and opera, of the female lament of abandonment or longing as characterized for instance by Dido (by Enea) and Arianna (by Teseo).

 

 In the context of female abandonment scenarios, Armida -- by Rinaldo  (along with Dido, by Enea, and Arianna, by Teseo) retains her appeal, because the sorceress keeps her beauty after Rinaldo leaves her.

 

Comparing the Armida abandonment story with earlier epics, Melinda Gough observes that though the veil is lifted on her deception of Rinaldo, she never transforms into a hideous witch, but is made even more beautiful by her grief.

 

Therefore, the singers would retain and enhance their beauty during the performance and even draw the listener’s sympathy for this character.

 

A similar parallel could be said of the paintings and representations of Armida discussed earlier.

 

Her beauty is dangerously alluring, but never grossly “exotic” or “Eastern”.

 

Therefore, when she submits to Western authority and Christian doctrine, this subjugation is easily accepted and even celebrated by the Western listener/viewer.

Selections from Gerusalemme liberata were also used by other Northern Italian courts for self-aggrandizment. Examining Tasso’s relationship to the court society in which the poet worked, Ettore Mazzali points out that he “is the interpreter of the Late Renaissance effort at re-elaborating and adorning its tradition; and his mind tends on the cultural level, toward a decorative idealism.”[40] This desire to “re-elaborate” court and cultural traditions was also in the motives of the composers who set the stanzas of Tasso to maintain their positions. Tim Carter notes “Often central to some historians’ interpretation of the arts in the period is a nostalgic harking back to the glories of the High Renaissance.”[41] For example, Fabbri comments on the context in which the young Claudio Monteverdi composed his two Tasso settings in his Il terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1592):

On more than one occasion, Vincenzo [his patron] had been on the point of realizing those chivalric ideals which he found idealized on an epic scale in Gerusalemme liberata and would become a new champion of a new crusade in the Holy Land.[42]

Therefore, in selecting Armida’s abandonment and Tancredi’s insanity at the loss of Clorinda, Monteverdi could, on one hand, reflect a Golden Age when the West attempted to control or reject the “otherness” of the East. On the other hand, the poetic language of the romance narrative allowed the young Monteverdi to compose in a hyperbolic manner that would impress his patron.

Similarly to Wert, Monteverdi combined various stanzas to create a mini-narrative and provide a great deal of emotional contrast. As other writers on Monteverdi have suggested, the young composer was deeply indebted to the style of Wert in his third book of madrigals. Tomlinson links Wert’s setting of Tasso to what Monteverdi does as his “cycles embraced the special junction of harmonic stasis and frenetic rhythmic activity that had marked Wert’s Liberata settings.”[43] Where Wert placed the significant coloration of “otherness” in the third person narration, Monteverdi has Armida state her own “otherness” in Vattene pur crudel (Example 4a). He does this by a simple leap of a minor sixth in the opening motive that instantly distances the listener from Armida. Dean Mace argues, “Monteverdi’s leap of a minor sixth, by allowing the physical qualities of the word to be imitated, serves as a ‘naturalistic’ rather than ‘symbolic’ expression of meaning.”[44] According to Gordon, this repetitive figure in the opening represents the “incessant quality” of a woman who “will not give up.”[45] Through the three stanzas chosen by Monteverdi, he is given ample opportunity for extensive shifts in melody, rhythm, and harmony that contribute to the overall depiction of Armida’s “otherness”. Tomlinson notes that the opening motive returns in the second part on “per nom’Armida” as her “otherness” proliferates the entire work.[46]

Example 4a: Vattene pur crudel

However, “Armida cannot sustain her anger; it ultimately leads to defeat and physical collapse, which the narrator describes and embodies in a slow chromatic descent that begins at the second half of the ottava.” [47] The musical texture here completely changes from the more kinetic first part to a sustained contemplative second section. It is here, especially, that the overarching narrative of the epic wrests control away from Armida and subdues the “exotic other” (Example 4b). When she comes to, illustrated through a thickening of the texture, her power has been removed. She is left to question the outcome of her life and her lingering love for Rinaldo. Near the cadence, Monteverdi inverts the minor sixth as if to demonstrate her loss of power.

Ex. 4b continued

Monteverdi’s setting of Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e le mie cure begins in the first person narrative, like Vattene pur crudel. Where Vattene was in the mouth of Armida, the “exotic other,” here the words come from crusader Tancredi. He behaves similarly to Armida, captured in unrestrained grief and removed from his true epic. David Quint’s discussion about the romance and epic dialectic helps in the understanding of this scene and of the knight’s actions: “This subordination [of the romance narrative] is also identical to the Western mastery—achieved by the Western male’s self-mastery—of a feminized East whose disorder tends towards self-destruction.”[48] Tancredi, completely engrossed in the divergent narrative, becomes entirely as feminized and irrational as the East—he searches for the tomb of Clorinda and not that of Christ.

The rituals surrounding funerals in Gerusalemme liberata, according to Albert Ascoli, is linked “to the otherness of the pagan enemy, rather than to the Christian crusaders.”[49] Using this interpretation of entombment, Tancredi, in Monteverdi’s setting, is connected with the tomb of the “exotic other” Clorinda. Not only Monteverdi’s descending melodic structure captures Tancredi’s psychological bind, but also the words he chooses to emphasize at the end of the prima parte (Example 5a). In an impassioned speech to the dead body of Clorinda, Tancredi claims he is “constantly fleeing” (sempre fuggendo) and “constantly following” himself (sempre me appresso). It is here that Monteverdi sets up his moment of exegesis. He composes two different motives for each phrase: fuggendo as dactyl and appresso in elongated half notes. By setting the two words with contrasting motives, he creates a dialectical opposition between them-- either he must flee from his situation or he must remain alone in his sadness. This tension created at the end of the first stanza, also reflects the dialectical tension Tasso created in his literary critique of romance and epic. In Monteverdi’s setting, Tancredi begins to ask himself whether to flee from the romance narrative into the epic under the command of Godfrey or to remain constantly following his own emotions, thereby removing himself from the Christian goal.

Example 5a: “sempre fuggendo, sempre appresso” from Vivrò fra I mieii tomrmenti e le mie cure

Whereas the end of the prima parte emphasizes the dialectic between romance and epic, the other two stanzas aurally depict Tancredi’s grief. In the seconda parte, a descending motive, entering the canto in m. 6, on the words “Ahi sfortunato” dominates the texture of the work. Juxtaposed over the text “in cui e le selve irritaron me prima” (whom the night and forest first betrayed me), the combination of the words and descending motive create an image of a character lost in his own torment.[50] The terza parte pulls him out of this tormented state of mind (Example 5b).

Example 5b: “Ahi sfortunato” from Ma dove, lasso me

The music slowly builds from the solo basso entering in the first measure to all voices joining together to symbolize Tancredi’s slow return to health. Monteverdi’s Tancredi does not resolve to return to the larger epic, remaining instead by Clorinda’s tomb, as the madrigal ends with the constant repetition of “onorata per me tomba e felice, / ovunque sia, s’esser con lor mi lice” (an honorable and happy tomb this would be for me, if only I may be with her there). Here the music moves from its static texture to a driving imitative section, representing Tancredi’s search for Clorinda’s tomb (Example 5b). In many ways, Monteverdi constructed a perfectly contained narrative in the last two stanzas, one in which Tancredi focuses on his love of Clorinda and not the larger epic.

Ex. 5b continued: “onorata per me tomba e felice” from Io pur verrò

Ex 5b conclusion: “ovunque sia, s’esser con lor mi lice” from Io pur verrò

Monteverdi’s poetic selection from Gerusalemme liberata not only allowed the composer to play with psychological states of mind, but also afforded him the opportunity to play with greater musical contrasts and certain vocal exaggerations in his melodic writing. Such settings played well within the court culture of Monteverdi’s employment; they made references to a larger epic struggle of Christian forces again the “pagan other” while also maintaining a certain luxuriance of style that would please the listener. However within the court culture where these works were composed, never are these divergent narratives ever brought together in a stage representation or in any other mediums available to artisans. That is, why were there no attempts at the court to stage the epic battle as a play or ballet, perhaps, and the romance stories as intermedii?[51] Instead, the Northern Italian courts turned away from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata for stage representations and focused on staging Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido in the 1590s.[52] Wert and Monteverdi also began setting stanzas from Il pastor fido to please their patrons. This play of shepherds and nymphs, represents the courts’ desire for an elusive Golden Age of utopian bliss, away from the “General Crisis” of the seventeenth century.[53]

----

Even with the rise in popularity of Il pastor fido, Gerusalemme liberata was still used for seventeenth-century madrigals.

With the development of OPERA proper, Tasso’s poem became a perpetual source for librettos.

As with the madrigals, though, the prevailing paradigm remains in the selection from the romance narratives over the entire epic.

In Carlo Pallavicino’s "La Gerusalemme Liberata" of 1687, for example, the librettist gives Armida the last word of the epic, when it should be Goffredo. 

Furthermore when the opera went to Germany, the title was transformed from "La Gerusalemme liberata" to, simply, "L'Armida".

Due to the requirements of courtly society, librettists and composers chose these plots because they allowed for spectacles in both staging and musical effects.

We can think for example of Handel’s Rinaldo (1711 -- libretto di G. Rossi, Mercato di Fieno) where Armida no longer enter with horses but with dragons and she casts spells and mixes potions, an action justified by her Eastern “otherness.”

Not only were these romance narratives ripe for spectacular scenic and orchestral effects, they also added A HUMAN INTIMATE QUALITY to such a grandiose warriorlike, too masculine subject as the First Crusade.

Giovanni Battista Lulli’s characterization of Armida moves through various emotional states as her hatred of Rinaldo transforms into love.

Where hatred gives way to love, then seduction give way to lamentations when Rinaldo departs from Armida’s pleasure garden.

Operatic interpretations of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata were not that different from the early settings of Monteverdi and Wert.

Like the proto-operatic developments by Wert and Monteverdi (in his "Lamento d'Armida"), opera exploits Tasso's spectacular imagery and colourful language for musical effects.

Composers could now justify their musical extravagance on grounds of characterization in the case of Armida.

Her exoticism or sorcery calls for a musical setting that moved beyond the conventional and mundane.

Yet stripping away such supernatural powers, Tasso’s romance narratives also provided composers with the necessary language to portray and evoke the most profound emotions of the human condition.

----

----

Tim Carter, “The Composer as Theorist? Genus and Genre in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” in Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Matiesen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 98.

2. Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Art of Poetry in The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and Comparative Study of their Significance, ed. and trans. Lawrence F. Rhu (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 119.

3. Ibid., 120.

4. Ibid., 122.

5. Ibid., 130.

6. Ibid., 131.

7. Torquato Tasso, “Allegory of the Poem,” in Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 416.

8. As Esolen’s introduction to Jerusalem Delivered (Ibid., 1-16) emphasizes, Tasso wrote this work during the Counter-Reformation, thus continual need to justify these divergent narratives not only on literary grounds but religious ones as well.

9. David Quint, “Epic and Empire,” Comparative Literature 41 no. 1 (Winter, 1989), 20. Similar analysis of Tasso’s epic can be found in Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic from Ariosto to Tasso, with introduction by Albert Russell Ascoli, ed. Dennis Looney, trans. Sally Hill and D. Looney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

10. Andrew Fichter, “Tasso’s Epic of Deliverance,” PMLA 93 no. 2 (March, 1978), 265.

11. Ibid., 267.

12. Ibid.

13. Charles H. Carman, “An Early Interpretation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberat,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 no. 1 (Spring, 1978), 33.

14. Ibid., 32.

15. Carman argues that this reclining figure represents Eve (pgs. 35-6). Though I do not completely disagree with his reading, however, due to the poetic context as well as other depictions of the sorceress in a reclining position (symbolizing her sadness over Rinaldo’s departure) (see Rensselaer W. Lee, “Armida’s Abandonment: A Study in Tasso Iconography before 1700,” in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 335-349), Armida seems a better candidate.

16. Ibid., 36.

17. Rensslaer W. Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painter,” The Art Bulletin 22, no. 4 (Dec., 1940), 242.

18. Julian Brooks, “Andrea Boscoli’s ‘Loves of Gerusalemme Liberata’”, Master Drawings 38, no. 4 (Winter, 2000), 456.

19. Lee, “Ut pictura poesis,” 242.

20. Rensslaer W.Lee, Poetry into Painting: Tasso and Art (Middlebury,Vt.: Middlebury College, 1970), 14.

21. Ibid.

22. Jonathan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4.

23. Ibid., 204

24. Ibid., 212.

25. Carol MacClintock, Giaches de Wert (1535-1596): Life and Works (American Institute of Musicology, 1966), 111-112.

26. Stephanie Lynn Treloar, “The Madrigals of Giaches de Wert: Patrons, Poets, and Compositional Procedures (PhD. diss. Harvard University, 2003), 137-173 discusses Wert’s texture likely derived from the oral tradition surrounding the singing of stanzas from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.

27. David Quint, “Epic and Empire,” 15.

28. Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, Canto 16 no. 43.

29. For further discussion of Armida’s power of seduction through music see Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Monteverdi-Artusi Controversy,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 no. 1 (Spring, 1993), 12-14.

30. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata,” Canto 16, stanza 47.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., Canto 10 stanza 76. Along with MacClintok’s monograph, Giaches Wer, additional information regarding Wert’s association with the Ferrara court can be found in Stephanie Lynn Treloar, “The Madrigals of Giaches de Wert,” 49-57 and 137-173.

34. The language of the manuscript version was later adopted by Marenzio in his setting of Giunto a la tomba, which Nino Pirrotta points out in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 204.

Aesthetic considerations between Wert and Marenzio’s settings are considered in Jessie Ann Owens, “Marenzio and Wert Read Tasso: A Study in Contrasting Aesthetics,” Early Music 27, no. 4 (Nov., 1999), 555-570, 572, 574.

35. James Haar, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance 1350-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

36. Anthony Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara 1579-1597 vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 50.

37. Bonni Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 161-200 discusses the act of singing by early concerto dell donne and how this would have effect the manner in which composer wrote for them. The Mantuan ensemble’s influence on Monteverdi’s vocal texture in his third book of madrigals is also discussed Nino Pirrotta, Music and Culture in Italy, 301.

38. Tim Carter, “Intriguing Laments: Sigismondo d’India, Claudio Monteverdi, and Dido alla parmigiana (1628),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 no. 1 (Spring, 1996), 32-69 for a detailed discussion of later laments based on the story of Armida.

39. Melinda J. Gough, “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 no. 2 (Summer, 2001), 546.

40. Ettore Mazzali, “Literature: Torquato Tasso: An Introduction,” in The Late Italian Renaissance 1525-1630, ed. Eric Cochrane (London: Macmillan, 1970), 144.

41. Tim Carter, “The North Italian Courts,” The Early Baroque Era from the late 16th Century to the 1660s, ed. Curtis Price (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), 25-26.

42. Paolo Fabbri, Monteverdi, trans. Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.

43. Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 68.

44. Dean T. Mace, “Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, and Monteverdi,” in Music and Language vol. 1 from Studies in the History of Music (New York: Broude Brothers Limited, 198), 134.

45. Bonni Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women, 171.

46. Tomlinson, Monteverdi, 71.

47. Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women, 172.

48. Quint, “Epic and Empire,” 21.

49. Albert Russell Ascoli, “Liberating the Tomb: Difference and Death in Gerusalemme Liberata,” Annali d’italianistica 12 (1994), 163.

50. Mace, “Tasso, La Gerusalemme liberata, and Monteverdi,” 150.

51. The closest I’ve been able to find in the context of court spectacle were depictions by Geoffrey of Boulogne’s battle on the Ponte Sta Trinità for the Entry of Christina of Lorraine into Florence, 1589 in Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1984), 132; and Lois Rosow states, “Genres included staged military actions on mythological or chivalric these—such as naval battles, tournaments and equestrian ballets—as well as masquerades and other genres focused on dance. In addition to ancient mythology and other Classical sources, poets and choreographers borrowed material from the sixteenth century’s two great epic romances of medieval chivalry: Orlando furioso (1516) by Lodovico Ariosto, and Gerusalemme liberata (1581) by Torquato Tasso, in “Power and Display: Music in Court Theatre,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. T. Carter and J. Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 214. Beyond this statement, the author does not go into more detail or cite additional sources.

52. Iain Fenlon, “Music and Spectacle at the Gonzaga Court, c. 1580-1600,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 103 (1976-77), 90-105 and Lisa Sampson, “The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Pastor fido and the Representation of Courtly Identity,” The Modern Language Review 98 no. 1 (Jan., 2003), 66-83.

53. On practical terms for the justification of song in the stage works, Il pastor fido worked on grounds of verisimilitude in that it was completely acceptable to have shepherds and nymphs singing, but it would have been strange for a knight of the Crusades to be humming along in battle. In the development of stage representations and opera Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo claim, “The warrior world of Ariosto’s and Tasso’s tales, the Golden Age of chivalry, was no less unreal and utopian than the Golden Age.” On the grounds of verisimilitude though, “it [Gerusalemme liberata] offered no specific justification of recitar cantando. It would seem then that fewer than two decades of opera had been sufficient to establish continuous singing, initially the privilege of shepherds and gods, as an accepted theatrical convention” in Music and Theatre from the Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 274.

54. Though this is for a later paper topic, perhaps opera houses shied away from staging the epic portions of the Gerusalemme liberata because it would have required staging sacred objects, the tomb of Christ most noticeably, on a secular stage. Placing such artifacts on stage during the Counter-Reformation would likely have been chancy with the censors.

55. A similar shift to dragons as Armida’s means of transportation happened earlier in the 1620 Roman fresco Rinaldo in Armida’s Chariot by Guercino, as discussed in Lee, Poetry into Painting, 16.

Ascoli, Albert. “Liberating the Tomb: Difference and Death in Gerusalemme liberata.”
Annali d’italianistica 12 (1994): 159-80.

Bianconi, Lorenzo. Music in the Seventeenth Century. Trans. David Bryant. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Brooks, Julian. “Andrea Boscoli’s Loves of “Gerusalemme liberata”, Master Drawings
38, no. 4 (Winter, 2000): 448-459.

Butt, John andTim Carter, ed. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Carman, Charles H. “An Early Interpretation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.”
Renaissance Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Spring, 1978): 30-38.

Carter, Tim. “The Composer as Theorist? Genus and Genre in Monteverdi’s
Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.” In Music in the Mirror: Reflections on
the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. Andreas
Giger and Thomas J. Matiesen, 77-115. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2002.

----. “Intriguing Laments: Sigismondo d’India, Claudio Monteverdi, and Dido alla
parmigiana (1628).” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 1
(Spring, 1996): 32-69.

----. “The North Italian Courts.” In The Early Baroque Era from the late 16th Century to
the 1660s, ed. Curtis Price, 23-48. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Corrigan, Beatrice. “Erminia and Tancredi: The Happy Ending.” Italica 40, no. 4 (Dec.,
1963): 325-333.

Cusick, Suzanne G. “Gendering Modern Music: Thoughts on the Monteverdi-Artusi
Controversy.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46, no. 1 (Spring,
1993): 1-25.

Da Pozzo, Giovanni. “Last Assaults and Delayed Victory in Tasso’s Liberata.” Italica
74, no. 3 (Autumn, 1997): 319-338.

Del Giudice, Luisa, ed. Western Gerusalem: University of California studies on Tasso.
New York: Out of London Press, 1984.

Fabbri, Paolo Monteverdi. Trans. Tim Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.

Fenlon, Iain. “Music and Spectacle at the Gonzaga Court, c. 1580-1600,” Proceedings of
the Royal Musical Association 103 (1976-77), 90-105.

Fichter, Andrew. “Tasso’s Epic of Deliverance.” PMLA 93, no. 2 (Mar., 1978): 265-74.

Finucci, Valeria, ed. Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966.

Gordon, Bonni. Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Gough, Melinda. “Tasso’s Enchantress, Tasso’s Captive Woman.” Renaissance
Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 523-552.

Haar, James. Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance 1350-1600.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Lee, Rensselaer W. “Armida’s Abandonment: A Study in Tasso Iconography Before
1700.” In De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed.
Millard Meiss. New York: New York University Press, 1961.

----. Poetry into Painting: Tasso and Art. Middleburg, Vt.: Middlebury College, 1970.

----. “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” The Art Bulletin 22, no. 4
(Dec., 1940): 197-269.

MacClintock, Carol. Giaches de Wert (1535-1596): Life and Works. American Institute
of Musicology, 1966.

Mace, Dean T. “Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, and Monteverdi,” in Music and
Language, 118-156. Vol. 1, Studies in the History of Music. New York: Broude
Brothers Limited, 1983

Mazzali, Ettore. “Literature: Torquato Tasso: An Introduction.” In The Late Italian
Renaissance 1525-1630, ed. Eric Cochrane, 134-148. London: Macmillan, 1970.

Migiel, Marilyn. “Tasso’s Erminia: Telling an Alternate Story,” Italica 64, no. 1 (Spring,
1987): 62-75.

----. Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s “Gerusalemme liberata”. Lewiston: E. Mellen
Press, 1993.

Newcomb, Anthony. The Madrigal at Ferrara 1579-1597. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980.

Owens, Jessie Ann. “Marenzio and Wert Read Tasso: A Study in Contrasting
Aesthetics.” Early Music 27, no. 4 (Nov., 1999), 555-570, 572, 574.

Pirrotta, Nino. Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A
Collection of Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

---- and Elena Povoledo. Music and Theatre from the Poliziano to Monteverdi. Trans.
Karen Eales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Quint, David. “Epic and Empire,” Comparative Literature 41, no. 1 (Winter, 1989): 1-32.

Rhu, Lawrence. The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the
Early Poetics and Comparative Study of their Significance. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1993.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Sampson, Lisa. “The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Pastor fido and the
Representation of Courtly Identity,” The Modern Language Review 98, no. 1
(Jan., 2003): 66-83.

Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650. Woodbridge, Suffolk:
The Boydell Press, 1984.

Tasso, Torquato. Gerusalemme liberata (JerusalemDelivered). Ed. and trans. Anthony
M. Esolen. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.

Treloar, Stephanie Lynn. “The Madrigals of Giaches de Wert: Patrons, Poets, and
Compositional Procedures.” PhD. diss. Harvard University, 2003.

Unglaub, Jonathan. Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the
Legacy of Tasso. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Waterhouse, E. “Tasso and the Visual Arts,” Italian Studies 3 (1947-48): 146-162.
Zatti, Sergio. The Quest for Epic from Ariosto to Tasso. With introduction by Albert
Russell Ascoli, ed. Dennis Looney, trans. Sally Hill and D. Looney. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006.