"Vattene pur crudel": Il "Rinaldo" di Monteverdi (Mantova, 1592)

Speranza

Selections from Gerusalemme liberata were used by Northern Italian courts for self-aggrandizment.

Tasso is the interpreter of the Late Renaissance effort at re-elaborating and adorning its tradition

Tasso's mind tends on the cultural level, toward a decorative idealism.

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.

Often central to some historians’ interpretation of the arts in the period is a nostalgic harking back to the glories of the High Renaissance.

For example, Fabbri comments on the context in which Claudio Monteverdi composed his TWO Tasso settings in his "Terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci" (1592):

On more than one occasion, Monteverdi's patron, Vincenzo di Gonzaga 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. 

Therefore, in selecting Armida’s abandonment by Rinaldo Monteverdi could reflect a Golden Age when the West attempted to control or reject the “otherness” of the East.

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, Monteverdi 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.”

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).

Monteverdi does this by a simple leap of a minor sixth in the opening motive that instantly distances the listener from Armida.

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.

This repetitive figure in the opening represents the “incessant quality” of a woman who “will not give up.

Through the three stanzas chosen, Monteverdi is given ample opportunity for extensive shifts in melody, rhythm, and harmony that contribute to the overall depiction of Armida’s “otherness”.

The opening motive returns in the second part on “per nom’Armida” as her “otherness” proliferates the entire work.

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.

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 Armida 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.”

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

The poetic selection from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata not only allowed Monteverdi 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.

The settings 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?

 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.

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.

REFERENCES

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

Carman argues that this reclining figure represents "Eve"! (pgs. 35-6). Though we 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.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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.

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.

 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.

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.

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

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

 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

The closest we’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.

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.

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.

CHRISTIAN MASCULINITY?

Opera houses (unlike ORATORIOS) shied away from staging the epic portions of the Gerusalemme liberata. 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.

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.