Madrigal

A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but the form usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varies between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets. Unlike verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals are through-composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being sung.
Madrigals written by Italianized Franco–Flemish composers in the 1520s partly originated from the three- to four-voice frottola ; partly from composers' renewed interest in poetry written in vernacular Italian; partly from the stylistic influence of the French chanson; and from the polyphony of the motet. The technical contrast between the musical forms is in the frottola consisting of music set to stanzas of text, whilst the madrigal is through-composed, a work with different music for different stanzas. As a composition, the madrigal of the Renaissance is unlike the two- to three-voice Italian Trecento madrigal of the 14th century, having in common only the name madrigal, which some have suggested derives from the Latin denoting musical work in service to the mother church or from the postclassical Latin matricalis. Other sources note that the word "madrigal" comes from the Hebrew word "madriga" meaning "step" and describes the step-like progression of the tune. The early Christians, having been Jews, are believed to have brought the musical style into the Christian/Byzantine liturgy, and from there, into Gregorian chant and from there, it made its way into secular song.
Artistically, the madrigal was the most important form of secular music in Renaissance Italy, and reached its formal and historical zenith in the later-16th century, when the form also was taken up by German and English composers, such as John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes, and Thomas Morley of the English Madrigal School. Although of British temper, most English madrigals were a cappella compositions for three to six voices, which either copied or translated the musical styles of the original madrigals from Italy. By the mid-16th century, Italian composers began merging the madrigal into the composition of the cantata and the dialogue; and by the early 17th century, the aria replaced the madrigal in opera.

History

Origins and early madrigals

The madrigal is a musical composition that emerged from the convergence of humanist trends in 16th-century Italy. First, renewed interest in the use of Italian as the vernacular language for daily life and communication, instead of Latin. In 1501, the literary theorist Pietro Bembo published an edition of the poet Petrarch ; and published the Oratio pro litteris graecis about achieving graceful writing by applying Latin prosody, careful attention to the sounding of words, and syntax, the positioning of a word within a line of text. As a form of poetry, the madrigal consisted of an irregular number of lines without repetition.
Second, Italy was the usual destination for the oltremontani composers of the Franco-Flemish school, who were attracted by Italian culture and by employment in the court of an aristocrat or with the Roman Catholic Church. The composers of the Franco-Flemish school had mastered the style of polyphonic composition for religious music, and knew the secular compositions of their homelands, such as the chanson, which much differed from the secular, lighter styles of composition in late-15th- and early-16th-century Italy.
Third, the printing press facilitated the availability of sheet music in Italy. The musical forms then in common use — the frottola and the ballata, the canzonetta and the mascherata — were light compositions with verses of low literary quality. Those musical forms used repetition and soprano-dominated homophony, chordal textures and styles, which were simpler than the composition styles of the Franco-Flemish school. Moreover, the Italian popular taste in literature was changing from frivolous verse to the type of serious verse used by Bembo and his school, who required more compositional flexibility than that of the frottola, and related musical forms.
The madrigal slowly replaced the frottola in the transitional decade of the 1520s. The early madrigals were published in Musica di messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha, by Bernardo Pisano, while no one composition is named madrigal, some of the settings are Petrarchan in versification and word-painting, which became compositional characteristics of the later madrigal. The Madrigali de diversi musici: libro primo de la Serena, by Philippe Verdelot, included music by Sebastiano Festa and Costanzo Festa, Maistre Jhan and Verdelot, himself.
In the 1533–34 period, at Venice, Verdelot published two popular books of four-voice madrigals that were reprinted in 1540. In 1536, that publishing success prompted the founder of the Franco-Flemish school, Adrian Willaert, to rearrange some four-voice madrigals for single-voice and lute. In 1541, Verdelot also published five-voice madrigals and six-voice madrigals. The success of the first book of madrigals, Il primo libro di madrigali, by Jacques Arcadelt, made it the most reprinted madrigal book of its time. Stylistically, the music in the books of Arcadelt and Verdelot was closer to the French chanson than the Italian frottola and the motet, given that French was their native tongue. As composers, they were attentive to the setting of the text, per Bembo's ideas, and through-composed the music, rather than use the refrain-and-verse constructions common to French secular music.

Mid-16th century

Although the madrigal originated in the cities of Florence and Rome, by the mid 16th-century Venice had become the centre of musical activity. The political turmoils of the Sack of Rome and the Siege of Florence diminished that city's significance as a musical centre. In addition, Venice was the music publishing centre of Europe; the Basilica of San Marco di Venezia was beginning to attract musicians from Europe; and Pietro Bembo had returned to Venice in 1529. Adrian Willaert and his associates at St. Mark's Basilica, Girolamo Parabosco, Jacques Buus, and Baldassare Donato, Perissone Cambio and Cipriano de Rore, were the principal composers of the madrigal at mid-century.
Unlike Arcadelt and Verdelot, Willaert preferred the complex textures of polyphonic language, thus his madrigals were like motets, although he varied the compositional textures, between homophonic and polyphonic passages, to highlight the text of the stanzas; for verse, Willaert preferred the sonnets of Petrarch. Second to Willaert, Cipriano de Rore was the most influential composer of madrigals; whereas Willaert was restrained and subtle in his settings for the text, striving for homogeneity, rather than sharp contrast, Rore used extravagant rhetorical gestures, including word-painting and unusual chromatic relationships, a compositional trend encouraged by the music theorist Nicola Vicentino. From Rore's musical language came the madrigalisms that made the genre distinctive, and the five-voice texture which became the standard for composition.

1550s–1570s

The latter history of the madrigal begins with Cipriano de Rore, whose works were the elementary musical forms of madrigal composition that existed by the early 17th century. The relevant composers include Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who wrote secular music in his early career; Orlande de Lassus, who wrote the twelve-motet Prophetiae Sibyllarum, and later, when he moved to Munich in 1556, began the history of madrigal composition beyond Italy; and Philippe de Monte, the most prolific madrigalist, first published in 1554.
In Venice, Andrea Gabrieli composed madrigals with bright, open, polyphonic textures, as in his motet compositions. At the court of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, there was the Concerto delle donne, the concert of the ladies, three women singers for whom Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Giaches de Wert, and Lodovico Agostini composed ornamented madrigals, often with instrumental accompaniment. The great artistic quality of the Concerto delle donne of Ferrara encouraged composers to visit the court at Ferrara, to listen to women sing and to offer compositions for them to sing. In turn, other cities established their own concerto delle donne, as at Firenze, where the Medici family commissioned Alessandro Striggio to compose madrigals in the style of Luzzaschi. In Rome, the compositions of Luca Marenzio were the madrigals that came closest to unifying the different styles of the time.
In the 1560s, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri — Monteverdi's instructor — Andrea Gabrieli, and Giovanni Ferretti re-incorporated lighter elements of composition to the madrigal; serious Petrarchan verse about Love, Longing, and Death was replaced with the villanella and the canzonetta, compositions with dance rhythms and verses about a care-free life. In the late 16th century, composers used word-painting to apply madrigalisms, passages in which the music matches the meaning of a word in the lyrics; thus, a composer sets riso to a passage of quick, running notes that mimic laughter, and sets sospiro to a note that falls to the note below. In the 17th century, acceptance of word-painting as a musical form had changed, in the First Book of Ayres, the poet and composer Thomas Campion criticised word-painting as a negative mannerism in the madrigal: "where the nature of everie word is precisely expresst in the Note... such childish observing of words is altogether ridiculous."