Madrigal

The Italian madrigal is the central secular vocal genre of the late Renaissance — a polyphonic setting of an Italian poem for four to six unaccompanied voices, in which each line of text is set with attention to its specific meaning. The musical vocabulary depends on text-painting: 'sospiro' (sigh) is set as a rest before a vocal entry, 'morire' (to die) as a descending semitone, 'piangere' (to weep) as a chromatic dissonance. The polyphony shifts continuously between homophonic (all voices moving together) and imitative (voices entering successively with the same motif) textures depending on what the text wants. The late madrigal, in the hands of Carlo Gesualdo and the early Monteverdi, pushes chromatic dissonance to extremes that anticipate twentieth-century music.

The madrigal emerged in early sixteenth-century Italy as a setting of Petrarchan and post-Petrarchan poetry for cultivated amateur singers gathered at noble courts in Florence, Ferrara, Rome and Venice. The first generation (Verdelot, Arcadelt, Willaert) established the format; mid-century composers (Cipriano de Rore, Orlando di Lasso) extended its expressive range; the late masters Luca Marenzio, Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) pushed it to its extreme expressive end. Monteverdi's eight madrigal books (1587-1638) trace the form's evolution into the seconda prattica, in which dissonance was justified by text rather than by counterpoint rules, opening the path into early Baroque opera. Gesualdo's late madrigals (Books V-VI, 1611) use chromaticism so extreme that no one matched it again until the nineteenth century.

Track the voices entering one by one in imitative sections, then all locking into homophony at moments of textual focus. Listen for text-painting: the music does something specific on each loaded word, and once you hear one example you'll catch others throughout the piece. In Gesualdo, listen for the chord changes between phrases — they don't follow expected harmonic logic, and the disorientation is the point.

Monteverdi's 'Lamento della Ninfa' from the Eighth Book of Madrigals (1638): a four-bar bass ostinato repeats while a soprano laments above and three male voices comment — close to a sixteenth-century loop song. For Gesualdo, 'Moro, lasso, al mio duolo' (1611) is the canonical chromatic extreme.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murdered his first wife and her lover in 1590 after discovering their affair — a crime he was permitted as a nobleman, but one that reportedly haunted him and is widely tied to the dark expressive intensity of his late madrigals. Igor Stravinsky was sufficiently fascinated to compose 'Monumentum pro Gesualdo' (1960), orchestral transcriptions of three Gesualdo madrigals.