Abstract

In a seminal article of some forty years ago, Don Harran identified a style of free madrigal poetry that showed some elements of fourteenth-century forms. He called it the ballata-madrigal. In scholarship since that time, however, it has not been fully recognized that the ballata-madrigal by no means disappeared from the poetic repertoire in the second half of the century, as has commonly been believed. In fact, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the poetic and musical madrigal continued to be heavily influenced by elements of the poetic form of the fourteenth-century ballata.

This article looks first at the shape of poetic madrigals in numerous literary publications of the second half of the century, in order to assert that the ballata-madrigal was recognized by many of the most important poets of the time--including Giovanni Battista Pigna, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanni Battista Guarini--as a separate and important subgenre of the madrigale libero. It then looks at musical settings of ballata-madrigals across the last four decades of the century in order to assert that many of the most important composers of the time--Giaches de Wert, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio, and Claudio Monteverdi--recognized and reacted to the distinctive formal aspects of this particular poetic genre. Various hypotheses for further testing of the importance and range of this poetic and musical genre are put forward at the close of the article.

Keywords: Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Giaches de Wert, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini.

In the Second Book of unaccompanied madrigals (1576) by the Ferrarese composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi (1545-1607), Luzzaschi set a poem attributed to the poet Niccolo Amanio, born in Crema in the late 1460s and dead by the 1530s. (1) The poem was in the form of a fourteenth-century ballata, and its only other setting, as tar we know, is by Philippe Verdelot, published in the first musical print labeled madrigali, in 1530. (2) This choice of text is striking for Luzzaschi, who usually set very recent poetry, often by living Ferrarese poets. His setting of Amanio's poem is divided into two sections by a firm cadence with a fermata--or more precisely a longa in the original--and followed there by a single or double bar. This cadence and full stop marked the end of a relatively brief opening poetic unit that was self-contained syntactically.

This musical and notational convention had appeared fairly frequently in publications of the early madrigal (from the 1530s and 1540s) and was frequent in settings of the poetic form ballata and its close relatives. (3) This poetic form was thought by modern scholars of the musical madrigal to have largely disappeared from the genre after the middle of the century, in response to the Petrarchan canon imposed by Pietro Bembo; Bembo's canon was dominated by the forms of sonnet, canzone, and sestina, all thought to be more serious than the sometimes frivolous ballata. (4) Yet in fact a striking number of the poems set in Luzzaschi's first two books of madrigals from 1571 and...