The Influence of Torquato Tasso’s Poetry on Monteverdi’s Madrigals

Abstract

There is general agreement in the scholarly literature that Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was one of the most skilled and historically significant composers active during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. He composed extensively in most of the principal genres of vocal music cultivated in Italy in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, including Mass, motet, sacred concerto, opera, and both unaccompanied and accompanied madrigals. His nine numbered books of madrigals, in particular, are thought to bridge the gap separating the polyphonic styles of the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. As is well known, one of his favorite sources of madrigal texts was the poetry of his contemporary Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), one of the most influential Italian poets of the second half of the sixteenth century. This document analyzes in detail thirteen madrigalian settings of Tasso's poetry by Monteverdi published between 1587 (Book One) and 1619 (Book Seven). Such analysis suggests that the composer consistently responded to the expressivity and increased formal freedom typical of Tasso's poetry by making greater use of musico-rhetorical figures, as described by the German theorist Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629) in his treatise Musica poetica (1606).