Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (review)

In this book, Giuseppe Gerbino sets out to chart and analyse the use and significance of music within the Renaissance conception of Arcadia. This pseudo-historical, pseudo-mythical topos, carried to fifteenth-century Italy on the wings of Virgil and Theocritus, relied heavily on music as a personally and socially felicitous mode of expression. Images of shepherds purging their political, amorous, or grief-stricken sentiments through song leap instantly to mind. Its cultural purchase in high and late Renaissance Italy was considerable, inspiring, influencing, or directly modelling verses, theatrical performances, and paintings, and thus helping to define the elusive and hybrid world of the pastoral, bucolic, and rustic modes. The subject is thus obviously appropriate to a musical monograph and surprisingly has not received systematic treatment until now (a possible exception is the unsatisfying chapter on music in Luba Freedman's 1989 The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), with which Gerbino is apparently unfamiliar).

The introduction sets out Gerbino's themes and parameters clearly. His subject is 'the musical representation and stylization of the myth of Arcadia in sixteenth-century Italy' (p. 1). His primary materials are madrigals of the later sixteenth century, and music for theatre before opera. The subject is of importance because, while pastoral found productive expression in the other arts, 'there was something special about the way that music contributed to the articulation of the value system associated with the Arcadian ideal, in part because music was an integral part of the myth itself ' (p. 2). Gerbino understands Renaissance pastoral to derive its distinctive quality from the mingling of ancient pastoral motifs with Petrarchan and Neoplatonic approaches to the philosophy of love. Through this mingling, Renaissance courtiers were able to use the pastoral topos as a kind of theatre of the mind ('symbolic space'), in which to act out real-life problems and situations ('to play oneself '). Music was central to such self-representations, not least because it formulated performative aspects of the philosophy of love as aesthetic objects, caught up at the same time in a system of value that assigned it civilizing qualities. Crucially, music within the pastoral mode offered the courts a model in socialized music-making, contrasting with and ultimately displacing the 'radical inwardness' of Petrarchan subjectivity.

Within these parameters, Gerbino established two axes, or problems, that will serve to focus his analysis. First, the literary vogue for pastoral began in the late fifteenth century, but the pastoral madrigal did not achieve popularity until the late 1570s—why this apparent 'musical disinclination' towards pastoral? Second, there was no pastoral theatre in the ancient world, making the claims of opera's early enthusiasts that their pastoral dramas were recreating ancient tragedy difficult to sustain—how did they square this circle?

The reader who begins with the introduction might fear, as I did, that the beginning of the sixteenth century would be dealt with cursorily, and without the imagination devoted to the fully-fledged madrigal or pastoral theatre. The first chapter of Part I comes as a welcome relief. Here we learn, through the example of a frottola extracted from Castiglione's Tirsi, that pastoral c.1500 was more about the act and circumstances of singing than about the song itself. The antique shepherds' overriding preoccupation was the same as that of the Renaissance courtiers: that is, love. Thus almost any song in a courtly vein could be pastoral, if its singer has in mind the conceit of the pastoral frame. Gerbino concludes that 'Pastoral is not so much a category of style . . . as a narrative strategy that uses an imaginary universe to explain the real one' (p. 19), establishing a distinction between songs about the pastoral environment—such as Marenzio's much later madrigals—and music as a practice fictionally located within Arcadia.

After further preliminaries, Gerbino goes on to consider in separate sections pastoral theatre and the pastoral topic in the madrigal...