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2 Youthful Imitatio and the First Discovery of Tasso (Books I and II) ONTEVERDI the musicalorator did not immediately find his voice. His first two books of madrigals, published while he was still at Cremona, his birthplaceand youthful home, preserve the record of his early steps on the way to this discovery—hesitant steps, along paths well trodden before him, that only infrequently point ahead to the musico-rhetorical triumphs of his mature works. Nevertheless these youthful efforts provide us with a lexicon of techniques and gestures that Monteverdi would develop, sometimes almost beyond recognition , in later compositions. And, not less important, they confess more frankly than the mature works their indebtedness to the music of older, established composers , allowing us a glimpse backward at the byways Monteverdi had already passed on his journey. The First Book The main guides of Monteverdi's style in his Madrigali . . . libra primo of 1587 are Luca Marenzio and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. They offered Monteverdi two distinct if overlapping stylistic options. Since 1580 the Roman composer Marenzio had been the acknowledged master of the canzonetta-madrigal,a hybrid genre, developed in the 15605 and 15705 by composers like Andrea Gabrieli, that incorporated the lighthearted emotions, lively rhythms, reduced textures, and homophony of the canzonetta into the through-composed context of the madrigal, with its emphasis on textural variety and textual expression. Almost allof Monteverdi's early madrigals show some impact of Marenzio's canzonetta-madrigal; indeed this influence is so great in Book I that Alfred Einstein was led to write of his "impression that it is a collection of canzonette."' Einstein exaggerated, as he well knew. But one has only to note the extensive 1. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, p. 719. 33 M similarities between the madrigals of Book I and Monteverdi's own volume of Canzonette of 1584 to feel the truth behind his hyperbole. In tonal type both collections show an almost exclusive use ofcantus mollis (the "soft hexachord," with B\> key signature) and chiavette (high clef systems); G finals predominate.2 Also, the madrigals of Book I return again and again to the reduced textures and lilting homophony of the Canzonette. (The three-part homophony that opens "Se nel partir da voi, vita mia, sento," in fact, is an exact recall of the beginning of "Chi vuol veder d'inverno un dolce aprile" from the 1584 volume.) From his experience in 1584 Monteverdi knew the canzonetta style well. There is little doubt that he looked especially to Marenzio to justify its incorporation into the more serious madrigalian polyphony of Book I (and none whatsoever, we shall see, that he did so at the time of BookII). The influential Ferrarese composer LuzzascoLuzzaschi,though he assimilated many features of the Marenzian canzonetta-madrigal, practiced a style of generally greater expressive weight in the only volume he published during the 15805, his Third Book of madrigals of 1582.3 His works typicallyset short lyrics, mostly poetic madrigali, developing the lover's complaints and the traditionalparadoxes of his impassioned state. In other words, they emphasize emotion. Their music shows a less obvious reliance on canzonetta-like homophony than Marenzio's and a more complex contrapuntal texture, built from the free arrangement and rearrangement of brief, plastic declamatory motives. Most prophetic of Monteverdi's works, however, are Luzzaschi's abrupt shifts of musical style for affective purposes, as in "Gratie ad amor, o mebeato elui," the opening work of the 1582 collection (Ex. i). The lively, consonant homophony of measures 46-48, reminiscent of the canzonetta-madrigal, gives way suddenly to slower, languishing declamation, with harsh suspended dissonance (at m. 53). This stylistic shift has, of course, a text-expressive rationale: to capture in music the opposed emotions of the enamored poet, embodied in the final two lines of the lyrics: "sempre il mio cor gioisca, / arda, o mora, o languisca" ("my heart is always joyful, / it burns, or dies, or languishes"). The powerful urge to affective text expression revealed in Example i sets Luzzaschi apart from Marenzio—at least from the Marenzio of the early and mid-i 5805. Not that there are no such gestures in Marenzio's early works; we shall note one example that Monteverdi imitated below. But they usually do not disrupt the musical flow as violently as Luzzaschi 's. The Ferraresecomposer seems more willing to resort to musical extremes to express his texts. And, as Monteverdi also distinguished himself from Marenzio 2. For a recent definition of sixteenth-century...

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