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3 Wert, Tasso, and the Heroic Style (Book III) ONTEVERDI'S APPRECIATION OFTASSO, hesitant and secondhand in Book II, matured notably by 1592, when he published his Terzo libro de madrigali. The work that fascinated him now was the epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. So much so that he put aside almost completely the "madrigalismo descrittivo" of many texts of Book II: there are no lyric poems by either Tasso or Casone here. The amorous trifling of 1590 gave way to amorous passion in 1592. The Third Book was Monteverdi's first publication since leaving Cremona and the environs of his youth and entering the service of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. It betrays in various ways the impact of his new surroundings. First of all, it is in Einstein's words "filled with the presence of the tredame"—not, undoubtedly , the singing ladies of Ferrara as Einstein supposed but the rival concerto formed at Mantua in the late 15805.l At least nine of its fifteen texts are the work of Guarini, whose ties to Duke Vincen/o dated back asfar as 1579 and who resided sporadically at Mantua from December 1591 to July 1593.2 Most important, Monteverdi's Third Book reveals even more explicitly than the Second the musical and literary tutelage of Giaches de Wert, by now the semiretired luminary of the Mantuan musical establishment. Monteverdi was not untouched by Wert's music before he moved from Cremona ; we have noted its impact in the multiple counterpoint and flexible homophonic declamation of certain works of Book II. But at Mantua Wert's influence quickly grew more profound. It revealed itself especially in Monteverdi's settings of ottave from Tasso's Liberata—six ottave, to be precise, in two cycles of three madrigals each, "Vattene pur, crudel, con quella pace" and "Vivro fra i miei tormenti e le mie cure." In choosing these texts Monteverdi took his lead from Wert, who had published settings of fourteen ottave from Tasso's epic in his Seventh and Eighth Books of 1581 and 1586. With only two exceptions (the lyrical landscapes"Vezzosi 1. SeeNewcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara 1:98- 2. Vittorio Rossi, Battista Guarini ed II pastor 101. 58 fido, pp. 54, 79, I05-I0 M augelli," which Monteverdi had taken as the inspiration for "Ecco mormorar 1'onde," and "Usciva omai dal molle e fresco grembo") Wert had drawn these stanzas from emotionally climacticepisodes of the poem: Erminia's plaints among the shepherds and over what she takes to be the corpse of Tancredi (cantos 7 and 19), Tancredi's lament at the tomb of Clorinda (12), and Armida's tirade at the betrayal and departure of Rinaldo (16). Monteverdi likewise chose his texts from the latter two episodes—though avoiding, no doubt deliberately, the ottave Wert had already set. He looked to Wert also for many particulars of his musical style in these settings , asEinstein and more recent commentators have noted. And in the process he achieved a musical gravita not found in any of his earlier works, a weightiness wholly in keeping with the heroic pretensions of the poetic genre from which his texts were drawn. Tasso himself may have played a role in inspiring Monteverdi's heroic style, just ashe seems to have prompted Wert's in the early 158os.3 For he lived in Mantua from March to November of 1591,4 and though it isunlikely that the troubled poet would have had direct contact with a novice in Duke Vincenzo's musical staff, his presence itself at the court could hardly have escaped Monteverdi's notice. In any case, Tasso had written at length on the heroic style in poetry.5 And in "La Cavaletta, as we have seen, he had challenged composers to seek nobler musicalidioms. In his Liberata settings of Book III Monteverdi responded to Tasso's challenge. Wert, we have suggested, had responded some time before. His settings from Tasso's poem display one facet of a stylisticseriousness he pursued throughout the 15805. (Another facet may be viewed in the imposing settings of Petrarch's verse in his Ninth and Tenth Books of 1588 and 1591.) But this was not the first time Wert had sought an appropriate musical idiom for epic verse. He had done so many years earlier, in 1561, in his only book of madrigals for four voices. Here he published settings from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando jurioso in an idiom that foreshadows his and Monteverdi's heroic...

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