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  • Claudio Monteverdi ‘letterato’ ou les métamorphoses du texte by Christophe Georis
  • Tim Carter
Claudio Monteverdi ‘letterato’ ou les métamorphoses du texte. By Christophe Georis. pp. 744. (Honoré Champion, Paris, 2013. €143.50. ISBN 978-2-7453-2537-2.)

Of the various catchphrases embedded in our music-historical narratives, the idea that ‘the words should be the mistress of the music and not the servant’ is one of the more potent. Giulio Cesare Monteverdi introduced it in his account (1607) of his brother’s proposed ‘second practice’, marking what we have assumed to be a fundamental aesthetic and stylistic shift on the part of a composer who, so Leo Schrade famously claimed, was ‘the creator of modern music’. Claudio Monteverdi had no such ambitions: rather, he was seeking a way out of an impasse into which he had been forced by his critic Giovanni Maria Artusi. The distinction between seconda pratica apples and prima pratica oranges meant that Artusi’s attack on Monteverdi’s musical errors—including his irregular dissonance treatment—was fundamentally misdirected, judging the wrong things by the wrong standards. This was certainly a neat argument of convenience, but not an epoch-changing one, as many have wished it to be.

Nevertheless the first wave of Monteverdi scholars tended to take the composer at his brother’s word—che l’oratione sia padrona del armonia e non serva—constructing readings of the composer’s works that hinge on his remarkable sensitivity to the texts he set to music. In this view, even where he gets things wrong by misquoting or misreading his poetry, he must still be right unless the problem can be explained away by some flaw in transmission or by typographical error, or the work in question is relegated to some lesser status. Flaws or errors will be corrected in modern editions—though they have not always been handled judiciously therein—and for the rest, even Beethoven had his off days. But in fact, such cases of misquoting or misreading are more prevalent than so cavalier a view might plausibly allow: some of us have made great sport of exposing them, even to the provocative but crass extent of questioning Monteverdi’s literary competence (mea culpa!). Inevitably, the broader narrative has tended to resist such second-wave tinkering at the margins.

More troublesome is the fact that the words by which we judge Monteverdi have been mistranslated and misconstrued. The opposition of mistress and (maid)servant (padrona and serva) is the result of a grammatical requirement (agreeing with the feminine nouns, oratione and armonia). Thus Monteverdi would quite properly to refer to ‘His Most Serene Highness’ the Duke of Mantua (Sua Altezza Serenissima) as his padrona, though elsewhere he was his padrone. As for what we understand as the ‘words’ (oratione) commanding the ‘music’ (armonia), matters are more complicated. Monteverdi knew full well that Plato divided the elements of music, or of a musical work, into three parts—in Ficino’s translation of The Republic, 398c–d: melodia ex tribus constare videatur, oratione, harmonia, et rhythmo. That takes care of armonia (not ‘music’ but harmony, separate from rhythm). However, it leaves the question of oratione, which one should read not as the ‘words’ but their delivery, or indeed in the context of melodia, their musical delivery. This opens up a very useful space: even where Monteverdi is not faithful to his words (for example, by misquoting or misreading them), he can be so in terms of how they are delivered in and through music.

Christophe Georis takes full advantage of this space in his impressive Claudio Monteverdi ‘letterato’, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation (‘Les Métamorphoses du texte: Le travail littéraire de Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) dans ses livres de madrigaux’, Université Catholique de Louvain, 2008). He also makes the very good point that even a ‘corrupt’ poetic text—as it might appear in Monteverdi’s setting—remains a ‘text’ to be read in some kind of way. There is, of course, a degree of circularity in the argument: the corruptions of a [End Page 457] text are vindicated by the musical and other circumstances of its corruption. But it...

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