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    • 2022-23 Virtual Offerings >
      • The Choir Loft >
        • Feb. 5 - Winter's Chill - Dianna Morgan
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  • Who we are and What we do
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Dolce Spirto d'amore by Gesualdo
The madrigal is famous for exploring and elaborating upon the experience of unrequited love. At a wild guess, I'd say that 40-50% of all madrigals at least touch upon this topic. Sometimes it's just a fading memory, superseded by a finally-achieved union. But usually it is central and doesn't end well.

Well, today we have a madrigal which runs counter to this trend, and indeed has a happy beginning, middle and end. It's by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566-1613), better-known for his dark, troubled madrigals on the topic alluded to above. Here's a famous example. 

But today's madrigal, 'Dolce spirto d'amore' is different. The poem is by the Ferrarese poet Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612), one of the go-to poets for the madrigalian set in the late 16th- and early 17th-centuries. Here's a translation:

Sweet spirit of love, captured in a sigh.
While I gaze upon her fair face, it breathes life into my heart.
Thus my heart takes courage from that lovely mouth,
Which, sighing, it touches.

Nothing tortured here, just a calm scene of love given and love returned. And dang, does Gesualdo ever bring it to life! It's a great example of the central goal of the madrigal: To bring about a perfect union of words and music, to capture a thought in tones, to illustrate and even to heighten a lyrical thought with a perfect little sound-world, custom-made for its purpose.

The languid, seemingly post-coital mood of this madrigal always puts me in mind of a poem called
​'After Love', by Maxine Kumin (1925-2014):

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, are mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Lips admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when


The wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self,

Lay lightly down, and slept.
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