O Voi Che Sospirate by Luca Marenzio
I hope you all had a good weekend and are ready for whatever this year holds in store for us. Let's hope it's good--
In the meantime, we are in the midst of much sadness; and although (in the words of Paul Simon) 'sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears', music can provide us with a much-needed way in which to express and work through our feelings of loss, grief, and hopelessness. Today's madrigal is a brilliant--even groundbreaking--example.
It's called 'O voi che sospirate', based upon one of the verses of 'Mia benigna fortuna', from the 'Canzoniere', by the 14th-century poet Francesco Petrarca.
The poem itself is well worth a look. As many of you know, the 'Canzoniere' recounts in hundreds of poems the course of Petrarch's love for Laura, a married woman whom he first saw in the church of St. Claire in Avignon, and for whom he carried an unrequited passion (over many years and beyond her death) which he recorded in immortal verse. Scholars have long divided the 'Canzoniere' into two large parts, distinguished by the date of Laura's death: 'In vita' and 'In morte'. Our poem for today comes from the latter part.
'Mia benigna fortuna' falls near the end of the 366 poems of the 'Canzoniere'. It is a double-sestina. The sestina is a Medieval poetic form involving six verses of six lines each, plus a three-line postlude (the 'envoi'). The final words of the six lines of the first verse do not rhyme; they are however determinative for the rest of the poem, as they must recur as the final words in each successive verse--but in a different order, arrived at via a set formula.
A double-sestina is just what it sounds like: Twelve verses of six lines each, with the final words of each line rotating as per formula; plus the three-line envoi. You must check it out--here's a link to 'Mia benigna fortuna', with a fine English translation which manages to reproduce the ever-shifting position of those final words: In this poem they are lieto [happy]; notti [nights]; stile [style]; rime [rhyme]; pianto [weeping]; morte [death].
Now this is a super-ramified form, and it's hard to imagine actually saying anything with it. It's like trying to walk with your feet shackled, or (more a propos at the present historical moment) to read someone's lips while they're wearing a face mask. But we know that poets (and musicians too) love the challenge of writing within a form; often a really tight preëxisting structure will even bring out the best in an artist. Thus, for sure, in the present case.
I don't know of any settings of an entire double-sestina. The most famous example of a complete sestina setting is Monteverdi's 'Incenerite spoglie' (this was one of our madrigal projects several weeks ago--here's the first stanza to remind you); but quite a number of the great madrigalists tried their hands at the challenge--see for example
'Standomi un giorno' by Orlande de Lassus.
It was far more common for composers to set single verses from a sestina; and that's what we have today. Luca Marenzio's 'O voi che sospirate' is the last verse (not counting the envoi) of 'Mia benigna fortuna'. The verse is a sort of peroration of the entire sestina, and vividly depicts the moment when the protagonist, weary of the strife and the turmoil, is prepared to simply 'throw up the sponge' (cf. E.M. Forster).
Marenzio reaches deep into his bag of techniques to vividly depict the poem. Outcries; sweeps from low to high; chromatic lines and chromatic chords; jagged leaps; depressed falling lines: All of these and more are deployed in this most expressive of madrigals. But I'd like to call your particular attention to Marenzio's treatment of the fifth line and its striking plea to Death to 'give up his ancient style of saddening each man'.
Here Marenzio, a composer who used plenty of chromaticism but always within certain bounds, actually skates on the edge of dissolving the modal system--or, in Petrarch's words, 'giving up his ancient style'. Take a look at measures 35-41 in the attached score. Follow the bass as it embarks upon a circle of fifths--G, C, F, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat...What! C-flat! (spelled B)...finally side-slipping to C and thence to an A minor cadence. And look at the strange chords in measures 38-39: Three instances of the same note spelled simultaneously two different ways.
This is not normal behavior. But it can be reasonably explained as an extreme form of word-painting, a response to the text and its desperate appeal to Death. It's an unforgettable moment in a hyper-expressive piece about sadness and desperation.
Attached you'll find a score, a recording, a text-translation sheet and (grazie à Cinzia) a pronunciation recording. I have pasted the translation into the score for ease of appreciating Marenzio's musical response to each detail in the poem. The critical line harmonized by the radical circle of fifths in in bold.
I hope you all had a good weekend and are ready for whatever this year holds in store for us. Let's hope it's good--
In the meantime, we are in the midst of much sadness; and although (in the words of Paul Simon) 'sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears', music can provide us with a much-needed way in which to express and work through our feelings of loss, grief, and hopelessness. Today's madrigal is a brilliant--even groundbreaking--example.
It's called 'O voi che sospirate', based upon one of the verses of 'Mia benigna fortuna', from the 'Canzoniere', by the 14th-century poet Francesco Petrarca.
The poem itself is well worth a look. As many of you know, the 'Canzoniere' recounts in hundreds of poems the course of Petrarch's love for Laura, a married woman whom he first saw in the church of St. Claire in Avignon, and for whom he carried an unrequited passion (over many years and beyond her death) which he recorded in immortal verse. Scholars have long divided the 'Canzoniere' into two large parts, distinguished by the date of Laura's death: 'In vita' and 'In morte'. Our poem for today comes from the latter part.
'Mia benigna fortuna' falls near the end of the 366 poems of the 'Canzoniere'. It is a double-sestina. The sestina is a Medieval poetic form involving six verses of six lines each, plus a three-line postlude (the 'envoi'). The final words of the six lines of the first verse do not rhyme; they are however determinative for the rest of the poem, as they must recur as the final words in each successive verse--but in a different order, arrived at via a set formula.
A double-sestina is just what it sounds like: Twelve verses of six lines each, with the final words of each line rotating as per formula; plus the three-line envoi. You must check it out--here's a link to 'Mia benigna fortuna', with a fine English translation which manages to reproduce the ever-shifting position of those final words: In this poem they are lieto [happy]; notti [nights]; stile [style]; rime [rhyme]; pianto [weeping]; morte [death].
Now this is a super-ramified form, and it's hard to imagine actually saying anything with it. It's like trying to walk with your feet shackled, or (more a propos at the present historical moment) to read someone's lips while they're wearing a face mask. But we know that poets (and musicians too) love the challenge of writing within a form; often a really tight preëxisting structure will even bring out the best in an artist. Thus, for sure, in the present case.
I don't know of any settings of an entire double-sestina. The most famous example of a complete sestina setting is Monteverdi's 'Incenerite spoglie' (this was one of our madrigal projects several weeks ago--here's the first stanza to remind you); but quite a number of the great madrigalists tried their hands at the challenge--see for example
'Standomi un giorno' by Orlande de Lassus.
It was far more common for composers to set single verses from a sestina; and that's what we have today. Luca Marenzio's 'O voi che sospirate' is the last verse (not counting the envoi) of 'Mia benigna fortuna'. The verse is a sort of peroration of the entire sestina, and vividly depicts the moment when the protagonist, weary of the strife and the turmoil, is prepared to simply 'throw up the sponge' (cf. E.M. Forster).
Marenzio reaches deep into his bag of techniques to vividly depict the poem. Outcries; sweeps from low to high; chromatic lines and chromatic chords; jagged leaps; depressed falling lines: All of these and more are deployed in this most expressive of madrigals. But I'd like to call your particular attention to Marenzio's treatment of the fifth line and its striking plea to Death to 'give up his ancient style of saddening each man'.
Here Marenzio, a composer who used plenty of chromaticism but always within certain bounds, actually skates on the edge of dissolving the modal system--or, in Petrarch's words, 'giving up his ancient style'. Take a look at measures 35-41 in the attached score. Follow the bass as it embarks upon a circle of fifths--G, C, F, B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat...What! C-flat! (spelled B)...finally side-slipping to C and thence to an A minor cadence. And look at the strange chords in measures 38-39: Three instances of the same note spelled simultaneously two different ways.
This is not normal behavior. But it can be reasonably explained as an extreme form of word-painting, a response to the text and its desperate appeal to Death. It's an unforgettable moment in a hyper-expressive piece about sadness and desperation.
Attached you'll find a score, a recording, a text-translation sheet and (grazie à Cinzia) a pronunciation recording. I have pasted the translation into the score for ease of appreciating Marenzio's musical response to each detail in the poem. The critical line harmonized by the radical circle of fifths in in bold.