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Si Ch'io Vorrei Morire By Claudio Monteverdi
O Jesu mia Vita By Aquilino Coppini

Claudio Monteverdi's great Fourth Book of Madrigals for Five Voices includes 20 of the greatest love-songs
(happy, sad and various flavors of in-between) ever penned.

The only problem (from a certain point of view) is that these madrigals are unabashedly secular,
and their glorious music can never be heard in a church setting.

Or not? Actually, a musician called Aquilino Coppini, who was in the service of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, had a solution to this dreadful problem: He created sacred contrafacta (re-textings) of many of Monteverdi's madrigals from the Third, Fourth and Fifth Books. These appeared in series of publications with titles like 'Musica tolta da i madrigali di Claudio Monteverde [sic], e fatta spirituale', or 'Music taken from among the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, and made spiritual'.

Now many of these pieces can be adapted rather well to this new context; but an especially challenging case in point is presented by the famous 'Si ch'io vorrei morire', which is nakedly about desire, about mouths, tongues, lips (and, no doubt, other body parts) joining together in a sort of earthly bliss.

What to do, what to do? Well, there's a precedent for this: The Song of Songs. As noted in an earlier screed, the SOS is all about an exciting romance between two young people. Yet it appears in holy scripture in both Christian and Jewish traditions by virtue of a sort of metaphorical transmogrification, by means of which the romance is interpreted as between the believer and God (or Jesus) (or Mary).

Coppini couldn't get by with just suggesting such a re-interpretation of Maurizio Moro's unabashedly sexy text, however; if you don't believe me, take a look at the text-translation sheet. So (as he did with many other madrigals) he wrote entirely new sacred words in Latin--'O jesu mea vita' for the piece, carefully adapting his new poem to the rhyme and scansion scheme of the original.

It actually works pretty darned well! The idea that a believer would ascribe a magic to his/her image of Jesus and would feel passionately and urgently about Him (in a decorous fashion) is not so very remote. If one can forget the original words and context, this transformation of physical to spiritual attraction is altogether believable.

See and hear and decide for yourself: Attached are scores and excellent recordings for both versions, along with a text/translation sheet which includes the two poems. And Cinzia has graciously provided pronunciation recordings for both the Italian and the Latin.
Click here to download learning materials
Click here to download learning materials
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