The Madrigal
The madrigal has its origin in fourteenth century Italy, and, as a poetic and secular musical form, reached its heyday during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was by far the most popular form of secular polyphony during this period, and the Italian example served as a template for parallel emerging forms in other European countries, particularly England. It earns its place as the most important genre of the late Renaissance because of the intense and expressive relationship between the music and the text, a stylistic evolution which was to become one of the cornerstones of choral and vocal music of the Baroque – both secular and sacred. Madrigalian verse in the early sixteenth century owed much in its style and imagery to Petrarch (1304-1374) whose early Italian poetry was enjoying an extraordinary revival at this time. Features of this included moving away from fixed-verse strophic structures into free-flowing prose, contrasted with weighty declamatory passages. The madrigals of the Franco-Flemish composer Jacques Arcadelt (1507-1568), in five books of madrigals for four and five voices, published in Venice between 1538 and 1544, use Petrarchian verse and were extremely popular. They were re-printed over forty times before the mid-seventeenth century. Musical features of these include intricate imitative counterpoint, and important lines of the text made prominent by having been set to heavy, declamatory, chordal passages. These musical features were hugely influential on Arcadelt’s Venetian successors.
Venetian printers established themselves as the leading publishers of madrigals in Europe, and, through the 1550s and 1560s, there was not a professional composer in Europe who did not cultivate this genre and seek publication in Venice. The principal purpose of madrigals was as chamber music, for cultured amateurs who were not instrumentalists, sung for their own enjoyment and recreation, and possibly also for the delectation of a select few – a sort of distant forerunner to the part songs and parlour songs of the Victorian era.
Venetian printers broadened the market during this period – no doubt to increase their sales – and arrangements and intabulations for the lute began to appear, as well as arrangements for smaller combinations of voices, which increased the accessibility of the music to the public. During the second half of the sixteenth century Venice was the leading centre of madrigal composition and publication. Musically, experimentation in modulation, wild chromaticism, and increasingly daring and bizarre harmonic progressions were carried out in ever-progressive attempts to bring the text more and more vividly off the page.
Adrian Willaert published a set of Madrigals in Venice to great fanfare in 1559, and musical features of this set were to become much imitated by lesser Venetian composers in the following decade. Andrea Gabrieli published his first set in 1566. He wrote no madrigals for four voices, preferring either the airiness of a high-pitched three-voiced texture, or the vast opportunities for colour and texture available from five to twelve part settings. His madrigals are also notable for moving away from the Petrarchian school of literature towards lighter, pastoral and more idyllic poetry.
Giovanni Gabrieli is not regarded as a composer who contributed a great deal to the genre of the madrigal. Unusually for the time, he did not publish a volume of work devoted to this genre, and his only published madrigals seem to appear in anthologies which also contain music by various other composers. About a third of his madrigals are “dialogue” madrigals for double choir, usually for eight voices, and the musical style is very much based on that of his sacred music, although usually with an emphasis on the upper voice in each choir, thus giving greater prominence to the melody. Many of the madrigals are settings of poetry appropriate for weddings, and it is assumed that they were written by commission, or request, for specific occasions.
Instrumental Music
The Venetians were also leading the way in terms of extended instrumental music south of the Alps. The ricercars (essentially instrumental motets), canzonas, sonatas and toccatas of Andrea Gabrieli are significant. They frequently base the musical content on only one or two themes which are then inverted (played upside down), diminished (played in half note values), augmented (played in double note values) and drawn together in a stretto (played in quick succession), and sometimes played with an accompanying counter-melody. This gave the music cohesion and structure, and these compositional devices spread across northern Europe and influenced composers such as Sweelinck (1562-1621) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). They are exactly the same devices which we find Bach using, in a more sophisticated way, in his fugues and instrumental music about a century later. The ricercars of Merulo (1533-1604) often alternate slow sombre passages with quasi improvisatory sections, whilst the canzonas, often based on an existing chanson melody, are generally simpler with less ornamentation and counterpoint. Giovanni Gabrieli published instrumental music for up to nineteen instruments, divided into antiphonal groups by pitch, and written in the same way as his polychoral music.
The Venetian polychoral (both secular and sacred) and instrumental compositions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, combining voices and instruments, and the advent of prolific music publishing, are amongst the most important musical events in the history of European music, and their influence on musical practice in other countries was enormous. The compositional innovations introduced by the Venetian school, along with the contemporary development of monody (solo song) and opera in Florence, together define the end of the musical Renaissance and the beginning of the musical Baroque.
