From Madrigal to Opera by Calcagno Mauro

Author:Calcagno, Mauro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

“Ergasto” is one of the main characters in Iacopo Sannazaro’s enormously influential Arcadia, first published in Naples in 1504, a pastoral romance in which the shepherd Sincero stands as the proxy for the author. Later in the century, the poet Antonio Piccioli modeled his shepherd Ergasto on Sannazaro’s homonymous character (borrowing also from Sincero) and made him into his spokesperson and the protagonist of the Prose tiberine del pastor Ergasto (1597).144 Written in a mix of prose and poetry (as Sannazaro’s), Piccioli’s work describes the activities of a group of Arcadian shepherds whose names at the beginning of the book are explicitly keyed to those of the members of a Roman academy called the “Shepherds of the Tiber Valley.” The volume is dedicated to the leader (principe) of the pastoral academy, Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, whose nickname was “Tirsi” and who was Marenzio’s patron in the 1590s (he may have inspired Shakespeare to create his character Orsino in Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love,” etc.). Torquato Tasso too was a member of the “Shepherds” under the nickname of Clonico, and so were literati such as Giovan Battista Strozzi the Younger, Antonio Decio, and Antonio Ongaro. “Aminta” was the nickname of Fabio Orsini, Virginio’s brother, to whom Tasso dedicated his poem Rogo amoroso. In this work the poet used the nickname Tirsi (the same as Virginio Orsini), as he had done in his pastoral play Aminta.145

Given the habit of encoding flesh-and-blood people behind fictional pastoral names, it is tempting to see behind the names “Tirsi” and “Clori” in the poems set to music in MARENZIO’S BOOK VI A 5 (1594) the identities of the dedicatees, Virginio Orsini and his wife Flavia Peretti.146 The composer had paid homage to their wedding three years earlier with his Book V a 6. Book VI includes poems written by the “shepherds” Tasso and Ongaro (respectively nos. 3 and 6 in table 3).147

The possible presence of the dedicatees disguised under pastoral names of madrigal books is yet another aspect of the socialization of the Petrarchan discourse in late Renaissance Italy discussed above: the opening up, typical of Petrarchism, of the I–you relationship inaugurated by Voi ch’ascoltate into the plurality of real-life and self-fashioning agents populating courts and academies. In madrigal books the pastoral code is used as yet another means of communication within the relationship between composer and patron. Far from being only a private one, through publication this I–you relationship becomes socialized, being “witnessed” by that “third party” represented by the “world,” the buyers of the madrigal book.148

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