The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi (Cambridge Companions to Music) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

INTERMEDIO IV: Lamento della ninfa (1638)

Tim Carter

The Lamento della ninfa , included by Monteverdi in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638), has been a focus of hot debate over aesthetic and expressive issues in the composer’s Venetian secular music. It was identified by Ellen Rosand in 1979 as a prototypical example of a ground-bass pattern moving from tonic to dominant through a descending minor tetrachord – the so-called ‘emblem of lament’ that then, in diatonic or chromatic form, and with or without a cadential extension, permeated Baroque music, via Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Dido’s concluding ‘When I am laid in earth’) to the Crucifixus of Bach’s B minor Mass, even extending into the Classical period and beyond (the opening of Mozart’s D minor string quartet, K. 421) . In 1987, Gary Tomlinson sought to reconcile his disparaging view of Monteverdi’s apparent decline from Renaissance subtlety into Baroque sterility with his undoubted sense of the power of this ‘through-composed dramatic scena ’: the Lamento della ninfa is ‘a brilliant anomaly’ – ‘In it, from the foundation of Marinism, with materials touched by memories of lighter styles, Monteverdi erected an enduring monument to the Petrarchism of his youth.’ In 1991, Susan McClary picked up on Tomlinson’s notion of it being a ‘dramatic scena ’ and explored the piece as a prototypical (again) mad-scene, worthy of comparison with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor , Richard Strauss’s Salome , and Schoenberg’s Erwartung . More recently, the debate has hinged on how Monteverdi’s use here of a triple-time aria style (if it is) signifies a shift of emphasis from recitative to aria as the prime form of musical expression – clearly significant for what would emerge in later Baroque opera and cantata – and even from a ‘second practice’ to a ‘third’. 1

Certainly, the Lamento della ninfa is a very odd piece. The text is a relatively straightforward canzonetta by Ottavio Rinuccini that must have been written before its first musical setting appeared in print, a solo song by Antonio Brunelli published in 1614. Brunelli’s monody, plus a duet by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (1619) and an anonymous solo voice setting in a Florentine manuscript, treat the text fairly straightforwardly. Rinuccini’s poem is in ten stanzas, each ending with the same two-line refrain:

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