medieval.org
Dorian 90154
septiembre de 1990
mayo de 1996 · Corpus Christi Church, New-York
01 - Carlo GESUALDO. Tristis est anima mea [6:04]
02 - Claudio MONTEVERDI. Io mi son giovinetta [2:27]
03 - Claudio MONTEVERDI. Ohimè, se tanto amate [2:43]
04 - Carlo GESUALDO. Omnes amici mei [5:44]
05 - Giaches de WERT. Voi, nemico crudele [1:58]
06 - Giaches de WERT. Ahi, lass'ogn'or [2:15]
07 - Carlo GESUALDO. Tenebræ factæ sunt [6:47]
08 - Claudio MONTEVERDI. Cor mio mentre vi miro [2:08]
09 - Claudio MONTEVERDI. Piagn'e sospira [4:03]
10 - Claudio MONTEVERDI. Sì ch'io vorrei morire [2:44]
11 - Carlo GESUALDO. Velum templi scissum est [5:46]
12 - Carlo GESUALDO. Io tacerò [4:54]
13 - Carlo GESUALDO. Beltà, poi che t'assenti [3:21]
14 - Carlo GESUALDO. O vos omnes [4:04]
15 - Luca MARENZIO. Crudele acerba [2:48]
16 - Carlo GESUALDO. Solo e pensoso [5:23]
Pomerium Musices
Alexander Blachly
SOPRANOS
Rossana Bertini
Ruth Cunningham
Kathy Theil
Alessandra Visconti
ALTOS
Karen Clark Young
Stephen Rosser
TENORS
Peter Bannon
Gregory Carder
Michael Steinberger
BASSES
Alexander Blachly
Tom Moore
Paul Shipper
THE MANNERIST
REVOLUTION
The "mannerist" art of the late Renaissance stands worlds apart from
the "Apollonian" art of the early Renaissance. Whereas the 15th century
had sought power and beauty through integration, elegance and
naturalism, the "avant-garde" in the later 16th century startled and
provoked through the dynamic interaction of opposites. First in Italy,
then elsewhere, the impulse we know as mannerism fueled a profound
change in notions of what high art could and should strive to express. Maniera
(literally, "style") was a term used in the 15th century in reference
to "(good) manners"; but a century later, having evolved nearly
diametrically, it was used in aesthetics with a meaning closer to
"artificial," that is, what we now call "mannered." The hallmarks of
mannerist art are disproportion, discontinuity, surprise, and,
especially, novelty.
In literature, the revival of interest in Petrarch (d.1374) —
many of whose works are charged with conflicting emotions —
spurred several generations of 16th-century poets: Pietro Bembo,
Lodovico Ariosto, Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Luigi
Tansillo. Maria Rika Maniates has put in a nutshell Tansillo's more
overt tendencies: "Violent descriptions and sharp conceits are piled
one on top of the other in a paroxysm of anguish." In painting,
mannerist artists such as Parmigianino, Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco
Salviati, and Giulio Romano set classical notions of high art on their
head, portraying in exquisite detail elegant but skewed figures, often
in conjunction with voluptuous nudity and other startling effects. In
music, mannerism found expression in chromaticism, the unsettling
quality of which, coupled with an increasingly direct musical rhetoric,
enabled composers to "speak" through music the anguish, frustration,
and sorrow of the poems they selected to set.
The primary musical arena for the developing mannerist style was the
madrigal, a fundamental aspect of which is the use of four, five or
more singers to express the thoughts and declarations of an individual,
often in the first person. The history of the 16th-century madrigal is,
in fact, a microcosm of the progress of mannerism itself. The musical
language of the earliest madrigalists, who wrote in the 1520s and '30s,
is heartfelt but gentle, responsive both to the inflection and the
sense of the poetry, but more concerned with grazia (beauty)
than with the effetto meraviglioso (marvellous or miraculous
effect). Composers in the next generation, especially Cipriano de Rore
(1516-1565) in the 1550s and '60s, wrote in a more intense style,
incorporating into their music greater chromaticism, more outré
devices, and increasing discontinuity. For Cipriano, Petrarch has
become a favored poet.
Giaches de Wert (1535-1596) developed in his madrigals of the 1580s and
'90s a new degree of musical pictorialism, capable of "representing"
not just such natural phenomena as rivers, storms, and breezes, but
also of capturing in music a spoken question — such as "Chi
moi-rà, vita mia?" ("Who will die, mylife?"), in Voi, nemico
crudele. Wert's younger contemporary, the native Italian Luca
Marenzio (c.15531599), is so thoroughly at home in the madrigal idiom
that for every poetic idea he finds an immediate musical equivalent.
Marenzio is the master at creating wonderfully apt musical settings for
the diverse images of "expressionistic" poems.
Carlo Gesualdo (c.1561-1613), focusing almost exclusively on texts of
frustrated love, develops in his madrigals a language of uninhibited,
outrageous, yet startlingly effective despair, carrying both
chromaticism and musical rhetoric to a point previously unimagined.
Indeed, Gesualdo's works, with their unending collisions of conflicting
emotions, may be regarded as the pinnacle of musical mannerism —
as the end of that particular road of artistic exploration.
Interestingly, his works are marked by the very traits that Nikolaus
Pevsner finds in the mannerist architecture of late-Renaissance Italy:
" 'restlessness and discomfort,' the 'incongruous proximity of
opposites,' the 'tendency to excess within rigid boundaries,' the
'intricate and conflicting pattern,' and above all 'no solution
anywhere' " — to cite the summation by music historian Edward
Lowinsky.
With Monteverdi (1567-1643), we are at the threshold of a new musical
universe, one in which the a cappella madrigal will soon have
no place. But Monteverdi's last essays in the form, his unaccompanied
five-voice madrigals of Book IV (from which the five of his madrigals
heard on this recording are drawn) and Book V, are the climax of the
genre in their thematic continuity and virtuosic musical effects. These
works are particularly brilliant in their integration of Netherlandish
musical artifice — points of imitation, double and triple musical
subjects, invertible counterpoint — with the emotional intensity
of recited poetry.
We should not overlook the fact that the madrigalists' expression of
despair and frustration is intimately connected with eroticism. Indeed,
love, especially of the tormented and twisted varieties, is a subject
from which the mannerist composers seem unable to escape. As the
counterpart of the universally-understood erotic interpretation of the
poets' "dying" and "resurrecting," the madrigalists after 1550 create
an association of eroticism with chromaticism. Not surprisingly, it is
in the works of the most morbidly erotic of all composers —
Gesualdo — that chromaticism reaches its peak.
Regarding the ideal performance of mannerist music, we have a specific
recommendation by a 16th-century critic who was also a theorist and
composer. The following statement from Nicola Vicentino's L'Anticamusica
ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555) should put to rest any claims
for a "neutral" presentation of this repertory:
One must sing the words
in accordance with the composer's intention, and express with the voice
intonations accompanied by the words with their affects: now cheerful
and now sad, now sweet and now cruel — and one must accompany the
pronunciation of the words and the notes with expressive accents; and
at times one uses a certain mode of proceeding in the performance of
the compositions that cannot be written down, such as to sing piano
and forte, fast and slow, and to change the tempo in accord
with the text so as to express the effects of the passions and the
music. . . . In secular music such a mode of performance will please
the listeners more than an unchanging, even tempo, and the tempo must
change according to the words, slower and faster . . and the experience
of an orator is an example, for one can observe the orator's mode of
speech, now with a loud, now with a soft voice, and slower and faster,
and in this manner he moves the listeners more; this mode of changing
the tempo stirs the soul....
— Alexander Blachly © 1991