Monteverdi

According to Pater, all art aspires to music.  It is strange, then, that music is consistently a generation or more behind other media.  For example, where Romanticism raised its tousled head at the beginning of the nineteenth century in poetry, music had to wait a good 30 years before displaying the full panoply of navel-contemplating tendencies.  Where French Classicism and the English Augustans flourished in the first part of the eighteenth century, music only caught up with Mozart and Haydn.  But nowhere is the delay more striking than with Renaissance art.

The art which took man as the measure of all things first sprung up around 1400 in Tuscany.  It was the visual arts that led the way, followed by literature.  Although the music of the time inevitably reflects the shift of emphasis, there is no corresponding breakthrough in method or approach.  That had to wait until what we misleadingly call the Early Baroque.

Just as it was a rediscovery of the body of Greek and Roman knowledge which acted as a spur to the new art, so it was with music around 1600.  Although it grew out of Intermedi and other mixed media entertainments, the rise of opera in the last years of the sixteenth century was a dramatic breakthrough.  The use of monody – a single voice, accompanied by a bare continuo – was no throwback to medieval practices.  The emphasis on words, supported by only the barest of melodic outlines which rose and fell with the text, was quite radical.  Even in the days of poet-composers like Machaut, the music was central rather than subsidiary.

This changed attitude to text and melody brought with it an even more revolutionary approach to harmony.  Where before harmony had arisen as a result of the simultaneity of many horizontal lines, it now emerged naturally as an independent concept in its own right, vertically.  Freed from the exigencies of polyphony and part-writing, it could be used as a key element in the new operatic style.  Above all it allowed drama.

The inflected monody was intended to heighten and emphasise the words.  But the use of strictly verticalised chords meant that they too could be used as building blocks in the musico-dramatic edifice.  By cutting across the flowing linear counterpoint in this way, it was also possible to introduce perhaps the most dramatic music element of all: silence.

These elements are nowhere better seen than in Monteverdi’s progressive exploration in his books of madrigals.  At no time in the history of music have simple chords been so luxuriated in; it is clear that these pieces were as much voyages of discovery for the composer as for the audience.  True to his Renaissance roots, Monteverdi always uses music to support the words, which he shows a keen response to.  Since even the simplest harmonic ploy was new, he was able to invest his music with both a direct simplicity and an affective power which matches anything which came later.  Soon, of course, like all Renaissance art, this pristine delight in the basic elements of the medium passed into mannerism.  But not with Monteverdi.  In the surviving operas, and in the long and rich development of the madrigals, we have a true rebirth of the very essentials of music, one which any art might have aspired to with pride.

(22.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets

Index