Madrigalia

It is hard to understand, much less recapture, the initial impact of Monteverdi's madrigals, especially those of the later books.  Today we can only marvel at the expressivity and the delight in minute responsiveness to the words.  What we tend to lose is the sense of context.  By any standards, the music is powerful and compelling; but what would it have been like to have heard it for the first time - remembering that this would also have been the first time in the history of Western music?

Perhaps the heart-stopping effect of his music would have had the same impact as, say, each new Beatles LP in the 60s which successively mesmerised a generation.  Listeners then must have felt an awesomely gifted presence; the impact would have been that much greater for being so clearly beyond anything previously experienced.

Each age seems to have its leading edge medium which races out ahead, mapping the land which will be colonised by society, until it too becomes assimilated and left behind.  Later it will appear hopelessly isolated or irrelevant; its landmarks quaint or just unfamiliar.  But at the time this was where the cultural fermentation took place. 

In the 50s and 60s that locus was clearly pop music.  Rock and roll and its derivatives were not just interesting musicological developments.  They arose out of and in turn fed fundamental changes in society.  Mostly this had to do with youth, and in particular with their new-found wealth.  It also mirrored the increasing liberalism - some would say promiscuity - that society began to espouse at that time.  Before that, in the 30s and 40s, there had been films.  They represented the first populist medium offering release from reality, and formed part of a response to the horrors of the Great War, and the ensuing economic collapse.

In the nineteenth century novels were the key art-form.  The new novels of Dickens, Walter Scott, and a host of lesser luminaries were eagerly seized upon, rather like the latest films and record albums which superseded them.  The rise of the novel also coincided with the growth of the middle classes.  Before the novel, it was poetry that held centre stage.  Novels in the eighteenth century were subsidiary. Verse ranged from the lucid, almost prosey urbanities of Pope and Dryden to the passion of Byron and Keats.  Its public was the minor gentry and upper bourgeoisie. 

There was a split in the seventeenth century: in the Protestant countries, always more staid, it was the theatre, whereas in the Catholic ones opera.  Both were largely the province of the court and its hangers-on.  And of course opera flourished initially in Venice, which boasted some 40 opera houses only years after the form's birth.  Monteverdi's later madrigals are practically mini-operas, with the same characters Tirsi and Clorinda, preoccupied with the same problems of their sylvan or mythological lands, but cast in a more portable and practical chamber form.  In the last analysis, perhaps the nearest we can come to understanding the centrality of such works is to look at the present-day equivalents of these artificial, escapist worlds - the soap operas of our own characteristic medium, television.  Rather a come-down from the real thing.

(21.6.86)

Index