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Scott, and a host of lesser luminaries were eagerly seized upon, rather like the latest films and record albums which superseded them.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

The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

Index