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PROGRAM NOTES
In the 16th century the term “madrigal” had a very specific meaning, referring first of all
to a certain shape of poetic text—one stanza, freely employing lines of 7 or 11 syllables, with a
rhyme scheme following no particular pattern, but usually ending with a rhymed couplet. When
such poems were set to music, the result was also called a madrigal, and the setting consisted of
anywhere from two to eight vocal parts (usually four or five) performed by solo singers usually
without accompaniment, though doubling instruments were very likely often used.
Before long “madrigal” came to be employed for such vocal polyphony regardless of the
poetic form of the text. But one feature that came increasingly to the fore throughout the century
was a conscious attempt to translate the emotional content and symbolic elements in the text into
their musical equivalents. Often this meant that the composer invented (or borrowed from someone
else who had already done so) a musical gesture that might look on the page like the intended idea:
“mountain” (a melodic rise followed by a descent), “river” (undulating lines), “high” or “sky”
(high-pitched notes), “low” or “earth” (low-pitched notes), “eyes” (two minims—or whole notes
to us—on the same pitches that look like a cartoon image of two eyes staring out from the page).
This device, known as “word painting” was essentially an in-joke between the composer and the
singers, who could actually see the image.
But by the end of the century composers more and more began using expressive harmonic
and polyphonic devices to project the emotional content of the text, especially in cases of lighthearted joy or intense passion.
The madrigal tradition, as defined above, essentially died out after about 1620, as polyphonic
vocal ensembles gave way to the solo singing voice accompanied by instruments to produce a
chamber work or a dramatic scene on the stage.
Yet the idea of singing by a solo vocal ensemble never died, through all the changes of
musical style in the ensuing four centuries. Sometimes an approximation of the Renaissance
madrigal returned, but often in an attempt to recreate a “historical” style. More often the four
or more voice parts were fused into a kind of song—especially in the romantic era—with an
expressive melody accompanied by harmonic expression in which elaborate polyphony is only
rarely a main feature.
The present program offers a selection of works that are either madrigals or are inspired
in some way by the madrigal tradition, whether with a sacred text (since madrigals almost always
expressed passionate—and sometimes very risqué love stories, the genre was normally regarded
as suspiciously secular), or with the expression presented in later harmonic styles, or—toward the
end—with amusing modern parodies or recreations of the tradition.
Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (near Naples), was passionately absorbed in music. The
fame (not to say notoriety) of his work was reinforced by the scandal of the assassination in 1590
of his wife and her lover, whom Gesualdo caught in flagrante delicto. Three years later Gesualdo
contracted to marry Leonora d’Este, the sister of the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II, the last in a line
of rulers who had lavishly promoted music-making and composers throughout the entire century.
After several years of busy musical activity in Ferrara in the 1590s, where his third and fourth
books of madrigals established his reputation as a composer of professional quality (previously he
had been considered a dilettante), he spent his last years mostly on his estate with his own musical
ensemble. It was during his last years that he composed the works to be heard here.
In these last years he almost entirely withdrew from the management of his realm and
withdrew, in deep melancholy, into music.
As an aristocrat who did not need to curry favor with any potential employer, Gesualdo
could—and did—write his late works solely to please himself. They are filled with extensive and
daring use of chromaticism, sometimes appearing in was what might be normal if heard in just one
voice, but piled up in several voices through the texture in quick succession.
The responsories for the Tenebrae service (before dawn on the morning of Holy Saturday)
employ an emotive style that few composers used in sacred music. The madrigal Mille volte il di
moro employs a popular literary idea of the time, linking “dying” with sexual orgasm—though
most such madrigals suggest that “dying a thousand times a day” is greatly desired, while Gesualdo
sets a text expressing the anguish of the lover who longs to “die” while the woman torments him
letting him complete the experience. Today (and in some madrigals of the time) this might be
presented as a light-hearted lament—but not for Gesualdo!
Salamone Rossi was a rare thing in Renaissance Italy, a Jewish composer who wrote
polyphonic music, including a particularly significant body of instrumental chamber music and
of madrigals in a style quite different from that of Gesualdo, and harking back more to the lighter
examples of Marenzio and early Monteverdi. E cosi pur languendo sets another poem lamenting
the struggle between love and death—again with “death” as the desired outcome—but far less
psychologically intense than with Gesualdo.
Rossi is also noted for having been the first composer to set polyphonic music to a Hebrew
text and to confront the technical difficulty that arises when placing a text in a language that is
read from right to left under music that is read left to right. The volume is titled (in Hebrew) “The
Songs of Solomon,” implying that he has drawn his texts from the love poetry found in the Biblical
Song of Songs. These are set in a style similar to that of Monteverdi’s madrigals. But since none
of the texts actually comes from that source, it is more likely that the composer is punning here, by
calling his book “The Songs of Solomon [Rossi].”
Claudio Monteverdi started off as one of the great final generation of madrigal composers
in the Renaissance tradition. But his dramatic flair made him the principal Italian composer in the
great stylistic revolution that occurred about the year 1600, approximately the midpoint of his
lifespan. The polyphonic madrigals of his earliest years (up through his Sixth Book of Madrigals,
drawn upon for this program), disappeared with his next publication and turned to solo and duet
“madrigals” over an instrument basso continuo—the fundamental texture of the early Baroque.
Increasingly the texts that composers chose involve dialogue, or at least implied speech.
As opera was the Great New Thing in the musical world—particularly Monteverdi’s
first two operas, Orfeo and Arianna (the latter lost except for one extremely famous number)—
composers invented various ways to handle the “dramatic” element of the dialogue in the context
of a vocal ensemble. Sometimes, indeed, a single voice will sing the “solo” line, while the rest of
the ensemble narrates; other times, the group may be divided into two (or more) parts, with one
part (in several voices) representing the solo singer.
The four Monteverdi pieces included here offer several approaches to this changing literarymusical relationship.
Of all the composers of the 19th century, Johannes Brahms was the one who knew the
most about the past history of his art. Beginning about 1855 he carefully studied music of the
three centuries before him, read old theoretical treatises, compared what they said with the actual
music, and kept a file of old pieces that particularly interested him. Rather than thinking of these
long-forgotten composers and works as gone past recall, he absorbed the lessons they had to teach
and reused them in new ways in his own work. He had learned much to apply directly to his own
performance instrument, the piano, from the late Baroque, but his investigation of vocal ensemble
writing took him a good three centuries into the past.
Vineta is a setting of a poem by Wilhelm Müller, best known as the author of the texts
to Schubert’s two great song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Here he imagines a
romantic image of a sunken city whose evening bells continue to ring, evoking a lost past and the
imagery of a broken heart that cannot get over the pain of a loss. Brahms finds 19th-century musical
equivalents to the kind of word painting used in the madrigal tradition to evoke the romantic
passions of the poem.
Der bucklichte Fiedler is a Lower-Rhenish folk song which Brahms had previously set to
its original tune as a solo song, but in 1883 he recomposed it for four voices with his own melody
and a bow to the past in colorful madrigalisms depicting the dance, the fiddling, the Walpurgisnight
witches—and doing so with some haunted parallel fifths and in the Lydian mode, which gives it a
slightly Bartokian air.
Letztes Glück uses a madrigalist image of falling leaves in descending two-note phrases to
depict the chill emptiness of year’s end.
Claude Debussy is not generally thought of as a choral composer, despite some colorful
and sonorous choral passages in several larger works. But his Trois Chansons are a thoroughly
Debussyan homage to the madrigal tradition—even to the choice of texts, which were by the
15th-century Charles d’Orleans. He wrote Dieu! Qu’il la fait bon regarder in 1898, along with a
companion piece about the bitterness of winter. Ten years later he set Quand j’ay ouy le tabourin
and published all three.
As with Debussy, Maurice Ravel’s major reputation as a choral composer is largely
based on his set of three a cappella chansons (though Ravel had, at least, composed five pieces
for solo voice, SATB chorus, and orchestra, in the first years of the century and, of course, the
brilliant writing that treats the chorus as a part of the orchestra in Daphnis and Chloe. But the Trois
Chansons, composed to his own texts during the first months of World War I, are his finest and
most original works for vocal ensemble. Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis employs a favorite Ravelian texture—solo soprano against
mixed voices, here movingly depicting the separation—perhaps forever—of a loved one who has
gone off to war. Nicolette is a cheerful, if cynical, Frenchman’s view of what it is women are
looking for.
Glenn Gould was, of course, one of the most honored and discussed pianists during his
brief active concertizing career and the longer period of relative silence when he occasionally
recorded in the studio but no longer appeared in public. Few people know that he was also a
composer, trained in and mostly preferring to pursue Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. Naturally
he wrote some piano pieces, but his major work was a large single-movement string quartet. And
what may well be his only vocal work takes aim at the Bach style with a fugue that describes itself
as it unfolds. It was a stroke of genius when American composer Peter Schickele invented “the last
and least” of the sons of J.S. Bach, the unsurpassably imcompetent P.D.Q. Bach. Periodically
Schickele’s “research” has resulted in the fortunate (?) “discovery” of a new work from the
deathless hapless composer. Normally P.D.Q. falls flat on his face while attempting music in the
style of various 18th-century composers, but in this case he is really spreading his wings, taking on
one of the most famous of Elizabethan madrigals, “My bonnie lass she smileth” as only he can do
it.
Organist, composer, and teacher Peter Lutkin spent almost his entire life in the upper
Midwest. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Europe and became the organist at a series of Chicago
churches in the 1880s and ’90s. He founded the School of Music at Northeastern University
about 1895. His compositions all seem to have been intended for church use. The setting of the
benediction, drawn from Numbers 6:24, followed by a sevenfold “Amen,” is sung every Sunday
in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Protestant churches in the United States.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)