Monteverdi, Marenzio, and Battista Guarini's ‘Cruda Amarilli’

摘要

Claudio Monteverdi's choice of Cruda Amarilli to open his fifth book of madrigals (1605) is most obviously related to the book's narrative design, which it initiates as a dialogue, followed by O Mirtillo, but it also serves to highlight the importance of one of the works most criticized by Giovanni Maria Artusi after he heard the piece in Ferrara in 1598. When compared with settings of the same text by Benedetto Pallavicino and Giaches de Wert, Cruda Amarilli also aligns Monteverdi with Marenzio's setting of the same text in his seventh book for five voices (1595). Monteverdi's choice of model has greater significance in the light of other works published in the fifth book, which have texts in common with Marenzio's seventh; also significant is the narrative organization of the seventh book, which I argue Monteverdi took as a starting point for that of the fifth.