<i>Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation</i>, by Roseen Giles

Scholarship on Monteverdi’s secular vocal music is a comparatively crowded field, with this new entry by Roseen Giles joining influential studies by Mauro Calcagno, Tim Carter, Massimo Ossi, Ellen Rosand, and Gary Tomlinson, among many notable others.1 The multifaceted brilliance and complexity of Monteverdi’s works invite different and contrasting perspectives; despite a great deal of attention from leading scholars in the field of seventeenth-century music, there are still clearly new interpretations to be explored. Giles, in this careful study of selected Monteverdi madrigals, leverages the composer’s deployment of the marvelous (meraviglia), a central concept of Italian aesthetics during this era that, she argues, has not received the full scholarly scrutiny it deserves. Her starting point is how meraviglia came to be a primary concern for poets, referring not just to the expected Giambattista Marino—who famously proclaimed that the aim of the poet was to arouse meraviglia—but also to minor figures such as Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, who positioned himself compellingly against the Aristotelian notion that mimesis was the highest function of poetry. Crucially for Giles’s reading, meraviglia was not just an intrinsic quality of the poetry, but also acted extrinsically upon the audience—and responses and comprehension from listeners become even more vital when poems are transformed into sounding music. The conversion of meaning-rich poetry into music adds an extra layer of signification and opens the poetry to additional sensory registers, allowing for not only the reinforcement of the images and actions present in the poetry (as has been studied previously in great detail) but also the construction of other meanings, which are perhaps supplemental or even contradictory to those contained in the poem alone. While other scholars have certainly engaged with Monteverdi’s settings of Marinist poetry and his general entanglement with this intellectual milieu, Giles’s book-length study offers a more nuanced examination of how meraviglia permeated multiple areas of his output and shaped his musical responses to the poetry.Giles devotes the bulk of the book to case studies from the repertoire, which are contextualized by supporting concepts from the poetry and intellectual thought of the era. Chapter 2, “Marino and the Rime boscherecce,” provides a starting point for considerations of the connections between Monteverdi and the aesthetic backdrop by examining selections from the Sixth Book of Madrigals. Chapter 3, on “Monteverdi’s Contradictory Kisses,” tracks representations and meanings of kissing through Classical and Renaissance contexts, applying analyses of the temporality and physicality of the kiss to examples from Monteverdi’s five-voice Tasso settings from the Second Book. More ambiguous kisses representing the Renaissance fascination with the fine line between pleasure and pain feature in Chapter 4, “Il bacio mordace: Of Kissing and Biting.” Giles naturally focuses on the Marino settings in Monteverdi’s Seventh Book, assessing their concertato interactions between the voices and the ways in which artful juxtaposition and simultaneity of different lines of poetry might introduce new meanings and nuance. For the last two chapters, Giles turns to Monteverdi’s settings of extracts from larger poetic texts. Chapter 5, “Tasso and the Music of Epic,” provides an introduction to issues of narrative and temporality that were inherent to the creation of epic, showing that Renaissance epic combined the Classical concepts of enargeia (vividness to the eyes and/or ears) and energeia (animation or energy, bringing things to life). Giles compares Monteverdi’s approach to setting excerpts of epic poetry such as the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata with similar settings by Wert and Marenzio, while the last chapter considers “Monteverdi’s Earliest Laments” for Armida and Tancredi. Unfortunately, the book lacks any formal conclusion to tie the presented ideas together and summarize the broader implications—discussion of the last case study continues essentially to the final page of the book, where concluding thoughts are limited primarily to the content of that chapter.The strength of Giles’s volume lies in its rich discussion of the repertoire and in its reliance upon the close reading of musical details to substantiate points of argumentation; musical examples from Monteverdi and others are plentiful throughout. Giles highlights places in Monteverdi’s output where his compositional choices permit readings that complicate those focused on the poetry alone, showing how the translation from a single poetic voice into multiple sounding voices can be a transformative creative act. While the lines between narration and direct speech in the original poems may be clear, Monteverdi’s settings often obfuscate this relationship by introducing uncertainty as to whether speech from a character is directly conveyed by that character or only reported by a narrator, as in “A Dio Florida bella,” in which seemingly direct speech is later recontextualized as reported speech through the exchange of voices and use of tutti textures (pp. 54–57). The text might also be enhanced by temporal adjustments and added physicality, such as the repetitions of the “ahi baci” proclamation (“ah, kisses!”) that recur throughout some madrigals and plant kisses in places where they were not present in the original poetry (p. 158). Such readings are convincingly communicated through granular analyses of the selected passages, which clearly show Monteverdi’s creative mind at work. Sometimes less compelling are the analyses of why Monteverdi might have made minor changes in the poems’ texts while setting them: granting any significance to his reversal of the presentation of kisses and words in the phrase “o dolci baci, o cari detti” (“oh sweet kisses, oh dear words”), for example, might be seen as overreaching (p. 84). Indeed, Giles’s study does seem to lose some of its force by focusing primarily on smaller details. While individual case studies make fascinating points that reward close reading and listening, I was left wondering whether these predominately small-scale observations can come together to fully explain why we marvel at this music.A focus on the effect of Monteverdi’s music on the listener and audience is a valuable part of Giles’s argument, as supported by contemporaneous aesthetic views that “the change effected in the mind of an audience becomes chiefly important” (p. 25). However, while the listener’s experience is referred to throughout, I would have appreciated a bit more nuance in exploring the phenomenological side of these pieces’ reception. Analyses are largely rooted in what may be more readily observed in the score, and I suspect that some of Giles’s interpretations might occur to only the most astute and expert listener. I also remained somewhat unclear on the identity of the hypothetical listeners whose experience is manipulated by Monteverdi’s music—are they listeners from the present day or listeners contemporaneous to the music, whose listening practices and cultural exposure were completely different from our own? The early modern listening experience is certainly extremely difficult to excavate with any specificity and I appreciated Giles’s effort to keep in view the music’s effect upon the listener; however, the omission of any citations of Andrew Dell’Antonio’s noted book on this topic is conspicuous, and his smaller, preliminary chapter on the topic is cited only in support of the claim that “the role of the listener has . . . been somewhat underestimated in our discussions of early seventeenth-century music” (p. 10).2 The book ultimately might tell us more about Monteverdi’s agency in making creative decisions than it does about an audience’s agency to “listen differently” (as advertised in the book’s description).Any scholars who are interested in Monteverdi’s compositional strategies or in poetry-music relations during the early modern era should find much of value in this book. Giles’s work sits well alongside other books on Monteverdi’s vocal music, though it might not contribute such far-reaching arguments as the volumes by, for example, Calcagno or Tomlinson. With its interesting discussion of the cultural backdrop to meraviglia and its close readings of a fine selection of madrigals, it is to be recommended to any who find Monteverdi’s music “marvelous” and wish to discover more of its nuanced details.