Cipriano de Rore's Canonic Madrigals

Abstract

In his Dichiaratione of 1605, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi repeatedly asserts that his brother Claudio's advocacy of the seconda prattica was in large part inspired by, as James Haar has put it, word-centered musical language the origins of which he saw in the madrigals of Cipriano de Rore.2 Rore's influential approach to text and the relationship between its meaning and its musical setting did not fully coalesce until well into his creative output. Specifically, Rore's 1550 book of four-voice madrigals, a print in which he virtually stopped setting Petrarch's stanzas and tended more towards contemporary poetry, has been said to represent a turning point in the composer's career.3 For many Renaissance composers, particularly during the middle third of the sixteenth century, one such contemporaneous source of texts was Ludovico Ariosto's epic Orlando furioso. Its role as a wellspring of stanzas that resulted in countless musical settings has been well documented.4 But surprisingly, Rore (1515-1565) turned to Orlando furioso relatively infrequently for his madrigal texts (only eight settings)