English madrigals filmed

Abstract

Somewhat surprisingly, given its reputation for pictorialism, the madrigal makes few appearances in cinema. The use of Thomas Morley’s Sing we and chant it and Now is the month of maying in George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet (MGM, issued 1936, 125′) is fairly typical, performed diegetically as accompaniment to a dance, representing Shakespeare’s England rather than Renaissance Verona. Such nationalist orientation was evident early on, signposted by the appropriative title of Thomas Watson’s Italian madrigals Englished (1590), which championed Italian composers like Luca Marenzio and at the same time pointed the way forward by including two settings by William Byrd. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries madrigals were a standard part of the repertory of glee and catch clubs, and E. H. Fellowes’s 36-volume edition of The English madrigal school (London: Stainer and Bell, 1913–24) was born of the belief that the repertory represented ‘our finest School of national composition’. There is no doubting Fellowes’s enthusiasm, though the image of the madrigal has tarnished somewhat since. Kingsley Amis deftly skewered the eagerness of the genre’s supporters in his campus novel, Lucky Jim, first published in London in 1954, where the young lecturer Sam Dixon finds himself press-ganged into a weekend of madrigal singing: ‘“Of course, this sort of music’s not intended for an audience, you see”, Welch said as he handed the copies round. “The fun’s all in the singing. Everybody’s got a real tune to sing—a real tune”.’