'In grembo a Citherea': the representation of ingenium and ars in Claudio Monteverdi's Tempro la cetra

Abstract

CLAUDIO Monteverdi opens his Seventh Book of Madrigals (1619) with a madrigal that, in many respects, is not a madrigal at all. A setting of Giambattista Marino’s sonnet ‘Tempro la cetra’, Monteverdi casts the poem as four strophes for solo tenor over a repeating continuo bass-line. The composer punctuates these strophes with ritornellos, and frames the whole with opening and closing sinfonie, interpolating a triple-metre dance section into the final sinfonia (Table 1). With these musical elements the composer, rather than pointing the audience’s listening compass to hear the piece as a ‘madrigal’, gestures to something else—the strophic prologues of early opera, such as the one sung by the personification of Music at the beginning of the composer’s own Orfeo (1607) twelve years earlier. While musicologists have noted the resemblance of ‘Tempro la cetra’ to these prologues, none have questioned why Monteverdi musically fashioned Marino’s sonnet in this way: perhaps the reason is that Monteverdi placed ‘Tempro la cetra’ first in Book Seven where it does function as the prologue to the collection.2 As a stand-alone work, however, the madrigal’s prologue form is more striking and puzzling, particularly since Monteverdi’s strophic setting dismantles Marino’s sonnet into its constituent parts, rather than setting it as a through-composed whole with a syntactical break between the octave and the sestet as was conventional in sonnet-madrigals.3 With his use of a strophic setting within the prologue-like format of framing ritornellos, and the interpolation of triple-metre dance music, Monteverdi seems to be ignoring the text-begotten basis of the madrigal that he himself proposed and defended in his famous foreword to the Fifth Book of Madrigals outlining the principles of the seconda prattica. Why does Monteverdi set ‘Tempro la cetra’ in this way?