Monteverdi, Marino and the aesthetic of meraviglia

Abstract

In his influential book, Monteverdi and the end of the Renaissance (1987), Gary Tomlinson argued that Monteverdi’s fidelity to the integrity of the poetry he set to music marked him as one of the last proponents of Renaissance Humanism. With the seconda pratica, the composer proved himself to be the most astute musical interpreter of Italian poetry, and the master of matching musical technique to poetic gesture. But following his introduction to the sensual poetry of Giambattista Marino (1569–1625)—often called ‘the poet of the marvellous’—Monteverdi did not always respect the formal integrity of his texts. Though it is generally agreed that the appeal of Marinist meraviglia prompted a change in Monteverdi’s compositional approach after c.1614, the way in which the composer engaged this new aesthetic in music has not been fully explained. In order to come to a nuanced understanding of the composer’s late style, this essay reconsiders how the traditional view of Monteverdi—the singularly perceptive interpreter of literature and the creator of the seconda pratica—can be reconciled with his vastly different approach to poetry and music in his settings of Marino, an approach based on contrast rather than resemblance.