« Si de mi baja lira tanto pudiese el son… » Le chant d’Orphée et les poètes de la Renaissance

Abstract

This article demonstrates how in the Renaissance poetry and music were thought of and practiced together, as two aspects of the same art, embodied in the figure of Orpheus, who is used by Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega among others as a means to define his own poetic program. Latin metrics are the basis of the treatment of rhythm in the last three books of Francisco de Salinas’ De musica libri septem (1577) ; a close reading of book V shows how an incorrect assemblage of feet was considered a dissonance, analogous in every way with harmonic dissonance. A comparison with contemporary verse proves that such dissonances were used in the exact same manner by poets as composers of madrigals used harmonic dissonances to underscore specific ideas. One can therefore truthfully say that there was music in Renaissance poetry. Such rhythmic dissonances prepared the musical performance as is confirmed by examples from Monteverdi and Gesualdo’s madrigals.