The Ballata and the “Free” Madrigal in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract In a seminal article of some forty years ago, Don Harran identified a style of free madrigal poetry that showed some elements of fourteenth-century forms. He called it the ballata-madrigal. In scholarship since that time, however, it has not been fully recognized that the ballata-madrigal by no means disappeared from the poetic repertoire in the second half of the century, as has commonly been believed. In fact, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the poetic and musical madrigal continued to be heavily influenced by elements of the poetic form of the fourteenth-century ballata. This article looks first at the shape of poetic madrigals in numerous literary publications of the second half of the century, in order to assert that the ballata-madrigal was recognized by many of the most important poets of the time—including Giovanni Battista Pigna, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanni Battista Guarini—as a separate and important subgenre of the madrigale libero . It then looks at musical settings of ballata-madrigals across the last four decades of the century in order to assert that many of the most important composers of the time—Giaches de Wert, Marc9Antonio Ingegneri, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio, and Claudio Monteverdi—recognized and reacted to the distinctive formal aspects of this particular poetic genre. Various hypotheses for further testing of the importance and range of this poetic and musical genre are put forward at the close of the article.