Monteverdi and the Marvellous
Poetry, Sound, and Representation

Explores the path-breaking interaction between language and music in Monteverdi's madrigals through the provocative poetics of the marvellous.

Roseen Giles (Author)

9781009355353, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 2023

300 pages
25.1 x 17.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.68 kg

'[The book] is a substantial contribution to understanding the composer as an adept literary interpreter dialoguing with the aesthetics of his time. The book will serve an interdisciplinary readership well, especially enticing literary scholars, cultural historians, and musicologists and finding use in music and general academic libraries.' Jonathan C. Ligrani, Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.

The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. It illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.

Introduction: Monteverdi's Modes of Representation
1. The sound of the marvellous
2. Marino And the rime boscherecce
3. Monteverdi's contradictory kisses
4. Il bacio mordace: of kissing and biting
5. Tasso and the music of epic
6. Monteverdi's earliest laments.

Subject Areas: Medieval & Renaissance music [c 1000 to c 1600 AVGC2]