The Italian Madrigal

“If therefore you will compose madrigals, you must possess yourself of an amorous humor, so that you must be wavering like the wind, sometimes wanton, sometimes drooping, sometimes grave and staid, otherwhile effeminate; and show the very uttermost of your variety, and the more variety you show the better shall you please.”

From a music textbook by madrigal composer Thomas Morley, 1597

It was in secular music, however, that the Renaissance ideal of music as expression made the greatest impact. This took place principally in an important new Italian genre, after around 1530, called the madrigal.

The madrigal is a short composition set to a one-stanza poem — typically a love poem, with a rapid turnover of ideas and images. Ideally it is sung by one singer per part, in an intimate setting. The music consists of a sometimes equally rapid turnover of sections in imitative polyphony or homophony. Essentially, then, the plan is the same as that in High Renaissance sacred works such as Masses and motets.

But with secular words came a decisive change of emphasis. The points of imitation were shorter, and the imitation itself less strict; there was generally much more homophony; and the words assumed more and more importance. Both declamation and word painting were developed with great subtlety. For three generations a line of Italian madrigal composers, or madrigalists, pioneered an amazing variety of techniques to make words more vivid and to illustrate and illuminate them by musical means. Many thousands of their madrigals were published at the time and have come down to us.