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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: LUP-MAL |
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MADRIGAL (Ital. madrigale) , the name of a form of verse, the exact nature of which has never been decided in English, and of a form of vocal music. (1) In Verse.The definition given in the New English Dictionary, " a short lyrical poem of amatory character," offers no distinctive formula
The beauty and the life Of life's and beauty's fairest paragon, O tears! 0 grief! hung at a feeble thread ,To which pale Atropos had set her knife; The soul with many a groan Had left each outward part, And now did take his last leave of the heart; Nought else did want, save death, even to be dead; When the afflicted band about her bed, Seeing so fair
Cried ah! and can death enter Paradise? This may be taken as a type of Drummond's madrigals, of which he has left us about eighty. They are serious, brief, irregular lyrics, in which neither the amatory nor the complimentary tone is by any means obligatory. Some of these pieces contain as few as six lines, one as many as fourteen, but they average from nine to eleven. In the majority of examples the little poem opens with a line of six syllables, and no line extends beyond ten syllables. The madrigal appears to be a short canzone of the Tuscan type, but less rigidly constructed. In French the madrigal has not this Italian character. It is simply a short piece of verse, ingenious in its turn and of a gallant tendency. The idea of compliment is essential. J. F. Guichard
Orgon, polite marital, A Venus compare sa femme; C'est pour la belle un madrigal, C'est pour Venus une epigramme. This quatrain emphasizes the fact that in French a madrigal is a trifling piece of erotic compliment, neatly turned but not seriously meant. The credit of inventing the old French verse-form of madrigal belongs to Clement Marot, and one of his may be quoted in contrast to that of Drummond: Un doux nenni avec un doux sourire Est tant honneste, il le vous
Quant est de-oui, si veniez a le dire, D'avoir trop dit je voudrois vous
Non que je sois ennuye d'entreprendre D'avoir le fruit dont le desir me point; Mais je voudrois qu'en ne le laissant prendre, Vous me disiez: vous ne l'aurez point. In English, when the word first occurredit has not been traced farther back than 1588 (in the preface to Nicholas Yonge's Musica transalpina)it was identified with the chief
house
Fleet
The word " madrigal " is frequently also used to designate a sentimental or trifling expression in a half-contemptuous sense. (E. G.) MADURA 295 (z) In Music.As a definite musical art-form, the madrigal was known in the Netherlands by the middle of the 15th century; like the motet, it obviously originated in the treatment of counter-point on a canto
canto
Italian madrigals, however, are by no means always elegiac; but the term always means a highly organized and flowing polyphonic piece, often as developed as the motet, though, in the mature classical period, distinct in style. Yet masses were often founded on the themes of madrigals, just as they were on the themes of motets (see MASS; MOTET); and it is interesting, in such beautiful cases as Palestrina's Missa gia fu chi m'ebbe cara, to detect the slight strain the mildly scandalous origin of the themes puts upon the ecclesiastical style. The breaking strain was put on the madrigal style at the end of the 16th century, in one way by the new discords of Monteverde and (with more musical invention) Schutz; and in another way by the brilliant musical character-drawing of Vecchi, whose Amfiparnasso is a veritable comic opera in the form of a set of fourteen madrigals, all riotously witty in the purest and most masterly polyphonic style. It was probably meant, or at least made use of, to laugh down the earliest pioneers of opera (q.v.); but it is the beginning of the end for the madrigal as a living art. Long afterwards we occasionally meet with the word again, when a 17th or 18th century composer sets to some kind of accompanied singing a poem of madrigalesque character. But this does not indicate any continuation of the true musical history of the madrigal. The strict meaning of the word in its musical sense is, then, a musical setting of an Italian or English non-ecclesiastical poem (typically a canzone) for unaccompanied chorus, in a 16th-century style less ecclesiastical than the motet, but as like it in organization as the form and sentiment of the words admit. The greatest classics in the madrigal style are those of Italy; and but little, if at all, below them came the English. The form, though not the name, of course, exists in the 16th-century music of other languages whenever the poetry is not too light for it. It is important but easy to distinguish the madrigal from the lighter 16th-century forms, such as the Italian villanella and the English ballet, these being very homophonic and distinguished by the strong lilt of their rhythm. The madrigal has been very successfully revived in modern English music with a more or less strict adherence to the 16th century principles; the compositions of De Pearsall being of high artistic merit, while the Madrigals spirituale in Stanford's oratorio Eden is a movement
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