Monteverdi's Voices: A Poetics of the Madrigal

"Ah, alas!" The "faithful shepherd" Mirtillo's woeful sigh of unrequited love, delivered with outrageous musical dissonances, has rung through the ages since the first publication of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigal "Cruda Amarilli" in 1605. But there is far more to the composer's nine books of madrigals than dissonant progressions—they are an integral part of the intellectual, artistic, and practical worlds of creation and performance in Italian musical and literary culture of the late sixtee...