The madrigals of Giambattista Marino and their settings for solo voice (1602-1640)

The Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino made a major impact on the history of Italian music in the early seventeenth century. His short, epigram-like madrigals in particular challenged composers to find analogies to the many kinds of rhetorical surprises they contain. Marino\u27s insistence on structural features such as parallelisms and contrasts found a counterpart in the emphasis many composers setting his poetry placed on rhythmic and motivic relationships within compositions. The first chapter deals with the literary concepts of concetto and meraviglia, central to an understanding of Marino\u27s innovations. The second discusses some of the ways in which poetry and the polyphonic madrigal of the late sixteenth century foreshadowed Marinism and its musical treatment, respectively, while the third provides a general overview of all extant settings of Marino\u27s poetry. For the remainder of the dissertation, settings are represented by works composed for solo voice and accompaniment on poetic madrigals from Marino\u27s La Lira. Compositions from this repertoire are investigated in subsequent chapters for rhythmic, textural, melodic, harmonic, and ornamental analogies to Marinist practices; the last chapter focuses on how piece endings in particular resemble typical endings in the poetry. It appears that the musical impact of certain formal ideas in Marino\u27s poetry is considerable and quite far-reaching. The Appendices contain a catalog of all extant Marino settings ordered according to dates of publication, and an anthology of selected polyphonic and monodic compositions commented on in the main text