What Is a Madrigal? Poetry Set So the Music Acts It Out

A madrigal is a secular vocal piece for several voices, typically three to six, unaccompanied, setting a short poem in the vernacular rather than in Latin. It is through-composed, meaning the music follows the poem continuously rather than repeating a tune for each verse, which is what allows it to respond to individual lines. It is polyphonic, with independent voices imitating and overlapping rather than one melody with accompaniment, alternating with passages where all voices move together for emphasis. There is no refrain and no fixed form, which distinguishes it from the French chanson and the earlier fixed forms of medieval song, and there was no audience in the modern sense: madrigals were sung by the participants for their own pleasure, one to a part, around a table, which is why the music assumes competent amateur readers and why the parts were printed in separate books that the singers arranged around the edges of a table rather than in a score.

The defining technique is the literal illustration of the text, and the vocabulary became conventional enough that composers used it as a shared code:

• •Rising and falling lines for words about height, ascent, heaven, descent and death
• •Fast running notes for running, flying and pursuit, and long held notes for eternity, sleep and standing still
• •A single voice left exposed for solitude, and all voices together for words about union or crowds
• •Dissonance and chromatic movement for pain, weeping, cruelty and unrequited love, which is the largest single subject
• •A sudden silence for death or for a broken heart, and a deliberate false relation for bitterness
• •Two voices moving in parallel for lovers, and the number of voices matching a number mentioned in the text
• •The device is sometimes called madrigalism, and English composers used it so enthusiastically that Thomas Morley's 1597 treatise instructs students in it directly

The form emerged in Italy in the 1520s and developed rapidly over the century. Early madrigals are relatively simple and homophonic, setting the poetry of Petrarch and his imitators clearly. The middle period, with composers including Cipriano de Rore and Philippe de Monte, several of them Flemish musicians working in Italy, increased the contrapuntal complexity and the responsiveness to the text. The late period pushed expression to an extreme, with Luca Marenzio and above all Carlo Gesualdo writing chromatic harmony so far ahead of its context that it sounds disorienting today and had no successors for three centuries. Gesualdo is also remembered for murdering his wife and her lover, which he was not prosecuted for given his rank, and the temptation to connect the biography to the music is one most writers have not resisted. Monteverdi's eight books of madrigals span the transition to the baroque, moving from unaccompanied polyphony to pieces with instrumental accompaniment and solo voices, which is effectively the birth of opera happening inside a madrigal collection.

The form reached England late and produced an intense burst of activity. A 1588 anthology of Italian madrigals translated into English, Musica Transalpina, created the taste, and within twenty years English composers including Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye had produced a substantial repertoire. The English version is generally lighter than the late Italian, with more dance-like pieces, nonsense refrains and pastoral subjects, alongside serious works that match anything on the continent. The Triumphs of Oriana, published in 1601, collected pieces by twenty-three composers each ending with the same couplet in honour of Elizabeth I. Weelkes's setting describing Vesta descending a hill while nymphs run down by two, by three and together supplies the textbook example of word painting, with the music doing each of those things exactly. The vogue lasted barely three decades and ended with changing taste and the political upheaval of the seventeenth century.

A madrigal is an unaccompanied secular piece for several independent voices setting a vernacular poem through-composed, sung by the participants themselves from separate part books around a table rather than performed to an audience. Its defining technique is word painting, in which the music literally illustrates the text with rising lines for ascent, held notes for eternity and chromatic dissonance for pain. It developed in Italy from the 1520s to the extreme chromaticism of Gesualdo, and produced a brief and brilliant English school around 1600.