What is Madrigal Music?

Imagine a candlelit chamber in a Florentine palazzo, sometime around 1540. Four or five singers sit around a table, each holding not a score but a single partbook (soprano, alto, tenor, or bass), so no one sees the whole until they sing it. There is scarcely an audience; the singers are the audience. A poem by Petrarch, or by one of his innumerable disciples, lies open among them, and as they sing, the verse is not merely carried by the music but questioned, illuminated, and now and then tenderly teased by it. That, in a sentence, is the madrigal: secular polyphony for a handful of voices, made chiefly for the delight of those who perform it, and devoted with an almost fanatical attentiveness to the meaning of its words.

Its subjects were the worldly ones. Love requited and love refused, the pastoral idyll of nymphs and shepherds, the sting of a mistress’s glance, the occasional barb of satire: these were its daily bread. Its glory lay in harmony and texture, in the way independent lines braid themselves into chords and then unravel again, in the way a single dissonance placed precisely upon a word such as dolore can feel less like a sound than a wound. Like the Renaissance sonnet, the madrigal was a small vessel that held enormous weather. Three minutes of music might contain a whole afternoon of longing, the light shifting across it as clouds pass over a field.

What is Word Painting?

Used primarily in choral music and opera, word painting represents the meaning of a text through musical gestures or sounds. This technique grew during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, although it’s traceable to earlier periods.

Word painting enhances the music’s expressiveness and creates an emotional effect that is more compelling than abstract music. Musical effects illustrate words or describe an event’s emotional and dramatic content. For example, a composer uses a high pitch to reflect excitement or a fast tempo to convey tension. These create powerful connections between text and music, immersing listeners in the musical narrative.

Two Madrigals, One Name: From the Trecento to the Cinquecento

History has played a small trick with the word, and it is worth untangling at the outset, for there were, in effect, two madrigals. The first flowered in fourteenth-century Italy, the age of the Trecento, when composers such as Jacopo da Bologna and Francesco Landini set short pastoral poems in three-line stanzas rounded off by a ritornello, for two or three voices with ornate upper lines. That repertory faded in the fifteenth century, when the polyphonists of northern France and Flanders held Europe’s musical imagination in their capable hands.

The madrigal most of us mean arrived in the 1520s and 1530s, in Florence and Rome, and it shared with its ancestor little beyond a name and a homeland. Its first great practitioners were, with fine irony, northerners: Philippe Verdelot and Jacques Arcadelt among them, who brought their contrapuntal sophistication south and put it to work in Italian verse. Within a generation the presses of Venice were issuing books of madrigals by the hundred. As Alfred Einstein demonstrated in his monumental three-volume study, the genre became the principal laboratory of Italian music for the remainder of the century, where composers tried out the harmonic and expressive experiments that would eventually give birth to opera.

Why Poetry Mattered: Petrarch, Bembo, and the Literary Madrigal

The sixteenth-century madrigal was as much a literary movement as a musical one. In 1525, the Venetian humanist (and later cardinal) Pietro Bembo published his Prose della volgar lingua, a treatise that enthroned Petrarch as the model for Italian poetry and taught readers to hear the very sounds of words: the gravity of certain vowels and consonants, the sweetness and lightness of others. Composers took the lesson to heart. If a poet’s syllables could be grave or sweet, then music, too, could weigh each word on a jeweler’s scale.

The poets beloved by the madrigalists form a roll call of Italian letters: Petrarch above all, then Sannazaro, Ariosto, and later Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido supplied texts to an entire generation, Monteverdi among them. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) had already made the ability to sing one’s part at sight a mark of the cultivated man and woman, and so the madrigal became a social grace as well as an art, something one did rather than something one merely attended. One thinks of those evenings as rooms full of half-lit faces bent over small oblong books, the conversation slipping in and out of song as easily as a stream slips between sunlight and shade.

The madrigal’s fame soon outran Italy. By the century’s end, Christopher Marlowe could fill his passionate shepherd’s catalog of rural delights with an image of birds singing madrigals beside shallow, falling rivers, and Shakespeare thought the lines familiar enough to put a garbled version into the mouth of the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. A musical genre truly arrives when playwrights start joking about it.

What Is Word Painting?

Word painting (musicians of the period and scholars since have often simply called it “madrigalism”) is the art of making music do what the words say. When the poem climbs toward heaven, the voices ascend; when it sinks toward the grave, they fall. When it speaks of running, the notes hurry; when it sighs, the line breaks off into a rest, a small intake of breath made audible. A word such as “alone” may be entrusted to a single voice, while “together” gathers every singer into one chord. Some composers even indulged in what scholars call eye music, blackening the notation for words like “night” or “death,” a private joke, or perhaps a private devotion, meant for the singers alone, since no listener could possibly hear it.

The technique predates the madrigal and long outlived it. Handel’s Messiah lifts its valleys and levels its mountains with the plain literalism of a cartographer, and you can hear the madrigal’s grandchildren in every film score whose strings swell at the instant the lovers kiss. Yet in the madrigal, word painting became something close to a philosophy. The Renaissance composer approached a poem as a great actor approaches a soliloquy: not as text to be delivered but as thought to be lived through, phrase by phrase, in real time.

Critics have long debated whether the habit could tip over into the merely literal, a kind of punning in tones, and occasionally it did. A composer who sets every “heaven” high and every “earth” low is like a pianist who plays every crescendo exactly as marked, with nothing in between. At its best, however, word painting accomplishes something abstract music cannot quite manage. It lets us feel the exact moment at which a word becomes an emotion. Walter Pater famously proposed that all the arts aspire toward the condition of music; the madrigal suggests that music, for its part, once aspired just as ardently toward the condition of poetry.

The Most Famous Madrigal? Arcadelt’s “Il bianco e dolce cigno”

If any single piece may claim to be the most celebrated madrigal of the sixteenth century, it is Jacques Arcadelt’s Il bianco e dolce cigno (The White and Gentle Swan), the opening number of his First Book of Madrigals for four voices, which first survives in a Venetian edition of 1539. That collection was reprinted again and again for more than a century, making it something like a Renaissance bestseller, and its first page became, for countless amateur singers, the very definition of the genre.

The text, variously attributed to Alfonso d’Avalos and to Giovanni Guidiccioni, draws upon the ancient legend that the swan, silent all its life, sings only once, at the moment of death. The poet sets his own fate beside the bird’s. The swan dies disconsolate, he tells us, while he dies in bliss, filled with joy and desire, and if dying brings no greater pain than this, he would gladly die a thousand deaths a day.

Here the modern listener may need a gentle nudge, for sixteenth-century singers caught what we might miss. In the amorous vocabulary of the age, “to die” was a familiar euphemism for the consummation of love. The madrigal is therefore not a lament at all but a sly, sensuous jest dressed in mourning black. It may be the only funeral in music history at which the deceased is positively delighted to be present.

Arcadelt’s genius lies in treating this conceit with exquisite restraint. Much of the piece moves in clear, largely chordal declamation, so that every word arrives intact; a darkening inflection shades the poet’s weeping; and then, at the words di mille morti (of a thousand deaths), the texture opens into gently overlapping imitation, the voices entering one after another and repeating the phrase as though the deaths were genuinely multiplying. This is word painting not as illustration but as wit. Simple enough for amateurs and subtle enough for connoisseurs, it remains a staple of choirs worldwide.

A swan of a very different temperament glides into English music some seventy years later. Orlando Gibbons’s five-voice The Silver Swan, which opens his First Set of Madrigals and Mottets of 1612, tells the same legend, and it is here, not in Arcadelt, that the dying bird bids its explicit farewell to all joys, before the poem turns on a final, rueful epigram that more geese than swans now live, more fools than wise. Placed side by side, the two swans make a perfect little lesson in national character: the Italian sensual and ironic, the English elegiac and gently moralizing.

Masters of the Italian Madrigal

Luca Marenzio (c. 1553–1599) was, to many contemporaries, the madrigal’s supreme craftsman, and his fame reached as far as England, where the writer Henry Peacham singled him out for praise in The Compleat Gentleman (1622). His nine books for five voices are an encyclopedia of expressive devices. In his late setting of Petrarch’s Solo e pensoso, the top voice creeps upward by semitones through a full octave and then slowly descends, a musical portrait of the solitary poet pacing deserted fields with deliberate, heavy steps. One hears in it the landscape and the mind at once, the outer road and the inner one.

At the court of Ferrara in the 1580s, the duke’s famous concerto delle donne, a small ensemble of virtuoso women singers, pushed the madrigal toward dazzling ornament and soloistic display, and composers such as Luzzaschi wrote for them music that only professionals could sing. The amateur’s genre was becoming the virtuoso’s showpiece, and the road toward monody and opera began to appear on the horizon.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566–1613), remains the genre’s dark star. History remembers him first for the double murder of his wife and her lover in 1590; musicians remember him for harmonies that seem to have wandered in from another century. In Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, from his Sixth Book of 1611, chromatic chords slide past one another with a disorienting, almost seasick beauty, only to snap without warning into brisk, conventional counterpoint. It is music that sounds as if it is in pain and knows it. The twentieth century, with its own taste for extremity, rediscovered him with fervor: Stravinsky paid homage in his Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960), and Aldous Huxley wrote a memorable essay on the prince’s strange, tormented art.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) carried the madrigal across the Baroque threshold. In 1600 the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi attacked certain unprepared dissonances in his then-unpublished madrigals, Cruda Amarilli among them, as offenses against the rules of good counterpoint. Monteverdi’s reply, sketched in the preface to his Fifth Book (1605) and expanded by his brother Giulio Cesare in 1607, announced a seconda pratica, a “second practice” in which the words govern the harmony rather than serve it. Here is one of music history’s great quarrels, and like most great quarrels, both sides were partly right: Artusi understood the grammar, Monteverdi the poetry. The Fifth Book also introduced basso continuo into the madrigal, and his Eighth Book, the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (Madrigals of War and Love) of 1638, includes the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda after Tasso, with its agitated, trembling stile concitato in the strings. By then the madrigal had become something closer to chamber theater, and opera, which Monteverdi had already helped bring into being with L’Orfeo in 1607, stood fully grown beside it.

Orlande de Lassus (Orlando di Lasso, 1532–1594), the most cosmopolitan composer of his age, wrote madrigals of every hue, from bawdy villanellas to grave Petrarchan settings. His final work, the Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of Saint Peter), completed weeks before his death in 1594, sets twenty stanzas by Luigi Tansillo, followed by a concluding Latin motet, for seven voices. These are madrigali spirituali, spiritual madrigals, in which the apostle’s remorse after denying Christ is examined with a psychological intensity worthy of a novelist. The madrigal turns inward, toward conscience.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) deserves a footnote rather than a chapter here. Revered for sacred polyphony such as the Missa Papae Marcelli, he did publish secular madrigals, and his Vestiva i colli was widely admired. In the dedication to his motets on the Song of Songs (1584), however, he confessed that he blushed to have once set poems of profane love. That small act of contrition tells us a great deal about the age, and about how seductive the madrigal must have seemed.

English Madrigal Music: The Italian Import That Became a National Treasure

The madrigal crossed the Channel in print. In 1588, the year of the Armada, Nicholas Yonge published Musica Transalpina, a collection of Italian madrigals furnished with English words, and Elizabethan amateurs took to it with appetite. Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigals Englished followed in 1590, and within a decade England had produced a school of its own that many listeners regard as the madrigal’s last golden age.

Thomas Morley (1557/58–1602) was its impresario, editor, and chief theorist. His A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) advises composers, in effect, to suit their music to the nature of the words: grave harmonies for grave matter, light ones for light, rising lines for rising thoughts. His own balletts, modeled on Giovanni Gastoldi’s Italian balletti, are dance-songs with nonsense refrains of “fa-la-la,” and they are strophic, with several stanzas sung to the same music. (The true madrigal, by contrast, is generally through-composed, with each line of poetry receiving fresh music.) In 1601 Morley assembled The Triumphs of Oriana, an anthology honoring Queen Elizabeth in which every contributor ended with a salute to “fair Oriana.”

Thomas Weelkes (1576–1623) contributed to that anthology As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending, surely the most cheerful textbook of word painting ever composed. The goddess descends on a descending scale, and the maiden queen ascends on an ascending one; Diana’s nymphs come running down in a scurry of quick notes, first two by two, then three by three, in exactly that many voices, and finally the goddess is left “all alone” on a single line. It is as if Weelkes had read Morley’s advice and then decided, with a wink, to follow every word of it at once. Elsewhere, in pieces such as O Care, Thou Wilt Despatch Me, his bold chromaticism reveals a far more troubled spirit.

John Wilbye (1574–1638) wrote fewer madrigals than either and is perhaps the finest of the three. His Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis (1598) is a farewell of rare tenderness, and Draw On, Sweet Night (1609) unfolds with a melancholy that seems to dim the room as one listens, like dusk gathering in the corners before anyone thinks to light a lamp.

William Byrd (c. 1540–1623), the towering master of the age, stood somewhat apart. His Psalmes, Sonets and Songs (1588) belong mostly to the native consort-song tradition, though he contributed two settings of This Sweet and Merry Month of May to Watson’s 1590 collection. The musicologist Joseph Kerman has argued that the English madrigal drew more deeply on Italy’s lighter forms, the canzonetta and balletto, than on its gravest madrigals, which helps explain the genre’s distinctly English blend of melancholy and merriment.

Virginia Woolf, whose Orlando begins in the glittering, frost-bound London of the late Tudors, once described the Elizabethan imagination as a cluttered lumber room of marvels. The English madrigal is one of the treasures in that room: small, finely made, slightly dusty, and still able to catch the light.

Why the Madrigal Still Matters

By the early seventeenth century, the madrigal was yielding to newer forms: the solo song with continuo, the cantata, and above all opera, which took the madrigal’s passion for the expressive word and gave it a stage, costumes, and a plot. Yet the genre never quite vanished. London’s Madrigal Society, founded in 1741, kept the old partbooks open for one of the longest unbroken traditions in amateur music-making, and the twentieth-century early-music revival restored these pieces to concert halls, recording studios, and college choirs, where they continue to teach young singers the art of listening to one another.

That, finally, may be the madrigal’s deepest lesson. It is music in which no voice is merely accompaniment, in which every singer must hear the poem whole while carrying only a part of it, and in which meaning arises from the meeting of independent lines. Shakespeare’s age imagined harmony as the music of the spheres, a cosmic order audible only to the pure in heart. The madrigal brought that harmony down to a table in a lamplit room, set it among friends, and asked them to make it true for three minutes at a time.

Listen then, to Arcadelt’s swan and Gibbons’s, to Marenzio’s solitary wanderer and Gesualdo’s anguished prince, to Monteverdi’s warriors and Weelkes’s running nymphs. And if they inspire you, as they have inspired composers for four and a half centuries, to fashion something of your own, so much the better. The madrigal was always, at heart, an invitation to join in.