Meraviglia: the marvellous; the sense of wonder that stimulates the imagination, spurs investigation and generates knowledge; the state of mind that orators, poets and other artists seek to instill in their audiences, whether as an end in itself or as preparation to receive the artwork’s substantive message. For modern scholars, it is synonymous (for better or for worse) with that other difficult term, ‘baroque’, which Rémy Saisselin characterises as the ‘love of illusion, of the pleasure of surprise, of enchantment, coupled with the blurring of the distinction between illusion and reality’.Footnote ¹ In other words, meraviglia. For many literary scholars of past generations, and the musicologists who followed in their wake, the marvellous was synonymous with concettismo, a kind of wit that relied on farfetched, pungent metaphor, itself closely allied to marinismo (named for the poet Giambattista Marino) or secentismo – all three pejorative terms that connoted an over-reliance on the empty pursuit of cleverness, surprise and wit at the expense of substance. Alfred Einstein viewed marinismo as the antithesis of everything that had been good in Renaissance poetry and music, and for him Monteverdi’s turn to the verse of Marino from the Sixth Book of Madrigals on was disastrous for the composer and for his age: as Gary Tomlinson put it, following Einstein, it represented The End of The Renaissance.Footnote ²

More recent musicological scholarship, in line with a new, broader interest in the early Baroque and on meraviglia as the driving force behind the work of such scientists as Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon and writers like Marino, Miguel de Cervantes and Luìs de Gongora, has re-examined Monteverdi’s late madrigals, finding in them creative vigor and depth of affect and connecting them with the intellectual trends of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

With Monteverdi and the Marvellous, Roseen Giles joins the effort to understand more fully how Monteverdi responded to the aesthetic trends that were developing around him. Following the scholarly continuum that began with Nino Pirrotta’s ‘Scelte poetiche di Monteverdi’,Footnote ³ she focuses on the poets who, in her view, most shaped Monteverdi’s conception of the marvellous: Torquato Tasso and Marino. Giles focuses on time – its circularity and its indeterminacy – as the element of meraviglia that Monteverdi manipulates most effectively to create musical settings that bring out the tensions inherent in the texts he selects. After an introduction to Monteverdi’s approach to representation that ranges widely over his works and introduces the concept of meraviglia, the first two chapters treat ‘The Sound of the Marvellous’ and ‘Marino and the Rime boscherecce’; here Giles delves into Monteverdi’s Second Book of Madrigals (1590). The third and fourth chapters are devoted to the kiss, from Greek poetry to Monteverdi’s kiss poems in his Concerto: Settimo libro de madrigali (1619). The last two deal with Tasso, the epic mode and Monteverdi’s Third Book of Madrigals (1593). The focus on the Second and Third Books is most welcome, as these are not generally addressed in the critical literature, and Giles makes a strong case for their importance. The Third in particular gets pride of place as the concluding section of the book – Tasso’s laments from Gerusalemme liberata have the last word and put their stamp on the reader’s impression of the study. The book’s programme is well thought out and insightful: Monteverdi and the Marvellous is a solid achievement, and it merits serious consideration by musicologists interested in going deep into Monteverdi’s music.

The opening chapter establishes the meanings of meraviglia that Giles later applies in analysing Monteverdi’s music. She starts from Marino’s characterisation of it as a poet’s most important goal and traces its effect on modern scholarship, which has, somewhat misleadingly, taken its cue from the most extreme forms of the marvellous, obscuring its subtler and deeper meanings. In musicology, the spectacular marvellous has played an important role in shaping our perceptions of the aesthetics of theatrical music and opera, but it has limited our understanding of the range of possibilities inherent in the concept of wonder. Literary criticism in the last two decades or so has focused on its subtleties, and Giles turns to Tasso, who treated meraviglia as an essential component of poetry in his theoretical writings, and to Francesco Patrizi, whose Della poetica (1586) highlighted its importance as a middle state between understanding and emotion – wonder moves between the senses, it is apprehended in time, and it plays with the space between opposites (the Horatian concept of ‘concordia discors’, discordant concord). The temporal dimension of wonder, in particular, becomes a central theme throughout the book and informs Giles’s analytical approach to Monteverdi’s music; she is the first to seek the marvellous in his early works, which are generally treated as routine madrigals by a young, if ambitious, composer. The chapter concludes with a section on paradoxes in Marino’s literary imagery – in particular, his treatment of visual arts and music.

Marino’s reliance on paradoxes leads into a discussion in chapter 2 of Monteverdi’s settings of poems from Marino’s Rime boscherecce in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Madrigals. The chapter opens with a reflection on the nature of representation, what Monteverdi called ‘the natural way of imitation’. As others have argued, the point of the Seconda pratica was to produce not an exact replica of nature but a stylised version of it, artificial rather than ‘natural’, and it was the artificiality of this image that was calculated to create wonder. Monteverdi’s settings of Tasso, Guarini and Marino reproduced human emotions just as the poetry did – by manipulating time, the relationships between objects or people and the very nature of words and syntax. They processed the verisimilar by creating what William Egginton calls Baroque ‘holes and folds’, those incongruities that warp our perception of the world as represented by artists.Footnote ⁴ Reality is seen as reflected in a deliberately warped mirror.

In the poetry of his contemporaries, Monteverdi, according to Giles, found that these distortions were there for him to exploit, and this he did in various ways that put music on the same footing as poetry. While this view of his approach is not new – it can be found scattered in various ways in the secondary literature – Giles deftly assembles the pieces of the puzzle and offers a new assessment of the madrigals themselves. Her analyses of Monteverdi’s earliest settings of Marino in the Sixth Book of Madrigals seek to uncover how he matched poetic incongruities of time and space with uniquely musical techniques, manipulating texts along the way to suit his purposes and putting the music on a par with the texts.

Giles devotes the next two chapters to a recurring theme in Monteverdi’s madrigals, that of the kiss in its many variants. The third focuses on the Tasso settings in the composer’s Second Book. This volume leans heavily on Tasso’s lyric poetry, which is perhaps underappreciated in the secondary literature; thus, Giles’s focus, and her close reading of the kiss poems, is particularly welcome. The chapter opens with an extensive background study of osculatory poetry going back to classical Greece; from this survey she focusses on the temporality of the kiss (see the section entitled ‘What Does a Lover Want from Time? Eros in Greek Lyric’, pp. 86–94),Footnote ⁵ a concept she then expands to the manipulation of time through purely musical techniques as Monteverdi’s strategy for levelling the relationship between music and poetry. This background established, Giles moves on to detailed analyses of the music; as she concludes, ‘Monteverdi represented [Tasso’s] kisses in music, giving the contradictions of Eros full voice through the temporal complexities of counterpoint’.

From Tasso’s kisses, Giles moves on to Marino’s baci (kisses), whether mordaci (biting) or otherwise, from his collection La lira (1614), four of which appear as a kind of idée fixe in Monteverdi’s Seventh Book. A particularly welcome aspect of the fourth chapter is Giles’s introduction of other composers’ settings of these poems, not as mere mentions in lists of settings of particular texts, but as actual music that she compares to Monteverdi’s settings.Footnote ⁶ Although the comparisons introduce composers and musics that are unfamiliar and contextualise, however minimally, Monteverdi’s settings, neither Giles nor the reader come to significant conclusions about his relationships to the music that surrounded him. She points out differences, occasional similarities that suggest familiarity, different interpretations of the texts, but not much beyond these observations. It is not so much a failing on Giles’s part, but a significant lack in the field. Large-scale surveys of any repertory, of the kind John Whenham undertook in Duet and Dialogue in the Age of Monteverdi (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), take too much time and effort, it would seem, and we shy away from them. More’s the pity, as they are invaluable in understanding a major figure like Monteverdi, recognised by his peers as a master of his art in comparison with his contemporaries. Snippets like those offered by Giles are therefore invaluable glimpses into what might be.

After this erotic exploration, chapters 5 and 6 focus on Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata (and its post-Tridentine revision, Gerusalemme conquistata). The seriousness of epic demands a different approach to text than does lyric poetry, and its narrative continuity places particular focus (and strain) on the music to which it is set. Wonder, in the epic, resides in the power of language to represent both action (external, visual, tactile) and introspection (unspoken, cerebral, affective), as well as to play with narrative time. As Giles writes, ‘epic can convey the actions and speech of characters in real time, that is, mimetically, but its moments of introspection long for that which is “out of time”, diegetic, and free of temporal constraints’ (p. 166). Tasso divides the poet’s task into two main components, verisimilitude and the marvellous, both of which must be present: ‘I judge that the same action may be both marvellous and verisimilar’ (p. 166). In the epic, the poet manipulates a multitude of narrative elements to convey reality through words, in itself a wondrous process. Tasso invokes the concept of evidentia, a rhetorical device in which the poet’s voice brings before readers/auditors events in a way that makes them as vivid as if they were really happening before their eyes as both real in visual terms and animate; sound plays an important part in this evocation. This creates immediacy of perception, but also of time: the audience experiences them as if they are unfolding in the present. Evidentia is the exclusive property of the poet’s narrative voice: as Giles puts it, ‘the quality of evidentia is … versatile enough to account for the hybridity of epic, honoring both the vividness of narration and the action of representation’ (p. 169). Music, and in particular the madrigal, is perfectly positioned to complement evidentia, and even to add its own dimensions to it.

The analyses that follow, in both chapters 5 and 6, put these concepts to the test in discussing settings from Tasso’s epics (Liberata and Conquistata) by both Monteverdi and Giaches de Wert. Giles has clearly done her homework: she traces poetic sources, contextualises them, charts variants found in the texts as set to music and shows how Monteverdi, and his colleague and likely mentor/teacher Giaches de Wert, along with Marenzio, approach epic texts. These are in-depth, highly detailed comparative readings of their settings. She devotes extensive sections to Wert’s music, to a close reading of ‘Piagne e sospira’ from Monteverdi’s Fourth Book, to Monteverdi’s madrigal laments as evidence of his thinking before Arianna’s solo lament, and finally to ‘Lamenting Men’ (Rinaldo and Tancredi).

This is a book with which scholars of Monteverdi and of the madrigal are likely to engage well into the future. No book is perfect, however, nor exhaustive; I offer a few instances (not all) where she leaves herself open to criticism.

Giles has circumscribed her topic carefully: Tasso discussed at length his ideas about epic poetry and, although less so, about music, which, most importantly, he thought suitable for setting epic verses. This makes his poetry an easy target, and Monteverdi obliges with a significant corpus of settings. The same is true of Marino. It would have been useful to see some of the concepts developed throughout the book applied to the madrigals that flank those setting Tasso and Marino in the Second, Third and Sixth Books. As it is, we are left with the impression that the others are somehow lacking meraviglia, and that Monteverdi does not apply his ingenuity to other texts. After all, the techniques she identifies are commonly employed more or less extensively in many, if not most, madrigal settings around the turn of the seventeenth century, and it seems easy to dismiss her interpretations as cherry-picking madrigals already identified as explicitly evoking the marvellous. Practicality and narrative focus may well have prevailed, and this is understandable.

For all the discussion of the marvellous as a rhetorical technique in both Renaissance and classical sources that pervades the book, there is no mention of affect, of how the madrigals might be experienced by listeners who had no way of understanding and evaluating from a technical standpoint what they were hearing. Giles’s discussion is very much poet-, composer- and score-centered, and as a result wonder appears as a mostly cerebral technique, to be experienced as such by audiences. But the whole point of rhetoric is to have an effect on listeners, to move their passions (neither ‘affect’ nor ‘passion’ are found in the index). Considering that Monteverdi justified his handling of counterpoint specifically by his desire to manipulate the listeners’ perceptions, and that the focus on moving souls seems to have permeated theoretical and critical writings at the end of the sixteenth century, it seems odd that it does not figure in a discussion of meraviglia.

Not all of Giles’s analyses are convincing. Her discussion of ‘Addio Florida bella’ from the Sixth Book lingers on what appears to be a mistake – Monteverdi reverses Florida’s and Floro’s lines in the closing narrative section, then corrects his error – which leads her to conclude that this madrigal is not ‘dramatic’ as is generally assumed, and that Monteverdi ‘deliberately indicates with his “mistake” that this is not a miniature opera scene, but rather an instance of a genre in which time, place and character can be manipulated beyond the expectations of verisimilitude, as if the syntax of language were more a matter “of a verbal design or pattern rather than a significant discursive sequence”’ (p. 57).Footnote ⁷ While I agree that this is not trying to be an opera scene, I also question her equating ‘dramatic’ and ‘opera’ (or even ‘theater’) at a time where such boundaries were extremely permeable (to paraphrase Orazio Vecchi, music is theater, not for the eyes, but for the mind which it reaches through the ears).Footnote ⁸ Another, perhaps less attractively theorised, explanation for what happens in ‘Addio Florida bella’ is that – solo voices notwithstanding – it is still a madrigal, a genre in which individual voices can be deployed for multiple purposes. Monteverdi, acutely aware of the possibilities inherent in the increasing variety of combinations of genre and style, may have wanted to exploit the availability, made possible by the continuo accompaniment, of isolating two voices from the ensemble without giving them the status of ‘personae’. These temporarily embody Floro and Florida, not as characters but as poetic voices, only to be returned, along with their utterances, to the corporate ensemble voice of the narrator’s role where their rearrangement will not be noticed. Undoubtedly, Monteverdi’s choice is both witty and surprising, and the change in the roles of tenor and soprano is a clever exploitation of madrigal conventions and of new solutions to the possibilities inherent in mixed-mode poetry. But in this case, Monteverdi had no need to signal that this was a madrigal, nor is it likely that his audience, even in Mantua, would have thought of it as a detached, scene-like, nod to the nascent favola per musica, which some would have experienced as an extraordinary curiosity and not as a new ‘genre’.

Giles’s reading of what appears to be Monteverdi’s alteration, in Marino’s ‘Qui rise o Tirsi, e qui ver me’, of the line ‘qui l’angelica voce in note sciolse e le parole | ch’umiliaro i più superbi tori’ (here the angelic voice released notes and the words | that humbled the most arrogant bulls) misreads the nature and the significance of Monteverdi’s emendation (pp. 66–72). She argues that the removal of the verb ‘sciolse’ (released) creates an incomplete, ungrammatical sentence that confuses the listener and breaks Marino’s rhyme. But it is not really the case that the change is confusing. The demonstrative pronoun ‘qui’ (here) points to two things: in the original, to (a) the voice and (b) the sounds into which the voice transforms itself; in Monteverdi’s modified version, to (a) the voice and (b) the words spoken by the voice. It is worth pointing out that resulting construction ‘qui … e …’ (here … and …) aligns this verse with other, similar verses (1, 5 (the verse modified by Monteverdi), 7, 9, 12) – Marino’s treatment is, not surprisingly, not rigid, but the pattern carries at least some force in the structure of the sonnet. The verse that results, particularly if heard in context, is perfectly logical: ‘here is the voice and the words [she spoke] to humiliate [even] the most arrogant bulls’ (p. 68). No verb is required to create a functional poetic verse, and this kind of construction occurs in madrigal (and other) poetry. It is akin to the rhetorical device of ‘parlar disgiunto’ or ‘broken speech’, in which words or phrases follow one another abruptly and without connection and which is meant to suggest mystery and deep significance. Mental gymnastics, either to puzzle this out or to fill in a word that only someone familiar with Marino’s original could imagine, are not necessary. The soprano’s declamation of this line does not interfere with its meaning, rather, it emphasises it, and the pauses give a sense of importance to each utterance, suggesting that her words have some particular, magical power over even the proudest, most powerful bulls.

A leap of a different kind is required when Giles, in the section devoted to Monteverdi’s Second Book (1590), proposes that his ‘introduction to Tasso’s lyric is … likely to date back to about 1586, the time of Tasso’s first stay in Mantua’ (p. 101). This hypothesis follows from her detailed discussion of Tasso’s longstanding relationship with Vincenzo Gonzaga, who supported him through thick and thin and supported the poet’s first stay in Mantua ‘in the years leading up to and concurrent with Monteverdi’s tenure [there]’. She also suggests that the conspicuous presence of Tasso’s poetry in the Second Book was ‘related to [Monteverdi’s] desire to move from Cremona to Mantua, where he must have supposed it would be well received’, and that his ‘intense’ acquaintance with Tasso’s poetry was ‘acquired at least in part through the mediation of his future colleagues in Mantua Benedetto Pallavicino and especially Giaches de Wert’ (p. 98). For this highly speculative claim there is no evidence, and Giles builds a broad but unconvincing circumstantial case that at no point touches Monteverdi directly. What we do know is that Tasso’s poetry was already in print by 1586, that Monteverdi filled his Second Book with it, and that he dedicated it to the president of the Milanese senate, Giacomo Ricardi, before whom Monteverdi had performed as a string player on a recent trip to Milan.

Monteverdi and the Marvellous ends abruptly after a lengthy analysis of ‘Rimanti in pace’ and a brief review of Monteverdi’s settings of Tasso’s epic texts. There is no conclusion, something that the book needs in order to bring together the most important strands from its long, detailed and at times circuitous narrative. The last word belongs to Tasso, whose belief in the heroic nature of love Giles reports: ‘I … maintain … that love is just as heroic a subject as war, and I will defend [this belief] with reason, with the authority of Aristotle, and with passages in Plato that speak clearly, clearly, extremely clearly’, and ‘love comes from confusion, just as the ancient poets described it arising from the soul of chaos’ (p. 268). Giles does not remark on this, but Tasso’s words sound very much like a point of departure for Monteverdi’s own defense of his works in the essays that accompany his Fifth and Eighth Books – perhaps there is food for thought in this short but significant declaration, but it does not suffice as a conclusion.

On a more practical note, aside from the typographical accident that mars the last words of the book, I found the index totally inadequate. It does list relevant concepts and work titles, but it includes only names of historical individuals and leaves out the authors cited throughout the text. This is a significant handicap for readers who engage the book as a research tool. Needing to trace a quotation from a secondary source, with no help from the index, I had to flip my way through the section where I thought it might be. I hope this was the publisher’s decision, not the author’s – regardless, it was a bad choice.

To return briefly to the substance of Monteverdi and the Marvellous and end on a deservedly positive note, it is, as I have already noted, a significant contribution to Monteverdi scholarship. Giles’s approach is one that will prove fruitful for those who might engage with it, and there is room for expanding the concepts it introduces to other works, both by Monteverdi and by his contemporaries.