Zefiro torna

Before there was Beethoven, who broke so many conventions of galant style composition, there was Claudio Monteverdi. Considered the father of opera, Monteverdi worked at a time when differences of opinion regarding the proper treatment of dissonance could result in literal fist fights. He was a pioneer in the free use of dissonant intervals. And whether by his or another’s choosing, he became the mouthpiece a new “second practice” of composition where textual meaning governed the music—not vice versa. While employed in Mantua and Venice he befriended many Italian humanist poets and philosophers, who held the lofty ideal of resurrecting the arts and letters of ancient Greece and Rome. And although this movement would fuel Monteverdi’s development of large-scale opera, it also fertilized the development of individual song. Tonight we hear an ode to Zephyrus, the west wind and bringer of warm summer breezes. Zefiro torna appeared in Monteverdi’s ninth book of madrigals (published posthumously in 1651). It is structured in two main sections, both of which use a repeated bass pattern above which the voices engage in tight imitation. The give-and-take between two tenors contributes excitement and visual enjoyment to the piece. At the final stanza, Monteverdi shifts chromatically from G major to E major for the poem’s darker, inward turn. As the end nears, the writing grows increasingly florid, culminating in very fast scales as the text mentions “now [I] sing” in amorous celebration of the beloved’s eyes.

(c) Jason Stell