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Abstract
Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals have typically been examined under his rubric of the Seconda Prattica theory "where the words are mistress of the harmony," published as part of his Scherzi Musicali , the same year as the premiere of his first opera Orfeo (1607). However, Monteverdi's madrigals published after this date—the Sixth (1614), Seventh (1619), and Eighth (1638) books of madrigals—fit awkwardly within the tenets of the Seconda Prattica through the composer's injection of new musical gestures and formats from outside the genre into the madrigal.
In this study I argue Monteverdi continues to explore the self-fashioning cultural agenda of the madrigal in these later works by moving "beyond the Seconda Prattica" with a technique built upon genre montage learned from composing Orfeo—what I call his "poetics of genre". Chapter One sets out the critical reception of his controversial post- Orfeo madrigals, the problems of using the composer's Seconda Prattica madrigal theory as the basis for criticism of these works, and proposes a theoretical model to analyze these works through a combination of genre theory, the anthropological concepts of structure/anti-structure, and cinematic montage theory to understand Monteverdi's musical semiotics. Chapter Two centers on Monteverdi's musical re-appraisal of subjectivity in the traditional madrigal through a genre juxtaposition of dance music with a more conventional madrigal style in his two "Zefiro torna" madrigals. Chapter Three explores the composer's madrigal setting of Marino's sonnet as a strophic prologue and dance, depicting the inspiration and the effort needed by the artist to imaginatively re-fashion the reality of the self. Chapter Four examines the power struggle of for self-fashioning through the metaphor of theSeconda Prattica text-music relationship in his setting of a narrative text from Tasso in the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Finally, Chapter Five shows Monteverdi metaphorically reconciling the mind/body split of the text-music relationship by referencing the polychoral style.
