Polyphony and Poetry, High and Low

The infatuation with ingegno that inspired Venier's correlative sonnets must have found congenial exemplars in the madrigalian practice recently ascendent in Venice. Both correlative sonnets and polyphonic madrigals depended on an audience immediately at hand, ready to be engaged and impressed and to reflect on its currency in the world of vernacular arts. And both were rooted in a kind of intellectual luxuria that was necessary to champion what might otherwise have seemed intolerably arcane creations.

The reshaping of Venetian madrigals in knotty church polyphony parallels the academic, self-conscious impulse toward intellectual sophistication that lay beneath Bembo's thinking about vernacular style and that reached extremes in correlative verse. Such impulses were the very sort encouraged by the competitive lather of Venetian academic life and the commercialization of art with which it intersected. Yet they contradict the prevailing norms of decorum that control both Venetian sonnets and sonnet settings to produce a basic tension in Venice's high vernacular arts: like Venier's most intricate poems, the madrigals produced by Willaert and his circle seem to want to emerge unruffled from the competitive fray as both the most urbane and the gravest emblems of aristocratic culture — to win eminence in the domain of virtuosity without jeopardizing the aristocratic values to which they are beholden.

Ultimately the extremes of complexity in both Willaertian madrigals and Venier-styled verse threatened to upset the Bembist balance between calculated artifice and natural grace. Both labor in a ponderous rhetoric whose guiding hand is an over-riding consciousness of noble gravitas, without embracing the elegance — the sprezzatura — that was de rigueur in Florentine music and letters or in those of courts like

Mantua and Ferrara. On the contrary, the new Venetian products were strangely mannered by comparison with those produced elsewhere in northern Italy and in ways perhaps unimaginable without Venice's combative pressure to adapt afresh new techniques and styles. Beneath its virtuosic displays Venice managed to maintain as a Procrustean bed ideals of the ordene antiquo that were deeply rooted in Venetian consciousness.

Although no direct reports tell of Venetian madrigals performed in the Venier household (or in most others, for that matter), fictive re-creations like Doni's make it clear that madrigals found their main abode in drawing rooms. Clearly the primary occupation of the Venier house was vernacular literature, with musical performances playing a decidedly secondary role. Yet much evidence suggests that music nonetheless occupied a regular niche in the academy's agenda. Several central figures linked with Venier's household sustained strong connections with the culture of written polyphony: in addition to Parabosco the literati Girolamo Fenaruolo and Girolamo Molino, to whom I will turn shortly. Two other star pupils of Willaert's were known to its members: Perissone Cambio and Baldassare Donato. Perissone formed the subject of a double sonnet exchange between Venier and Fenaruolo following his death, probably in the early 1560s.^[42] And the promising Donato was given the task no later than 1550 of setting three of Venier's stanzas for large civic celebrations — this at a time when Venier's academy was still in its youthful stage and Donato himself no more than about twenty.^[43] Even Willaert appears in what may be suggestive proximity to Venier, namely the postscript to Parabosco's capitolo characterizing Venier's salon to Lambertino of 1555.^[44] Perhaps Willaert — aging, heavily burdened, and slowed by ill health — would not have spent much time there late in life, but there is no doubt that he kept in touch with many of its intimates.

Serious polyphonic madrigals stand at the forefront of developments in Venetian secular music. But like Venier's correlative sonnets for Venetian literati and vernac-

ular poetry more broadly, they represented only one of several genres available to musicians. Bembo's call for discrete stylistic levels echoed as profoundly in vernacular music as it did in literature. And while Venetian composers now generally reserved their most serious secular efforts for madrigal books, the same composers also began, in 1544, to publish in separate volumes stylized genres of light music — canzoni villanesche alla napolitana and villotte.^[45] Many of the dialect songs were obscene and invariably had something comic, rustic, or earthy about them. The canzoni villanesche that emanated from Venice reworked Neapolitan polyphonists' three-voice settings of popular Neapolitan songs by expanding the models from three voices to four and shifting the original popular tune from its prominent place in the soprano to a more hidden location in the tenor. They often Tuscanized the poems' dialect and reduced the number of stanzas. These transformations made the whole genre into something less soloistic and more madrigalistic — that is, more a matter of shared choral singing according to the elevated northern ideal of equal-voiced polyphony. They also invested the settings with self-conscious artifice — lowly tunes uplifted by northern wit, as it were — in ways that could appeal to Venetian intellects. Many prints of Venetian canzoni villanesche met with immense success — numerous reprints and many arrangements for solo lute.

Dialect songs likely formed part of the academy's fare, just as madrigals did. One collection of villotte was produced in 1550 by Willaert's close Netherlandish friend Antonio Barges and dedicated by Barges to Venier's cohort Fenaruolo.^[46]

To the Magnificent and Reverend Monsignor Mr. Girolamo Fenaruolo, my lord:

Being the custom of almost everyone who wants to print some little thing of his to erect a defense against a certain sort of person who, either out of a bad nature or not to appear ignorant, censures the efforts of everyone, good and bad alike, I too on that account would have to address these flowers of mine (rather than fruits) to someone who by his profession had toiled and acquired more in music than in any other science. But all the same I will not do so. For in this case it's enough for me that I've forced myself as much as I could not to deviate from the teaching of the only inventor of true and good music, the most excellent Adrian, who was not only my most diligent teacher but the very best father to me. I therefore dedicate these little efforts of mine to you — you who are a friend and who, besides belles lettres and

gracious habits, are so adorned with that sweet virtue, and who gladly hear my works. Not that they were made with the goal that they might be printed, but rather composed at various times at the wishes of my different friends (although now perforce being sent out, so as to appear a grateful friend with little praise rather than an ungrateful musician with much). I also send you a few sweet compositions by the Magnificent Cavalier S. Andrea Patricio da Cherso, which I believe you'll like a lot. This, my sir, is how much I now give you evidence of the love I bear to you, and I do so ardently, being certain that you know clearly (and much better than many others) how true that thought is; for he who does what he can do does therefore what he ought. Not that anyone should therefore blame me for not sending them to the very worthy and gentle M. Stefano Taberio, since in sending them to you not only do I make a richer gift to M. Stefano, who loves you so much, but also to the gentle M. Marco Silvio, both of whom, living in you as you live in them, love and honor the one who loves and honors. I kiss your hand, my lord, and I wish for that dignity that your good qualities merit, begging you to be kind enough to sing these little canzonette of mine now and then with your Silvio and with those gentlemen, among the pleasantries and delights of the most merry Conegliano; and love me since I love and honor you. Antonino Barges.^[47]

Barges's villotte — some of which are really villanesche alla napolitana, others Venetian dialect arrangements — were among the more northern, complex examples of light music. They justify his claim to be following closely his "ottimo patre," Willaert, and his linking of villotte with the seemingly high literary circle of Fenaruolo.

Barges pointedly avoided praising Fenaruolo's own musical skills, emphasizing instead his devotion to musicians and citing the genesis of the print's villotte among amateur appreciators like Fenaruolo and friends. Clearly he did expect that they could render their own performances of the songs, for he asked Fenaruolo to sing them "now and then" together with his other literary cohorts. Barges's expectation

that his recipient would sing the pieces recalls those of Perissone and Parabosco in dedicating prints to Gottardo Occagna (see Chap. 3, pp. 53-60). Like Perissone, Barges claims not to have composed these works for print but for the pleasure of literary friends — Silvio, Stefano Taberio, and Fenaruolo. In any case, they were not so hard to negotiate as Perissone's five-voice madrigals, which required a firmer grasp of singing written counterpoint from part books.

Fenaruolo knew other musicians too, including Willaert, to whom he addressed a satiric capitolo in 1556, and Perissone, whose death he mourned with Venier, the dedicatee of Fenaruolo's posthumous canzoniere.^[48] Venier's academy seems a likely setting for the sort of light music dedicated to Fenaruolo, since it was one of his main venues. Napolitane may even have been heard there in equal measure with serious madrigals, as was true at the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona from the time of its founding in 1543.^[49]

With their earthy tones and often obscene Neapolitan or Venetian texts, these songs correspond musically to bawdy dialect verse composed by Venier himself and others in his circle, verse that formed the subject of a letter from Aretino to Venier in November 1549.

Just as the coarseness of rustic food often incites the appetite to gluttony, Signor Domenico — more than the great delicacy of high-class dishes ever moved to the pleasure of eating in such a way — so too at times the trivial aspects of subjects in the end sharpen the intellect with a certain eager readiness, which as fate would have it never showed itself with any epic material. So that in composing in the Venetian language, style, and manner in order to divert the intellect, I especially praise the sonnets, capitoli, and strambotti that I have seen, read, and understood by you, by others, and by me.^[50]

Until recently nothing else has been known of this aspect of Domenico's literary activity (unlike that of his brother Lorenzo and nephew Maffio, both famous dialect poets). But a codex at the British Library, MS Add. 12.197, preserves a full-length autobiographical canzoniere in dialect composed as an exchange between Domenico Venier and another nobleman named Benedetto Corner.^[51] The collection turns on the two men's relations with a woman named Helena Artusi, whom both claim to have "chiavà" (screwed). The opening sonnet "del Venier a i Lettori" describes the authors of the poems: "One has the name Domenico, the other Benedetto; one comes from ca' Corner, the other from ca' Venier, and is sick in bed" (Un ha nome Domenego, e Benetto / L'altro; questo si se da ca Corner; / L'altro è da ca Venier, ch'è gramo in letto; vv. 9-11).^[52]

The collection is organized as a risqué canzoniere, a low dialect countertype to Petrarch's Rime sparse. Some of the poetic forms stand outside, in some cases beneath, the Petrarchan canzoniere, including capitoli, sonnets "con ritornelli," madregali, madrigaletti, and barzellette; others — canzoni and sonnets "senza ritornelli" — are standard Petrarchan types.^[53] Many are in dialogue, mainly with Helena, and a few mention various contemporaries — a "Cabriel Moresini" and the mid-sixteenth-century poet "Domenego Michiel," for example.^[54] In order to expand the conceit into a larger social-literary exchange, they also pin Helena's name as alleged author to fictitious rejoinders to their own defamatory verse.

It may seem paradoxical that Venier, like the madrigalists, should have simultaneously practiced two such opposed stylistic levels with equal zeal. But it was not so

in the world of Renaissance styles and conventions, epitomized by the Venetians' pragmatic acceptance of such contradictory modes and their arduous attempts to explain and order them by appeal to Cicero. As early as 1541 a composer called Varoter — apparently a Venetian nobleman fallen on hard times — dedicated his four-voice villotte to no less a patron than Duke Ercole of Ferrara with the apologia that "just as a man whose ears are filled with grave and delicate harmonies, satiated as at a royal banquet, feels a desire for coarse and simple fare, so I have prepared some in the form of rustic flowers and fruits."^[55]

It is hardly surprising that a prominent patrician and former senator would have kept such activities close to the vest. Venier was a figurehead in a different sense from Willaert. The civic ideals that the chapelmaster was expected to reflect in his official capacity were ones that Venier was obliged to embody as their very font. While Venier and his noble friends might act in paradoxes among one another, these were not for everyone to see. Unlike professional, salaried musicians, they sent works to the press not as the servants of consumer audiences but as representatives of their class. And what they did not send the press — whether high or low — was as much a register of class differences as what they did. The pervasive presence of a variety of stylistic registers through all social classes should therefore not be taken as erasures of class differences at the base of social structure. On the contrary, the modes in which styles, and the tropes and dialects attached to them, circulated on the whole maintained, rather than surrendered, the claims of class.