“Imitar col canto chi parla”: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater

Abstract

Abstract Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of affections. But by dealing exclusively with the referential meanings of texts (e.g., emotions, images, and concepts) these views overlook an important aspect of music's interaction with language. In opera, music also imitates language's contextual and communicative functions—i.e., discourse, as studied today by the subfield of linguistics called pragmatics. In his operas Monteverdi fully realized Peri's ideal of “imitating in song a person speaking” (“imitar col canto chi parla”) by musically emphasizing those context-dependent meanings that emerge especially in ordinary language and that are prominent in dramatic texts, as opposed to poetry and prose. Such meanings are manifest whenever words such as “I,” “here,” and “now” appear— words called “deictics”—with the function of situating the speaker/singer's utterances in a specific time and place. Monteverdi highlights deictics through melodic and rhythmic emphases, repetition, shifts of meter, style, and harmony, as part of a strategy to create a musical language suited to opera as a genre and to singers as actors. In Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, this strategy serves large-scale dramaturgical aims with respect to the relationships among space, time, and character identity, highlighting issues also discussed within the contemporary intellectual context.

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