Monteverdi, Marenzio, and Battista Guarini's ‘Cruda Amarilli’

Claudio Monteverdi's choice of Cruda Amarilli to open his fifth book of madrigals (1605) is most obviously related to the book's narrative design, which it initiates as a dialogue, followed by O Mirtillo, but it also serves to highlight the importance of one of the works most criticized by Giovanni Maria Artusi after he heard the piece in Ferrara in 1598. When compared with settings of the same text by Benedetto Pallavicino and Giaches de Wert, Cruda Amarilli also aligns Monteverdi with Marenzio's setting of the same text in his seventh book for five voices (1595). Monteverdi's choice of model has greater significance in the light of other works published in the fifth book, which have texts in common with Marenzio's seventh; also significant is the narrative organization of the seventh book, which I argue Monteverdi took as a starting point for that of the fifth. The strong association Monteverdi sought to establish with Marenzio's work, and the apparently deliberate rejection of the Mantuan models it implies, is consistent with his attempt to present himself as a cosmopolitan composer, who, like the older master, is comfortable with contemporary literary culture, and in particular with the discussions surrounding Guarini's Il pastor fido. It also reflects his intense interest in the late 1590s in the progressive activity of the Ferrarese court of Alfonso II. Indeed, the ridotto at Antonio Goretti's house where Artusi heard Cruda Amarilli and other Monteverdi madrigals, all on Pastor fido texts, may have been devoted entirely to such discussions, centred around the play and Monteverdi's settings exclusively. They were probably modelled on similar evenings at the home of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, Marenzio's patron in the early 1590s, at which Guarini himself had been a guest. Monteverdi's ultimate purpose, in the aftermath of Alfonso's death, may have been to position himself as worthy of the succession to the post of maestro di cappella at Mantua, for which he was passed over in 1596 in favour of Pallavicino.