![\"Portrait](\"/assets/img/articles/word-painting-gesualdo-portrait.jpg\")
Word painting, also called text painting, sets a single word to a musical shape that reflects its meaning, such as a falling line on a word about death or a rest on a word about silence. Italian and English madrigal composers of the late sixteenth century made the device central to their music, and it came to be called madrigalisms. Critics thought the practice was often too literal, and the argument about its limits runs through the whole period.
\nA madrigal is secular vocal music, most typical of the Renaissance and early Baroque. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied and usually has three to six voices. Most madrigals are through-composed: each stanza gets different music, and the composer follows the emotion of each line and, often, of single words. The name is shared with a fourteenth-century Italian form that differs from it in nearly every other respect.
\nThe Renaissance madrigal grew out of several sources. Madrigals written by Italianised Franco-Flemish composers in the 1520s drew partly on the three- to four-voice frottola, partly on renewed interest in vernacular Italian poetry, and partly on the French chanson and the polyphony of the motet. The frottola set each stanza to the same music, while the madrigal is through-composed, so the difference is in the structure as much as the sound.
\nBecause word painting works word by word, it can be read straight from the page. The text sits under the notes, one syllable at a time.
\nRenaissance printers placed each syllable beneath the note it was sung to, so a reader can see exactly which word receives a long note, a dense run or an unusual interval. Cipriano de Rore’s madrigal Anchor che col partire survives in a printed cantus partbook, marked A 4 for four voices. Its opening words, Anchor che col partire, io mi sento morire (“even at parting, I feel myself dying”, our translation), are printed under the first phrase of the melody.
\nReading the text against the notes is the first step in hearing word painting. The connection is written into the page, so you do not have to guess at it.
\nSome scholars trace the technique back to Gregorian chant, where the shape of a melody was sometimes tied to the meaning of a word. The madrigal made it the organising principle of the whole piece.
\nThe late madrigal had not always been serious. In the 1560s composers including Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, Monteverdi’s teacher, Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Ferretti brought lighter elements back into the genre. The villanella and the canzonetta, with their dance rhythms, replaced some of the serious Petrarchan verse about love, longing and death.
\nLuca Marenzio (1553–1599) wrote around five hundred madrigals, ranging from the lightest to the most serious, and many are packed with word painting and chromaticism. His lighter madrigals reached England in 1588 in Musica transalpina, the anthology that started the English madrigal craze. Marenzio spent most of his career in Rome, and his output shows how the Italian style could be adapted to very different moods.
\nCarlo Gesualdo was born in 1566 into an aristocratic family and wrote madrigals with some of the most extreme chromaticism of his age. In the early 1590s he learned the chromatic style and textural contrasts of the Ferrarese composers, among them Luzzasco Luzzaschi, but few madrigalists followed his extreme chromaticism. Monteverdi later avoided its stylistic extremes and concentrated on the drama of the text instead. Few composers followed Gesualdo that far. Antonio Cifra and Sigismondo d’India used his techniques selectively, and in the 1620s Michelangelo Rossi, whose two books of unaccompanied madrigals show sustained chromaticism, is described as his successor.
\nWord painting and chromaticism often appear together in these madrigals. A word the composer wants to stress can receive a chromatic note or a remote harmony, so the listener hears the stress as well as the sense.
\nEnglish composers took up the Italian style after the 1588 anthology. The British Library holds a manuscript copy of John Wilbye’s madrigal The Lady Oriana, in the hand of Thomas Edmund Warren. Its refrain, Long live fair Oriana, spreads the syllables of Diana over a run of notes, a device called melisma, so that one name is sung to many pitches.
\n![\"Manuscript](\"/assets/img/articles/word-painting-wilbye-manuscript.webp\")
Thomas Campion, writing in the preface to his first book of lute songs in 1601, called the close observing of words in music childish and ridiculous.
\nThe quarrel that shaped the late madrigal is told in full in the rise of functional tonality. Giovanni Maria Artusi criticised Monteverdi’s unpublished madrigals in 1600. In 1603 a second part of Artusi’s book printed the term seconda pratica, attributed to an anonymous defender of Monteverdi. Monteverdi adopted the term in the preface to his Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605), where he set out a second practice in which the words, rather than the rules of harmony, govern the music.
\nThat position gives word painting a theoretical footing. If the text rules the harmony, a single word may change the chord, the rhythm or the register of the line that carries it.
\nMonteverdi’s madrigals fill nine books. They carry the form from the polyphony of the late sixteenth century toward solo song with continuo and the concertato style. His Eighth Book, published in 1638, contains the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, which uses the stile concitato, an agitated style that employs string tremolo.
\nThe device outlived the madrigal. In Handel’s Messiah, the setting of “every valley shall be exalted” from Isaiah 40:4 puts the word valley on a low note and gives exalted a rising figure. The final word, plain, is held over a series of long notes. Popular music has the same habit: in Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”, the word low is sung on a low note.
\nStart with the text, not the music. Work through a passage in four steps:
\nThe two short examples below illustrate the kind of shape composers used. They are not quotations from any madrigal.
\nUse the ear training studio to practise the intervals you hear, and the virtual piano to test a melody against its text. The polyphony entry explains how several independent voices sing at once, which is the texture of the madrigal.
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