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O dolorosa gioia is an Italian secular madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, a composer noted for intensely expressive writing around the turn of the seventeenth century. Its text treats love as a paradoxical source of both pleasure and suffering. The music reflects that conflict through chromatic harmony, ab...
"Mille volte il dì moro" is a five-voice Italian madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, published in his third book of madrigals. Its text uses the Petrarchan image of dying repeatedly through the emotional pain and ecstasy of love. Gesualdo reinforces the poem's contrasts through chromatic movement, abrupt ha...
S'io non miro non moro is a five-voice Italian madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, published in his third book of madrigals. Its text uses a paradox of looking, death, and desire to express the emotional contradictions of courtly love. Gesualdo sets the words through shifting textures, chromatic movement, a...
Vivrò fra i miei tormenti is a five-voice madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi, published in his Third Book of Madrigals in 1592. The text is drawn from Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and presents Tancredi's anguished words after he has killed the warrior Clorinda, whom he loved without recognizing...
O dolce anima mia is a five-voice Italian madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi, published in his Third Book of Madrigals in 1592. Its amorous text is treated through closely coordinated vocal lines and expressive changes in harmony and rhythm, techniques central to Monteverdi's secular writing during this...
“Rimanti in pace” is a five-voice Italian madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi, published in his Third Book of Madrigals. Its text presents a painful farewell between lovers, and Monteverdi uses shifts in harmony, vocal texture, and rhythmic motion to reflect individual words and emotional turns. The work...
A Monteverdi madrigal setting an amorous text, notable for its chromatic expressivity concentrated on the symbolic word lumi, meaning eyes or lights.
A 5-voice madrigal from Monteverdi's First Book (1587), among his earliest published works, showing the smooth polyphonic influence of Marenzio and Wert.
A Monteverdi madrigal setting a pastoral text, representative of his craft in evoking natural imagery through closely interwoven polyphonic vocal lines.
Italian madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi evoking a pastoral scene of tender grasses, using nature imagery to frame an amorous theme in the Renaissance madrigal tradition.
