Love as an aspiration to immortality, love as sacrifice, love as transcendence, love as a drive towards perfection, or as a source of destruction. These themes, universal and timeless, have always found expression across all forms of artistic endeavor, transcending both time and space. In the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, as recounted by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses, love is portrayed under the shadow of envy. In the medieval narrative cycles, Guinevere and Lancelot engage in a love that defies authority: the most trusted knight of King Arthur and his queen become protagonists of a tragic tale that contributes to the downfall of the legendary Camelot. Similarly, Tristan and Isolde are caught in a story that renders them victims of a capricious fate, leading to their inevitable deaths. These themes, which traverse the history of literature, span from antiquity to the courtly romances of the Middle Ages, extending into Romantic narratives, from myth to fairy tale.
I believe that many of these elements can be discerned in the poetic cycles presented in David Fontanesi’s collection, Five Cycles of Erotic Songs. Fontanesi’s lyrics, authored by the composer himself, are undoubtedly rich in allusion, yet they never descend into vulgarity—a quality reminiscent of the lyrical tradition of the Provençal poets, who often addressed themes of love through cryptic or allusive language, with the physical dimension of passionate love vividly present, not merely as an elevated abstraction. There is always space for grace, allusion, and imagination—consider the senhal employed by the Provençal poets: in these ancient texts, even the name of the beloved is often disguised to avoid recognition.
Fontanesi’s lyrics are structured in stanzas with fixed rhyme schemes, an element that evokes a sense of “antiquity”: the lyrics are composed in hendecasyllables with various rhyme patterns, divided into two quatrains and two tercets, structures that recall the sonnet form—a poetic form that has historically accommodated a range of themes, including love, within the Italian literary tradition. The Petrarchan canzone also comes to mind: though more extensive than the sonnet, its musical form reflects the monodic productions of troubadours and trouvères, which would later find a renewed presence in the Lied form in Germany.
The German Lied tradition, along with the French chanson and the mélodie—as exemplified in the works of Gabriel Fauré—finds some resonance in Fontanesi’s compositions, which occasionally evoke traditional French influences through refined and sophisticated harmonic solutions, often favoring modal over tonal resolutions.
In the Lied, concise lyrical poems are given coherent form in cycles with varying degrees of internal narrative coherence; Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are exemplary of this genre. In the Lied, poetic texts, typically strophic, are set as miniature cameos for solo voice and piano, with melodies that may repeat, emphasizing the strophic nature of the texts, or evolve into ever-new phrases in a durchkomponiert form. The Lied is particularly suited to adherence to the poetic text, conveying an ostensibly spontaneous expression of sentiment, almost embodying the composer’s most introspective moments: the music often mirrors the character and flow of the poetic text, thus reinforcing its meaning and highlighting the intrinsic, intimate connection between the potential of music and that of language. In this cycle of Fontanesi’s compositions, the voice is clearly accompanied and supported by the piano in this narrative journey. The piano is not merely an accompaniment but serves as a second character, engaging in dialogue or standing as a silent witness to the soul’s soliloquy. The music sketches and colors the concealed depths of the emotions depicted, expressing what words alone cannot articulate.
In the first three cycles by Fontanesi—Eros & Psyche, Four Lancelot and Guinevere Songs, Four Tristan and Isolde’s Songs—various facets of four epic tales are portrayed, with a close interplay between music and text, each defining a distinct musical and narrative climax. For example, in the first cycle, dedicated to Cupid and Psyche, a lively tempo and a gentle accompaniment align well with a sense of fulfilling happiness, while a desolate adagio and a more rigid accompaniment introduce doubt, sorrow, and profound solitude. In the second cycle, Lancelot emerges from the water to a smooth, legato accompaniment over which the declamatory text unfolds; detached notes evoke lamentation, yet also the urgent plea for a promise of love, while rapid triplets propel the hero towards a triumphant battle.
This expression of emotion prioritizes the word, the verbal text, and its meaning, with music serving to amplify and underscore the emotions conveyed. It is impossible not to think of the madrigal, a genre with a long and intricate history, which has bestowed prestige upon composers who have tackled its challenges throughout the sixteenth century and which, on the threshold of the seventeenth century, would approach the realm of opera, moving away from polyphony to grant supremacy to the soprano voice. The melody was entrusted to the declamation of the upper voice, tasked with enhancing the close bond between music and text, between the musical score and the lyrical verse. This marks the full realization of the so-called “seconda pratica”: harmony does not dominate the word, as in the Franco-Flemish contrapuntal tradition, but rather becomes a complementary element that imparts realism to the word’s meaning.
Fontanesi successfully navigates the multifaceted task of fully narrating complex stories within a few pages of music, engaging the listener as both audience and spectator. Even though a true stage representation is never contemplated, the musical narrative itself becomes a medium to evoke an emblematic series of emotions, intimate and narrative situations, akin to certain representative genres. Here, however, the instrumental part is not merely supportive but serves as a genuine dialogic element. The representation of human emotions absorbs the complexity of musical composition, another feature traceable to the madrigal’s origins: eschewing intricate and highly formalized structures, the style is characterized by the declamation of words, clearly enunciated, even on repeated notes, emphasizing every signifier of the lyrical text—an expressive possibility that evokes the same emotional resonances of theatrical action beyond the confines of the stage.
The literary form of the madrigal has never truly fallen out of use; Italian poets like Carducci and D’Annunzio composed madrigals following the poetic form popular in the fourteenth century, while Pascoli embraced the sixteenth-century monostrophic form, as seen in the poems contained in Myricae. The texts of Maestro Fontanesi reveal affinities with the bucolic and allusive content of the sixteenth-century literary madrigal, even though formal similarities with the structure of the poetic texts are less readily apparent. In the final cycle, Four Sentimental Songs, featuring lyrics by Clery Celeste, the structure is freer, more open, lacking a clearly defined formal framework, which recalls some aspects of the sixteenth-century madrigal, without a strophic structure, where the verses flow without a strict rhyme scheme in a relatively brief text.
Fontanesi’s compositional style is predominantly syllabic, with the voice as an active protagonist—serving as narrator, character, and a medium for evoking and arousing emotions through a musical language that, while contemporary, maintains connections to past traditions. From a compositional perspective, this is evident in his consistent use of contrapuntal techniques: numerous passages feature canons at the unison, third, sixth, and octave, evident from the opening bars of the first movement of the cycle dedicated to Cupid and Psyche; these techniques are also apparent throughout all the lyrics, providing a profound sense of unity.
Paola Donati © 2024
Fontanesi: Erotic Song Cycles, for Soprano and Piano
