Fontanesi: Les Regrets – Madrigals for Five, Six and Eight Voices

Description

Within the catalogue of David Fontanesi, the number four recurs with the force of an ordering principle. Quartets, sonatas, concertos and poetic cycles are often arranged in groups of four, as though numerical symmetry offered to musical thought a primary guarantee of solidity. This disc carries that tendency a stage further, gathering sixteen madrigals distributed in four nuclei of four pieces each, entrusted to scorings of eight, six, five and again eight voices. The architecture coincides with the poetics. It is the first sign of a writing that seeks measure, proportion and clarity of articulation, and that finds in dialogue with the past a discipline of invention. Fontanesi has repeatedly affirmed his distance both from the dogmatism of the avant-gardes and from a neo-Romanticism devoid of genuine compositional labour, and has indicated in beauty, counterpoint and the continuity of the Western tradition the cornerstones of his craft. In these pages that position manifests itself with particular clarity, because the composer encounters an author, Joachim Du Bellay, whose writing itself lives by crisis, memory and a conscious confrontation with models. Published upon the return from the Roman sojourn, Les Regrets belong to the moment at which Du Bellay, among the principal figures of the Pléiade and author of the Défense et illustration de la langue française, turns the poetic gesture away from pure classicising imitation and leads it back to lived experience. The collection introduces into the French sonnet the moral diary, court satire, nostalgia for the homeland, the disenchantment of ambition, the need for a language capable of uttering at once the wound of exile and the dignity of song. For Du Bellay, Rome is also an inward laboratory. Hence the continual friction between grandeur and servitude, between the desire for glory and weariness, between poetic ardour and its sudden eclipse. Fontanesi grasps that tension and makes of Les Regrets the very matrix of musical form. The anaphoras, the interrogations, the conceptual turns between quatrains and tercets, the final sententiae, all are translated into procedures of imitation, vertical accretion, suspension and cadential release. The reference to the Renaissance madrigal is explicit, and the language of these scores lives within a present that reopens it. The fundamental principle remains that of adherence to the word, which the Italian tradition of the Cinquecento made exemplary and which the seconda pratica would later radicalise, placing the text at the centre of the sonic order. Fontanesi assimilates that lesson and transfers it into a contemporary horizon. The writing is predominantly syllabic, the imitative entries are often closely spaced, the homorhythmic episodes coincide with the syntactic articulations of the verse, chromaticism intervenes at points of suffering, sarcasm or intense affective concentration. At the same time, the polyphonic web is conceived as harmonic progression, with a clear tonal polarisation within a surface that preserves modal memory. What emerges is a substance of great transparency, in which counterpoint reinforces intelligibility and confers prominence upon it. The first book for eight voices opens the course with a kind of poetic self-portrait. Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature and Je ne veux fueilleter les exemplaires Grecs are sonnets of negative poetics, in which Du Bellay rejects cosmological emphasis, the servile imitation of the Greeks, of Horace, of Petrarch and of Ronsard himself, preferring a more direct manner of writing, bound to the contingencies of living. Fontanesi translates this declaration into a texture of great compactness, in which the eight parts pursue one another and coalesce like successive waves, almost making of verbal anaphora a constructive law. In Las, où est maintenant ce mespris de Fortune ? the memory of former poetic exaltation bends into elegy, whereas Cependant que la Court mes ouvrages lisoit confronts the question of patronage, honour and the dependence of art upon the favour of the powerful. The whole book thus moves between declaration of simplicity, loss of fervour and the public consciousness of poetry. The breadth of the scoring lends to these pieces an almost architectural profile, suited to sonnets that speak of the very destiny of the poetic voice. The madrigals for six voices constitute the contemplative heart of the programme. Here the word of Du Bellay becomes more gathered, more inward, more exposed to a spiritual verticality. N’estant, comme je suis, encore exercité opposes the former saincte fureur to the weight of necessity; France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois transforms nostalgia into one of the loftiest personifications of the homeland in the whole of French Renaissance lyric; Esprit royal raises the discourse into an almost Neoplatonic light; Dans l’enfer de son corps transforms the lexicon of love into penance and redemption. The six-voice scoring favours a median density, less monumental than the eight-voice pieces and more intimate than the five-voice ones, and produces a meditative sonority capable of enveloping the text in an almost choral aura. In these pieces Fontanesi dwells with particular finesse upon the internal cadences, which mark the moral turns of the poetic thought. The polyphony breathes with the verse. More limpid and keen-edged are the madrigals for five voices, which delineate a Du Bellay who is polemical, moral and epigrammatic. Si les larmes servaient de remède au malheur takes up lament only to hollow it out from within, transforming tears into a sterile nourishment of sorrow. Tu ne crains la fureur de ma plume animée belongs to the satirical vein and closes upon the sharp stroke of the pédante, with a directness rendered still more incisive by the homorhythmic writing. On donne les degrés au savant écolier stages the hierarchy of worldly rewards in order to arrive at the bitter realisation that to the poet there falls only the laurel, a lofty yet insufficient symbol. Muse, qui autrefois chantas la verte Olive finally restores the discourse to an elevated encomiastic register, in which the Muse is summoned to a higher flight in order to celebrate princely greatness. In this book the reduction of scoring becomes a dramatic advantage. The lines acquire a sharper profile, the final clauses gather with greater decision, the word receives a direct light. It is the most acute sector of the cycle, the one in which the verbal intelligence of Du Bellay and the constructive lucidity of the composer come together with greatest evidence. The second group for eight voices closes the disc, once more enlarging sonic space and at the same time completing the moral self-portrait of the poet. Bien qu’aux arts d’Apollon le vulgaire n’aspire defends the office of the lyre against the scorn of the world and against the apparent uselessness of an art that procures no wealth; Maintenant je pardonne à la douce fureur makes of verse the ancient error and at the same time the sole medicine; C’était ores, c’était qu’à moi je devais vivre contemplates lost freedom and the winter of age; Ô qu’heureux est celui qui peut passer son aage raises the secluded life, without envy or ambition, to the rank of a model of wisdom. If the first book for eight voices possessed the character of a combative poetics, this second one assumes the tone of an existential reckoning. The harmonic disposition also contributes to the difference. According to the indications given by the composer, the first group of eight voices gravitates towards softer and more shadowed tonal areas, often marked by flats, whereas the second turns towards a clearer radiance, animated by sharps and by an ascending chromaticism. The large vocal body thus allows Fontanesi to pass from peroration to confession without losing compactness. One of the most remarkable traits of the whole cycle is the precision with which the syntax of the sonnet becomes musical syntax. The anaphoras of Du Bellay generate constructions of successive entries, social or moral enumerations are transformed into series of kindred cells, rhetorical questions produce melodic ripples and an increase in density, sententious endings receive more stable chordal dispositions and firmer cadences. Fontanesi does not conceive the text as a surface to be illustrated, but as a logical organism to be articulated. From this derives also the strong unity of the collection, although each group possesses its own colour. The five-voice pieces tend towards incisiveness, the six-voice ones towards meditation, the eight-voice ones towards ample and perorative construction. The difference of scoring corresponds to three different ways of balancing intelligibility and fullness. What results is one of the most coherent undertakings in the recent output of Fontanesi. These madrigals reaffirm the vitality of a genre that history has not relegated to the museum, but has consigned to successive metamorphoses. The composer looks towards the Renaissance within a present horizon. He looks towards counterpoint together with harmonic evidence. He looks towards the poetic word as a living organism, capable of orienting musical time from within. At the centre remains the conviction that music must still speak, persuade, wound and console, and that beauty is not a residue but a form of truth. In Du Bellay he finds an ideal companion, because Les Regrets too are born of a crisis of language, of the function of the poet, of the relationship with society and with memory. This music restores to that crisis a new resonance. It delivers it to a present still capable of hearing the weight of words and the design of voices.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026