Carlo Alessandro Landini: Libro di Madrigali

Poetic suggestions and polyphonic «maniera»

In 1958, Schott published a collection of twelve five-part madrigals by Paul Hindemith. The author’s brief preface begins with these words:

True madrigals haven’t been composed since the disappearance of Italian madrigal art and its English imitations in the 17th century. In the development of the compositional styles that led to our techniques today, there was no longer any room for such a tranquil and introspective art form. Only the string quartet in its purest form, created by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, comes close to the previous ideal, but in my opinion, it never fully achieved that perfect harmony between compositional skill, ideal treatment of materials, and perfect fusion with the needs and possibilities of consumers that characterized the Italian madrigal in its last period of splendor (Marenzio, Gesualdo, Monteverdi).

Almost seventy years later, Carlo Alessandro Landini turns to that glorious musical genre with his Libro di madrigali, a collection whose title explicitly refers to the «last period of splendor». A surprising choice, but not too surprising when one considers his most recent Missa novem vocum, published in 2022, but the result of a decade’s work. The key factor in both cases is the return to the tradition of counterpoint, that formidable invention that Andrea Bedetti, reviewing Landini’s Missa, defined as «the most sublime achievement made by man in the science of sound, with respect to the time in which it is performed and expressed». Two other fundamental choices are linked to the great Italian madrigal tradition. The sober and rigorous choice of four voices, in contrast to the textual splendor of the Missa, and the choice of poetic texts to be set to music. Five by Torquato Tasso (all taken from Rime d’amore), four by Agnolo Poliziano (Rime, Canzoni, the unfinished Stanze per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano, and an octave from Orfeo), and then Dante, Petrarch, and Boiardo. This is indeed a surprising selection, not least because it might suggest a musical setting directly inspired by the golden age, perhaps with various figurative elements. This is not what we find in Landini’s Madrigals. For the Milanese composer, whom I apologize to for quoting here from a private communication, «words must be able to ‘suggest’ […] rather than express something specific, rather than ‘indicate’ or ‘signify’ anything that can be situated within a circumscribed and well-defined time and place». This point of view, which is technical but inevitably reverberates on aesthetic conception, brings to mind Passeggiata in compagnia di Rossini (1837), in which Antonio Zanolini reports this reflection by the great Pesaro composer:

Words have the power to represent emotions in the mind and stir them in the heart; music only stirs them, but very strongly. The expression of music is not as clear and explicit as the meaning of words, nor is it as apparent and vivid as the images and attitudes of painting, but it is more attractive and more poetic than any poetry. Words would be empty sounds without the meaning attributed to them by convention. This is not the case with music, an expressive language in itself which, without the work of the listener’s mind, immediately penetrates the soul and moves it powerfully. […] While words and actions express the most minute and concrete particularities of emotions, music has a higher, broader, more abstract purpose. It will not stop at words except to harmonize the song with them, without however deviating from the general character it has chosen, so that the words serve the music rather than the music serving the words. […] If the maestro sets out to follow the meaning of the words step by step, he will compose music that is not expressive in itself, poor, vulgar, made, so to speak, like a mosaic, and incongruous or ridiculous.

While the presence of all the resources of counterpoint, including rigorous imitative procedures, is to be expected in a work such as this – see, for example, the openings of numbers 1 and 3 – the variety of «tonal» settings is particularly noteworthy. In general, these range from the clear diatonicism of Io non posso gioire, to the different tonal cadences at the end of some pieces – perfect in No. 8, composed in 2, plagal in 3 – to the tormented chromaticism of Deh ferma, in which triadic combinations are almost entirely absent (but which surprisingly ends with an E7/A connection reminiscent of Gesualdo). In between, there is a vast range of combinations between harmonically close and distant regions, all achieved with often tormented melodic lines. In some cases – and without prejudice to the above – it seems possible to glimpse a more direct link between words and music, as at the beginning of Amor l’alma m’allaccia. In the opening bars, both the homorhythm and the diminished seventh chord that closes the word «allaccia» (followed by a crowned pause) could be linked to the «laces» of love that characterize Tasso’s text. No less important are the metrical and rhythmic choices, with which, once again, Landini seems to draw directly on the great tradition of Italian vocal polyphony. The predominantly stable meter—with the exception of numbers 7 and 11, in which the meter is constantly changing—and the rhythm, which almost entirely abandons the (often abstruse) complexities of much Neue Musik, give the overall texture of the Libro di madrigali the order and transparency typical of its illustrious ancestors. Make no mistake, however. This is very complex music, both to perform and to listen to. I believe that in this new contrapuntal tour de force by Carlo Alessandro Landini, in its marble-like beauty, we find the characteristics that have made the polyphonic madrigal one of the key genres of the European tradition: «the pleasure of making music together […], the desire to combine singing with expressions of high poetry, the physical and intellectual pleasure that is nourished by the creation of complex sound textures, in which multiple voices intertwine to create a continuously variegated fabric» (Paolo Fabbri).

Paolo Alessandro Rossini

The dual nature of the madrigal

«Madrigal» is a mysterious word laden with emotional significance. On the one hand, it refers to a text written in the vernacular, in the language of the people, rather than in Latin; on the other, it carries within it a reference to herds and singing in the pastures. The idea that etymology confirms is the opening up to an emotional, immediate dimension, which immediately contrasts with the artifices of writing and with the need to capture the meaning of poetic images through work on sound, rhythm, and polyphonic conduct. This duality inhabits the compositional technique of this extraordinary practice. All the strict procedures of writing, as in a sublime Platonic mathematics, must be able to bend to the irruption of the meaning of the word, of poetic color, transforming severity into a container, as happens with poetic verse.

The poetic world set in motion by these twelve madrigals by Carlo Alessandro Landini, certainly carved out of the harsh framework of polyphony, carry within them the theme of travel, of painful excavation into the past, of the idea of rebirth after pilgrimage, which has profound and involuntary similarities with the Petrarchan themes that imbue the substance of the verses. But the irreplaceable beauty of the ancient word is matched by a compositional technique that revels in chromaticisms far removed from the formalizations sedimented in the historical tradition of the genre, or that works on melody and its loss in spatial echoes that go beyond the severe style or representative elegance of the dramaturgy of distances.

There is nothing here that reproduces models of the past, apart from a severe and often very daring polyphonic technique. What emerges instead is a taste for deformation, for metamorphosis that is not flowery or reassuring, a musical sense for uncomfortable but stony-expressive vocal positions. When listening, it is inevitable to seek comfort in the score, as always happens in madrigals. It is inevitable to look for the hidden face behind the mask of the texts. This opens up an impressive world of dynamic leaps and fades, of a sense of loss, which seem to re-examine the form of the madrigal without nostalgia.

The harshness of the polyphonic combinations and the dissonances generously distributed throughout the score seem to point to the distant past of the madrigal, to an original, wounded, and sharp terrain where images are regenerated, almost purified. It’s therefore surprising to hear unpredictable cadences in Poliziano, rhythmic lightness in Tasso, tears without tears in Petrarch, and the whole sense of a subversion of the representative meaning of the madrigal, towards the truth of an expressive meaning. Like a contortionist trying to return to the elementary forms of rhetoric, Landini takes us to a landscape that does not wear nostalgic colors, but the harsh awareness of loss, as if the stakes of the search were an unattainable bet that could only end with Dante’s Abbi pietà.

A landmark, from this point of view, should be considered the first section of the tenth madrigal, Scuoti, meschin, based on the text by Poliziano, that keen observer of human weakness and courtly love. All the semantic lightness of the composition is masterfully woven into the melodic trace of «cieco errore» («blind error») and the colors associated with the word «love», felt as a disturbing presence and rendered with a chromaticism that would not be unworthy of Wagner. The meaning of the madrigal is not reduced to a pastime of the Medici court; yet, in Landini’s music, it is linked to a disenchanted reflection on loneliness, on the useless harshness of bewilderment, on a sense of distance and estrangement, which enters into polyphony with the lighter tone of the text. Landini’s writing thus goes to the heart of humanity, avoiding any academicism, but fluidizing the polyphony on his own writing. A non-didactic way of reopening the meaning of the poetic.

Carlo Serra

Between the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of madrigals were published. The genre spread through the courts and palaces of the aristocracy, institutional occasions as well as private and secret ones. Then, slowly, it fell into oblivion and, after oblivion, removal. With the madrigal disappeared, or rather was redefined according to other paradigms, much of the mother tongue that had nourished European music for centuries: counterpoint. Disappeared from the surface but not entirely extinct, like a karst river, the madrigal resurfaced episodically in the 20th century: Stravinsky, Hindemith, Poulenc, Petrassi, Dallapiccola, Ghedini…

However, it remains a completely unorthodox, and therefore welcome, undertaking for a 21st-century composer to choose to write not just a few sporadic madrigals, but rather a substantial collection or, as they would have said in the golden age of the genre, an entire «muta», a muta that is astonishing in many ways. The undertaking was not without risk. One could have limited oneself to writing in the old style, simply imitating it in the most slavish sense of the term, or, conversely, chosen a completely different language in which the madrigal remained a lifeless label, a mere pretext. The path taken by Carlo Alessandro Landini, however, is the most difficult, but also the most fruitful. That is, to rewrite the counterpoint according to the sensibilities, techniques, and suggestions of a contemporary composer, without ever disavowing its lesson.

First and foremost, this music shows a deep understanding of that world, a deep understanding necessary to bring it back to life, to make it alive and vital without turning it into a museum piece. And so we are left in awe of the splendid two-voice openings that begin many madrigals, of the refinement with which the tactus expands, almost amplifying the lesson that comes to us from the performance practice of the time, which reminds us that the madrigal should not be performed «alla battuta», a recommendation that is often not even reflected in the most philologically informed interpretations and which, here, however, the composer takes on board by indicating a wide variety of metrical-rhythmic scansions and metronomic indications.

Bold, but at the same time fascinating and alienating, is the choice to set to music texts by the same great writers set to music by musicians of the past: Tasso, Poliziano, Petrarch, Boiardo, Dante… These poems, some of the most beautiful ever written, are given new life thanks to new meanings that rewrite their significance. Rather than sterile madrigalisms, often naive even at the time, the composer works on the dramaturgical depth of the text, on its intrinsic expressiveness. Sound, pure sound, thus becomes a revealing element of the poetic text: what makes it real in the act of performance.

Listening to and meditating on Carlo Alessandro Landini’s madrigals is an enriching experience, one that reconnects us with our memories of the past and, at the same time, reveals how memory of the past has a productive function, helping us understand how indispensable it is for building something new.

Stefano Lorenzetti

The verses of some of Italy’s greatest poets – from Dante Alighieri to Torquato Tasso – take on a new guise in Carlo Alessandro Landini’s Book of Madrigals thanks to the richness of his musical invention, fueled by the inexhaustible source of vocal counterpoint that flows copiously from the composer’s vein. The density of the polyphonic interweaving and the resulting effect of sonic continuum are striking. Here we have an incessant dialogue between the voices made up of bursts and pauses, heights and depths, severe imitations or, more often, simple references, assonances, and reminiscences. The focus is on the key points where the discourse passionately reaches its climax, only to then gather, condensed or rarefied, in the cadence. The exquisitely horizontal dimension of the writing weaves unusual yet comprehensibly articulated and powerfully evocative harmonies, the result of natural diatonic processes or the consequence of sudden chromatic combinations. It is here that we see the fruitful relationship with the text, which brings us back, once again, to the practice of the Renaissance madrigal. But that’s not all. While Bachian echoes resound at times in the polyphonic structure, the melodic lines, which favor the use of conjunct motion with few strictly consonant leaps, echo Gregorian melismas, while some intimate solutions recall late Romantic choral Lieder. Listening to this Book of Madrigals takes us by surprise and amazes us. The pleasure is not immediate. Only by immersing ourselves for a long time in the atmosphere created by each piece can we be fascinated and captivated by it. Every expectation arises in us at the very moment it is satisfied, as if the author wanted to lead us, with sure steps, to generate desires, expectations and thoughts that we didn’t know we could conceive before, tracing the itinerary of an unforgettable journey to an enchanted world. An exciting experience.

Maria Elena Mazzella