Styles and Methods of Recent Editions of Italian madrigals

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to translate into artistic terms. This judgment is doubly unjust: there is no need to magnify Monteverdi's genius by belittling his contemporaries, and the creative activity of the artists of the Camerata was limited only by their own personalities. Each one, like every true artist, deserves and demands to be considered on his merits and not to be measured against the greatness of others (p. 234).

Pirrotta's work teaches primarily by example rather than precept. And his general points are deeply embedded in the specific details of his argument. But he steps outside his historical narrative from time to time to speak directly to his audience. In one memorable lesson he allowed himself to address the subject of musicology quite specifically, almost as an apologia for his own work. The address prefaces one of his earliest formulations of the

concept of an unwritten tradition (p. 26):

Musicology is a recent word . . one many people are not too happy with. It is modeled, as others are, after the old and glorious name of philology. But whoever invented the older name set the accent on love-love of beauty in speech; every subsequent derivation has emphasized instead the logos component, with inelegant verbosity and, in the name of objectivity, with a detached, almost aggressive attitude toward its purported subject. Lovely and loving Philology was deemed by a poet the worthy bride of Mercury; I can think of Musicology only as a maiden, whose secret love for no lesser deity than Apollo will never have a chance until she gets rid of her heavy glasses, technical jargon, and businesslike approach and assumes a gentler, more humanistic manner.

To be fair to my lady Musicology, I must admit that the magnifying glasses, the analytical approach, even statistics, are at present indispensable tools to her work. She acquired her status among the historical disciplines as late as the second half of the last century, at which time, alas, euphoric generalizations and rationalizations were made, quite often on the basis of only scanty documentary evidence. Musicology and musicologists are still reacting to those generalizations, and that is why we are so strictly bound to the document, to the manuscript source, to the early music print, of which an enormous quantity still must be inspected before we can establish new values.

Ever mindful of the necessity of grounding critical interpretation in fact, his aspirations for the field are moved by a higher vision. Pirrotta's career is an affirmation of the humanity of musicology.

ELLEN ROSAND Rutgers University

Giovanni Ferretti. II secondo libro delle canzoni a sei voci (ir75). Edited by Ruth I. DeFord. Recent Researches in the Music of the Renais- sance, 57-58. Madison: A-R Editions, 1983. xx, 157 pp.; 2 plates.- Girolamo Frescobaldi. II primo libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (16o8). Edited by Charles Jacobs. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. x, 165 pp.-Andrea Gabrieli. Complete Madri- gals. Edited by A. Tillman Merritt. i2 volumes in 8. Recent

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396 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 41-52. Madison: A-R Editions, i98i-84. xxvi, I20 pp. and 2 plates; xviii, 97 pp. and 2

plates; xxix, 90o pp. and 3 plates; xxix, 203 pp. and 5 plates; xxvi, 183 pp. and 3 plates; xxvii, 216 pp. and 3 plates; xviii, 92 pp. and 2 plates; xvi, IoI pp. and 2 plates.-David S. Butchart, I madrigali di Marco da Gagliano. Translated by Isabella Pellican6. Civilta musicale medicea, I. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1982. 83 PP.; 3 plates.-Antonio Il Verso. Madrigali a tre e a cinque voci (1605 e 1619). Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi. Musiche rinascimentali siciliane, 8. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1978. xli, 85 pp.; 6 plates.-Sigismondo d'India. Ottavo libro dei madrigali a cinque voci (1624). Edited by Glenn Watkins. Musiche rinascimentali siciliane, io. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, i980. xlvi, 63 pp.; 4 plates.-Luca Marenzio. Opera omnia, IV-VI [Madrigals for six voices, Books I-VI, i581-95]. Edited by Bernhard Meier. Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 72. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, 1978-83. xii, 218 pp.; xiv, 206 pp.; xiv, 223 pp.- Luca Marenzio. The Secular Works, VI, VII, and XIV [Madrigals for 6 voices, Book VI, i595; Madrigals for 4-6 voices, Book I, I588; Madrigals for 5 voices, Book VII, I595]. Edited by Steven Ledbetter and Patricia Myers. New York: Broude Brothers/The Broude Trust, 1977-83. xxxviii, 220 pp.; xxviii, 167 pp.; xxxviii, 224 PP-- Pietro Maria Marsolo. Secondo libro dei madrigali a quattro voci (16i4) et al. Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi. Musiche rinascimentali siciliane, 4. Rome: De Santis, 1973. lxvii, 115 pp.; 8 plates.-Philippi de Monte. Opera, Series D, Madrigals, I-III [Madrigals for five voices, Books I- III, 1554-70]. Edited by Othmar Wessely and Erika Kanduth. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977-82. xx, 105 pp. and 4 plates; xxiv, 93 pp. and I plate; xvi, 69 pp. and 2 plates.-Angelo Pompilio. I madrigali a quattro voci di Pomponio Nenna (1613). Studi e testi per la storia della musica, 5. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983. 147 pp-. Benedetto Pallavicino. Opera omnia, I-III [Madrigals for five voices, Books I-VI, I58- 600oo]. Edited by Peter Flanders and Kathyrn Bosi Monteath. Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 89. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology, 1982-83. xviii, 206 pp.; xvi, 199 pp.; xvi, 181 pp.

THE RASH OF RECENT EDITIONS of late Renaissance madrigals invites a review not of the detailed contents of each of them but rather of the ways and the whys of making such editions. A consideration of the ways raises recurrent and relatively well-defined questions of method, questions answered various- ly by these editions. The whys, on the other hand, provoke questions about intended users, questions less clearly defined, it seems, by most editors and publishers.



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At one end of the spectrum of intended clients stand those who want a convenient selection of music, defined primarily in practical terms, e.g., an anthology of pieces for three high voices, for SATB, or with lute accompani- ment. Such an audience would seem to be the one envisioned for editions such as Der Bliserchor or The Renaissance Recorder, but for none of the editions under review. At the other end stand specialized scholars and research libraries. What they demand is a complete edition of a single source or a complete group of pieces of a single type by a single author, presented together with the fullest possible documentation concerning the sources themselves, the pieces they contain, and the cultural context from which they sprang-no matter how monumental, pricey, or even cumbersome the resulting edition becomes. The University of Chicago's Monuments of Renaissance Music caters to such clients. (Admittedly, its latest volume is a bit less cumbersome than usual in physical format.)

Let us call these two clients types I and IV, respectively, for in between we will identify two other important types. Clients of type II, like those of type I, want a selection of pieces rather than a complete source, but they are at least somewhat concerned with the authority of the source for the edition, and they tend to define their selection not so much by practical requirements as by considerations of genre and composer. They want some motets by Isaac, for example, or some madrigals by Gagliano. Series such as Das Chorwerk and Diletto musicale have served such clients long and well. Then there are clients of type III: those who want a complete source or group of pieces together with enough documentation to enable them adequately to reconstruct the original text and context for the pieces at hand, yet who require that the pieces and documentation be accessible in a format that is both easy to use and as compact as possible. In other words, they want a format that is both elegant and handy (in the literal sense of the word).

Editions for clients of type III are common in other disciplines. The well- fingered condition in graduate study-rooms of such series as Gallimard's Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Einaudi's Nuova universale Einaudi, or Rizzoli's I classici d'arte indicates their scholarly respectability. Their wide diffusion outside of academia indicates that there is a relatively broad public for this kind of edition. In the case of Italian madrigals, this public would presumably include not only Renaissance musicologists but also performers, both amateur and professional, other scholars, whether in another Renaissance field or in another area of musicology, and even some lay lovers of sixteenth- century music.

This taxonomy, rough as it is, can at least offer points of reference as we consider recurrent questions of methodology raised by the editions under review. The major questions involve the kind of introductory commentary provided, the handling of variants in musical and verbal texts, and the layout of the music on the page. Editors and publishers of madrigals, indeed of Renaissance music as a whole, have been relatively slow to satisfy the type III public. Either the documentation they provide is seriously inadequate, or they show a somewhat reckless attitude toward handiness of format and economy of presentation.

It would seem clear that the editions reviewed here, all of which are presumably aimed at clients of types III and IV, should have a generous introductory essay that places the print, manuscript, or group of pieces




within its cultural and musical environment, interprets the ordering of pieces within the source or sources involved, singles out unusual texts and settings in the source, and perhaps even offers comparisons with closely related settings outside the source, if such are available. It is hard to see the reason for omitting such introductory commentary. In comparison with the music itself, such material is not expensive to print. The author of a scholarly edition, who has normally been occupied with the music and its sources for several years, should be the person most qualified to write such an essay, which will help the user comprehend the quality and distinctiveness of the pieces included.

There are some who would have such introductory essays published separately-for example, in scholarly journals. But to separate the essay from the edition is probably to ensure that the performer or interested amateur will never consult it. It is also strongly to imply that he need not. Much of what James Haar has said in opposition to "the expensive and slow-paced issuance of monumental editions" is to the point, but his polemical verve carries him too far, I think, when he suggests that the editor's duty might be fulfilled by cutting and pasting facsimile partbooks into a rough score alignment.2 Do we musicologists take the view that the task of scholars and experts is only to get the music printed in as adequate a text as possible and that the understanding of musical artworks of the past requires nothing but this text? Clearly our colleagues in other disciplines do not take this view. There is scarcely a modern edition of literary or visual artworks from the heritage of the past that lacks introductory material of the sort sketched above.

Yet several of the editions reviewed here have almost no introductory material. Wessely's few sketchy paragraphs introducing the Monte edition offer a rather random mixture of specialized and commonplace information. The learned Bernhard Meier gives as introduction to his Marenzio edition only a few brief remarks on performance practice in one volume and a condensation of his specialized work on modes in another. Jacobs's introduction to the Frescobaldi madrigals is sketchily informed and disingenuous: it represents the collection as a major musical discovery, in need of immediate publication, while, in fact, those working on Frescobaldi had long known it to be complete, and it had been announced as part of a complete edition that is in progress.3 The skimpy introductions to Flanders's Pallavicino volumes offer the best case in point. Why should users of this edition have to seek out Flanders's unpublished dissertation to learn more about these poems, musical settings, or dedicatees? We have the right to expect some enlightenment- certainly more than the few words offered here-from the editor of the volumes, who has been working on these matters for over a decade.

'Among the editors under consideration, only DeFord and Myers speak to this issue. The policy in the Gabrieli edition of breaking up the original publications and grouping together pieces according to their number of voices has the disadvantage of obscuring the shape of the original publication.

2 Review of Vol. XIV of the Broude edition of Marenzio, Early Music History, II (1982), 376. 3 See the review of Jacobs's edition by Alexander Silbiger, Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the

Music Library Association, XLI (1984-85), 577-78.



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Not all the publications considered here lack adequate introductory essays. In fact, Butchart's small monograph on Gagliano is primarily not an edition but a scholarly essay with musical examples attached: a thirty-nine-page essay on Gagliano's style is followed by eight epigrammatic madrigals from various sources, crowded onto thirty pages of autography that is rather too much reduced.4 Pompilio, on the other hand, presents a thorough and careful edition of a complete source-Nenna's only book of madrigals for four voices. But his twenty-six-page introductory essay covers a much wider area than that of the single musical collection he has edited: it is a short monograph on Nenna and southern Italian music at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with important new information both biographical and bibliographical. It deserves to be widely read.

The introductions by Bianconi and Watkins to the editions of Marsolo, Antonio II Verso, and Sigismondo d'India in Musiche rinascimentali siciliane are models of the genre, even going so far as to print and discuss other settings of the texts set. Although these essays are fairly long, they remain primarily focused on the collections edited, and they by no means over- whelm in quantity (although they sometimes do in quality) the music on which they comment.s They are among the most impressive pieces of recent scholarship in the area of the late Renaissance madrigal and its poetry.

Ruth DeFord's introduction to Ferretti's Canzoni proves that the needs of this kind of introduction can sometimes be met in fewer than ten pages (if one does not count the poetic texts and facsimiles). In this space she manages to give us valuable information, some of it newly published, on the genre of the pieces, on the composer's methods of arranging preexistent models (which are printed at the end of the volume), on the biography of both composer and dedicatee, on the style of the pieces in the volume, and on possible principles of ordering in the original source. Keeping clearly in mind a client of type III or type IV, she informs where information is needed without bothering to explain such things as what the Renaissance is or what constitutes a sonnet.

Merritt's introductions to the volumes of the Gabrieli edition, on the other hand, suggest some ambiguity as to intended audience, for they offer these rudimenta on the one hand, while elsewhere seeming to assume considerable sophistication. For example, in addition to providing a complete set of translations in separate sections, the editor summarizes most of the texts within his introductory essays.6 Yet information needed by nonspecialists is nowhere included. Without it, most users will not understand what some of the texts actually mean. Thus, the introductions offer not a word about the

4 The eighteen settings by Gagliano published by Jeppesen, Einstein, and Butchart whet one's appetite for more. Perhaps it is my experience with the Ferrarese school that leads me to hear the examples of Gagliano madrigals that are now available as more text oriented and polyphonically complicated, indeed more Ferrarese-influenced (especially by Fontanelli), than is claimed by Butchart or by Strainchamps in The New Grove Dictionary, VII, 83-84.

5 D'India's Eighth Book is of the highest quality and, like the available pieces by Gagliano, makes us wish for more. Glenn Watkins informs me that he has the earlier madrigal books ready for the press. The Eighth Book has been excellently recorded by the Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley, director (Oiseau-Lyre DSDL 707).

6 It would be preferable (and more economical) to have all discussion of each text placed together with the printing and translating of that text.




hexachord in their discussion of a text full of plays on solmization syllables. They do not mention that the text "Gratie, che'l mio Signor" is an imitation of Petrarch's "Gratie ch'a pochi il ciel" (reproducing its sentence structure, its rhyme words, and many of its phrases). They do not point out that "Chiedendo un bascio" ends with a quotation of the first line of one of Petrarch's most famous and most frequently set sonnets. (Is there a musical quotation involved as well? I did not discover one in checking the other settings to which I had access-about one-half of the total.) They make no comment on the six-section sestina ("Per monti e poggi") that concludes the First Book for five voices, a poem in dialogue form that seems to have been written for the marriage festivities of a couple whose members come from around Modena and Pavia.7 Certainly information such as this would help all but the most erudite user better to understand the texts and settings at hand. In short, much of Merritt's apparatus is generous, as if designed for users of type III or even IV. But some of what such users will want is missing, replaced by paragraphs appropriate for the naive beginner. And the editor makes a few curious errors of his own: for example, identifying (and printing) as Gabrieli's a five-voice setting of "Occhi sereni," a piece that is actually a recomposition for five voices by Lodovico Balbi of the top voice of Gabrieli's four-voice madrigal-a situation made clear in the introduction to the print from which Merritt took the five-voice piece, and also pointed out by Einstein.8

On the positive side, Merritt's introductions offer a sizable biographical essay (written just a bit too early to incorporate the new birthdate of 1532- 33, substantiated by Martin Morell in Early Music History, III [1983],

II o-

I I), a sketch of the unusual publication history of Gabrieli's madrigals, and a few comments on performance practice. Sections on specific texts effectively place in context the excerpts from the giustiniane, from Petrarch's canzoniere, and from Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Merritt's introductions, if sometimes chatty or imprecisely directed, are certainly preferable to the near silence of Meier, Flanders, and Wessely or the personal polemics of Jacobs.

James Haar has recently reminded us that the scholarly problems involved in editing late Renaissance madrigals are not complicated.9 Their literary texts doubtless present the thorniest problems. In the most general terms, these concern the passage from the version(s) in the partbooks to a version

7 What does it tell us about the range of activity of the Venetian Gabrieli that he had composed such a piece by I566? The number of occasional texts found among the published madrigals of Gabrieli is strikingly high. A study of the people and occasions to which they refer would help our understanding both of Gabrieli's career and of the more general working of the musical world in which he moved.

8 The Italian Madrigal, II (Princeton, 1949), 754. 9 Early Music History, II (1982), 369-70. Don Harrin's edition of a group of madrigals from

mid-century (The Anthologies of Black-Note Madrigals, I-II, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, 73 [Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1978]) gives a thorough picture of the difficulties presented by somewhat earlier music. Although these madrigals are outside the chronological bounds of this review, Harrain's extensive introductory material deals more carefully than any other I have encountered with the issues raised here. It should be read by anyone concerned with editing the Italian madrigal.



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optimally understandable by users of types II and III (unless the editor wants to address type IV only). Specifically, the most difficult problems involve the variations in spelling and punctuation from partbook to partbook and edition to edition, and the changes in criteria for spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation over the past four hundred years. The difficulty comes in answering these problems in ways that are at once clear to the modern user, informative enough for the serious scholar, and economical.

One aspect of the proper handling of texts, however, is not difficult to resolve, and I shall mention this first. Given the importance of the text in the madrigal, there is little excuse for not presenting somewhere in the edition the text of each piece, correctly laid out as a poem, so that it can be easily read and grasped as a whole. Ideally, each text should be printed separately just before its setting, either with an annotated translation or (when the text is in the same language as the edition) with an interpretation of corrupt, arcane, or grammatically tortuous passages. With this before them performers or readers of the piece would be led almost inevitably to try to understand the most immediate premise of the piece-the text. This ideal situation exists in none of the editions under review. Most of them do, however, print the texts separately as part of their introductory material, usually making some attempt to provide attributions and sometimes even citing independent literary sources for the texts.'10 Only the American Institute of Musicology editions of Pallavicino and Marenzio fail in this respect: a serious defect. The fault does not seem to lie with the publisher, for some A. I. M. editions (for example, Harrin's of the black-note madrigals cited in note 9 above) are exemplary in their presentation of the texts.

Once one tries to determine exactly what should be printed in the individual texts, the answers become less clear-cut. Does one modernize the archaic spellings in the original partbooks? Most editors do so without commentary, under cover of some diffident phrase or other. Pompilio (p. 35) offers "sober modernization"; Bianconi (II Verso, p. xxxiv) admits to "parsimonious modernization"; while Watkins (p. xxx) declares that "a minimum number of changes in punctuation and spelling have been under- taken.""' DeFord and Flanders/Monteath modernize according to the specific principles given in their introductions (p. xiii and Vol. I, p. x, respectively). The Broude edition of Marenzio, on the other hand, rejects modernization of the underlaid text, choosing instead to print the least abbreviated and most

10 Among the editions under consideration here, those by Pompilio, Bianconi, and Watkins

are particularly thorough in this respect. A project for the establishment of a computerized data base for the Italian lyric poetry in literary and musical prints, 1500-1650, is proceeding under the direction of Michael Keller (Music Library, University of California, Berkeley) and Professors Lorenzo Bianconi (University of Bologna), Louise George Clubb (University of California, Berkeley, and Villa I Tatti, Florence), Anthony Newcomb (University of California, Berkeley), and Thomas Walker (Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara), with the assistance of Angelo Pompilio (Bologna), Antonio Vassalli (Florence), and Professors Roberto Fedi (Flor- ence), Amedeo Quondam (Rome), and Marco Sant'Agata (Pisa). Results from a limited pilot project should be available by the end of 1986.

11 These cautious, almost apologetic phrases remind one of editors' comments of the 1950s and 196os regarding added musica ficta. If one is going to modernize, why do it parsimoniously or minimally? Is the modernization of spelling a necessary evil? Why evil? Why necessary?




modern version to be found in any of the individual partbooks (see Vol. XIV, p. xxviii). Merritt, too (Vol. I, p. xv), says he has adopted for any particular word the spelling most frequently found in the partbooks. Most editors also reproduce their somewhat modernized spelling in the separately printed text. To my way of thinking, DeFord's is the most sensible procedure if one must modernize. Her procedures for modernization are specified in careful detail (p. xiii): she avoids it where it "would significantly affect pronunciation (e.g., voilvuoi, corelcuore, morolmuoio)."'2

A related detail concerns the retention of the original capitalization. When this is not at the beginning of a sentence or a poetic line, most editors view it as a product of the compositor's whimsy or the printer's insufficient stock of type and thus suppress it. Yet some topical reference may lie hidden in this capitalization. Its retention seems justified when it occurs in more than one partbook, especially of the first edition. To do so takes no added space and creates no new complexity of format for the user. A pair of examples from the Pallavicino edition shows how meaning can be suppressed with the capitals. The capitalization of "la dolc'Aura mia" and "I'Aura" in the first madrigal of Pallavicino's Second Book is likely to be a reference to the famous Mantuan- Ferrarese singer Laura Peverara. In this case, the editors have recognized the reference and preserved the capitalization. In the fifth madrigal of the Third Book, however, they suppressed the capitalization given for the complete word "SEN" on its first occurrence in each voice as well as the capitalization of its first letter on all subsequent occurrences. The first occurrence is as follows: "L'almo splendor che da i celesti Poli/Nel bel SEN al mio Sole/Piove gigli e viole. . . ." The exceptional capitalization of "Poli," "SEN," and "Sole" makes it seem likely that this madrigal was dedicated to a certain Polissena, perhaps a Polissena Sole. When the capitalization goes, the reference goes with it.

Punctuation in the original sources is always minimal, often limited to commas and a final period. It is rarely in agreement with modern usage- indeed, it is rarely what we can understand as rational or logical. Even the musical editors most sophisticated in literary matters (Harrain and Bianconi) abandon the punctuation and redo it according to modern criteria, as do most modern editors of Renaissance literature.'3 Again, I wonder if this practice is justified. That there is some danger here of silently imposing a meaning on the text without the user's being aware of it can be demonstrated by an example from the Gabrieli edition. The text of the second madrigal of the First Book for Five Voices is a sonnet, apparently an occasional poem to a

12 The only qualification that I would add (as I discuss below) is that one should somehow note the editorial intervention, instead of doing it silently. One might also place modernized spelling in the underlaid text, where most modern performers would welcome it, while retaining the spelling of the chosen source for the separately printed texts.

13 Philip Gaskell, in his standard work, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972), pp. 339-49 and 358-60, makes the customary division of textual elements into substantive and accidental, grouping punctuation among the accidentals-which are not part of the author's intention, and which modern editors should feel free to remake, just as did Renaissance compositors. The problem, as Gaskell would admit, is that the line between the two is hard to draw. Accidentals may sometimes be carriers of meaning and hence substantive.



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young man, named Flaminio, who had entered a monastery. Its opening quatrain is printed as follows in the edition (III-IV, p. xxi):

Perche di fiamm'ancor celeste e pura Accendi l'alm'e i freddi cuori nostri, E'1 divin lume al cieco mondo mostri, Flaminio? A noi ti die l'eterna cura.

The editor translates this as follows: "Why do you yet kindle our souls and cold hearts with a flame so heavenly and pure, and show the divine light to the blind world, Flaminio? The eternal steward gave you to us." A quick check proved that the question mark was not in any of the original partbooks. Without it the text makes the following sense: "The eternal steward gave you to us, Flaminio, in order that you might kindle our souls and cold hearts with a flame quite heavenly and pure, and show the divine light to a blind world." The danger of such an invisible (and in this case, I think, mistaken) editorial interpretation could be avoided by typographically distinguishing in some way any editorially added punctuation stronger than a comma (i.e., question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, and even semicolons and periods). No madrigal edition that I am aware of does this at present.

There is a final difficult question concerning the handling of the texts: if one modernizes, normalizes, or recasts capitalization, spelling, or punctuation, to what degree does one note specific instances (e.g., that the word spelled che'l in the edition is sometimes or always spelled ch'el in the sources) or try to record the exact location of variant readings in the original sources (e.g., the places in each partbook in which che'l is spelled ch'el)? While most of the editions under review normalize and modernize spelling and punctuation tacitly and with no mention of variants, the bulk or complexity of their introductory material would increase but little were they to note in connec- tion with the separately printed texts that, for example, the ch'el occurs instead of the given che'l somewhere in the alto and basso parts of source X. Few circumstances can be imagined in which this general method of calling variants to the user's attention would be insufficient. Specialist scholars interested, for example, in the dialectical implications of variant spellings and those who glimpse a wholly new possible meaning for the text glimmering behind a variation of punctuation will have been sufficiently alerted, so that they will know where to look in order to pursue their hunches.

Any attempt to locate textual variants more precisely than this is very cumbersome. The editors' determination to do just this accounts for much of the bulk of the apparatus in the Broude Marenzio and the Leuven Monte editions. I cannot see that the information gained is worth the space consumed. More seriously, the notae variorum become so overloaded with quantities of relatively insignificant variants that the user will find it hard to locate the significant ones-and is likely soon to give up trying.

A final note about translations: they should do more than provide to those unfamiliar with the original language an idea of what the entire text means. They should also give as close an idea as possible of the contribution made by each word to the overall meaning, so that performers, for example, can better judge how to weigh and color each word. Thus, the best translations are literal and as close as possible to the original word order. Ideally, they are printed line-by-line and parallel to the original, as in the Broude Marenzio




edition. The second best method is to print them run-on below the original, as in most editions.14 While sometimes grotesquely clumsy as English sentences, such word-by-word translations remain the best suited to the particular goal. Although it is nice for the translations to be not only literal but literary, this is of secondary importance. To use English translations from the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, as Merritt occasionally does in the Gabrieli edition, seems beside the point. These translations were produced for different purposes and under quite different constraints. While they may give an elegant sample of the flavor of the time, they often depart widely from the word order and vocabulary of the original and hence do not give users of the edition what they need.

A matter on which most of the present editors have little to say is that of the various surviving sources for a particular piece or collection. Most identify the source that they have used, while almost no one justifies the choice or specifies variants in other sources. For example, Flanders and Monteath cite all the editions of each Pallavicino madrigal and give an admirable list of manuscript copies. But not a single manuscript variant is given, and only a tiny handful of printed ones are cited for each book. Was the transmission of these works in fact so uniform and error-free? DeFord (p. xii) says only that later editions duplicate most of the errors in the first, and "therefore have no independent value in establishing the correct versions." Pompilio is an exception, and he uses the information gained by collating later editions to give (pp. 32-33) a terminus post quem for the important manuscript, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabecchiana XIX. Io6bis. The Broude Marenzio editors provide reasons for their choice of a principal source, then list, madrigal by madrigal, their emendations to the chosen source and the variants found in other early sources. This proves to be the ideal solution, and it is not intrinsically a bulky one (although it is laid out rather wastefully in this instance).

I should think that it is the scholars' responsibility to check an exemplar of each edition and each known manuscript copy for variant readings, although our imperfect bibliographic control of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century musical manuscripts should not be allowed to hold up modern editions forever. Is it their responsibility, as well, to check each exemplar of each edition for possible corrections, either pasted on or handwritten? Here again the ideal answer is yes, especially in the case of press runs of small printers where we have some reason to believe that the composer may have been personally involved-as, for example, the madrigals of Luzzaschi and Fontanelli, or the motets of Byrd. This wearisome labor might well result in little significant information, which at least means that it would add little to the bulk of the edition. And the occasional detail might be genuinely significant to our understanding of a piece, of the printing industry, or of the clients who bought, copied, or sang this music.

Although the matter of textual variants may loom large for the professional scholar, doubtless the most important matter for most users of an edition,

14 When translations are printed run-on, it is well to put in slashes to indicate as closely as possible the correspondence with the lines of the poem.



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performers and students alike, is the layout of the music on the page. Important here is that both student and performer not have to turn the page every few seconds. Every time we have to try to grasp the meaning of a literary text from only the underlaid version in the musical setting, we get some insight into how much more difficult it is to understand the overall shape of something when it is spread out over several openings. The height of absurdity in layout was reached, I hope, a few years ago with the (in some ways excellent) edition of the manuscript Montecassino 871, which had only six three-voice measures on some of its oversized pages." Among the editions under review, it is the Broude Marenzio that leaves the greatest part of the page unfilled. The staves are so widely spaced that the system is somewhat difficult to read as a whole, and there are only two systems, each of three to five semibreve measures, per oversized page.'6 Some of the American Institute of Musicology editions and those of the Musiche rinascimentali siciliane get three systems of six to seven voices, each of three to five breve- length measures, on a page of roughly the same size as Broude's. And even a page of the A. I. M. editions could often be slightly reduced in size while remaining clear and easy to read." Das Chorwerk has long provided a fine example of a solution to these requirements: there is plenty of music on its normal-size page, and the book fits well in the singer's hands. The layout on the page is the only noteworthy fault of DeFord's Ferretti edition. Not only is there little music (five to eight bars) visible on a page, but there is difficulty in following one's part when moving from system to system on a page, since the space between systems is not markedly greater than that between staves, and since bar lines are drawn only through the individual staff rather than through the entire system. The layout of the page would be clearer and the page actually more legible if the space between staves were reduced and that between systems increased. In general, publishers of editions would please many more users from type III by putting more rather than less information on each opening, while at the same time taking care that each page is easy to scan.

Most other editorial questions are matters of consensus or are relatively insignificant. All of the editions under consideration use only G and F clefs, an obvious advantage for the user of type III.18 Some (Gabrieli, Monte)

15 The Musical Manuscript Montecassino 871, ed. Isabel Pope and Masakata Kanazawa (Oxford, 1978). The madrigals printed in the second volume of my own study, The Madrigal at Ferrara (Princeton, 1980), were, alas, nearly as bad.

16 James Haar notes that the pieces are "a trifle too 'blown-up' on the page" in his review (see n. 2 above), p. 376.

17 See, for example, how easily the Casimiri edition of Palestrina, with fifteen to eighteen five- voice measures per page, accommodates reduction in the Kalmus reprint.

s1 The only disagreement concerns whether parts originally printed in the alto clef (c3) should be printed in the treble clef or in the g clef that sounds an octave lower. The second is, to my view, preferable. The first has two disadvantages: it involves a quantity of ledger lines below the staff, and it implies that the part should be sung by a woman rather than a man. There is no evidence that parts in the c3 clef were intended for women. The vocal parts for three women in the Luzzaschi madrigals of 16oi are printed in only the g and c' clefs; their range goes no lower than g, the normal bottom of the c2 clef. There is, on the other hand, evidence that men often sang parts in the c3 clef. As but one example, the singer mentioned by Gagliano for the part of Tirsi in Dafne (c3 clef, range g-a') was a man (see his Preface, reprinted in Emil Vogel, Bibliothek dergedruckten weltlichen Vocalmusik Italiens [Berlin, 1892; repr. Hildesheim, 1962], I, 266).




reduce note values by half-an acceptable practice for music of the mid- century, but one that, because of a gradual slowing of tactus, produces in music from the end of the century an impression of a too frantic rhythmic activity (frequent thirty-second notes and declamation on sixteenth notes).19 The most difficult issue concerning reduction, and the one where there is much variation among these editions, arises with internal passages in triple meter. Some editors (e.g., Watkins) preserve the original notation and mensuration signs, even where the latter vary from partbook to partbook. Most transcribe such passages in modern notation but leave no evidence of the original notation to help the performer with difficult questions of tempo and proportion, which often cannot be answered unambiguously. The best solution for such passages would surely be to put them in modern notation while indicating the original notation at the beginning of the top voice in the passage (including mensuration sign) above the staff of that voice. Although it would add no bulk and little visual complexity to the edition, no one at present does this.

There are few problems of unspecified accidentals in this music. Incom- prehensible is the failure in the Monte edition to suggest raised suspension cadences in a number of cases; its inclusion of editorial accidentals in brackets next to the note instead of above the staff seems an unnecessary violation of convention. The one issue worthy of mention here concerns accidentals repeated in the original source, which are redundant by the modern convention of accidentals valid until the end of the bar. These redundant accidentals are silently suppressed by most editors, the result of which is the disappearance of sometimes necessary information.

A better practice is simple: retain on the staff all the accidentals in the original source, and put all editorial accidentals above the staff.20 To some users the retained accidentals may be occasionally redundant, but they will not be confusing-that is, the pitches will never be in doubt.21 And, without adding bulk or visual complexity to the edition, one will have made clear exactly what was specified in the original source and where cases of ambiguity exist. Only Butchart, Ledbetter/Myers, Meier, and Pompilio reproduce all accidentals. The editors of the Monte and Gabrieli editions seem to say that they do, but-upon checking-prove not to have done so. The other editors explicitly suppress "redundant accidentals."

19 In the introduction to his Marenzio edition, Meier explicitly opposes reduction for this music, although he espouses it for his Rore edition. I am no longer convinced of its desirability even for mid-century music. Also see the discussion of this matter in the preface by Don Harrin to the edition cited in n. 9 above.

20 A simple visual means could differentiate cases in which editorial accidentals should almost certainly be performed from those in which there is more doubt or possible variation. I would propose an accidental followed by a question mark for the latter category. The performer tends, almost by reflex, to follow editorial accidentals unless warned away by something as shocking as a question mark; parentheses do not suffice.

21 On the other hand, the retention of any sharp sign that originally was used to cancel a flat sign will confuse the modern performer. The ideal solution in this instance is tacitly to change, for example, a b-sharp that cancels a b-flat in the source to a b-natural in the edition, and to note in the critical commentary, as Pompilio does in his edition, the relatively rare occurrences, in the source, of the modern natural sign.



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The information given by such accidentals is sometimes necessary because the conventions for continued validity of an accidental were not firmly established by I6oo-to the extent that a few editors of that time felt the need for prefaces explaining their particular practices.22 For example, does an accidental also apply to a note immediately following the note directly prefixed--or to a note separated from it by a rest or by a single intervening note? These are not questions to be answered unambiguously in every case. The later note in the above instances, if within the same measure, will remain sharped (by convention) in the modern edition, but the user has no way of knowing if this sharp represents an editorial opinion, since it was not present in the source, or if a sharp was actually present in the original but was suppressed as redundant. Situations of this sort occur in many collections, although they are found most frequently in the chromatic madrigal at the turn of the century. To pick an example from 1624, and from an edition that I particularly like, Musiche rinascimentali siciliane, io (p. 12, m. 34, tenor part): are the sharps implied for the second and third occurrences of the pitch f specified in the source or not? Or consider another, from 1566: in the introduction to the Gabrieli edition (Vol. I, p. xv), Merritt says that "the accidental signs in the source prints have been retained in the edition," but the accidentals on the staff of Vol. III-IV, p. 95, mm. 15-16, look quite different from those in the edition of the same piece in Einstein's The Italian Madrigal, II, 535. A check with the original print reveals that Merritt has, in fact, omitted redundant accidentals and has added accidentals within a staff to notes in a new measure when he judged that they would have been understood in the print. Thus, an interpretation on the part of the editor is, alas, indistinguishable from a direct transcription of the source.

Many of the proposals made above would take little time or trouble to realize. Others, such as careful collation of all sources, would be extremely time-consuming in the case of a widely printed composer, such as Andrea Gabrieli. That the editor did not check all copies of all editions in this case was doubtless one of the reasons that we could have twelve volumes (in reality, four single and four double volumes, the latter four long enough to be counted-and priced-as two) of the Gabrieli edition issued between 1981 and 1984. Presumably, we shall now hear more than "Ecco l'aurora" performed. And we finally have in accessible, legible form the music from which to gain an idea of the style of this composer, said by Einstein to be the crucial ingredient for the formation of Marenzio's style. Both editor and publisher are to be applauded for their swiftness, which proves that monumental editions need not be slow paced. The rapidity with which the Pallavicino edition has been appearing (six madrigal books in two years) is nearly as heartening, although it is not, in this case, sufficient excuse for its very scanty introductory material.

Soon the most glaring of the remaining lacunae in the area of the polyphonic Italian madrigal will have been filled: Edmond Strainchamps

22 See, for example, the prefaces to Caputi, Book I ' 5 (1593), Salzilli, Books I and II a 5 (1607 and 1611), and, especially, to Palazzotto-Tagliavia, Madrigali a 5 (1617) and Mazzocchi's Partitura di madrigali

' 5 (1638), all reprinted in Vogel, Bibliothek, I, 138 and 436-37; and II, 3

40 and 188.




informs me that his edition of all the Gagliano madrigals (in two volumes for the American Institute of Musicology) is ready for submission; and my own editions of Fontanelli and Luzzaschi are nearing completion. Desire for the promised complete edition of D'India is made even keener by the excellence of the one volume given us. May the funding for the Sicilian series be sufficient to produce subsequent volumes in quick tempo. An edition by David Butchart of Alessandro Striggio's First Book for Six Voices is promised from A-R early next year. One hopes that he or someone else will go on to do the other complete books, since they are not many. The most important composers of late Renaissance madrigals for whom no series is, as yet, officially announced are Ruggiero Giovannelli and Giovanni Maria Nanino, who, with Palestrina and Marenzio, were the leaders of the important Roman school.23

In looking over what the past few years have given us, I must reiterate the admiration for the Broude Marenzio edition that I expressed several years ago.24 Most of the issues raised in the present review have been faced directly in that edition and answered in a manner that is at least responsible; I would wish only for more concision in the presentation of the musical text and of the variant readings. On the other hand, its progress has been painfully slow, while the edition of Gabrieli's madrigals is now complete. With just a bit more attention to detail, Merritt and A-R Editions might have shown that an edition of a major composer could be both quickly issued and superbly presented. The Italian editions by Pompilio, Bianconi, and Watkins are admirable in most details, but they are publications of one or two isolated prints and are tied to local or national funding, which unfortunately seems to be irregularly bestowed. DeFord's edition of Ferretti is also an edition of a single print. Its excellence in almost all respects makes one wish she would take on the challenge of a major edition. As the author of a dissertation on Giovannelli, she would be the natural choice to edit his output. May we hope for a Giovannelli edition by DeFord from A-R in the near future?

ANTHONY NEWCOMB

University of California, Berkeley

23 Nino Pirrotta, " 'Dolci affetti': I musici di Roma e il madrigale," Studi musicali, XIV (1985), 59-ro4, reminds us of the importance of this school and of its relative neglect by modern scholarship. 24 Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, XXXV (1978-79), 6 14-16.

David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds. Verdi's Macbeth: A Sourcebook. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. xvi, 527 PP.

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this long-awaited and welcome book, Andrew Porter mentions its genesis out of his desire to produce something more than a standard set of proceedings of the Fifth International Verdi Congress, held at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, I-I2 November 1977, and devoted to



Styles and Methods of Recent Editions of Italian madrigals

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