The music you are listening to is "Il Combattimento Di Tandredi
E Clorinda - E Stanco E Anelante" by Claudio Monteverdi's "Seconda
prattica". This music was considered to be the beginning of
modern opera, as now poetry could be set to music with a new,
Humanist theory of rhetoric tacens, and not the old,
inflexible, strictly hierarchical Scholastic view of reality.
The image above shows Monteverdi's classification of maniera di sonare
(good playing), the three generi, the associated voce, the
passioni, and the three modi (functions). It is Monteverdi's
view that the prima prattica can express two of the three generi,
specifically temperato, and molle, but that only the secunda
prattica can express all three of the affects generi: new expressive
devices. 1
Monteverdi expressed secunda prattica in "Combattimento di Tancredi
e Clorinda", based upon Tasso's "La Gerusalemme liberata".
2 Note, Tasso's
poetry is hendecasyllabic, 3
and alternates between cantus durus and cantus mollis.
4 This piece of work
celebrates the Christian Crusades, and as a piece of rhetoric (religious
propaganda) is well selected to show how effective Monteverdi's music can be.
1
Ossi, Massimo; "Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda
Prattica", Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 209
.
2
Ossi, Massimo; "Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda
Prattica", Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 212, 213
.
3
Ossi, Massimo; "Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda
Prattica", Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 217
.
4
Ossi, Massimo; "Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi's Seconda
Prattica", Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 220
Website Terms of Use