5. Tonal language.

There is also scope for varieties of interpretation of Monteverdi's tonal language, quite apart from the fact that his output encompasses a number of distinct styles. Since the late 18th century (possibly first in BurneyH, 1789) his music has generally been associated with the replacement of modal by tonal practice, and 19th-century French theorists were responsible for popularizing a view of him as the inventor of the unprepared dominant 7th chord and, with it, major-minor tonality. Indeed F.-J. Fétis notoriously located this in bar 13 of Cruda Amarilli che col nome ancora from the fifth book (third crotchet of the second bar of ex.1).

It is true that much of Monteverdi's music, particularly in his later Venetian style, can readily be analysed in terms of major-minor tonality (even though this music never uses the resources of tonal modulation in any developed way). On the other hand, the anachronism implicit in such analysis, not least in the light of Artusi's interest in Monteverdi's modal practice, has led to 20th-century attempts to interpret the music in terms of modes. Bernhard Meier (see L. Finscher, D1986) is an extreme example of a writer interpreting the music in terms of a supposedly thorough-going, unified modal system, with all divergences from supposed norms interpreted in terms of rhetorical intention.

Others offer compromise readings; Dahlhaus (J1968) has analysed some of the modally ambiguous pieces (notably O Mirtillo, Mirtillo anima mia, a Pastor fido setting from the fifth book that was criticized by Artusi), seeking to distance Monteverdi from both modal and fully tonal practice, and suggesting that these works are based on a system of so-called Teiltonarten (‘partial’ keys) that permits cadencing on any note of the prevailing hexachord. His impressive understanding of the more complicated aspects of Monteverdi's tonal practice has been developed at greater length by Chafe (J1992), who provides a speculative system of tonal allegory again based on relationships between hexachords. In another notable contribution, Susan McClary (J1976) has reinterpreted Monteverdi's modal practice in quasi-Schenkerian terms, including an account of the development through his career of increasingly extensive prolongational techniques.

But changes in the understanding of the late Renaissance modes during the last three decades have brought into question many of the assumptions on which much of this work was based, including the assumptions that 16th-century music was uniformly modal; that Monteverdi's tonal language represents a transitional stage between ‘modality’ and ‘tonality’; that the establishment of modern tonality involves an increase in structural complexity; or indeed that tonality depends primarily upon chordal, vertical relationships at all. It is sufficient here to note that many of Monteverdi's works exploit novel techniques of tonal integration, not necessarily invented by the composer, and that these later became part of the basic equipment of all composers writing in major-minor tonality (see §7 below). Their use contributes to some of the most profoundly satisfying artistic effects in Monteverdi's music, although they are in part specific to certain sections of his output.

One of the most interesting is represented by Monteverdi's characteristic long overlapping diatonic scale descents, migrating from voice to voice – sometimes in the bass, sometimes in the upper voices and sometimes sequential – that are often used to prepare principal cadences, though seldom to structure entire works. They are neither specifically modal nor tonal in the modern sense, and are cast basically as trio textures for two sopranos and bass, though usually elaborated in five voices. A characteristic example is found in the last 13 bars of Io mi son giovinetta from the fourth book, based, as ex.2 illustrates, on interlocking diatonic scales harmonized essentially as a lightly disguised chain of parallel root position triads. Such structures, probably developed in the first instance from the Marenzian villanella repertory of the late 16th century, appear in some of Monteverdi's works from 1590 onwards (see §7 below). They underlie some of the schematically constructed instrumental ritornellos in the first two acts of Orfeo, and they are still evident in the fine six-voice psalm setting Cantate Domino canticum novum sv293, published by G.C. Bianchi in 1620. Whether or not they should be considered ‘tonal’ in any modern sense, these Monteverdian diatonic descents arguably constitute one of the most important of the structural innovations of the late 16th century. They provide contrast with sections in which they are not used, giving strong, temporary tonal unity to sections of works and providing a powerful sense of tonal release as they conclude; they are also of historical importance in that they foreshadow similar structures providing overall tonal unity in later major-minor works such as the sonatas of Corelli. They are a characteristic feature of many of Monteverdi's best madrigals, and Monteverdi often reinforced them by adding strings of suspended dissonances, so that the final progression to the tonal goal comes to seem all the more ‘inevitable’ in both musical and affective terms.

Such structures are less often found in the works of the Venetian period that more obviously project major-minor tonality. Their place is now taken, characteristically, by simpler structures – ground basses and techniques of variation over repeated bass patterns, set as accompanied duets rather than five-voice textures and typically controlling entire movements rather than contrasting sections. Such patterns are used to great effect, for example, in such works as Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti sv251 or the Lamento della ninfa. Some of the differences between these structures and the earlier ones are more apparent than real; in particular, the trio textures that are obvious in the Venetian works are structurally fundamental in the earlier works as well. But the avoidance of the disguised consecutive perfect triads in the later style, with a marked increase in the use of 6-3 sonorities, represents a substantial change of style and of musical language; this is true even of the short duet between Fortuna and Virtù in the prologue to L'incoronazione di Poppea, which is once again built on a steady stepwise descent (ex.3).

Monteverdi, Claudio