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War Giovanni Maria Artusi (um 1540–1613) zu Lebzeiten ein hochangesehener Musiktheoretiker, so hat insbesondere die Kontroverse mit Claudio Monteverdi und dessen Bruder Giulio Cesare dafür gesorgt, dass er in der musikalischen Forschung lange Zeit als Inbegriff eines reaktionären Musiktheoretikers rezipiert wurde, der nicht in der Lage gewesen sei, das Visionäre und Wegweisende der Musik Monteverdis zu erfassen. Trotz der weiten Kreise, die das Thema innerhalb der wissenschaftlichen Rezeption seither gezogen hat, wird erst in diesem Beitrag anhand einiger ausgewählter Passagen aus Artusis Canzonette a quattro voci (1598) auch dessen kompositorisches Schaffen in die Diskussion miteinbezogen. / Although Giovanni Maria Artusi (c. 1540–1613) was a well-respected music theorist during his lifetime, the controversy with Claudio Monteverdi and his brother Giulio Cesare ensured that the musical establishment regarded him as a mere reactionary, who was unable to recognise the visionary and ground-breaking aspects of Monteverdi’s music. Despite myriad academic publications on the topic, this is the first article to include Artusi’s own compositions in the discussion by considering selected passages from Artusi’s Canzonette a quattro voci (1598).

TITLE: THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC: Claudio Monteverdi as an innovator in the field of dealing with text in music. SUMMARY: The main topic of this Thesis is Claudio Monteverdi's work and its importance for the development of dealing with text in music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period. In Monteverdi's compositions we can follow the evolution of counterpoint techniques reaching from the traditional 16th century vocal polyphony to the purely monodic approach to composition that is typical of Baroque music. The text works as a creative element that affects the author's way of working, leading him from the first experiments with the musical representation of each word in the madrigal to a dramatic expression of the text in the style of opera. In his work Monteverdi uses wordpainting to an unprecedented extent. He invents new musical expression for words that contain a strong emotional charge, like subtle rhythmic figures for joyful words, or sharp dissonances for words conveying pain. He is the first composer to achieve excellence in combining flawless technical skill with the dramatic line of the composition. His work forms an imaginary bridge between music of two periods: in the first period text is perceived as a mere "servant" of music but becomes the "ruler" of it in the later one. The Thesis...

Although early Venetian operas by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli offer today's listeners profound moments of emotion, the complex codes of meaning connecting emotion (or affect) with music in this repertoire are different from those of later seventeenth-century operatic repertoire. The specific textual and musical markers that librettists and composers used to indicate individual emotions in these operas were historically and culturally contingent, and many scholars thus consider them to be inaccessible to listeners today. This dissertation demonstrates a new analytical framework that is designed to identify the specific combinations of elements that communicate each lifelike emotion in this repertoire. Re-establishing the codes that govern the relationship between text, musical sound, and affect in this repertoire illuminates the nuanced emotional language of operas by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, Antonio Cesti, and Francesco Lucio. The new analytical framework that underlies this study derives from analysis of seventeenth-century Venetian explanations and depictions of emotional processes, which reveal a basis in their society's underlying Aristotelian philosophy. Chapters III and IV examine extant documents from opera librettists, composers, audience members, and their associates to reveal how they understood emotions to work in the mind and body. These authors, many of whom were educated by Aristotelian scholars at the nearby University of Padua, understood action and emotion to be bound together in a reciprocal, causal relationship, and this synthesis was reflected in the way that they depicted affect in opera. It also guided the ways that singer-actors performed and audiences interpreted this music. In contrast, post-1660 Baroque operas from France and Italy express affect according to the musical conventions of the Doctrine of Affections (based in the ideas of René Descartes) and aim to present a single, clear emotion for each large semantic unit (recitative or aria). This paradigm does not hold true for operas composed before 1660; thus, this vibrant repertoire requires a new analytical approach that respects its pre-Cartesian musical aesthetics. Early Venetian opera composers express not just one, but many affects in each semantic unit. In their operas, musical sound interacts directly with text and dramatic action on a line-by-line basis to produce an unprecedented fluidity of emotional meaning. Chapter II describes a new analytical framework based in this understanding to reveal the means that librettists, composers, and performers used to communicate emotion in this repertoire. Chapters V through X contain hermeneutic and musical analyses (according to the method described in Chapter II) of case studies drawn from Venetian operas performed between 1640 and 1658. These chapters illustrate how this repertoire uses a flexible but well-defined system of musical and textual markers to convey characters' emotions. This new approach unlocks an aesthetic system that privileges the fluid, real-time emotional reactions of the individual in accordance with Aristotelian emotional understanding. In Chapters XI and XII, supporting information gleaned from seventeenth-century acting treatises, reception documents, and conduct books enables an examination of the singer's role in depicting these textual and musical representations of affect in performance. These two chapters address seventeenth-century views on affective communication through voice acting and physical gesture, together with recommendations for today's singers who perform this repertoire. In taking a systematic approach to the identification of specific textual, musical, and gestural means for communicating affect in early Venetian opera, this dissertation offers a new approach to analyzing and performing its dynamic emotional content.