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Talking back: the female voice in Il ballo delle ingrate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Extract

Suzanne Cusick has recently argued that the musical processes of Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna purge Ariadne of passion and desire in order symbolically to make her a good wife. Written for the 1608 marriage of Francesco Gonzaga to Margherita de Savoy, the lament, according to Cusick, reflects Renaissance marriage and gender ideologies that were determined to silence women and put them in their place. Ariadne has dared to choose her own mate and therefore must suffer. Her fate is dramatised by her uncharacteristically long lament, which enacts the transformation women experienced as they gave up their own desires to the constraining institution of marriage. Cusick's argument is in line with recent critical tendencies to read early modern culture in terms of the opposition between passive female silence and active male desire.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 Earlier versions of this essay were read at the 1996 meeting of the American Musicological Society and the 1997 meeting of the International Musicological Society. I want to thank Elyse Carter, Eric Chafe, Jeff Kallberg, Nathan Macbrien, Roger Parker, Gabriella Safran, Julie Schutzman and Gary Tomlinson for patient and astute readings of many drafts. Also many thanks to die Folger Library's Subjectivity and Sexuality Colloquium for their comments.Google Scholar

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6 Eric Chafe calls attention to the G-minor tonality of Venus's plea in which the goddess of love reminds Pluto of her role in his conquest of Proserpina. This emphasis on G minor also recalls Proserpina's sympathy for Orpheus in Act IV of L'Orfeo. See Chafe, , Monteverdi's Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 163.Google Scholar

7 Pamela Jones argues that Cesare Negri, in his early seventeenth-century treatises on dancing the ‘entrata,’ separates social dance from that of the dramatic balli. See Spectacle in Milan: Cesare Negri's Torch Dances,’ Early Music 14 (1986), 182–98. Iain Fenlon has suggested that Il ballo delle ingrate's ballet music, six distinct sections with contrasting rhythms, is based on a model for seventeenth-century large-scale dance spectacles first developed by Cavalieri. See ‘The Origins of the Staged Ballo’ (see n.5), 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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18 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical productions tend to make musico-rhetorical distinctions between genders and between chaste and lascivious women. For an informative discussion of the kinds of the musico-rhetorical distinctions between genders in Monteverdi's music, see McClary, Susan, ‘Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi's Dramatic Music,’ this journal, 1 (1989), 203–23.Google Scholar For a discussion of the ways that song was deployed by female characters in Venetian opera, see Carter, Tim, ‘In Love's Harmonious Consort? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria,’ this journal, 5 (1993), 116.Google ScholarSee also Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminace: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,’ Music and Letters 14 (1993), 343–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20 I want to thank Suzanne Cusick for pointing out in her response to the version of this paper delivered at the fall 1996 meeting of the American Musicological Society that all the women in these productions sin against patriarchy.Google Scholar

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35 Fenlon, suggests that Il ballo delle ingrate marks the high-point of seventeenth-century spectacle dance performances, which he says acquired their generic form with the 1589 wedding production of Cavalieri's final ballet, La Pellegrina. For more on the court ballet as a genre and especially on its French influences,Google Scholar see Saslow, James M., The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996);Google Scholar and Fenlon, Iain, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Anthony Newcomb suggests that the French ballet de cour influenced the development of the Dancing Duchesses of Ferrara. Considering the artistic cross-pollination between Italian courts, it is more than likely that ballets at Mantua also carried traces of French dance. See Newcomb, Anthony, The Madrigal at Ferrara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).Google Scholar For information on European dance in general, see Little, Meredith Elias, ‘Recent Research in European Dance, 1400–1800,’ Early Music, 14 (1986), 331–40;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFranco, Mark, Dance As Text Ideologies of the Baroque Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993);Google Scholar and Neville, Jennifer, ‘The Italian Ballo as Described in Fifteenth Century Dance Treatises,’ Studies in Music, Australia, 18 (1984), 3851.Google Scholar

36 Ovid also dismembers his women. For example, Apollo's erotic glance at Dafne effectively takes apart his love object, objectifying each part as an individual entity: hair, eyes gleaming like stars, and a sensuous mouth.Google Scholar

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39 Elucidating the Ovidian roots of Petrarch's representational strategies, Vickers examines canzone 23, a poem in which Petrarch takes on Actaeon's voice. She argues that the poet's anxiety about seeing Laura's whole body emerges because he associates himself with Actaeon, whose forbidden encounter with Diana led to dismemberment and immobilisation. Vickers (see n. 37), 273.Google Scholar

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43 The literature exploring the influences on and of Petrarch's representational strategies is vast. For discussions with a similar theoretical stance to this one, see Enterline, Lynn (see n. 41), and Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). Both of these scholars also discuss the influence of Augustine on Petrarch, particularly with respect to the origin of language in desire.Google Scholar

44 Within neoplatonic cosmologies, song and the spirit had a special magnetic affinity for one another, turning song almost into a living thing. See Tomlinson, Gary, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 101–45.Google Scholar

45 The ‘Addio per sempre’ setting recalls in its harmonic progression the opening to ‘Si ch'io vorrei morire’, one of Monteverdi's most explicitly erotic madrigals published in the fourth book. Perhaps by giving the ingrate a musical gesture explicitly associated with orgasm in another piece, Monteverdi imbued her with the erotic desire she refused in life. I have written elsewhere about the erotics of that madrigal. See ‘Singing the Female Body’ (see n. 8), Chapter Three.Google Scholar

46 Stevens, Denis, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 117.Google Scholar

47 The ingrate's harmony differs slightly from Ariadne's. The bass C is held for five bars in the ingrate's lament, providing a less directed and more harmonically static feel.Google Scholar

48 Metamorphoses, XI (see n. 11), 121.Google Scholar

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59 Jacques Ferrand, a French medical philosopher writing in the mid-seventeenth century, is here drawing on Aristotle's famous dictum. See Ferrand, , A Treatise On Loveskkness, ed. Beecher, David A. and Ciavolella, Massimo (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 311.Google ScholarAristotle, , Generation of Animals, ed. Peck, A. L. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), bk. 1, ch. 20, 103.Google Scholar

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61 Here I refer to the many conduct books and debates on women that appeared from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Castiglione's famous Il libro del cortegiano is just one representative work among many. Much work has already been done on these discursive battles over women's bodies. For accounts that take these ‘etiquette books’ as mostly didactic, see Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For accounts that treat conduct books more as literature and look closely at cultural contexts, see Jordan, Constance, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Text and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar and Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women's Lyrics,’ in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3973.Google Scholar

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63 Barbarod, 205.Google Scholar

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