Ecco Mormorar L Onde Literary Analysis

All the three works of group three extend the novelties of group two. “Ecco mormorar” and “S’andasse Amor” adventure the florid writing in them, while “Memtr’io mirava” shares its move to distant harmonic areas. However, there are two traits that are very difficult to define that unite these madrigals; one is an ability to bring to music the syntactic and meaning organization of text and a structural coherence of a rigor which is unknown to Monteverdi’s earlier works. All the listed characteristics and especially the last one, are exemplified in the “Ecco mormorar l’onde” which happens to be Monteverdi’s most famous madrigal of the second madrigal books. The texts of “Ecco mormorar l’onde” is a fourteen-line that illustrates the pastoral dawn, a sort of landscape poetry in which Tasso shined .
The text in “Ecco mormorar l’onde” provides a clue to a source of the elements in Monteverdi’s setting. The text resembles in wording and subject one of Tasso’s poetic landscapes, the description of the garden of Armida from Gerusalemme liberate, which had been set by Wert in his work of 1586. This textual resemblance motivated a

It is as if one voice is staying motionless, watching the other voice depart, before leaving in the opposite direction while looking back frequently at the other longingly . The alto then joins the quinto and canto at measure seven, and rapidly mimics the descending stepwise line of the canto at the lyrics “ah, end of my life.” This is an essential text painting as a descending line is suggestive of a lament, and the lyrics in this fragment, full of despair and grief, are somewhat clearly lamentable. The two voices, quinto and canto repeat the descending line together in