Cerberus Barks in Vain: Poetic Asides in the Artusi–Monteverdi Controversy

The numerous documents associated with the controversy launched in 1600 by the Bolognese music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi (1546–1613) against the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) have been well studied by scholars. But no one has yet engaged with the encomia included in the front and back matter of the printed books lying at the heart of the dispute: three sonnets (two by Vicenzo Maria Sandri and one by Mutio Manfredi) and a Latin carmen (by Erycius Puteanus) in the treatise L’Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (1600), and two madrigals by the poet and theologian Cherubino Ferrari in Monteverdi’s Il quinto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1605). Although one might dismiss them as mere “occasional” poetry flattering Artusi, on the one hand, and Monteverdi, on the other, as well as their respective patrons, close reading suggests that these encomia represent attempts to claim the high ground not just on musical but also on philosophical and even religious terms. Ferrari’s praise of the composer finds a clear echo in Alessandro Striggio the Younger’s libretto for Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (1607). All this provides an intriguing footnote, and perhaps something more, both to the controversy over the seconda pratica madrigal and to Orfeo in their broader Ferrarese and Mantuan contexts.