‘Parole tronche et imperfette’: The Lament as a ‘Mode’ across Poetical and Musical Genres

ABSTRACT A paradoxical feature of the lament as a poetical and musical genre is the imbalance between the supposedly spontaneous expression of emotional turmoil and the artificial dimension of its artistic representation. Embedded in the lament since antiquity, such tension becomes particularly prominent in the early modern period, when the development of the ‘lamenting mode’ in poetry and vocal music facilitated experimentation in both domains. After reconsidering the rhetorical status of the lament, this essay explores the ways in which one specific lament – Olimpia’s from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso – moves across mediums and genres. More precisely, by focusing on the transition from ottava rima to the free-verse recitative style of seventeenth-century lamenti and cantatas, the article argues that the formal instability intrinsic to the lament exposes the limitations of any attempt to represent the utterance of a lamenting character as well as the expressive potential conveyed by its quintessentially performative nature.