In this environment music, having separated from Man, turned back towards Man and rediscovered the individual, focusing on the idea of drama and playing with a vast palette of feelings and affects ranging from a vital and Dionysian exuberance to metaphysical anguish (such as that in which Gesualdo, for example, imprisoned himself ‘in search of an unattainable forgiveness’).

From then on, composers naturally had a new rhetorical concern with language and the power of the word. For, in the debate about emotions turning on the inevitable confrontations of love, it was unavoidable that in their reflections and their work they should come up against the major problem of ‘how to speak in music’. This was already an old problem, in fact, since, more than half a century before the birth of opera, it was at the heart of the polyphonic conundrum of the madrigal.

When the young Monteverdi first appeared as a participant in the cultural process of his age, the madrigal was master of the Italian music scene, a veritable sign of identity for a whole people. From Lombardy to the Mezzogiorno, from the Venetian campi to the Roman and Neapolitan piazzette, there was the same passionate or melancholic buzzing, the same hive of commotion and confessions, the same tender miniatures, usually in five voices.

There were the madrigals intended for the avant-garde courts of the Estes at Ferrara (the circle of chromaticists founded by Luzzasco Luzzaschi) and the Gonzagas of Mantua (where, before Monteverdi, the worthy de Wert worked), depictions of pastoral happiness in the manner of the elegant and vibrant Marenzio—the ‘classics’ of the genre. But there were also the experiments of Don Carlo Gesualdo, in his castle near Naples, his murderer’s remorse bristled up with stravaganze in the mannerist style. The variations on the genero madrigalesco multiplied, sometimes playful but usually anguished, focused on the ‘war of love’, as whose inspired chronicler Monteverdi would excel.