Madrigals - A tale of two Swans

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01][music] [singing] >> Today, let's explore one of the earliest and yet most enduring forms of song that dominated our musical history for over a century, the madrigal. And I want to tell you that story through two swans.

[00:00:18]>> [music] [music] [singing] >> At just over a minute, this is the shortest piece of music I've ever examined on this channel, but it's also one of the most beautiful. The Silver Swan, a madrigal written in 1612 by the English composer Orlando Gibbons.

[00:00:46]The myth behind the song is the idea that the swan only sings once in its life, at its death, hence our phrase swan song. The madrigal itself is calm and simple, no repeats or choruses, just a single through line from start to finish.

[00:01:02]>> [music] [singing] >> There's a peace to the music with clear and beautiful melodic lines laid over understated, but nevertheless haunting harmonics.

[00:01:14]>> [singing] [music] >> Making this one of the most graceful of deaths.

[00:01:24]>> [music] [music] >> Madrigals are a Renaissance form of song widespread across Europe 500 years ago, but despite that half a millennium time gap, madrigals are remarkably ageless.

[00:01:47]Indeed, they're still sung today, to which I can personally attest, [music] belonging to an amateur group that sings, or at least tries to sing these wonderful songs. Madrigals are easy to grasp music about easy to grasp matters, love making, nature, death, humor.

[00:02:05]Madrigals really were the pop music of their time, dominating European music for over a century. And yet, by the time Gibbons wrote The Silver Swan, the art of the madrigal was dying out. Indeed, The Silver Swan may itself be singing about the death not of a swan, but of the art form itself. Which takes me back to another madrigal about another swan, but this one takes us back nearly a century earlier.

[00:02:31]>> [singing] [music] [singing] >> The time, 1527, the height of the already high Renaissance. The place, Florence, Italy, the heart of the heart of the Renaissance. A young Flemish man arrives to seek his fortune. He will stay in Italy for some 25 years, during which time he'll pretty much become the megastar of madrigals. The man is Jacques Arcadelt, born in 1507, which is around the same time as the birth of madrigals themselves. And incidentally, the man pictured here is not Arcadelt, but instead the composer Palestrina. We have no actual surviving portraits of the composer. Arcadelt left his home city of Namur in modern-day Belgium to find work in Florence, where he succeeded. Arcadelt was one of the most talented composers of his day and almost certainly the most popular. He was employed by the top of the top brass in Florence, the Medici Duke Alessandro, meaning he had direct access to one of the most powerful men in Italy and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Michelangelo and Raphael.

[00:03:47]>> [music] >> This painting by Caravaggio shows a lute player, but the music itself is easily identifiable. It's a madrigal by our man Arcadelt, a composer who only wrote vocal music and whose largest output were madrigals, including this one, Com' ciel bianco cigno, like the white swan, written over 70 years before Gibbons Silver Swan, but [music] like Gibbons song, containing a double meaning.

[00:04:15]>> [singing] [music] >> Arcadelt's madrigal was published in a 1539 compilation of madrigals by Arcadelt, which was probably the most important musical book published in the entire 16th century, and certainly the most influential book of madrigals in history. Arcadelt's collection would be responsible for spreading the art form right the way across Europe, which is how this madrigal comes to be found in a Caravaggio painting some 27 years after Arcadelt's death. Like the white swan is one of the most well-known of early Italian madrigals. Like Gibbons Silver Swan, it tells of that traditional belief that swans only sang at the moment of their death. Now, the text of madrigals was hugely important. These were essentially a form of sung poetry, and the text of Arcadelt's madrigal contains a double meaning.

[00:05:11]>> [singing and music] >> There's a lot of talk of death, but well, let's put it this way. In Renaissance Italy, if you die and you're happy about it, chances are that death is taking place in the bedroom. In other words, death here suggests erotic climax rather than actual death, which kind of explains our final line.

[00:05:34]>> [music] >> If in dying I feel no other pain, I would be content to die a thousand deaths a day. Yeah, right. [singing] >> [music] [singing] >> Madrigals were a vocal form of music where singers would each sing different lines of melody, polyphonic music to give it its posh name. But, Arcadelt's White Swan is surprisingly homophonic, meaning the voices move together in a single block of harmony, as it were.

[00:06:05]There's no friction here. The phrases are balanced and symmetrical, [music] and the harmony consonant, creating a smooth and controlled sound. All very swan-like. And a simplicity, and that's a simplicity that ensures any double meaning in the text is more obvious to the ear, unencumbered by more complex polyphony.

[00:06:27]>> [music] [singing] >> Madrigals became and remained hugely popular. Even after Arcadelt's death, newer generations of composers emerged, including the greatest composer of his day, Monteverdi, whose nine book of madrigals probably represent the art form at its zenith.

[00:06:49]Madrigals stand at the crossroads of music, social gathering, and poetry, and they stand outside of the church's influence. Unlike earlier sacred music, madrigals set poetic texts, often about love, nature, or human emotion, not in Latin, but in the vernacular, the language people spoke outside the church door, in the everyday world. Madrigals reveal the influence of good old Renaissance humanism with their focus on individual worldly experience and expression, [music] rather than otherworldly spiritual purity. Yep, they truly put the human into humanism. Madrigals brought together poetry and music to an unusually intimate degree. With earlier vocal traditions, the text could sometimes feel secondary to the music, whereas madrigal composers were really concerned with making the music reflect the meaning of every line of text, which led to the development of techniques like word painting, where composers would shape the melody, harmony, or the rhythm to mirror specific ideas or emotions in the text. A word like ascending, for example, might be set to rising notes, and conversely descending, as you can hear in Wilbye's As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending.

[00:08:04]>> [music] [music] >> And notice how the rhythm speeds up with the lyrics ran.

[00:08:14]>> [music] >> Equally, sighing could be expressed through falling phrases or dissonance, as Monteverdi does in Cruda Amarilli.

[00:08:30]>> [singing] >> At the same time, madrigals were highly social pieces. They were typically published in partbooks, with each singer holding a single line, which encouraged group participation rather than just passive listening. A combination of expressive detail and communal performance meant they functioned as a kind of shared cultural language among educated people right the way across Europe. Remember, this is mixed-gender groups meeting outside the church for communal fun. No doubt, there was some flirting outside the pages of music as well as within.

[00:09:11]Madrigals were very popular, and their popularity, spearheaded by Arcadelt's original compilation, spread right the way across Europe, reaching English shores towards the end of the 16th century.

[00:09:33]>> [singing] >> In England, the form was enthusiastically taken up by composers who gave it a distinctive English style.

[00:09:42]>> [singing] [music] >> English madrigals are generally more light-hearted in tone than their Italian cousins, which means they seem to enjoy a chorus of fa la la-ing more than most.

[00:09:56]>> [music] >> English madrigals chose simpler harmonics and a stronger sense of rhythm.

[00:10:07]Plus more pastoral settings, which means more frolicking in the countryside between men and women with a hay nonny no.

[00:10:20]>> [music and singing] >> John Farmer's Fair Phyllis is full of fun and frolicking, but it's tightly composed. Notice how Phyllis sings all alone at the start before being joined in by the other singers.

[00:10:40]And there's word painting a plenty in the music. Up and down goes up and down.

[00:10:44]And also notice the flurry of music happening as he wanders around.

[00:10:56]I do hope that's his feet doing the wandering and not his hands. But once our singer finds Fair Phyllis, all of our singers come together in homophony.

[00:11:08]>> [singing] [music] >> And notice how the rhythm changes to triplets at the um excuse my phrasing climax of the piece when the couple fall a-kissing.

[00:11:22]>> [singing] [music] [music] >> That's flirtation added to the rhythm giving it a sense of concertina-ing of time, of slowing down just as the couple become entwined.

[00:11:40]Farmer composed Fair Phyllis at the height of madrigal's popularity in England, 16 years before Gibbons wrote The Silver Swan, a song that really comes at the close of this period. And Gibbons' tone is far more serious.

[00:11:55]Again, we're introduced to a dying swan's song, but unlike Arcadelt's offering from over 70 years previously, this time there's no sexual double entendre. But there is a double meaning, and this time it seems what is dying is the art of madrigals itself.

[00:12:14]>> [music] >> There's some lovely word painting in the madrigal, such as the expansion of texture at "unlocked her silent throat".

[00:12:25]>> [music] >> And some gorgeous harmonies, including an almost painful augmented fifth on the word close, as in death closing your eyes, where the cantus sings an E flat over a G chord.

[00:12:42]19th century editions of the music actually tried to amend that E flat to a D to correct that lovely chromatic augmentation into a dull G chord.

[00:12:52]Thankfully, modern editions have corrected that correction. The madrigal's end provides the punchline.

[00:12:59]This dying swan is being replaced by geese, more fools than wise. A cynical conclusion, musically reinforced by the weighty cadence and darker harmonics.

[00:13:10]This is a pessimistic end coming with a sense of sadness and unavoidable finality.

[00:13:17]It's not just the swan that's dying, you see. Gibbons is essentially saying goodbye to what has, by the early 17th century, become a dying art form.

[00:13:26]People, it seemed, had finally become bored of madrigals, preferring a single voice with instruments rather than pure vocal harmonies. Again, Caravaggio's painting reveals the trends of its day with a lute player picking out notes using Arcadelt's original vocal score.

[00:13:43]Now, cantatas [music] and solo singing begin to predominate.

[00:13:47]Now, we focus on a single line of melody, often supported by other instruments, which will eventually and most loudly express itself in the form of opera, already pioneered in Italy, of course, by that brilliant madrigal composer, Monteverdi, who would pour all of his knowledge of the art form of madrigals when creating those very first operas. Which all means that when Gibbons composes his Silver Swan, the art form of the madrigal is dying out.

[00:14:16]Indeed, Gibbons' Silver Swan is a perfect swan song for the madrigal itself, an art form being replaced by solo song, lute playing, and of course, opera.

[00:14:31]It's a sad lament, but as my own madrigal group will attest, though not necessarily in perfect harmony, this old swan is still a singing.

[00:14:40]Please like and subscribe.

[00:14:42]>> [singing] [music] [singing] [singing] [laughter] >> I was saying you were still recording.

[00:14:58]Can we just stop that?