Guarini, Giovanni Battista (EN)

Guarini Giovanni Battista, *10 December 1538 Ferrara, †7 October 1612 Venice, Italian poet. He studied law at the University of Padua and around 1577 lectured there on rhetoric and poetics. Around 1560 he married Taddea Bendidio, sister of the renowned singers Lucrezia and Isabella at the court of Lucrezia d’Este in Ferrara. Around 1564 he stayed at the court of Scipione Gonzaga in Padua. Between 1567 and 1588 he served as court poet to Alfonso II d’Este, first alongside T. Tasso and, from 1579, as his successor. In 1569 he received the title of “cavaliere.” From 1569 to 1576 he undertook diplomatic journeys to Turin, Rome, Venice, and twice to Poland (1574, 1575); from the latter journeys he left an account entitled Discorse sulle cose di Polonia. After 1588 he stayed at various courts, including Turin and Mantua (in 1595 at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga). In 1595 he returned to Ferrara, but after the death of Alfonso II (1597) he moved to the Florentine court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to whom he dedicated Trattato della politica libertà. Between 1602 and 1604 he was at the court of Francesco Maria della Rovere in Urbino.

Guarini spent his final years in Rome and Venice. His contemporaries held him in very high esteem as a poet and man of letters; he belonged to the Accademia degli Eterei (Padua), Accademia degli Innominati (Parma), Accademia degli Umoristi (Rome), Accademia Fiorentina, and Accademia della Crusca (Florence).

Guarini maintained especially close ties with the world of music. In Ferrara, between 1571 and 1584, concerts directed by L. Luzzaschi and T. Molza were held regularly, at which Lucrezia and Isabella Bendidio, and later Guarini’s daughter Anna as well, performed the poetic-musical genres most fashionable at the time: madrigals, canzonettas, and dialoghi da musicare. Guarini’s madrigals were shorter than those of the first half of the sixteenth century. Their erotic and epigrammatic texts were literary in character yet possessed extraordinary musicality. Today Guarini’s poetry may seem overly refined, artificial, and mannered, but at the time it fascinated audiences through its elegance, pathos, and dramatic quality. His texts, full of antitheses (for example dolce-amaro, viver-morir, amore-dolore), offered composers rich opportunities for musical contrasts favored by madrigal composers. Guarini’s texts inspired numerous madrigal settings, both in their original form and in various adaptations. Among the most favored was the pastoral canzone Tirsi morir volea (set by L. Marenzio, G.C. Gabussi, G. Wert, Ph. de Monte, L. Luzzaschi, Gesualdo da Venosa, and A. Gabrieli), as well as the madrigal Ardo sì, ma non t’amo, to which T. Tasso wrote both a risposta and a contrarisposta (all three texts were set by C. Monteverdi in the First Book of Madrigals, 1587). In 1585 G. Gigli da Immola published an anthology of 31 compositions of this text (Sdegnosi ardori. Musica di diversi auttori… a cinque voci, Munich 1585). Other popular texts included Un bacio solo a tante pene, O cruda, O dolce anima mia, and Parto o non parto. In Gorga di cantatrice Guarini described the successive stages of virtuosic singing (later set by Monteverdi). Monteverdi was particularly fond of Guarini’s poetry, (Con che soavità, Interotte speranze, and Dolcissimo uscignolo.)

Guarini’s life work was undoubtedly Il pastor fido (written 1581–84), considered alongside Tasso’s Aminta one of the treasures of Mannerist literature and the model pastoral tragicomedy. The work was criticized by contemporaries who accused Guarini of violating the principles of Aristotelian poetics. He answered them in Il verrato and Il verrato secondo, defending the artist’s right to individual creativity and arguing that the purpose of poetry is “not to instruct the reader, but to give pleasure.” The final edition (the second) was furnished anonymously by the author with commentaries after each scene and numerous extensive explanations clarifying stylistic complexities and elaborate literary devices. Il pastor fido consists of five acts and the work is so vast that, according to legend, during a performance in Mantua no one noticed that 1,600 lines had been omitted. Its extraordinarily intricate plot, full of complicated love intrigues, unfolds in Arcadia. The work was written in hendecasyllabic verse. All the characters speak in highly refined language, since the play was above all a display of poetic virtuosity, evident in its wealth of stylistic figures and frequent wordplay. Guarini introduced contrapposti, imperfect rhymes, and rhymes based on pairings such as nome–nume and suoi–miei. It seems that he often subordinated the plot to sophisticated stylistic devices, or at least introduced them at the climactic moments of the action. Among the virtuoso passages of the work is the chorus O bell’età d’oro (the ending of Act IV), a 68-line canzona. According to notes from the 1602 edition, some passages were written with musical settings in mind. Il giuoco della cieca (Act III, Scene 2) was first choreographed, after which Guarini commissioned L. Luzzaschi to compose music for it (now lost), to which he later added the text. For a Mantuan performance, the choreography of Il giuoco was reportedly prepared by I. Ebreo, and the music by G. Wert and F. Rovigo (also lost). Emilio de’ Cavalieri likewise composed music for Il giuoco (lost), adapting the text with L. Guidiccioni for a Florentine performance in 1595. Among the most important surviving musical settings of Il giuoco are works by G. Fattorini (1598), G.G. Gastoldi (1602), G. Ghizzola (1609), M. Casentini (1609), and G.P. Biandra (1626). Other fragments of Il pastor fido were also adapted musically, especially monologues (“pre-monodic arias,” according to A. Einstein), often published as independent madrigals. Particularly famous were Ah, dolente partita (33 settings), Cruda Amarilli (23 settings), and O primavera (20 settings). In total, around 125 composers created approximately 550 madrigals based on texts from Il pastor fido (including Ph. de Monte, G. Ghizzolo, L. Marenzio, G.G. Gastoldi, M. da Gagliano, L. Luzzaschi, G. Wert, C. Monteverdi, and H. Schütz).

The pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido anticipated the form of opera and influenced the writing of seventeenth-century librettos, particularly through imitation of its complex, multi-stranded plots. During the seventeenth century it was repeatedly staged, published, and translated (including a Polish translation by Jerzy Lubomirski, Toruń 1694; second edition 1722). The popularity of this pastoral work is also shown by the fact that many collections of madrigals bore the title Il pastor fido (by Ph. de Monte, G. Piccioni, C. Pari, and others), while others took titles from its contents, such as Corisea (B. Tomasi), L’Amarillide (S. Cerreto), and Satiro e Corisca (T. Merula). Even in the eighteenth century, G. F. Handel composed the opera Il pastor fido (1712, 1734), J.-Ph. Rameau the cantata Le berger fidèle (1728), A. Salieri the opera Il pastor fido (1789), while A. Vivaldi titled his Op. 13 collection of six sonatas for musette, flute, oboe, and violin Il pastor fido.

The music to the comedy L’idropica (C. Monteverdi – prologue, S. Rossi – intermezzo, G.G. Gastoldi – two intermezzi, “messet Monco” – three intermezzi, G.C. Monteverdi – four intermezzi, P. Biat – licenza) has been lost. Guarini also wrote the text for Barca di Venetia per Padova… by A. Banchieri (Venice, 1605).

Literature: A. Hartmann Jr. Battista Guarini and „Il pastor fido”, “The Musical Quarterly” XXXIX, 1953; A. Einstein The Italian Madrigal, Princeton (New York) 1949, repr. 1970; P. Petrobelli „Ah, dolente partita”. Marenzio, Wert, Monteverdi, in: Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo, conference proceedings, Verona 1969; J. Shearman Manieryzm, Polish trans. M. Skibniewska, Warsaw 1970; E. Ferrari-Barassi Tarquinio Merula e il dialogo di Satiro e Corisca, “Anuario Musical” XXVII, 1972.