Talk:Sfogava con le stelle (Claudio Monteverdi)

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Infermo d'amore

Hi John, thanks for correcting the score text; you're right, this seems to be a very common and old mistake, as I have found:

"In making this recording we have tried to avoid both textual and musical errors by consulting the latest musicological research and making use of recently published and more accurate editions of the madrigals. Such errors, while taking nothing from the beauty of the works, arose in the past from problematic areas which have now been resolved: for example the line in track 4 which for many years was sung as "Sfogava con le stelle / un inferno d'amore", but which we now know ought to be "un infermo d'amore"."
-- Marco Longhini, in MONTEVERDI: Madrigals, Book 4 (Read more about this recording)

and

"I haven't followed all the contributions, so apologize if this has already been mentioned, but would just mention Frank Kermode's essays "The Uses of Error" -- the enrichment of texts through (sometimes unintentional) misunderstanding or contamination. For me an excellent example would be Monteverdi's madrigal "Sfogava con le stelle", where Rinuccini's "un infermo d'amore", one sick with love, becomes "un inferno d'amore" in the setting, a blazing inferno of love, which (though in some ways nonsensical and probably unintended) draws in intertexts in a remarkable way, and I don't think this detracts from it in the least in the musical context given it by the composer."
-- Geoffrey Chew, in Re: liberties with text

From my own experience, this was one of the first music settings I sang, back in 1988, in a choir conducted by a catholic priest who had specialized in Music in Rome, and he instructed us to sing infermo instead of inferno as was in the score.

Regards, Carlos 02:51, 31 March 2008 (PDT)

Yes, thanks.
I didn't know about that mistake until I saw your post. I also found that searching the internet for the words gave an equal mix of inferno and infermo: the right one is obvious, once one's seen it. I imagine that inferno has been able to stick because to English speakers it has more of a meaning of "furnace" than of "hell", and "the fire of love" makes sense where "the hell of love" is dubious.
regards John 2008-04-01

Text attribution

Can someone check if the attribution of the text is correct?

I found the claim "sometimes misattributed to Ottavio Rinuccini" here: [1]


Thanks and cheers

--GiachesDeWert 09:15, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi Giaches, I wasn't aware that there was doubt in the attribution, thanks for raising this subject. It seems that the first one to attribute the text to Rinuccini was Francesco Trucchi in his Poesie italiane inedite di dugento autori. Although the attribution hasn't been undoubtedly confirmed, Gary Tomlinson in his book Monteverdi and the end of the Renaissance brings up some external evidences that reinforce the ascription: [2]
Cheers, —Carlos Email.gif 12:10, 10 February 2010 (UTC)