ABSTRACT
This Chapter is concerned with the ‘emblematic’ nature of the descending minor tetrachord as it appears in the work of the French composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier. It considers the intersection of the ostinato aria with the variation passacaille. Ellen Rosand began her discussion of Pier Francesco Cavalli’s operatic laments over the minor tetrachord ground with the piece that evidently served as Cavalli’s model, Monteverdi’s famous ‘Lamento della Ninfa’, published in the same book of madrigals as ‘Altri canti d’Amor’. The proximity of pleasure to pain in Humanist love poetry suggests a broader range of meaning for minor harmony, easily encompassing the ‘sweet charms and sighed-for kisses’ caused by Cupid’s sharp arrows. Both the passacaille and the chaconne entered the French theatre as dance types, and in Lully’s stage works it is the passacailles, and also the contrasting minor-mode portions of the chaconnes, that use the minor-tetrachord ostinato as a basis for continuous variations.
