ABSTRACT
As the madrigals of Book V, the elegant ease of the madrigals of Books III and IV, which are generally placed at the centre of the Claudio Monteverdicanon., may seem to have been jettisoned in favour of an over-ascetic, rationalist aesthetics. Monteverdi’s setting of Petrarch's sonnet 'Hor che'l ciel', one of the most substantial compositions in Book VIII, is divided into two partes, each with numerous subdivisions. The spondaic foot, which Monteverdi opposes to the pyrrhic as the rhythm appropriate to supplication, comprises two long syllables. Giulio Strozzi's account of Monteverdi's use of Greek music, also notes the soothing effect of spondaic metre. By the 1630s, Monteverdi may have thought the dissonance technique usually singled out as its essential component as less important than the esoteric, Platonic — and thus politically charged — techniques designed to flatter his noble patrons.
