Lettera amorosa : Musical Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy

This Element traces the breadth and significance of the musical love letter with a focus on the provocative lettere amorose of the seventeenth century.

In early modern Italy, letters were not only written and read but, in some cases, sung. Musical settings of love letters rekindled a complex kind of vocality which was rooted in the letters of antiquity and endured in the musical sub-genre of the lettera amorosa. Epistolary poetry served to transform, or, to echo Achillini''s lettera set by Monteverdi (1567–1643), to ''distill'' a lover''s thoughts and emotions into verse, and the music that set it was equally transformative. The history of musical letters spans several centuries. It begins in the early sixteenth with a setting of Ovid''s Heroides by Tromboncino; returns in the early seventeenth through the lettere amorose of Monteverdi, D''India, and Frescobaldi; and ends with epistolary cantatas by Carissimi, Melani, and Domenico Scarlatti. This Element traces the breadth and significance of the musical love letter with a focus on the provocative lettere amorose of the seventeenth century.