“Amarilli, mia bella” is a lovely song with music by Giulio Caccini and words by Alessandro Guarini. It became not only one of the most popular solo madrigals of 17th-century but also a chestnut in modern vocal pedagogy.
Let’s start with a performance; here’s local (i.e., Bay Area) soprano Phoebe Rosquist singing it with Voices of Music co-director David Tayler on the lute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21hYxQvgMs Amarilli, mia bella,
Non credi, o del mio cor dolce desio,
D’esser tu l’amor mio?
Credilo pur: e se timor t’assale,
Prendi questo mio strale,
Aprimi il petto e vedrai scritto in core:
Amarilli e mio amore.
I hope you recognize the song. It might be familiar because it is one of the songs in the G. Schirmer yellow-cover volume of 24 Italian Songs, used and abused for decades by beginning vocal students.
A tiny lyric like this is a challenge to translate: compressed, idiomatic, full of emotion, and at the same time, well aware of the over-the-top nature of its imagery: opening up the heart to find a certification of his love.
Here’s what I did with it.
Amaryllis, my beauty,
my heart-throb: don’t you believe
that I love you?
Well, believe it; and if you’re not sure,
take this scalpel
and open my chest: written on my heart,
you’ll see: “I love Amaryllis.”
I know, they didn’t say “heart-throb” in the 16th century, but they did talk a lot about the heart (cor in Italian). And a “scalpel”? in the Italian, he offers her a strale, the point of an arrow; I thought the scalpel would be a more modernly “pointed” metaphor. Some research tells me that they had scalpels as long back as the Greeks, though I’m sure they didn’t yet have open-heart surgery. Certainly not of the test-my-love kind.
When it was published in 1602, the song had already had an big career, if we can believe the composer Caccini. He asserts in the preface to his show-off volume, Le nuove musiche (“new music”), that he had earlier refrained from publishing his songs, even though they’d been around for two decades, because he “esteemed them but little.” Well, maybe; we see these kinds of self-deprecating remarks in countless prefaces of the day (and now).
He deftly turns to self-congratulation:
It seemed to me these pieces of mine had been honored enough–indeed, more than they deserved–by being constantly performed by the most famous singers of Italy, male and female, and by other noble persons who are lovers of the profession.
[The quotes are from the musicologist Tim Carter, in his article “Caccini’s ‘Amarilli, mia bella:’ Some Questions (And a Few Answers)”]
Wow: lots of renditions. . . across the country. . . sung by the top professional singers . . . and by amateurs . . . and not just any amateurs–nobles!
So why publish? ah, he says, because my friends “forced (and also urged)” me!
Moreover, he says, he was annoyed at seeing his songs get overused (“circulating tattered and torn”) and over-ornamented. He complained: “I see vocal crescendos and decrescendos, esclamazioni [long notes diminishing and coming back], tremolos and trills, and other embellishments of good singing style used indiscriminately.” Like a bad rendition of the National Anthem at the ball park, I guess.
So, he hopes that printing his songs will establish authoritative versions! Engrave it, and it’s fixed in stone. It never works, of course, trying to fix an “authorized version.” Publication, as musicologist Tim Carter points out, led to dozens of new arrangements of the popular Amarilli song, even further from the original — for six voices, for keyboard, maybe even for town band (just kidding, but who knows?).
Here’s a variant version, from a manuscript in the British Museum:
A take-away, for the moment:
Music exists not to be engraved in the book (or on the heart, like the poet’s “I love Amaryllis”) but to be used, changed, ornamented, performed–and learned from!
If you want to know more about Italian madrigals and their texts, take a look at my book, A Poetry Precise and Free (Univ of Michigan Press, 2018).
