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6 On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric: Distance and the Madrigal Texts of Costanzo Festa
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Published:March 2006
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Abstract
In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “The magic and most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all—distance.”1 Jacques Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche underscores this effect: “A woman seduces from a distance. In fact, distance is the very element of her power. Yet one must beware to keep one’s own distance from her beguiling song of enchantment.”2 Derrida stresses action at a distance as intimately and essentially musical, a sympathetic vibration, a song. On this view a singing courtesan is doubly desirable, and openly courts desire, especially in the courtly urban salons of Renaissance Italy, where an amorous aesthetic so totally dominated by the Petrarchan poetics of loss relegated woman to an institutionalized absence. There, the paradox of action at a distance is personified in the form of the courtesan’s voice. In the context of a poetics that denied them utterance, courtesans managed to modify conventional models and engage in meaningful lyric expression. In this essay I explore the problem of voice and address in a single large corpus of madrigals from the 1520s and 1530s set to music by Costanzo Festa (1485–1540), an early master of the Italian madrigal, in a project I call “locating the courtesan.” The courtesan appears in Festa’s madrigal texts as addressee and speaker, and possibly even as author (three anonymous texts are written in the female voice). My study considers a more generalized musical representation of the courtesan’s voice than De Rycke’s (chap. 5), and rather than focusing on what she might have sung interrogates musical and poetic constructions both of and by her.
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