Giovanni Battista Guarini  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Giambattista Guarini)
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e



Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel
Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel




He was the father of Anna Guarini, one of the famous virtuose singers of the Ferrara court, the three women of the concerto di donne. She was murdered by her husband in 1598, with the assistance of her brother Girolamo.

Work and influence

No poet was more influential on music history in the late Renaissance and Baroque eras than Guarini. His poems were set more often by madrigal composers than the work of any other poet, even Tasso, who came in a close second; the prolific madrigal composer Philippe de Monte even named one of his collections Il pastor fido after Guarini's most famous work. His popularity was due to his providing texts to composers which were rich with possibilities for word-painting and other easy translations of emotion into music. One of his poems, the erotic Tirsi morir volea, recounting the amorous encounter of a shepherd and a nymph, was set to music as a madrigal more often than any other single poem of the entire era.



An example of his work would be "O come è gran martire" from Libro Terzo dei Madrigali (1592) by Monteverdi.

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Giovanni Battista Guarini" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools