Painting, poetry, and music in Nicholas Lanier's 'Hero's Lament to Leander'

• Published in: The Seventeenth century Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 215 - 232
• Main Author: Barrington, Breeze
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Durham Routledge 04.03.2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 17th century; Authorial voice; Ekphrasis; Intertextuality; Lanier, Nicholas; Music; Poetry; Songs; Italy
• ISSN: 0268-117X; 2050-4616
• DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2022.2156915

In his composition, 'Hero's Lament to Leander', Nicholas Lanier sought to interweave art forms. Lanier was painter as well as a composer, an art agent for Charles I, and the Master of the King's Music. In 1625 he was sent to Northern Italy and ended up in Mantua where he likely encountered not just Domenico Fetti's and Peter Paul Rubens's paintings of the Death of Leander, but also ekphrastic poems of Giambattista Marino celebrating Rubens's painting as well as a no-longer-extant work by Bernardino Poccetti. Responding to the works of Monteverdi and Sigismondo d'India, both whom Lanier would have been familiar with and may even have met during his time in Italy, Lanier wrote both text and setting for his own recitativo cantata, 'Hero's Lament to Leander'. His composition responded to musical innovations that were happening in Italy: the recitativo form, as outlined by Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna, favoured 'ancient monodic music to the intricate web of vocal polyphony' found in the prevailing madrigal style. Galilei, Monteverdi, and Lanier himself, sought a return to ancient poetry as verse accompanied by an instrument and perhaps even sung, and thus to the original unity of speech and song itself. Galilei's dialogue preferred the declamatory works of orators and of classical poets, and this is where Lanier drew his inspiration, as the heroic couplets of the written text are placed in syncopation with the melodic lines Hero sings. His composition is full of intertextual allusion, to the Hero and Leander poems of Marlowe and Chapman, as well as classical sources, and the recitativo style allowed him to play with the boundaries between speech and song.