Claudio Monteverdi — Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, SV 153

Tancredi and Clorinda face each other at night outside the walls of Jerusalem.
In Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, SV 153, Claudio Monteverdi transforms a dramatic episode from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered into musical theatre.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (SV 153) brings to the stage one of the most painful episodes in Torquato Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered. Outside the walls of Jerusalem, two armed opponents meet in the darkness, but one does not know whose face is hidden beneath the other’s helmet. Monteverdi gives the scene to three voices — a narrator and two characters — supported by a small string ensemble and basso continuo.

The instruments take an unusually active part in telling the story. The strings follow a horse’s measured tread, quicken their attacks as the swords clash and change the way they are played when the fighters grapple at close quarters. At the end, their sound fades with Clorinda’s voice. These details become more revealing once we understand the story unfolding between the two combatants.

The Story

The action belongs to the world of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, set against the siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. Tancredi fights with the Christian army. Clorinda, a warrior raised in the Muslim faith, defends the city. Their paths have crossed before: Tancredi once saw her without her helmet beside a spring and fell in love with her. When the night of the duel arrives, however, they remain on opposite sides of the war.

Clorinda leaves the city with Argante to set fire to a Crusader siege tower. They succeed, but as they make their way back, the gate closes before she can get through. She is wearing different armour from that in which Tancredi saw her before. When he catches sight of her moving outside the walls, he takes her for an unknown man of the enemy army. He follows, stops her and challenges her to fight.

In the darkness they exchange blow after blow. The struggle grows so fierce that they end up striking each other at close quarters, until exhaustion forces them apart for a brief rest. As the first light appears, Tancredi sees that his opponent has lost more blood. He asks the stranger’s name, wanting to know who will lend honour to his victory or his death. Clorinda refuses to identify herself. She does reveal, however, that she was one of the two warriors who burned the siege tower. Her answer rekindles his anger, and the fight begins again.

In the second bout, Tancredi inflicts a mortal wound. As Clorinda’s strength fails, she forgives him and asks him to baptise her. Still unaware of whom he has wounded, Tancredi fetches water in his helmet. When he removes hers to perform the baptism, he recognises the face of the woman he loved. Despite the shock of recognition, he completes the rite. Clorinda seems to speak of heaven opening and of departing in peace. In Tasso’s poem, the following stanza describes her death.

Monteverdi begins his musical setting with the pursuit, drawing chiefly on stanzas 52–62 and 64–68 of Canto XII. He also takes a phrase describing the fighters’ slow approach from Tasso’s later Gerusalemme conquistata. He omits stanza 63, which compares the lingering motion of the struggle to waves on the Aegean after the wind has dropped, and moves more directly from renewed fury to the fatal blow. His most consequential decision is to divide the poetic text among three singers: in the final moments, Clorinda herself sings the words that Tasso’s narrator says she only seemed to speak.

Movements / Structure

The scene runs continuously. Its outlines emerge through changes in musical activity: the call to Night interrupts the pursuit, a change of metre signals the beginning of the fight, and the return of rapid repeated notes ends the pause between the two bouts. The Italian cues below identify points in the score and in the sung text.

Dramatic episode Cue in the score Musical direction
Pursuit and challenge Tancredi che Clorinda un homo stima · Trotto del cavallo The narrator introduces the pursuit, the strings suggest the horse’s trot, and the combatants exchange short phrases.
Approach and invocation of Night Notte, che nel profondo oscuro seno Instrumental passages mark the fighters’ approach. The narrator’s line becomes more expansive as he calls on Night, and the two combatants fall silent.
The first bout Principio della guerra · Non schivar, non parar An opening triple motion gives way to increasingly dense attacks. Plucked strings mark the point at which the fighters are close enough to strike with their sword hilts.
The pause at dawn and the question E dopo lungo faticar respira · Nostra sventura The texture thins to voice and continuo. Tancredi asks his opponent’s name and Clorinda reveals her part in setting the tower alight.
Renewed combat and the mortal wound Guerra · Torna l’ira ne’ cori · Ma ecco omai Rapid repetitions return. When the narrator reaches the fatal blow, the upper strings fall away and the voice is heard against the bass again.
Pardon, recognition and baptism Amico, hai vinto · La vide, la conobbe · S’apre il ciel Clorinda asks to be baptized. The narrator describes Tancredi’s recognition and the baptism itself, then the strings return softly for Clorinda’s last words.

The pause at dawn offers Tancredi a chance to find out whom he has been fighting. Clorinda’s answer sends him back into combat. Recognition will come only after the music of battle has subsided and she is asking for his help.

Musical Analysis

The pursuit passes from the narrator to the strings

The Testo, or narrator, begins by telling us what Tancredi does not know: the fighter he is pursuing is Clorinda. His line moves with the flexibility of recitative, generally allowing one note to each syllable while changes of pitch and duration follow the contours of speech. Sustained notes in the continuo give the words room to register. Then the Trotto del cavallo passes the action briefly to the strings. Their short, recurring figures suggest the horse’s regular tread. From the opening, Monteverdi distinguishes two kinds of time: the flexible pace of a story being told and the relentless movement of the pursuit.

The story becomes an exchange between the characters when Tancredi asks “Chi sei?” — “Who are you?” — and Clorinda answers. Tancredi and the Testo sing in neighbouring areas of the male range, while Clorinda’s line is higher. We follow the change of speaker through the handover between singers and the shape of their words. Her first response, invoking war and death, is as direct as a challenge. After she has been wounded, the same voice will stretch into longer, more unsettled phrases as she asks for baptism.

The appeal to Night and the first bout

As the opponents draw nearer, short instrumental passages of varying density suggest their cautious progress. The action pauses when the Testo turns to Night: “Notte”. He asks it to preserve the memory of what takes place in the dark. The other voices and upper strings fall silent. The narrator stretches certain syllables over several notes, especially alta before memoria, and his melodic line expands beyond the predominantly syllabic narration heard earlier. In the printed instructions of 1638, Monteverdi explicitly permits vocal ornaments here while restricting them elsewhere in the Testo.

As the appeal ends, the score announces Principio della guerra (“Beginning of the battle”) at bar 133 in Mario Bolognani’s transcription. At “Non schivar, non parar”, the narrator describes how neither fighter evades a blow or stops to defend. The strings’ initial triple motion develops into increasingly dense attacks. When the Testo calls “Odi le spade” — “Hear the swords” — the instruments answer his words with sharp strokes. Monteverdi joins the narrator’s account to the sound of the conflict itself.

A particularly telling change comes in bars 174–176. The continuous rapid bow strokes give way to isolated pizzicato notes, played by plucking the strings with the fingers. By this point in the verse, the combatants are so close that they strike with the hilts of their swords and collide with helmets and shields. Where a stream of motion had dominated, we now hear a few short, separate impacts. The change of timbre follows the change in the physical action.

Bars 174–176. Repeated string notes give way to isolated attacks.
Example 1. First bout, bars 174–176. The strings and bass line move from uninterrupted repetitions to isolated attacks while the Testo describes close combat. Claudio Monteverdi, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638, Basso continuo partbook, p. 30, Library of Congress digital facsimile. Bar numbers follow Mario Bolognani, p. 10.

Dawn, a question, and the return of fury

The first bout leaves both warriors exhausted. As they draw apart to breathe, the musical texture thins. At “Già de l’ultima stella”, the Testo sings over the continuo without the upper strings. In the first light of dawn, Tancredi sees that his opponent has lost more blood and hopes for victory. The narrator, who knows Clorinda’s identity, breaks into the account with “Misero, di che godi?” — “Wretched man, why do you rejoice?” The question anticipates the suffering that awaits Tancredi. Against the spare accompaniment, the shift in the narrator’s tone carries particular weight.

During the pause, Tancredi asks his opponent’s name. He wants to know who will lend honour to his victory or his death, and the longer, largely syllabic phrase unfolds over continuo. Clorinda’s reply is brief: “Indarno chiedi” — “You ask in vain.” She will not say who she is. Instead, she admits that she helped set the Crusaders’ siege tower alight. What the two characters say here changes the course of the scene: the opportunity for the combat to end slips away.

Tancredi’s anger returns, and at bar 299 the heading Guerra marks the renewed clash. The strings unleash a volley of rapid semiquavers, make room for a few words from the Testo, then launch into another volley. The exchange is more precise than a general increase in volume or speed: the singer relates the action while the instruments enact its relentless motion. The violence of the first bout has returned, but the listener now knows how the failure of recognition is carrying the characters towards disaster.

The wound and the moment of recognition

At “Ma ecco omai”, the Testo announces the decisive moment. The upper strings fall silent, while longer notes in the bass leave space for the words about the sword, the blood and Clorinda’s faltering step. The rapid pulse of the swordplay recedes. After so much accumulated motion, the thinner sound gives the mortal wound greater weight.

Clorinda addresses her opponent with “Amico, hai vinto” — “Friend, you have won.” She forgives him and asks to be baptised. When the strings return, each note begins firmly and softens within a single bow stroke; pauses leave space between her short phrases. The harmonic setting also changes. The B-flat signature and cadential motion around G and D colour the plea: an opening G sonority with a minor third comes to rest on an A harmony before the narrator resumes in a different harmonic setting. Clorinda begins in a lower register, rises as she offers forgiveness and reaches higher again when she asks for baptism. The changing range, silences and unsettled harmony make the plea feel like something she must struggle to finish.

The recognition passes back into the narrator’s voice. As Tancredi removes Clorinda’s helmet, the Testo repeats “La vide” — “He saw her” — and separates the cries “Ahi vista, ahi conoscenza” with pauses. The discovery seems to stretch the time it takes to speak. Tancredi himself no longer sings; the narrator must convey the event that the character cannot put into words.

Baptism and Clorinda’s last words

Tancredi fills his helmet with water and returns to the wounded Clorinda. The Testo relates the baptism over continuo; the words of the rite remain within his narration. Then comes “dir parea” — “she seemed to say” — and the narrator gives way to Clorinda herself. At “S’apre il ciel” the strings re-enter with an instruction to play gently. Her voice lengthens the word pace, sustaining D first above A in the bass and then above D, while the written string parts settle on D and A. Monteverdi asks both singer and players to let the final sound die away. The fading is not simply a performer’s expressive addition: it is written into the composition.

Bars 438–445. The narrator gives way to Clorinda’s final phrase.
Example 2. Final scene, bars 438–445. The handover from the Testo to Clorinda’s last phrase, with strings and bass line, from “dir parea” to the dying sound on “pace”. Claudio Monteverdi, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638, Basso continuo partbook, p. 43, Library of Congress digital facsimile. Bar numbers follow Mario Bolognani, p. 23. 

Tasso adds one more stanza, in which Clorinda raises her hand towards Tancredi and dies as though falling asleep. Monteverdi stops before it. Once Clorinda has sung her own final words, her voice and the strings fade together. The listener understands what has happened without the death needing to be narrated.

Complete live performance by La Fonte Musica, directed by Michele Pasotti, at the Church of San Leonardo in Verbania on 20 August 2023, as part of the Stresa Festival. Mauro Borgioni (Testo), Massimo Altieri (Tancredi) and Alena Dantcheva (Clorinda). 

Stile concitato and the pulse of battle

The rhythm of the battle grows out of an idea Monteverdi explains in the preface to the Eighth Book. Alongside the gentle (molle) and the moderate (temperato) he places the agitated (concitato), which he associates with anger and the excitement of combat. To produce it, he divides a semibreve — here equivalent to a whole note — into sixteen semiquavers reiterating the same pitch. He relates the long value to the spondee and the rapid repetition to the pyrrhic, as he understood those ancient rhythms. The pitch remains unchanged, yet the succession of attacks radically alters the sense of motion.

The second bout brings this technique into sharp focus. In bars 299–302 the strings and bass sound sixteen rapid attacks, stop long enough for “Torna l’ira ne’ cori” to be heard, then begin again. Repeated notes return in bars 308–310 after a passage in triple metre. The contrast between softer and stronger attacks changes the pressure surrounding the narrator’s voice. This driving pulse is the stile concitato. The pizzicato in the first bout serves a different purpose: a finger plucks the string instead of the bow drawing across it, so the sound begins sharply and decays almost at once. A few widely spaced notes can then evoke the heavier blows of combat at very close quarters.

Monteverdi insists that the swift repetitions apply to the continuo players as well. In the preface he recalls that some performers initially replaced the sixteen attacks with one held note. The pitch survived, but the battle’s momentum disappeared. His account clarifies the continuo’s double role in the piece. The bass line and harpsichord provide a harmonic foundation for long stretches of narration; during the fighting, the written bass joins the upper strings in driving the rhythm forward.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

A Venetian evening preserved in print

In early seventeenth-century Venice, Claudio Monteverdi directed music at St Mark’s and counted the patrician and senator Girolamo Mocenigo among his patrons. It was in Mocenigo’s residence, according to Monteverdi’s own account, that Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda was presented during Carnival. The composer dated the occasion to 1624, although the precise year remains disputed. We cannot establish whether Mocenigo specifically commissioned the piece. We can, however, recover much of its intended theatrical shape from the unusually detailed instructions Monteverdi later put into print.

Those instructions begin with madrigals performed without stage action. Then, from the musicians’ side of the room, Clorinda is to appear on foot, fully armed. Tancredi follows her, seated on a theatrical representation of a horse. Once the figures have entered, the Testo, the singer who narrates what the combatants themselves cannot know, begins his account. Monteverdi asks him to stand a little apart from the instrumentalists so that his words can be clearly understood. After an opening of unacted madrigals, the arrival of the armed figures would make the shift into staged drama immediate.

The instructions attend just as closely to the fighters’ movements. Their steps, pursuit and blows must coincide with the rhythms and the words describing them: the combat is shaped for the eye and the ear at once. Years later, remembering the Venetian performance, Monteverdi wrote that the noble listeners had been moved by pity almost to tears. That reaction comes to us through his retrospective account rather than an independent report. Yet his choice of detail is revealing. After devising new ways to make the sound of anger and battle, what he recalled most vividly was the compassion of his audience.

The Combattimento did not disappear after that Venetian evening. On 1 May 1627 Monteverdi wrote to Alessandro Striggio, the poet who had provided the libretto for his L’Orfeo, proposing the scene for celebrations of Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga’s accession in Mantua. A work first heard in a Venetian aristocratic setting was now being put forward for a different courtly occasion. The surviving letter preserves the proposal, but it gives us no proof that the Mantuan performance actually took place.

Its most enduring form arrived through the printing press. In 1638 the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti included the Combattimento in Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand III. The scene appeared among the Canti guerrieri, the warlike pieces, together with its stage directions. The book also preserves a difficulty in dating the Venetian performance: the general preface gives 1624, while the note before the work says it had been heard twelve years before 1638, suggesting 1626. The music historian Tim Carter has also left open the Carnival season of 1624–25. The exact year therefore remains uncertain.

Those printed pages preserved more than the notes. They explained how the two figures were to enter, where the narrator should stand, how movement should follow words, and how the instruments could give the blows their sound. People who had never attended an evening at Mocenigo’s house could now encounter Monteverdi’s conception and attempt a new staging. The Combattimento could travel beyond its first audience with the close relationship between voice, instrumental attack and theatrical movement still set down in the score.

🎧 Listening Guide

The horse’s tread. After the narrator’s first phrases, listen for the small recurring groups of notes in the strings. Keep that even gait in mind when the much denser bow strokes arrive in the fight.

The word Notte. Notice how the narrator’s line opens out, especially as he approaches the end of the stanza at memoria. The words become much more sharply articulated when the battle begins. You can hear the difference without following every line of Italian.

The blows at close quarters. At “Dansi co’ pomi”, the rapid strokes give way to a few dry notes. Listen for the short decay that distinguishes a plucked string from a bowed one.

The question and the recognition. Remember Tancredi’s voice when he asks his opponent’s name. At “La vide, la conobbe”, when he finally recognizes Clorinda, the voice you hear is the Testo over the bass. Tancredi’s silence has become part of the scene.

The last bow stroke. Follow the strings beneath the soprano at “S’apre il ciel”. On the final syllable of pace, the sound lasts long enough for its disappearance to become part of the phrase.

🎶 Further Listening

These four recordings offer different ways to follow the narrator’s delivery, the balance of voice and strings, and the time allowed for Clorinda’s last phrase to fade.

  • La Fonte Musica — Michele Pasotti. The Verbania video lets you see when Mauro Borgioni hands over the words to the other singers and how the string players change from bowing to plucking. The theorbo and lirone are among the colours chosen for this performance. 
  • Concerto Italiano — Rinaldo Alessandrini. The complete Eighth Book places the work among the madrigals for which Monteverdi formulated his theory of the concitato. Separate tracks make it easy to compare the musical approach to the two bouts directly. 
  • Les Arts Florissants — William Christie. The performance runs a little over eighteen minutes. Set the dawn scene beside Pasotti’s live account and hear how much time each narrator has to shift from reporting the action to reproaching Tancredi. 
  • New London Consort — Philip Pickett. With John Mark Ainsley, Andrew King and Catherine Bott, this recording makes a good comparison for the two male voices in the scene of the truce and for the way Bott’s soprano takes over the weight of the ending. 

📚 Further Reading

  • Torquato Tasso — Gerusalemme liberata, Canto XII. Read from the burning of the tower through stanza 69 to see how much the reader knows before the pursuit begins and where the episode ends in the poem.
  • Antonio Cascelli — “Place, Performance and Identity in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.” The article puts the Venetian palace room back into the performance and traces the shifting harmony and range of Clorinda’s plea in close musical detail. 
  • Jane Tylus — “‘Non basta il suono, e la voce’: Listening for Tasso’s Clorinda.” The pages on Clorinda’s voice pay particular attention to dir parea, the moment that makes the difference between the poem’s ending and the music’s ending so consequential. 

🔗 Related Works

  • Claudio Monteverdi — L’Orfeo, SV 318. In the Messenger’s scene, Eurydice’s death reaches the stage through the person who tells of it. The comparison brings out what changes when the dying figure, as Clorinda does, is given the last words herself. 
  • Sigismondo d’India — Amico, hai vinto, from the Fourth Book of Musiche. This solo setting from 1621 opens with Clorinda’s plea. The abrupt drop in the melody makes a listener feel the wound that Monteverdi has already had time to stage.
  • Tiburtio Massaino — Amico hai vinto, io ti perdon, perdona. This five-voice madrigal of 1587 sets the same stanza. Hearing a single character’s plea distributed across five voices gives a different sense of whose voice we are hearing. 
  • Francesca Caccini — La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina. The 1625 Florentine production brought song, dance and action together for an aristocratic audience. It shows another way in which early seventeenth-century music theatre could bring a world of chivalry into a room.

🎼 Closing Reflection

Night conceals from Tancredi the face he once saw beside a spring. When at last he recognises Clorinda, she has only a few words left. Monteverdi allows her to sing them herself, then lets the sound supporting her voice disappear with her.

📖 Bibliography and Sources

The analysis follows the 1638 print, with bar numbers from Mario Bolognani’s modern transcription. Reading Tasso’s first and twelfth cantos alongside the score makes it possible to trace the passage from poem to performance. The general preface and the directions printed with the work are the principal evidence for the early performance and for the markings discussed in the analysis.

Scores

Claudio Monteverdi. Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, Book VIII. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638. First edition, Basso continuo partbook, pp. 18–43. Copies from the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna and Library of Congress, digitized via IMSLP. RISM A/I M 3500.

Claudio Monteverdi. Combat[t]imento di Tancredi et Clorinda. Edited by Mario Bolognani. Rome, Edizioni Mario Bolognani, 2022, version 1.0, CM280322.

Primary Sources

Torquato Tasso. Gerusalemme liberata, Canto I, stanzas 45–47, and Canto XII, especially stanzas 42–69. ·

Claudio Monteverdi. “A chi legge” and performance directions for the Combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda, 1638. Diplomatic transcription in the Catalogo Gaspari, BB.8, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna.

Torquato Tasso. Gerusalemme conquistata, Book XV, especially stanzas 65–71.

Secondary Sources

Tim Carter. “Claudio Monteverdi: A Chronology.” Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 18, no. 1 (2012, published 2016).

Tim Carter. “Claudio Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (Venice, 1624): Misconceptions and Misinterpretations.” Symposium abstract, Polyphonic Performance Space III, Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, 2024.

Antonio Cascelli. “Place, Performance and Identity in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 2 (2018), pp. 152–188, especially 156–160 and 171–176.

Jane Tylus. “‘Non basta il suono, e la voce’: Listening for Tasso’s Clorinda.” In Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick (eds.), Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity. Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, 2021, especially pp. 273–284.

Digital Resources

Claudio Monteverdi: A Digital Text Edition. “Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.” Sung text and stanza concordance.

La Fonte Musica. La sera del Combattimento. Programme notes and the 2023 Stresa Festival performance.