Gran Miracol d’Amore – Maddalena Casulana (c.1544-c.1590)

Posted on by stmaggiep

This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of our parish magazine. Here it is for you again:

Many readers will know that I attend Sing for Pleasure (SfP) conductor training events regularly, and it was as an Advanced student at the 2025 summer school that I was introduced to a set of utterly beautiful madrigals by Maddalena Casulana.  She was musically active composing and playing music from 1566-1583 and was the first woman to have her madrigals printed and published.

Very little is known about her. She was an Italian composer, lutenist and singer. Her patron was Isabella de Medici, daughter of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. Casulana had at least two husbands (the first left her destitute) and two children. She wrote and performed to please her patron – a humanist – and to earn a living.

Madrigals are a secular vocal genre of music, popular during the Renaissance. The lyrics were based on poetry, and they were usually performed a cappella and in polyphonic texture. Not so for this one! Whilst there is a highly secular reading of the poem, I chose to focus on an entirely sacred reading. It is mainly homophonic and was written and published in 1570. Here is the original ‘old’ Italian text and a poetic translation:

Gran miracolo d’amore, quell che uccide, Da vita e in un sis face, L’alma s’avviv’ e more, Che, mentre essser[e] piu vita le dipiace, Tal di morete ha desio Che di lui vive, e in lui mor’ella e io.Great miracle of love, that which kills,   Gives life and at once undoes it, The soul is revived and dies, For, while being more in life displeases her,   Such is her desire for death That through him she lives, and in Him she and I die.

Whenever musical directors (conductors) approach a new song, we are always led by the text. This informs creative decisions regarding musical interpretation – but first we need to understand what the composer/lyricist is saying! It me took some days to get to grips with the meaning of the poem, even after enlisting the help of a friendly high school English teacher. It wasn’t until I realised a few days later again that the Italian word for ‘soul’, ‘alma’, is a feminine noun and thus has she/her pronouns, that the meaning finally dropped into place:

  • Love = Divine Love, possibly Christ. Divine love kills death and grants eternal life.
  • The soul’s death and revival mirror mystical union — the annihilation of the self in divine presence.
  • The desire for death is not suicidal, but a longing to be consumed by God, common in works by mystics like Hadewijch, Angela of Foligno, or John of the Cross.
  • “Through him [Christ] she [the soul] lives” = salvation, or spiritual life, through Christ.
  • “In him she and I die” = union in Christ; self and soul (feminine noun in Italian) vanish in God’s presence.

This poem is not at all morbid: the speaker and her soul both yearn for transcendent unity with Christ:

Great miracle of love, that which kills,

Gives life and at once undoes it,

The soul is revived and dies,

For, while being more in life displeases her [my soul],

Such is her [my soul’s] desire for death

That through him [Christ] she [my soul] lives, and in Him she [my soul] and I die.

Interpretations of courtly/romantic love are also possible, but my artistic decision was to go with the spiritual, as it spoke more to me, and female composers of the renaissance era (those not bound for life by religious orders) may well have been prevented from writing sacred music. For Casulana, working for the Medicis (who were contemporaries of, and similar in stature to, the Borgias), there will also have been a blurring between the sacred, secular, and power in both worlds.

SfP gave us scores that used original notation, so note lengths are double what we would expect to see in music today. This means that the tempo is actually faster than a cursory glance at the sheet music might suggest. Furthermore, there were no dynamic markings. Musicians at that time would have just known how loudly or softly to sing the music. 500 years later, my decisions regarding dynamics and phrasing were all informed by the text. As mentioned above, there is barely any polyphony; it is only used to emphasise the word “vive”, life. Rhythmic decoration is used in the bass part to emphasise “avive”, revives/lives, and in the alto part to emphasise “dipiace”, displeases. The enormity of the last three lines is emphasised by the repetition of them in full in the music, giving an overall ABB structure.

There are very few recordings of Casulana’s madrigals, but you might enjoy these:

Carol P

Leave a comment