Of the madrigals in Book 2, the ones that consistently demonstrate Monteverdi's progressive bent are his settings of poems by Torquato Tasso, of which this is one. On the surface it behaves in many ways like a traditional madrigal, but one soon notices how radically simplified the components of the polyphony actually are. Harmony has come to the forefront of the composer's mind. It is harmony that now governs the interactions of the lines rather than the other way around. It is not a mere paring down of renaissance technique; the trade of one ideal for another is perfectly successful, nothing is left wanting. The new tonal clarity, pushing hungrily toward the Baroque, and the vividness of color fill whatever gaps may be left by the loss of more elaborate part writing. In any case, the old style had already reached its zenith in the works of the elder masters; there was little or nothing anyone, even a genius like Monteverdi, could add to that without fundamentally changing the way the music was composed.

Crudel, perchè mi fuggi? is lovingly haunted by the reappearences of the top voices, though it begins with a bass/tenor cry: "Cruel!" Once the sweet high voices enter (on the next statement) their presence honeys the anguished body of the music. It's the handling of color that makes it so: hearing the trade of motifs between the women's voices and the men's, we understand that the lines were composed to sound best in the top register. Monteverdi withholds and delivers this savoury delight, a dialectic of "great" and "even better!," in just the right way, producing a welcome, discreet form of amorous torture. Oxymoron was central to the whole sensibility at play in composing and listening to madrigals; "bittersweet" applies to so many of these works, for even in articulating the sharpest, darkest pain the ultimate aim of the madrigal is sensual pleasure, and the sound of bold voices singing in the young Monteverdi's harmony is one of the truest and most beautiful in music, no matter what grief they are ostensibly articulating.

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