Claudio Monteverdi on Music Theory Print

Frederica von Stade chante Monteverdi & Cavalli

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recording#

The first version of the album was digitally recorded in July 1984 in the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh. The Mozart arias on the second version of the album were recorded using analogue technology in May 1977 in the Palais de la Musique et des Congrès, Strasbourg.

Packaging#

The cover of the first version of the album was designed by Daniel et Compagnie, and features a photograph of von Stade taken by her then husband, Peter Elkus. The cover of the second version of the album was designed by Thierry Cohen, and features a photograph of von Stade taken by Colette Masson.

Il ballo delle ingrate

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Synopsis#

The stage shows the mouth of the Underworld. Venus and Cupid visit Pluto, King of the Underworld, and complain that the arrows from Cupid’s bow are no longer effective on the women of Mantua, who are scorning their lovers. Cupid asks Pluto to bring the spirits of women who rejected love up from the Underworld to show what fate awaits them in the afterlife. Pluto agrees and the spirits of the “female ingrates” enter and dance “two by two…with grave steps” as Pluto sings a warning to the women in the audience. As said ingrates return to the underworld, one of them sings a lament regretting she must leave the “pure and serene air.”

Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

The libretto is drawn from Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered)., Canto XII, 52–62, 64–68), a chivalric romance set against the backdrop of the First Crusade, when Godfrey of Bouillon and his allies conquered Jerusalem. Monteverdi composed it for the 1624 Carnival of Venice when it was first performed in the palace of Girolamo Mocenigo. The plot is about a Christian knight, Tancredi, and a Saracen girl, Clorinda, who are lovers, but meet in battle not recognizing each other because their faces are covered by armour. Tancredi hits Clorinda mortally, and realizes only after removing her helmet who she is. He baptizes her before she dies, and she sees Heaven opening. A narrator ( – ’text’) tells about most of the action, but the combatants should also act. Il combattimento was printed in 1638, with several other pieces in Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals which were written over a period of many years.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historical context#

Monteverdi was an established court composer in the service of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua when he wrote his first operas, L’Orfeo and L’Arianna, in the years 1606–08. After falling out with Vincenzo’s successor, Duke Francesco Gonzaga, Monteverdi moved to Venice in 1613 and became director of music at St Mark’s Basilica, a position he held for the rest of his life. Alongside his steady output of madrigals and church music, Monteverdi continued to compose works for the stage, though not actual operas. He wrote several ballets and, for the Venice carnival of 1624–25, Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (“The Battle of Tancred and Clorinda”), a hybrid work with some characteristics of ballet, opera and oratorio. In 1637 fully-fledged opera came to Venice with the opening of the Teatro San Cassiano. Sponsored by the wealthy Tron family, this theatre was the first in the world specifically devoted to opera. The theatre’s inaugural performance, on 6 March 1637, was L’Andromeda by Francesco Manelli and Benedetto Ferrari. This work was received with great enthusiasm, as was the same pair’s La Maga fulminata the following year. In rapid succession three more opera houses opened in the city, as the ruling families of the Republic sought to express their wealth and status by investing in the new musical fashion. At first, Monteverdi remained aloof from these activities, perhaps on account of his age (he was over 70), or perhaps through the dignity of his office as maestro di capella at St. Mark’s. Nevertheless, an unidentified contemporary, commenting on Monteverdi’s silence, opined that the maestro might yet produce an opera for Venice: “God willing, one of these nights he too will step onto the stage.” This remark proved prescient; Monteverdi’s first public contribution to Venetian opera came in the 1639–40 carnival season, a revival of his L’Arianna at the Teatro San Moisè. L’Arianna was followed in rapid succession by three brand new Monteverdi operas, of which Il ritorno was the first. The second, Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia (“The Marriage of Aeneas to Lavinia”), was performed during the 1640–41 carnival; Monteverdi’s music is lost, but a copy of the libretto, of unknown authorship, survives. The last of the three, written for the 1642–43 carnival, was L’incoronazione di Poppea (“The Coronation of Poppea”), performed shortly before the composer’s death in 1643.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Raymond Leppard recording)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background and recording#

During 1–26 June 1979, the album’s soloists, chorus, orchestra and conductor gave ten performances of the opera at Glyndebourne. (Glyndebourne’s staging was produced by Peter Hall and revived by Patrick Libby, with sets and costumes designed by John Bury and lighting designed by Robert Bryan.) The album was recorded using analogue technology on 4–22 June 1979 in the Henry Wood Hall, London. The performing score used in the making of the album was Leppard’s own edition of 1972, in which some of Monteverdi’s music is discarded, music of Leppard’s own composition interpolated and Monteverdi’s orchestration greatly enriched.

L'Arianna

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historical context#

Claudio Monteverdi (born in Cremona in 1567) began playing viol at the Mantuan court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga around 1590. Over the next decade he rose to become the duke’s . Meanwhile, musical theatre underwent innovation: Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, often cited as the first opera, debuted in Florence in 1598. The duke quickly saw this new musical genre’s potential, including the prestige it could bring sponsors. As part of his duties to the Gonzaga court, Monteverdi was often required to compose or arrange music for staged performances. These works included a fully-fledged opera, L’Orfeo, written to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio the Younger and presented before the court on 24 February 1607. This performance pleased the duke, who ordered a repeat showing for 1 March. A contemporary account records that the piece “could not have been done better … The music, observing due propriety, serves the poetry so well that nothing more beautiful is to be heard anywhere”. Monteverdi was then required to write several pieces for performance at the wedding of the duke’s son and heir Francesco to Margaret of Savoy, planned for early May 1608. These included a musical prologue for Battista Guarini’s play L’idropica and a setting of the dramatic ballet Il ballo delle ingrate (“Dance of the Ungrateful Ladies”), with a text by Ottavio Rinuccini. There was also to be an opera, though it was not initially certain that Monteverdi would provide this. Other works under consideration were Peri’s Le nozze di Peleo e Tetide (“The marriage of Peleus and Thetis”) with a libretto by Francesco Cini, and a new setting of Dafne by Marco da Gagliano. In the event, the former was rejected and the latter designated for performance at the 1607–08 Carnival. The duke decreed that the wedding opera should be based on the myth of Arianna (Ariadne), and that Rinuccini should write the text. Monteverdi was instructed to provide the music.

L'incoronazione di Poppea

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historical context#

Opera as a dramatic genre originated around the turn of the 17th century, although the word itself was not in use before 1650. Precursors of musical drama included pastoral plays with songs and choruses, and the madrigal comedies of the late 16th century. Monteverdi had already established himself as a leading composer of madrigals before writing his first full-length operas in the years 1606–08, while he was in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. These works, L’Orfeo and L’Arianna, deal respectively with the Greek myths of Orpheus and Ariadne. After a disagreement in 1612 with Vincenzo’s successor, Duke Francesco Gonzaga, Monteverdi moved to Venice to take up the position of director of music at St Mark’s Basilica, where he remained until his death in 1643. Amid his official duties at Venice, Monteverdi maintained an interest in theatrical music and produced several stage works, including the substantial Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (The battle of Tancred and Clorinda) for the 1624–25 carnival. When the first public opera house in the world opened in Venice in 1637, Monteverdi, by then in his 70th year, returned to writing full-scale opera. He may have been influenced by the solicitations of Giacomo Badoaro, an aristocratic poet and intellectual who sent the elderly composer the libretto for Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (The return of Ulysses). For the 1639–40 carnival season, Monteverdi revived L’Arianna at the Teatro San Moisè and later produced his setting of Il ritorno at the Teatro San Cassiano. Busenello had worked with Monteverdi’s younger contemporary Francesco Cavalli, providing the libretto for Didone (1641), and according to theatre historian Mark Ringer was “among the greatest librettists in the history of opera”. It is unclear how and when Busenello met Monteverdi, though both had served in the Gonzaga court. Ringer speculates that they drew joint inspiration from their experiences of the Gonzaga style of rule, “a mixture of artistic cultivation and brutality”, and thus developed a shared artistic vision.

L'Orfeo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historical background#

Claudio Monteverdi, born in Cremona in 1567, was a musical prodigy who studied under Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di cappella (head of music) at Cremona Cathedral. After training in singing, string playing and composition, Monteverdi worked as a musician in Verona and Milan until, in 1590 or 1591, he secured a post as suonatore di vivuola (viola player) at Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga’s court at Mantua. Through ability and hard work Monteverdi rose to become Gonzaga’s maestro della musica (master of music) in 1601. Vincenzo Gonzaga’s particular passion for musical theatre and spectacle grew from his family connections with the court of Florence. Towards the end of the 16th century innovative Florentine musicians were developing the intermedio—a long-established form of musical interlude inserted between the acts of spoken dramas—into increasingly elaborate forms. The Gonzaga court had a long history of promoting dramatic entertainment. A century before Duke Vincenzo’s time the court had staged Angelo Poliziano’s lyrical drama La favola di Orfeo, at least half of which was sung rather than spoken. More recently, in 1598 Monteverdi had helped the court’s musical establishment produce Giovanni Battista Guarini’s play Il pastor fido, described by theatre historian Mark Ringer as a “watershed theatrical work” which inspired the Italian craze for pastoral drama. On 6 October 1600, while visiting Florence for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to King Henry IV of France, Duke Vincenzo attended the premiere of Peri’s Euridice.

Lost operas by Claudio Monteverdi

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Monteverdi’s creative life covered more than 50 years. Between 1590 and 1612 he served as a musician in the Gonzaga court in Mantua, followed by 30 years (1613–43) as maestro di capella at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. This timespan saw opera develop, from its beginnings as a limited form of court entertainment, to become part of the mainstream of public musical theatre. Before the Italian word “opera”—short for opera in musica (“musical work”)—came into general use around 1634, musical stage works were typically termed favola in musica (musical fable), dramma in musica (musical drama), or tragedia in musica (“musical tragedy”); Monteverdi used these and similar descriptions for many of his early operatic projects. The first work now generally considered as an opera is Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1597, closely followed by Euridice (1600), for which Peri and Giulio Caccini wrote separate musical settings. Ottavio Rinuccini was the librettist for both Dafne and Euridice. In the new genre a complete story was told through characters, and in addition to choruses and ensembles, the vocal parts included recitative, aria and arioso. This was a development from various older forms of musical theatre that had existed since the earliest years of the Italian Renaissance; such forms included the maschera (“masque”), the ballo (a dance entertainment, often with sung passages), and particularly the intermedio or intermezzo, a short dramatic musical episode inserted as a prologue or entr’acte between the acts of straight plays. Another format in the later renaissance period was the torneo, or “tournament”, a stylised dramatic spectacle in which the main singing was performed by a narrator. Sub-operatic forms of dramatic music continued to thrive as opera itself developed; the blurred boundaries that existed for many years between these forms and “opera” has led to debate about how to categorise some works. For example, the precise genre of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) has proved particularly difficult to define. Monteverdi’s first acknowledged opera is L’Orfeo (1607). He composed, in all, 24 works for the stage. Of these, ten are usually classified as operas, of which the music for seven has been lost apart from a few fragments. Most of what is known about the missing works comes from surviving librettos and other documentation, including Monteverdi’s own extensive correspondence. Tim Carter, a leading Monteverdi scholar, suggests that the high rate of loss is explicable because, in Monteverdi’s times, “memories were short and large-scale musical works often had limited currency beyond their immediate circumstances”.

Selva morale e spirituale

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Selva morale e spirituale was Monteverdi’s “most significant anthology of liturgical works since the Vespers in 1610”. The collection of various works in different instrumentation was published in Venice in 1640 and 1641. While the 1610 publication summarizes Monteverdi’s sacred works written for Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, Selva morale e spirituale presents works composed at San Marco, Venice, where Monteverdi had served since 1613. The collection was dedicated to Eleonora Gonzaga and published by Bartolomeo Magni. The date in the original title is 1640, but the process of publishing lasted until 1641.

Vespro della Beata Vergine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Monteverdi in Mantua#

Monteverdi, who was born in Cremona in 1567, was a court musician for the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua from 1590 to 1612. He began as a viol player under Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga and advanced to become maestro della musica in late 1601. He was responsible for the duke’s sacred and secular music, in regular church services and soirées on Fridays, and for extraordinary events. While Monteverdi was court musician in Mantua, the opera genre emerged, first as entertainment for nobility, to become public musical theatre later. The first work now considered as an opera is Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1597. In the new genre, a complete story was told through characters; as well as choruses and ensembles, the vocal parts included recitative, aria, and arioso. Monteverdi’s first opera was L’Orfeo, which premiered in 1607. The duke was quick to recognise the potential of this new musical form for bringing prestige to those willing to sponsor it. Monteverdi wrote the movements of the Vespers piece by piece, while responsible for the ducal services which were held at the Santa Croce chapel at the palace. He completed the large-scale work in 1610. He possibly composed the Vespers aspiring to a better position, and the work demonstrates his abilities as a composer in a great variety of styles. The setting was Monteverdi’s first published sacred composition after his initial publications nearly thirty years before and stands out for its assimilation of both the old and the new styles .