An evening of opera?

“A cause for laughter, jokes and jibes, considering the madness of these men of whimsy [like Monteverdi, Ed.] who, thinking that their songs produce new harmony and new effects, merely create new nausea and new jibes!”

Nausea? That is some accusation! But Monteverdi was unperturbed. Contravene the laws of music? He saw nothing wrong in that. Sharp dissonances? Unexpected melodic leaps? Abrupt rhythmic contrasts? Monteverdi believed anything was possible, just so long as it served to strengthen the sentiment expressed in the text. “Music is the servant of the text, and the text is the mistress”, wrote the self-assured composer in the foreword to his fifth book of madrigals. The seconda prattica – as he dubbed his alternative way of composing music – was a new style and one that marked a departure from the earlier renaissance practice, the prima prattica. Not that Monteverdi was unable to appreciate and enjoy well-balanced, classic polyphony. Quite the reverse, in fact. But he believed in the need for another register: music should be allowed to speak. It had to be able to capture the heart directly, through the text and the meaning of the words.

Florentine friends

Monteverdi was not the first to experiment with opera – or what would become opera. The groundwork had been laid by a group of enthusiastic humanists from Florence who, fascinated by the great emotional impact ancient Greek drama must have had at the time, were intent on reviving it. They believed that the scripts of the old tragedies were not spoken but sung. So what would they have sounded like? The Florentine friends imagined a singing style somewhere between singing and speaking. Clearly intelligible and yet different, more intense and enchanting than ordinary spoken language. Was it possible to sing while speaking or speak while singing?

Favola in musica

When Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was first published in1607, he had been working for the princely Gonzagas in Mantua for many years. Initially as a gamba player with the large group of court musicians and from1601 as maestro di cappella. By that time, he had more than won his spurs for his collections of madrigals, which found ready publishers and were snapped up by music lovers all over Europe. But a complete sung drama? That was a different matter altogether. Its first performance attracted a good deal of attention, as exemplified by this nobleman writing to his brother:

“Tomorrow the Prince is to sponsor a play in one of the apartments at the palace. It should be most unusual, as all the actors are to sing their parts; it is said on all sides that it will be a great success. No doubt I shall be driven to attend out of sheer curiosity, unless I am prevented from getting in by the lack of space.”

It was no accident that Monteverdi chose a mythological subject for his first musical tale – favola in musica, as the composer himself called it. For surely the audience would find it more logical that the gods rather than ordinary mortals expressed themselves in song? Equal thought was given to the choice of the myth of Orpheus. A story about the spellbinding power of music? What better endorsement for Monteverdi’s musical experiment!

Monteverdi pulled out all the stops to heighten Orpheus’ magical aura. The Duke of Mantua’s full orchestra was in attendance: a fanfare of trumpets in the festive opening ritornello (track 1), recorders representing the charming pastoral scenes (track 2), trombones and the dark colour of the regal (a type of organ) for the terrifying underworld (track 3).

In Monteverdi’s stirring musical drama, long passages in the new, narrative singing style were interspersed with instrumental dances, simple songs with repeated strophes, choruses and dramatic instrumental interludes. There are also moments when Monteverdi allowed nothing to stand in the way of the singing itself. This is best exemplified by the key aria Possente spirto (track 4) with which Orpheus manages to win over the keeper of the underworld. Monteverdi demonstrated Orpheus’ musical powers of persuasion with a mesmerizing virtuoso vocal line and dramatic echo effects in the strings and the cornetts.

Venice

A year after his l’Orfeo, Monteverdi brought another new musical drama into the world, l’Arianna. Though an instant success, sadly the score has been lost, apart from the widely-known Lamento d’Arianna, Ariadne’s Lament. After that, feeling overworked and underpaid in Mantua, in 1613 Monteverdi found a new musical destination: Venice. There he became kapellmeister, a prestigious position he held until his death. While his main duty was composing sacred music for the Basilica of St Mark, noble families, who he counted among his friends, would also commission the occasional ‘theatrical something’. But a new opera? No, he had been there and done that. Until…

1637, a defining moment in operatic history with the introduction of an enterprising new business model. During the 1637 Carnival period, the first public opera houses in Venice opened their doors to the paying public for “an evening of opera”. The then seventy-year-old Monteverdi looked on with great interest and decided to chance his luck. Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) and l’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), along with the now lost Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia (1642), are the result of that fortunate gamble.

Entertainment!

These new operas differed substantially from Monteverdi’s earlier dramatic works. Whereas l’Orfeo was performed for a select audience of noblemen, the new operas were staged for a paying public seeking value for money. They wanted entertainment: an exciting story, a mix of serious and comic elements, unexpected twists and turns involving fancy-dress and disguises and, as the cherry on the cake, a bloody fight. Monteverdi took it all in his stride.

While the narrative singing style was still the main ingredient in Monteverdi’s late operas, he gradually added more variation. For the first time, in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, he coupled different musical styles with the different characters. The narrative style was reserved mainly for the gods and the allegorical figures, while the dramatic lamento, familiar to us from l’Arianna, was the preserve of the human protagonists. Strophic songs went to the more comical secondary characters. Stammering, laughing and crying completed the musical picture. So Monteverdi created a lively rollercoaster of textures and the paying public experienced not a moment of boredom!

Character profile

At the very end of his life, Monteverdi took his venture into the world of commercial opera a step further with l’Incoronazione di Poppea. Librettist Gian Francesco Busenello served him a deliciously unscrupulous historical subject: a gripping story of desire, treachery and death – and love, that too – with convincing dialogues and three-dimensional characters. Monteverdi responded to the challenge, finding ways of making the characters equally multifaceted musically. There is not a single flat character in this opera: sometimes they are good, sometimes bad, at times fake and at times genuine. Which parts of the score were actually written by Monteverdi is unclear, but in all probability he collaborated with several younger librettists. However, there is no doubt that with Poppea he raised the young opera genre to adulthood. Thank you very much, Monteverdi.

Translation: Alison Mouthaan