Claudio Monteverdi

This article presents a reading of Gian Francesco Busenello’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea in light of seventeenth-century theatrical practices. Reconstructing the doubling plan from the opera’s premiere in 1643 on the basis of contemporary doubling practices and the correspondence of the Ferrarese music patron Marquess Cornelio Bentivoglio, the author argues, adducing circumstantial evidence, that Ottavia and Drusilla were conceived as a double role for the operatic quick-change artist Anna Renzi. While Renzi is known to have created Ottavia, this part is half the size of all other roles written for her, which invariably involve dramatic, emotional and musical variety to a much greater extent than does Monteverdi’s tragic Empress. Renzi was admired for her command of both tragedy and comedy, and the essay develops the hypothesis of the double role as an intertextual interpenetration of the title heroines from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia and Girolamo Bargagli’s sixteenth-century comedy La pellegrina.

With its combination of gestures and music, instrumental sections, a narrator who occupies most of the composition, and two characters who sing for very short sections while acting and dancing for the rest of the piece, Monteverdi's Combattimento defies genre definition. Starting from Tim Carter's reading of the composition as a salon entertainment and responding to Suzanne Cusick's call for the untangling of Combattimento's multiplicity of meanings, this article investigates Combattimento in its ritualisation and performance of mutually defining relations that are mediated by the social and ideological implications of its immediate performance space, the salon – or portego, in Venetian dialect – the main entertainment hall of Venetian palaces. Using this as a key framework, the article explores the Combattimento's associations with Venice itself as the broader performance space. Within that context, the choice of a particular episode from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata for Monteverdi's composition – with its mixture of love and violence, assimilation and confrontation, personal identity and agency, history of winners and history of victims 1 – proves as crucial to seventeenth-century Venice, at the crossroads between Western and Islamic civilisations, as it does for today's culture.

No todos los amantes suplican piedad a sus amados a fin de evitar la muerte que los amenaza si no ven correspondido su amor. Algunos vislumbran una muerte dichosa si se produce una piedad póstuma. Estas páginas intentan explorar distintas manifestaciones del motivo de la muerte dichosa del amante que espera ganar post mortem la piedad del ser amado, a fin de evaluar las posibilidades interpretativas de un poema de Bartolomeo Gottifredi, compendio de los distintos valores de este motivo afortunado.

The article reads Sigmund Freud and Claudio Monteverdi’s understanding of musicality, its affinity with rhetoric, and the way this relation informs their individual oeuvres. Both Monteverdi and Freud, each in his own way, were condemned to live with an aversion to musicality that strengthened their hermeneutics of psychic and discursive disturbance. Through the specific rhetorical figure of the musical lament found in psychoanalytical discourse, the article demonstrates the way dissonances implicate opera, the madrigal, and the talking-cure, making aporetic claims, especially in the face of Freud’s self-attestation—his resolute conviction that he was “ganz unmusikalisch”—which astonishingly matches Monteverdi’s own resistance to music.

See https://sites.google.com/view/frommadrigaltoopera/home for resources.
"This pathbreaking study links two traditionally separate genres as their stars crossed to explore the emergence of multiple selves in early modern Italian culture and society. Calcagno focuses on the works of Claudio Monteverdi, a master of both genres, to investigate how they reflect changing ideas about performance and role-playing by singers. The author traces the roots of dialogic subjectivity to Petrarch's love poetry, arguing that Petrarchism exerted a powerful influence not only on late Renaissance literature and art, but also on music. Covering more than a century of music and cultural history, the book demonstrates that the birth of opera relied on an important feature of the madrigalian tradition: the role of the composer as a narrative agent enabling performers to become characters and hold a specific point of view."

Despite recent scholarly interest in Monteverdi's Selva morale et spirituale (1641), many aspects of this large, complex print remain enigmatic, and the intended context for much of the music in the collection has long been a matter of pure conjecture. Yet two of the most anomalous features of the Selva morale, the solo motets Ab aeterno ordinata sum and Pianto della Madonna, can now be placed into the context of the Habsburg court in Vienna during the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III (1637-57). Both of these works play directly into the most important aspects of Habsburg Marian devotion. Ab aeterno is a setting of Proverbs 8:23-31, a text that although very rare for seventeenth-century motets would nonetheless have been widely understood as a celebration of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. The Pianto, a Latin contrafactum of Monteverdi's celebrated Lamento d'Arianna, would have been perfectly suited for the Habsburgs' Fifteen Mysteries Celebration, a Lenten devotion in praise of the Most Holy Rosary. Various types of evidence, including liturgical and other religious writings, Habsburg sermons, and additional musical works, support these interpretations of Monteverdi's motets and reveal their importance to the imperial court. That the composer did indeed include the motets in his print with the Habsburg court in mind is further indicated by similarities between the Selva morale and an earlier publication stemming directly from Ferdinand III's court: Giovanni Felice Sances's Motetti a voce sola of 1638.

In Convolute N, Benjamin claims that both the Arcades Project and the Trauerspielbuch reject a historiography based on the notion of periods of decline. Reflecting on the sonorous dimension of the dialectical image as presented in Convolute N, I suggest allegory as another link between the two works, which I explore in connection to sound and noise through an example from Monteverdi’s Orfeo while remarking on the role of sound in Benjamin.

The myth of Orpheus, the ancient hero who could enchant nature with his music and tried to  bring back his beloved Eurydice from Hades, consists of many different elements. There is no single original Orpheus myth, but the story gradually developed in Antiquity, over time absorbing new elements and new turns. These elements often occur separately in texts and the visual arts, but are sometimes combined in a story as well. Thus Orpheus has
become a complex figure with many aspects. This versatility is an important feature of his character, that causes his reception not to be uniform, but to take many different forms. Orpheus appears in many different types of texts, but also in the visual arts, and especially in plays and operas.
Writers, visual artists and musicians often have views on the figure of Orpheus that differ strongly and often conflict with one another. These different and conflicting views are inherent to the diversity of the figure of Orpheus. People who use Orpheus in their works, often choose between the many stories about him.
On the one hand this choice is often determined by the knowledge available: many a time a stereotipical view is copied
from predecessors in the same genre. On the other hand, some artists are familiar with more aspects of Orpheus, but appear to deliberately select only those aspects that are appropriate  for  their  argumentation.  Orpheus  is  often  seen  and  presented  either  as  a positive character or as a negative character. Amongst his positive aspects are mainly reckoned his musical and poetical qualities and his ability to tame the beasts (i.e. to civilize
human kind) with his song (eloquence). Besides, his participation in the voyage of the Argonauts and his status as a poet-theologian or philosopher are judged in a positive
manner. Amongst his negative aspects are reckoned his love of wordly goods (Eurydice) and his looking back at these things, his homosexuality and his horrible death. The attempt to unite these conflicting images of Orpheus runs through his reception in Italy between 1300 and 1600 like a continuous thread. For example,
authors tend to ignore his negative aspects  or  express  their  astonishment  about  the  irreconcilability  of  the  different
characterizations of Orpheus; in some extreme cases they adjust the outcome of the myth.
Except for the change of outcome, there are no major adjustments to the myth, like a complete change of characters, of the action or of the setting of the story in time and
space. Most changes to the image of Orpheus stem from the
possibilities which the myth as a whole offers. Many representations of Orpheus are inherent to the character itself. An author or an artist chooses from the existing possibilities and thus manipulates his own version of the myth.

This article examines the temporal structure of L’Orfeo’s prologue. An analysis of the distribution of semibreves per line of text reveals a palindrome, which reinforces long-held perceptions of symmetry in the opera. Adopting the form of strophic variations, Monteverdi carefully shapes musical time for expressive and structural purposes. He is thus able both to enact and to check music’s affective power within the context of seconda prattica. More than a conventional prologue, La Musica’s exordium stands as an emblem of both L’Orfeo and the anxiety surrounding the nascent dramma per musica.

This article analyses the way of setting lament and the theme of madness to music in the first half of the seventeenth century, on the example of the works of Claudio Monteverdi.

At that time the way of expressing states on the verge of madness was the lament as a distinctive musical form in the course of the composition.

The discussion takes as its point of departure one of the most famous examples of lament from early seventeenth century, Claudio Monteverdi’s The Nymph’s Lament – an emotional outburst by the eponymous heroine, held within bounds by a chorus of male voices. The work is analysed in its musical aspect as well as in the context of the “video clip” advertising Anna Prohaska’s album Enchanted Forest. An example of a lament by Monteverdi using other musical techniques is the monologue from the opera Arianna by its heroine, which became the model for later laments. Symbolically it presents a woman’s unsuccessful struggle for her right to individuality and the cultural role of arranged marriage. Its shape is influenced by the commedia dell’arte tradition.

The first opera directly concerned with the theme of madness is Monteverdi’s La finta pazza Licori. Also in this case inspiration came from commedia dell’arte. Even though this work was not completed, the available versions allow us to reconstruct the composer’s intentions and to show how the theme of madness came to make its appearance on operatic stages.

This is an exploration of the reception history of Monteverdi. It examines how we have thrown a grid of our own cultural concepts and meanings (on national identity, originality, creative freedom, popular styles, 'revolutionary' music in the 'modernist vein, performance practices, etc.) across his own works and attitudes. Along the way it identifies new interpretations of his Innsbruck portrait,  the concept of 'popular' music in relation to his works, the origins of 'Possente spirto' from Orfeo, and the Spanish influence on his compositional material.

This study presents the oeuvre of Adriano Banchieri, a Bolognese monk whose lifetime spanned the late Renaissance and early Baroque. Although the catalogue of his works lists no more than some fifty extant items, these are of an exceptional variety: two-thirds of them encompass almost every musical genre of Banchieri's time – sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental – as well as his writings on music theory and practice. The remaining third consists of literary works ranging from novels, satires, commedia dell'arte, letters and sacred writings, to texts on and in the Bolognese dialect.
Since its publication in 1981, this study has remained the only one to provide an extensive, detailed survey and analysis of specimens from every genre of the composer-performer-author’s output, focusing on his genuine contributions, models and examples in order to reveal their common background and to portray Banchieri's mindset as an artist and personality. Nearly all of the musical and literary specimens are published here for the first time in a modern edition.

Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.

The 1623 publication of Procopius’ Secret History shocked the scholarly world. The ancient historian’s rejection of his official account of the reign of Justinian I forced humanists to reflect on the general reliability of historical sources. The article suggests that Giovan Francesco Busenello’s libretto L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) reflects the challenge posed by Procopius’ book. Though its portrayal of historical figures adheres to Tacitus’ Annals, it plays with the possibility that even Tacitus himself was deceived by Machiavellian rulers. Did he, for example, condemn Nero and Poppaea while praising Octavia because this was the truth, or because Octavia was, in fact, a superior politician who had managed to craft a favourable epitaph for herself?

This two-day conference, exploring the connections between theatre and music in seventeenth-century Italy, was held on Thursday 20th September and Friday 21st September 2018 at the University of Cambridge.

We welcomed Prof. Richard Andrews (University of Leeds), Prof. Antonio Rostagno (Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’), and Dr Lisa Sampson (University College London) as our keynote speakers.

The conference programme included a Commedia dell’Arte acting workshop with director Ludovico Nolfi and a fully-staged performance of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) in Clare College Chapel. Both events were free and open to the public.

More details on the conference website: www.intersectionsconferencecambridge2018.wordpress.com

Follow us on Twitter @SeicentoCam!

A comienzos del s. XVII, el creciente interés por comunicar emociones a través de la música contribuyó al abandono de la polifonía y al surgimiento de la monodía acompañada. En las obras vocales, este nuevo estilo de composición fortaleció la relación entre música y texto, volviéndolos sumamente interdependientes. A menudo, esta relación es tan estrecha que su estudio contribuye a una mejor comprensión de la intencionalidad expresiva y a la elaboración de una iterpretación declamatoria (especialmente, de las primeras monodías). Sin embargo, la aplicación de estos conocimientos al estudio de la música vocal suele circunscribirse a contextos reducidos de enseñanza y práctica musicales (clases, ensayos, talleres, etc.), lo que dificulta su divulgación. Con el objeto de contribuir al estudio de la música antigua, presentamos un estudio de la relación entre música y texto en la obra Quel sguardo sdegnosetto de Claudio Monteverdi y su síntesis para una propuesta de interpretación declamatoria. Además, brindamos materiales que ‒esperamos‒ puedan asistir en el proceso de aprendizaje: análisis poético del texto, traducción al español, transcripción fonémica, requisitos para su correcta dicción y edición crítica.

Pryer, Anthony J.. November 2012. Claudio Monteverdi: Sacrae Cantiunculae; Madrigali Spirituali; Canzonette a 3 Voci. Cremona (Italy): Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi. ISBN 9788886288361.

This edition brings together the three earliest printed collections of music in Claudio Monteverdi’s output – the Sacrae Cantiunculae (1582), the Madrigali Spirituali (1583) and the Canzonette a tre voci (1584). The Sacrae Cantiunculae have never been presented before with a full liturgical commentary, the Madrigali Spirituali have hitherto only appeared in facsimile and without a commentary, and the Canzonette have never been edited so as to display all of the stanzas of the texts underlayed to the music, and with a flexible system of barring that takes proper account of the accentuation of the Italian words. Additionally, these new transcriptions correct numerous notational and textual errors in two earlier editions (1909, 1939), and a substantial ‘Introduction’ provides important new information on the creative context and performance of these items. These collections were clearly designed to demonstrate the precocious ability of the young Monteverdi (he was just fifteen years old in 1582), covering as they do three important, contrasting musical genres – the motet, the spiritual madrigal, and the canzonetta. Moreover, they all date from Monteverdi’s years in Cremona, and the printers, publishers and patrons involved reveal interesting details about exactly how he gained entry to the professional world of music.

Matsumoto, Naomi. 2011. Pio Enea degli Obizzi and the Opera Torneo Genre – Towards an Understanding of the Commercialisation of Early Italian Opera’. The Journal of the Musicological Society of Japan, lvii(1), pp. 56-68. ISSN 00302597

http://www.musicology-japan.org/publish/v57/Matsumoto.pdf

No Combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda – drama musical composto por Cláudio Monteverdi sobre o trecho da Jerusalém Libertada de Torquato Tasso – se materializam os resultados das importantes pesquisas formais empreendidas por ambos, respectivamente nos campos da música e da poesia, e alicerçadas na releitura da Poética de Aristóteles. À luz dos textos teóricos dos dois autores tentamos mostrar a maneira pela qual se encarnam, nesta obra plena de implicações estéticas e históricas, as etapas de um processo de mutação que conduz de uma concepção poética tardo-renascentista à consolidação de uma estética barroca.

Dans le "Combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda" – drame en musique composé par Claudio Monteverdi sur un extrait de la Jérusalem Délivrée du Tasse – se matérialisent les résultats des recherches formelles entreprises par ces deux auteurs, dans les domaines respectivement musical et poétique, fondées sur la lecture de la Poétique d’Aristote. Nous essayons de montrer ici, à la lumière de leurs écris théoriques, la manière selon laquelle s’incarnent, dans cet oeuvre chargée d’enjeux esthétiques et historiques, les étapes d’un processus de mutation qui conduit d’une conception renaissante de la poétique à la consolidation d’une esthétique baroque.

A survey of the main aspects of  musical patronage in 17th-
century Venice  – those linked, respectively,  to the ruling class, the printing industry and the  theatrical  entrepreneurship –  in the light of  the author’s views on musical patronage  in early modern Italy and  on the basis of letters from  Monteverdi’s and  Carissimi’s epistolaries. Because of an exceeding number of misprints  an ad hoc  list of errata is appended to the  offprint uploaded below.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) constitutes a unique source for understanding Venetian norms concerning the nature of marriage, love, and the emergence of public opera as a popular form of entertainment in 17th-century Venice.  Monteverdi’s first foray into public opera demonstrates the composer’s ability to adapt to shifting expectations from the audience while fulfilling his own personal aesthetic.  This study seeks to understand the plurality of meanings embodied in a particular character, Queen Penelope, in an effort to recover period listening practices and receptions of operatic character.  In the historiography of Il ritorno studies, Penelope acquires a degree of autonomy more closely correlated to her Homeric counterpart than her textual and musical treatment suggests.  Augmented by an investigation of the social conditions and aesthetic shifts of the time, a study of Penelope’s music in its dramatic contexts reveals a systematic objectification of her character.  By examining these representations as deliberate actions of the composer, one concludes that the opera focuses on women as objectified symbols worthy of pity rather than representatives of chastity, prudence, or constancy.

The lecture is intended primarily to provide a systematic analysis of the genesis of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and then, to consider the ways the text was copied and published. The author demonstrates the methodological uncertainties of L’Orfeo’s modern editions, the existence of loss sources and the links between the existing ones, as well as the inconsistency of many musicological myths related to score. He especially seeks to demonstrate the unsustainability of the hypothesis concerning the presence of music by Monteverdi for the last scene instead of the existing in the Amadino printed scores.
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Lo studio si propone anzitutto di fornire una analisi sistematica della genesi de L’Orfeo di Claudio Monteverdi, della storia del suo testo e delle modalità di trasmissione dello stesso, ricostruendo non solo le vicende di testimoni perduti e i legami tra quelli esistenti, ma anche dimostrando le aporie metodologiche presenti nelle moderne edizioni dell’opera, oltre che l’infondatezza di molti miti musicologici legati alla partitura. In particolare si cerca di dimostrare l’insostenibilità dell’ipotesi della presenza di un finale “bacchico” come originariamente musicato da Monteverdi in loco di quello presente nelle stampe Amadino.

Orpheus and Eurydice’s myth has inspired many composers and librettists since Renaissance until present times, and was at the birth of one of the first known operas, the Euridice by J. Peri and G. Caccini. In this paper the author studies the influence of this myth in two of the most significant operas of modern repertoire: L’Orfeo by C. Monteverdi, and Orfeo ed Euridice by C. W. Gluck, bearing in mind the classical version established by Ovid and Virgil. Each opera has two distinct purposes: Monteverdi and Striggio’s work reflects a diligent care about the Classical World and its conceptions; Gluck and Cazalbigi’s effort is to use the myth’s text as a pretext for singing an overwhelming passion.

O presente artigo trata de questões referentes à linguagem harmônica da obra de Claudio Monteverdi, seus
procedimentos harmônicos e decorrentes movimentações melódicas, sua utilização como recurso dramatúrgico e
suas possíveis significações alegóricas, tomando por base diversas teorias de modos nos séculos XVI e XVII. Num
primeiro momento, aborda a questão das diversas nomenclaturas e significados dos modos e suas possíveis referências alegóricas de acordo com autores diversos. Num segundo momento, apresenta a análise de dois trechos de suas
óperas, que tratam da representação da morte de Eurídice e Clorinda (Orfeo & Il combattimento de Tancredi e Clorinda,respectivamente), relacionando os procedimentos harmônicos às duas situações dramatúrgicas.

Abstract: The Representation of Feminine Death in L’Orfeo and Il Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda by Claudio Monteverdi
Abstract: This paper refers to issues related to the harmonic language of Claudio Monteverdi, its harmonic procedures and resulting melodic movements, its use as a dramaturgical resource and its potential allegorical meanings,
based on theories and classifications of modes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At first, it approaches the
matter of the multiple names and meanings of the modes and their potential allegorical references according to different authors. Secondly, it presents the analysis of two examples from his operas that deal with the representation of
the death of Euridice and Clorinda (Orfeo & Il combattimento de Tancredi e Clorinda, respectively), correlating their
harmonic procedures to the corresponding dramaturgical situations.