Music historian Dr. Leah Broad explores the world of Monteverdi and the formation of an entirely new genre.
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Monteverdi and the birth of opera
Travelling to Mantua in 1588, an ambassador described the city as being ‘most pleasant’ because of ‘its wealth of many beautiful and great palaces’, and ‘spacious streets, which are long and wondrously straight. It has 40,000 inhabitants’. Naturally defended by the water that both surrounded it and linked it to Northern Europe, by the sixteenth century Mantua had become a flourishing centre for culture, politics, and learning to stand alongside Florence and Rome. Under the rule of the Gonzaga family, the city had risen to prominence during the Italian Renaissance. By 1588, Vincenzo I Gonzaga was Duke of Mantua, and he was especially keen to support the arts. He was friends with the poet Torquato Tasso, patronised the painter Peter Paul Rubens and, from around 1591, employed Claudio Monteverdi as a musician at his court.
Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Monteverdi's employer (by Peter Paul Rubens, 1600)
From Monteverdi’s perspective, Mantua was an ideal place to work. He was exceedingly ambitious, and the city promised an environment that would be conducive to developing new ideas and to establishing his name as a composer. When he came into Vincenzo’s employ, he had already published four collections of vocal works – the first when he was just fifteen years old – but he was yet to achieve widespread recognition. Moving to Mantua turned out to be a wise choice. Here, Monteverdi would produce the majority of the works that have made him one of the best-known composers of this period, including L'Orfeo.
Before he turned his hand to opera, however, Monteverdi’s main focus was on madrigals – unaccompanied, secular works for vocal ensemble. Madrigals were considered the testing ground for any aspiring composer. An effective madrigal used complex polyphony while also clearly expressing the sentiment of the text, which allowed composers to develop an individual style and showcase their technical skills.
Vincenzo had employed one of Europe’s most famous madrigal composers, Giaches de Wert, as director of the formidable court ensemble of singers and instrumentalists. Wert would have an enormous influence on Monteverdi, particularly in his focus on intensity of expression. He used striking dissonances to achieve dramatic effects in his madrigals, and Monteverdi continued to expand on this technique. But dissonance was a controversial business. After publishing his third and fourth books of madrigals, Monteverdi found himself the subject of an impassioned treatise by the theorist Giovanni Artusi, arguing against the style of composition that Monteverdi represented.
In particular, Artusi was affronted by Monteverdi’s use of ‘unprepared’ dissonance – a dissonant note that is not preceded by a consonant one. Because Monteverdi’s style ultimately won out, we are now so used to hearing this kind of writing that the differences Artusi complains about seem relatively inconsequential. But to seventeenth century ears used to the rules of Renaissance polyphony, unprepared dissonances sounded both jarring and modern. This new style was, according to Artusi, ‘a cause for laughter, joking and contempt considering the madness of these men of whimsy who, thinking that their songs produce new harmony and new affect, give birth to new nausea and new contempt, because they bring in their train new confusion, given that they are full of things which confound the good and the beautiful of music’.
Ceiling fresco of the Camera degli Sposi, in the Ducal Palace, Mantua Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)
Monteverdi’s riposte to Artusi was that this new mode of composing, which he termed the ‘second practice’, was not just excusable but necessary for expressing the ideas in the texts he was setting. For Monteverdi and his followers, vocal music needed to prioritise the sentiment or ‘affect’ of the text, and this required composers to use word painting and dissonance more freely than they had in the Renaissance. Doing so also gave greater expressive freedom to the singers, who were, in the words of one of Monteverdi’s defenders, ‘the soul of music’.
These principles would be especially important for Monteverdi when he came to write his first opera, L'Orfeo. At the start of the seventeenth century, opera was still very much an emerging genre. There was no established consensus about how it should be written, and as one of the first composers to write an opera at all, Monteverdi had considerable licence to experiment with the direction that this new form would take. Only one thing was certain – that opera demanded a style of composition that foregrounded the text, so the plot could be understood even though the words were sung.
The concept of opera had first been developed by a group of humanist thinkers in Florence called the Camerata, as part of their efforts to recreate ancient Greek dramatic forms, founded on the belief that the Greeks represented the pinnacle of cultural achievement. They faced a problem, however, in that very little documentation survives that might explain what Greek drama sounded like. The Camerata concluded that Greek drama was quite likely to have been sung throughout, and from this developed the idea for what would become recitative, lying between song and speech.
Orpheus mosaic at Dominican Museum, Rottweil, Germany, 2nd c. AD
Opera evolved directly from this interest in Greek drama, and more organically from pre-existing entertainments. The improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte were influential, as were intermedi, elaborate musical interludes within spoken dramas that combined music, dance, and spectacular stage machinery, and were performed at important court occasions like weddings. Despite these precedents, though, an entirely sung drama was considered a fascinating novelty. Considering whether or not he would attend the première of L'Orfeo, one courtier wrote that he would ‘be driven to attend out of sheer curiosity’ because it was a ‘most unusual’ entertainment. After all, the first opera known to have been written (Dafne, with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Jacopo Corsi) had premiered only nine years earlier.
Early opera advocates were deeply concerned about verisimilitude, and critics expressed concern about the implausibility of having characters singing an entire text. So it wasn’t just an interest in Greek drama that prompted the majority of early opera texts to be drawn from classical mythology. It was also thought to make the continuous singing more acceptable, because it was plausible that gods would converse in ‘elevated’ speech.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice was an especially apt choice for a libretto, because it additionally provided a plot that revolved around the power of music. And Monteverdi made full use of the court instrumentalists available to him, creating an aural spectacle as much as visual. The opera opens with trumpet fanfares, and he chooses instruments for dramatic effect. Different instruments are associated with the drama’s different worlds: trombones with the underworld, for example, and recorders with the pastoral scenes.
The libretto originally concluded with Orpheus being killed by Bacchantes, but Monteverdi instead changed to a happier ending with Apollo appearing to Orpheus and the two ascending, singing, to Heaven – much more appropriate to a message about music being all-powerful. It was also prudent given that operas were often read as allegories about the ruling families and the power they held. Having the lead character meet a grisly demise probably would not have endeared Monteverdi to the Duke and his heir, Prince Francesco Gonzaga, who had commissioned the opera.
Francesco Gonzaga, who commissioned the opera - by the studio of Frans Pourbus the Younger (17th century)
L'Orfeo was premièred on 24 February 1607, with an audience made up of a musical society called the Accademia degli Invaghiti. It was, according to one attendee, ‘performed to the great satisfaction of all who heard it’. Certainly it was considered enjoyable enough to be performed again, before a much larger audience at the court. For Monteverdi, this was just the first of his operatic successes that confirmed him as one of the leading proponents of the genre. Sadly many of Monteverdi’s opera scores are now lost, including the majority of the music for his second opera L’Arianna (1608), which was at the time considered one of his greatest achievements. Nonetheless, in the music that survives we can hear the formation of an entirely new genre, led by a composer of extraordinary power.
Dr. Leah Broad is the author of Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, she is a music historian specialising in music and gender. You can find more of her writing at leahbroad.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @LeahBroad.
