BOOKS: I believe in Monteverdi
Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre by Tim Carter
No good High Tory could fail to be attracted by the three eternal topics that opera deals with so uniquely well; love, power and death — not only, of course, on stage but in the audience, the theatre management and throughout the wider polity beyond. The opera house is, or should be, the temple which embodies and reflects the passions of the society in which it is embedded. If you doubt me, read any of the memoirs of the great opera managers — or even the less great ones such as Jeremy Isaacs (Never Mind the Moon, Bantam). Or look at the stir amongst cognoscenti and vested interests when Mr Portillo (for whom I must confess I have quite a soft spot — but even webzines can have resident dissidents) is touted as Intendant, or at least our watered-down British version of the post.
And it was notably ever so. Originally devised by classicising intellectuals as a means of simulating the lost melodic lines of Classic drama, opera was developed in the first years of the seventeenth century as a tool in the political armoury, to flatter the Renaissance nobility by whom it was commissioned, and raise their peer status. Anything Florence could do, Mantua could do better. The Gonzagas present at the premiere of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607, when the entire concept of opera was scarcely ten years old, were ushered in by the composer’s grandiose triple fanfare and immediately rewarded by Striggio’s libretto, as the Spirit of Music chanted, ‘I come to you from my beloved Parnassus, you renowned heroes of royal blood’.
Orfeo was still classified by its creators as a favola in musica (play with music). The librettist was considered as the principal begetter (as was to be generally the case in opera until the nineteenth century, a fact we tend to forget). One courtier, hoping he will be able to get a seat for the premiere, is quoted by Carter as confiding in a letter, ‘It should be most unusual, as all the actors are to sing their parts’. But Orfeo moves one step ahead of the more tentative experiments of opera’s Florentine pioneers by incorporating some of the more dramatic song, dance and chorus styles of the Mantuan court tradition. By the time of his death, with his last opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), Monteverdi had astonishingly brought this experimental art to something we recognize as wholly operatic — with a plot encompassing lust, betrayal, suicide, and comic asides, and articulated in recitatives, choruses, ensembles, and arias.
Free-marketeers amongst us may feel that this development was prompted by the need to provide fare which would draw paying punters in the public theatre of a republic (Venice), rather than feed the egos of Dukes at their courts. This is not the whole story, however. As a committed musical dilettante I have always set out to performances of Monteverdi’s operas out of a sense of duty, but returned with a sense of wonder. My recollection, from the ENO production a few years ago, of the scene of Orfeo crossing the Styx in mime, still evokes the authentic sense of magic of the greatest art.
The title of Monteverdi's Musical Theatre suggests an opportunity for the author, distinguished for his work on Italian baroque music, to give us an informed survey of the musical, theatrical and social background of the birth of opera. In his introduction Tim Carter raises our hopes by pointing out the need to ‘view Monteverdi in his various contexts’ and doesn’t necessarily dampen them by then immediately stating his concern with ‘the nuts and bolts of how a seventeenth-century musician might have written for, and worked within, the theatre’. But by the time we read, on page 14, that the Duchess of Mantua criticised the opera Arianna (now largely lost) as assai sciutta [quite dry] and that the librettist agreed to ‘enrich it with some action’ we are already applying these comments to the text before us.
The problem is that the reader gets the distinct impression of a salmagundi of assorted off-cuts from a variety of work by Professor Carter, some indeed very tasty, but many highly technical, if worthy. All these are interwoven in a manner which can be extremely frustrating. Thus the chapter ‘Monteverdi and his librettists’ begins promisingly. The issue of relative priority of music and words was a key debate in Monteverdi’s time — he was an early advocate of seconda practica (the primacy of text) — and has continued since, with notable contributions to the debate from Wagner amongst others. But after giving a lucid account of the principles of versification employed by Monteverdi’s librettists, and their importance, the chapter descends to a level of poetic micro-analysis which, whilst undoubtedly of interest to a handful of scholars, leave the rest of us stone-cold. Similarly, the chapter on ‘The Art of the Theatre’ contains fascinating information and comment on staging and singers, but is torpedoed for the general reader by pages of tabulated information correlating scenes, putative singers and vocal ranges in the three surviving operas. One cannot question the industry, detail and ingenuity demonstrated by Professor Carter: but one may regret that they have distracted him from giving us some more of the ‘various contexts’ which may throw light on Monteverdi’s genius, and which still need, as Professor Carter himself points out, to be explored, especially the social, political and commercial contexts.
By the last three chapters, dealing with the lost works and the last two operas, Il ritorno di Ulisse (1640) and Poppea, Professor Carter has got into a more integrated stride and we can accompany him with more ease, pleasure and reward. Substantial documentary evidence, including the composer’s own correspondence, and in many cases existing libretti, can give surprising life to works we shall never hear (unless they turn up in some dusty corner of a library) or were never completed. Monteverdi’s complaint about Agnelli’s feeble libretto Le Nozze di Tetide (1617) could serve as a locus classicus for the concept of music’s function as an imitator of nature — a concept which remained virtually unchallenged until the writings of Wackenroder, E. T. A. Hoffmann and their fellow Romantics:
How, dear Sir, can I imitate the speech of the winds, [which] do not speak? And how can I, by such means, move the passions?
In these sections Professor Carter’s considerations of how theatre audiences received the later works, and of how their texts might mirror or parallel the politics and diplomacy of Venice, at last draw in the wider perspectives that this reader, at least, was craving. Now that this work is under his belt, I hope he may feel moved to produce a text which can be based in this wider perspective for the benefit of all those interested in the origins of modern theatre and opera.
When he does so, however, I do hope the result may be free of some of those academic stylistic tics which mar this book. I don’t refer so much to Professor Carter’s evident predilection for the words ‘trope’ and ‘diegetic’, which it was, after all, the responsibility of his editor to sort out. Rather more upsetting is his frequent apparent reluctance to commit himself to an opinion. What is one to make, for example, of the following, referring to the lost works?
Without these links, if such they be, it is hard to produce a coherent account of [Monteverdi’s] development as a composer for the stage, should coherence be at all achievable or even desirable.
Monteverdi was a living intelligence, not a social construct: of course he was coherent, and it is the scholar’s responsibility to assess that coherence, not to doubt it or to even consider dismissing it. This sort of futile intellectual gesturing is suitable perhaps for French critics, but if it was ever fashionable or appropriate for proper scholarship it is surely now passè. If Professor Carter is not willing to testify to Monteverdi’s coherence, why is he wasting his time (and ours) writing a book about Monteverdi’s musical theatre? I believe in Monteverdi, and Professor Carter shouldn’t be ashamed to either. His mention, in a footnote to the above quote, that ‘the issue is explored provocatively’ in the proceedings of a convention held in Mantua in 1993, scarcely lets him off the hook.
And here’s a curiosity from the Professor Carter’s preface:
If I have not seemed to engage extensively in reading Monteverdi’s works through the prism of gender studies and other critical theories in the various manners of [three named female academics], it is not through lack of admiration for their work.
The reader is entitled to ask, well, why is it then? If these perceptions are worthy, why are they not communicated? If they are codswallop, why does Professor Carter not explicitly say so? Is he being ironic? Post-ironic? Or perhaps his comments are in themselves a trope, the statutory ransom to be paid these days by academic scholarship to political correctness.
Tim Carter, Monteverdi's Musical Theatre [Yale University Press, pp.326. £25.00]
Allen Buchler, September 30, 2002 09:47 AM