Page 96 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Milan
Brescia
Mantua Venice
Cremona
Bologna
Ferrara
Florence
Rome
0 0
100
200 Kilometers 100 Miles
Naples
Figure 5.8
The major musical centers in northern Italy in the seventeenth century. Opera first developed in Florence, Mantua, and Venice.
Galilei (1564–1642), and the composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643; Figure 5.9), who can rightly be called “the father of opera.”
Although he built on the experiments of his predecessors, Monteverdi’s first opera, Or- feo (1607), is generally considered the first true example of the genre. Monteverdi wrote Orfeo while employed as a composer and string play- er at the court of Mantua, Italy, and he would continue to produce operas after moving on to the important basilica of Saint Mark in Venice in 1613. Because the aim of early opera was to reproduce elements of ancient Greek drama, Monteverdi’s plots draw upon stories from clas- sical Greek mythology, not surprisingly. Orfeo is essentially a “rescue drama.” The hero, Orfeo (Orpheus), descends into the realm of Hades (the Greek equivalent of Hell) to rescue his new bride Euridice, who has languished there since her sudden, unexpected death. To accomplish his mission, Orfeo charms and disarms hellish
demons with a singularly formidable weapon: his beautiful singing. Indeed, the theme of Orfeo is the divine power of music.
Although Monteverdi employed choruses and the occasional instrumental interlude, he conveyed the bulk of his Orfeo through monody—expressive solo song. In the hands of Monteverdi and his successors, operatic monody increas- ingly split into two distinctive types: recitative and aria. Recitative, from the Italian word recitativo (“something recited”), is musically heightened speech. Generally, an opera composer employs recitative to narrate the plot of the opera. Recitative mirrors the natural rhythms of everyday speech and thus has no per- ceptible meter or beat—you can’t tap your foot to it. In Baroque opera, recitative is accompanied only by the basso continuo. Such sparsely accompanied recita- tive is called simple recitative (recitativo semplice in Italian; also called recitativo secco, “dry recitative”). Later, in the nineteenth century, recitative accompanied by the full orchestra, called recitativo accompagnato, would become the norm.
If recitative tells us what’s going on, the aria serves to tell us what the characters are feeling, to showcase the emotional high points of the drama. An aria (Italian for “song” or “ayre”) is more passionate, more expansive, and more tuneful than a recita-
tive. Here all or part of the orchestra enters to join the basso continuo and thereby provide a strong sonic support, saying, in effect: “Listen, everyone, this solo song is an important moment!” In fact, judging from contemporary accounts, the Baroque audience usually talked during most of the recitatives and listened only during the arias. Finally, whereas a recitative often involves a rapid-fire delivery of text, an aria will work through it at a more leisurely pace; words are repeated to heighten their dramatic effect, and important vowels are extended by vocal melismas to increase their emotional power. These moments not only ex- press feeling, but are moments of musical beauty. Then as now, the audience leaves
the opera house humming, not the speech-like recitative, but the tuneful arias.
Figure 5.9
Portrait of Claudio Monteverdi by Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), who also painted Barbara Strozzi (see Figure 5.7)
74 chapter five baroque art and music
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