The Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna is like mecca for scholars of 17th century music. It houses the collection of the renowned 18th century composer, teacher and scholar Giovanni Battista Martini, known as ‘Padre Martini’. Most of his massive collection of music prints (estimated by Dr. Burney at over 17,000 volumes) was donated to the Civico Museo on his death.

Of special interest to me was of course the original partbooks of Cozzolani’s 1650 collection Salmi a Otto Voci Concertati, a complete recording of which Magnificat recently released. While I have become intimately familiar with facsimiles of these partbooks, I have never had the opportunity to actually handle them, but thanks to the kind assistance of librarian Alfredo Vitolo, I was able to do so.

I was struck anew by the small format of 17th century prints – paper was expensive! As the photo shows the stack of nine partbooks was very compact indeed. The photo of the title page of the Canto Primo partbook shows the red lettering lost in scans and microfilms.

While at the Civico Meseo I also had the opportunity to examine first prints of publications by Isabella Leonarda and Barbara Strozzi as well as Orazio Vecchi’s L’Amfiparnaso – all music that Magnificat will perform in the coming season.

I also viewed the sole surviving partbook from Cozzolani’s collection of solo motets Scherzi di sacra melodia (1648). Over the past decade, Magnificat has supplied basso continuo parts for five of these motets for performance.

More photos of the partbaook for both the 1648 and 1650 collection can be viewed in the photo gallery.

[View with PicLens]

Magnificat at Grace Cathedral

Last weekend I had the privilege of sharing Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine of 1610 with an extraordinary assembly of musicians and three engaged and appreciative audiences. I have often said that the most wonderful  thing about directing Magnificat is that I get the best spot in the hall to experience fine artists at work and that was definitely the case in these concerts.

When I eventually got home from the Grace Cathedral on Sunday, I opened the laptop to check the Inbox and was greeted with the familiar pop-up window “You are now running on reserve battery.” My initial response was “No kidding!,” a response to which anyone coming off a production like the 1610 Vespers could relate. But it also got me thinking about the ‘rhythm’ of vespers how eloquently Monteverdi embroiders that rhythm and ‘recharges the batteries’ as the vespers moves from one multi-layered text to another.

After an audacious tutti opening acclamation that announces the commencement of vespers, Monteverdi sets about painting the five psalms proper to Feasts of the Blessed Virgin, with their mystical, often ambiguous and orthogonal verses so well suited to the Seicento composer’s fascination with color and word painting. Each of the psalm settings is a tightly controlled and sensitive reading of the text and they collectively present the listener with a complex matrix for contemplation. Monteverdi fills these psalms (and the non-liturgical sacri concenti interpolated between them) with a panoply of the most modern virtuosic operatic and madrigalian styles while ingeniously  grounding each in the ancient psalm tones to  provides an harmonic scaffolding as well as motivic and architectural coherence.

After the sheer intensity of the five psalms, some release is necessary and the inclusion of the metrical strophic poetry of a hymn aptly serves this purpose. The hymn was a later addition to the vespers, becoming part of the liturgy centuries after the 6th century Rule of St. Benedict, which had established the basic structure vespers. Monteverdi’s re-introduction of the instruments at this point (they had been silent since the brief ritornelli in the first psalm, Dixit Dominus) highlights the new energy – the reserve battery – that fuels the high point of vespers that follows – the Canticle of Mary, the “Magnificat”.

In a conversation after the Sunday concert, I found myself discussing “re-animation” in relation to Luke’s text “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” (“my sould doth magnify the Lord”) and how the quantum steps of the four statements of the word “Magnificat” in Monteverdi’s setting of the Canticle so exquisitely convey the notion of magnification – of re-animation and expansion, of calling upon the “reserve battery” in order to transcend the ordinary.

In Monteverdi’s Magnificat (the seven-part setting – Monteverdi collection also includes a 6 part setting without instruments, the composition of which most likely preceded and served as the basis for the 7 part setting was based) the instruments are featured in a most colorful and virtuosic manner. In fact, when performed as published, the Hymn and Magnificat create an almost “Wizard of Oz” black-and-white-to-Technicolor moment when the voices are suddenly illuminated by cornets, sackbuts and violins illustrating the shift from prophecy to fulfillment embodied by the Magnificat text.

It seemed to me that the emotional state necessary to sing that first statement of the text “Magnificat” (as Jennifer Paulino did so poignantly in each of the concerts over the weekend) and for the listeners to hear it, requires the experience of the psalms and hymn that precede it in the inexorable flow that is vespers.

Monteverdi sets each of the seven verses either in voal polyphony or as accompanied monody, subjecting the borrowed melody in successive verses to  a series of variations in texture, sonority and meter. Separating verses 2-6 is a ritornello for five unspecified instruments. The overall setting is conservative in character, even in notation, which is principally in semibreves and minims. The only modern elements are the insertion of the ritornello and the reduction of the texture to a solo voice with continuo accompaniment in verse 4-6. Nowhere is there an attempt to interpret individual wordsof the text, a difficult proposition in the strophic setting of hymns in any event.

The successive variations in texture, sonority and meter are organized around both symmetrical and asymmettrical principles. The first and last verses comprise identical eight-voice, double-choir polyphonic settings. The second and third verses reset the cantus firmus in triple meter and are identical except that they alternate four-voice choirs, thereby varying the sonority. The fourth, fifth, and sixth verses retain the triple-meter version of the melody, but are performed by a solo voice with only basso continuo support. The solo voice itself changes from verse to verse: the fourth verse is sung by a soprano from the first choir (cantus), the fifth by a soprano from the second choir (sextus), the sixth by a tenor from the first choir (tenor). Thus there is a regular alternation between first and second choirs in verses 2-7. Throughout all seven verses the harmonization of the plainchant remains unchanged.

The ritornello, in triple time, is identical in each repetition, and bears no melodic relationship to the hymn tune. It does, however, bear astructural relationship to the verses in triple meter and the tonal structure of the vocal harmonization. Like the triple-meter verses, the ritornello comprises four phrases of five bars each, and several phrases begin and end with the same harmony as the verses (although sometimes substituting a major or minor chord for its opposite).

This ritornello is symmetrically deployed in the hymn: it does not appear until after the second verse, and according to Monteverdi’s rubric, it is to be omitted between the sixth and seventh verses. There are therefore paired verses at the beginning and end not separated by the ritornello; otherwise, the ritornello alternates with each verse. Likewise, the deployment of the hymn tune is arranged symmetrically between the two choirs. On the other hand, the varying textures and varying parts carrying the hymn tune are organized asymmetrically. As a result, Monteverdi, in his customary fashion, creates a structure based on simple principles, but not at all simple in its realization.

[Excerpted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 293-295]

The cantus firmus does not begin until well into the piece, and its successive statements are altered rhythmically and separated by rests of varying durations. The instrumental sonata supporting the cantus firmus unfolds in ten overlapping section, the first one restated at the end in the manner of a da capo. As in the Magnificat, the different sections differ in style and texture, and the meter shifts between duple and triple time with some frequency. In contrast to the Magnificats, the sections do not correspond exactly with the restatements of the plainchant, since the opening segment is without cantus firmus and another section supports two intonations of the chant melody.

The lengths of the ten sections comprising the Sonata vary considerably–the longest is three-and-a-half times the length of the shortest. Yet despite these many irregularities, there are some elements of symmetry in the structure of the composition, even if the piece is not as schematic as the psalms, Magnificats, and hymn. The Sonata is framed by the opening section and its da capo at the end; only the final plagal cadence with the last statement of the cantus firmus lies outside this frame. Sections 2-4 concentrate on virtuoso, dotted-rhythm scale patterns and ornamented versions of these patterns in the cornettos and violins. These sections are entirely in duple meter until the introduction of a series of four-bar interpolations in triple meter at the very end. The central segment of the Sonata, section 5, is abrief passage notated in blackened triplets, still under duple mensuration. This passage merges with the succeeding large segment comprising four subgroups (sections 6-9), all in triple meter.

Thus the outward frame encloses an only slightly off-balance symmetry of sections 2-4 and 6-9, the former in duple meter, the latter in triple meter, which surround the central segment inblack notation. This middle section is not perfectly located, however, since it is the concluding cadence of this section that articulates the mid-point of the composition.

The variation concept applies not only to the differing contexts of the reiterated litany, but also to portions of the Sonata where the chant is absent. The first two sections, for example, are formed from the same music, first in duple meter, the reorchestrated and recast in triple time, a procedure frequently encountered in dance pairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A later figure, played by the violins in duet, is presented in several melodic and rhythmic variants, even in its first appearance: a scale in dotted quarters and eighths is embellishedwith an extra eighth and the continues in a sequnce of broken thirds.

The scale pattern, in both melody and bass, is a fundamental motif in the Sonata and appears in a variety of guises. While variation procedures may be at the root of some of these similarities, others may be attributed to a basic motivic consistency throughout the composition. The figure not only involves scale motion, but also is closely related by inversion to the opening motif of the Sonata. In fact, the section based on this motif functions as a transition between the scale forms and a new triple-meter section whose main motif bears a strong resemblance to the opening figure.

The motif undergoes several metamorphoses in the course of the extended middle section, but all its forms are suffieciently related to one another and to the opening motif in their use of conjunct and disjunct thirds to render perfectly and natural the return of the opening passage following the conclusion of this section.

These techniques in the Sonata illustrate the close relationship between Monteverdi’s concept of melodic and rhythmic variation and sixteenth-century methods of motivic development. Although the motifs are typical of the early seventeenth century in the strength and regularity of their rhythms and the time intervals of their imitations, the metamorphosis of one motif out of anpother by means of expansion, contraction, inversion, retrogression, and alteration of rhythmic values is the saem process found in innumerable ricercari and canzonas of the second half of the sixteenth century. It is only in those passages where greater identity of material is maintained that one can speak of variation in the form-building sense rather than as thematic development. Yet the distinction between the two in the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria is largely a matter of degree, although it has significant structural implications. The techniques of thematic development facilitate the construction of large continuous sections, which maintain a certain sense of homogeneity despite alterations in the melodic material.

This process of formal variation, on the other hand, through its retention of a basic and readily perceptible morphological identity, tends to subdivide the music into comparatively short, discrete sections where first one variation technique is exposed and then another. This is apparent in the first half of the Sonata, which relies more ont he process of variation and is more clearly sectionalized than the portion depending on sixteenth-century medthods of motivic development.

The passage in blackened triplets (meliora) concluding the first half of the Sonata (shown in the image from the Cantus partbook above), section 5, has given rise to a variety of interpretations of its rhythmic relationship to the surrounding sections. My reading of this passage (which will be adopted by Magnificat in their perfromances) allows for a single tactus to be used throughout the Sonata, and all the bars are of equivalent length in performance.

[Excerpted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 297-303]

The treatment of the psalm tone at the beginning of Laudate pueri resembles that at the opening of Dixit Dominus: after initial solo intonations in a tenor voice (quintus), the psalm tone combines with a countersubject to evolve a steadily expanding imitative texture. Even the countersubject is similar to the one at the beginning of Dixit Dominus. Whereas this process encompassed the entire first verse of Dixit Dominus, in Laudate pueri only the first half of the verse is traversed, so the process is repeated, with a new countersubject, to complete the first verse.

After the first verse, where Dixit Dominus had turned to the tripartite series of falsobordoni, ritornellos, and duets, Laudate pueri presents a lenghthy succession of virtuoso duets for voices in a single register, accompanied by the cantus firmus. In this portion of the psalm (verse 2-5), the psalm tone migrates upwards through the texture from one verse to the next, starting in the quintus and proceeding through the altus, the cantus, and finally the sextus. It is sung both in long notes and in half notes and quarter notes, but even in the shorter rhythmic values the cantus firmus appears sustained because of rapid embellishments in the other voices. The movement of the chant out of its bass role in the quintus part permits increased harmonic variety, and successive transpositions of the psalm tone upwards by a fifth (verses 2 and 3 transpose the reciting note to G, verse 4 to D) admit a wider tonal compass as well. Only at verse 5 does the reciting note return to its original C.

The virtuoso duets of verses 2-5 employ two sopranos (cantus and sextus) in verse 2-3, the two tenors (tenor and quintus) in verse 4, and the two basses (bassus and [octavus]) in verse 5. The gradual descent in register of the duets is mirrored by the gradual ascent of the cantus firmus (quintus, altus, cantus, sextus). the migrations and transpositions of the cantus firmus thus bring the psalm tone from the low register to the top of the vocal texture, parralleling the text of these verses, which begins with man’s praise of God and ultimately exults God above all nations, heaven, and earth in the climactic verses 4 and 5. The phrase et super coelos gloria eius is accompanied by durus harmonies over the notes of the natural hexachord, cadencing to A major, illustrating Monteverdi’s tendency to associate durus harmonies with positive textual ideas from this period onwards.

For the remainder of the psalm, Monteverdi abandons the few-voiced texture and makes use of all eight voices, with the exception of very brief passages for reduced forces. The psalm tone has already returned to its reciting note of C in verse 5, and it remains there for the rest of Laudate pueri, including the doxology. Because the chant always appears in an inner voice until it is projected to the top of the texture in the Sicut erat, there is considerable flexibility in its harmonization. Moreover, temporary pauses in the psalm tone allow for even further harmonic freedom and variety. Indeed, this portion of the psalm is characterized by substantial tonal variety couple with considerable textual variety, ranging from homophony to imitation, with the number of participating voices changing constantly. The rhythmic organization also shifts frequently between duple and triple meter.

Like Dixit Dominus, the doxology shifts tonality. The psalm text itself concludes with a complete cadence to A major, and through circle-of-fifths harmony, a transition is made to G major for the beginning of the Gloria Patri. As in Dixit Dominus, the psalm tone is recited by the tenor in long note values, accompanied only by the bassus generalis (though interrupted by a four-voice passage). This passage again reminds us of the traditional alternatim technique where plainchant verses alternate with polyphony. The Sicut erat, with its harmonization of the psalm tone in the top voice, is also somewhat parallel to the same verse in Dixit Dominus (Dixit places the chant in both the bass and top parts). But while the Sicut erat of Laudate pueri parallels Dixit Dominus in style, it is also reminiscent of the final verse and rounded structure of Nisi Dominus in closely resembling the opening verse of the psalm.

The final Amen, devoid of the psalm tone, constitutes an extended coda based on ascending fifths. At first the tenor and quintus remain silent, but as the texture gradually thins, they commence singing the same motifs as the other voices, emerging from the other parts to complete the psalm with a lovely imitative duet of their own. As a consequence, Laudate pueri ends with a thin texture in the tenor register, as it began. The two voices converge on the unison final g, the same note on which the two sopranos will begin their duet an octave higher in the following motet, Pulchra es. Indeed, the opening of Pulchra es outlines the same ascending fifths with which Laudate pueri concludes. The duet concluding the Amen is reminiscent of a very similar passage in Giovanni Gabrieli’s Quem vidistis pastores, published posthumously in his Symphoniæ sacræ of 1615.

In Laudate pueri, Monteverdi has bult a more dynamic form than the symmetrical structure of Dixit Dominus. This form proeeds, after the initial polyphonic verse, to a series of trio textures (duets against the psalm tone) before expanding again to the full choir. The length of each verse depends heavily on the character of the musical figures and their working out, and these figures depend in turn much more on the significance of individual words or phrases of the text than do the figures in Dixit Dominus. Yet some degree of symmetry is present in the reiteration of the music of the first verse in the Sicut erat. It may well have been the absenmce of other forms of symmetry in Laudate pueri that prompted Monteverdi to repeat the opening music for the Sicut erat (as in Nisi Dominus), whereas Dixit Dominus, being governed bthroughout by a symmetrical organization, did not require a similar return at the end.

[Excerpted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]

Within this scheme, Monteverdi varies the context of the chant in several different ways. In the falsobordoni themselves, the first half-verse is presented on an a minor chord (A major for verse 6), while the second half-verse is a steplower on a G major triad. In the alternate verses 3, 5, and 7, the chant, transferred to the bass in half and quarter notes, supports first an imitative duet, and finally an imitative five-voice texture, creating a series of variations over the bass cantus firmus. The beginning of this latter verse looks very much like measured falsobordone and illustrates how closely chordal textures in the harmonization of a psalm tone approximate falsobordone, expecially when the chant is in the bass, allowing for very little variety of harmonization.

Even within each of these verse the principle of variation predominates, since each half verse repeats the text, prompting variation in its setting. For example the third verse (Virgam virtutis) begins with the cantus alone and then adding the sextus in an imitative texture for the reiteration of the text. Note that although the chant is not present for the first statement of the half verse in the cantus, the bassus generalis still reflects the psalm tone. In the second half-verse of the verse a subtle coloristic variation is achieved by shifting the leading role from cantus to the sextus.

Even in those passages not based on the cantus firmus the principle of variation prevails. The melismas concluding each half-verse are rhythmic variants of a single underlying descending sequence. Each instrumental ritornello is similarly a slightly modified repetition (transposed up a step) of the immediately preceding melisma, exchanging the vocal sonority for an instrumental one.

The first verse and the doxology exhibit yet further contextual variants for the cantus firmus. In the first verse, the psalm tone itself becomes a subject for polyphonic imitation, joined by a countersubject in a six-voice texture. At the beginning of the doxology the solo cantus firmus appears in long notes a step lower on g in cantus mollis (one flat). The Sicut erat is unrelated to the first verse of the psalm, but is reminiscent in its reiteration of the sustained psalm tone on D (harmonized with D minor) of the Domine ad adiuvandum respond that opened the Vespers.

[Adapted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 211-215.]

Lauda Ierusalem, like Nisi Dominus, is characterized by two choirs in frequent antiphonal responses, but the texture is thinner, comprising only seven parts. The six voices apart from the cantus firmus are subdivided into two equal ensembles of canto, alto, and bass, and the more transparent sonority of these three-voice choirs facilitates more frequent interchanges and greater rhythmic complexity than is exhibited by Nisi Dominus. While the overall tonal organization of the psalm is determined by the pitch at which the reciting note appears, structure on a smaller scale is determined, as in Nisi Dominus , by antiphony. However, in contrast to the lengthy passages with one choir only that characterize Nisi Dominus, the second choir of Lauda Ierusalem regularly alternates (sometimes in imitation) with the first choir at the interval of approximately three bars.

With verse 5 this interval is reduced by at least half. Finally the two choirs join in verse 7, at the point where the chant returns its original reciting level, and remain together until the doxology. Although the texture in verse 7-9 is full-voiced and mostly homophonic, it is simultaneously imitative (sometimes only in the outer voices). At verse 9 the time between entries reduces to only a half or quarter note (depending on the voice), producing a lively mosaic of entrances as pitches and mtifs heard in the leading trio reappear almost immediately in the other while the tenor continues to intone the cantus firmus uninterruptedly. I know of no other example of doubl-choir music from this period, aside from the first and last verses of Montecerdi’s Nisi Dominus, that develops such a complex texture from the interplay of two separate groups.

Like Nisi Dominus, the doxology is anentirely separate section where the chant for the first time migrates out of the tenor into the top voice, achieving greater prominence. The Sicut erat, which in this case does not resemble the opening verse, begins with rhythmisized falso bordone, followed by an imitative texture based entirely on the psalm tone. Because the psalm tone comprises principally a repeated pitch, this imitative texture differs from the rhythmicized falso bordone in its straggered entrances. In contrast to Nisi Dominus, a large polyphonic Amen, from which the cantus firmus is absent, concludes Lauda Ierusalem. The structural parralels between Lauda Ierusalem and Nisi Dominus not only relate these two psalms to one another, but separate them from the other three, which are also related to one another by various means.

[Excerpted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 208-211.]

Recently Craig Zeichner, who is writing a piece about “2010 Vespermania,” asked me what made the Monteverdi Vespers so special. There are so many different answers to the question, which in itself is certainly a potent argument for its “specialness.” Several generations of writers have explored many angles in describing this amazing music — certainly more than any other music from the period — and it has become one of the enduring classics of the musical canon.

Surely one of the most striking aspects of this music is Monteverdi’s astonishing juxtaposition of old and new in a way that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of Italy in 1610. In fact, few works of art are so strongly associated with a specific year. At the same time, the music succeeds in transcending identification with any particular time and place.

But in considering Craig’s question, I found myself asking another: “What was the motivation for this grandiose display of talent?”

The answer may lie in the specific circumstances in which the collection was assembled. As many scholars have demonstrated, the Mass and Vespers collection of 1610 does not present the music performed for any specific event. Indeed, combining the five psalms and five sacri concenti into a single liturgy is problematic. But why a collection of sacred music — a genre almost entirely absent from Monteverdi’s published music in the first 40 years of his life? All indications suggest that the publication was intended to help Monteverdi escape the Mantuan court.

Monteverdi had always been ambitious – I like to think that I can see some of that in the only portrait we have of the composer as a young man. Before his 20th birthday, he had already published three collections of his own music, each dedicated to patrons outside his hometown of Cremona, a clear indication that he was intent on advancing his career in one of the great musical centers of the day. His engagement at the prominent court of Mantua certainly suited that ambition, and for many years the opportunities and rewards of service to the duke were abundant. However, by the end of the first decade of the 17th century, the situation had deteriorated, and Monteverdi had become exhausted, disheartened, and under severe financial strain.

While we tend to think of Monteverdi as the towering musical figure of his time — the celebrated maestro di cappella of the most prestigious musical position in Europe, the Basilica of San Marco in Venice – at the time he published his Mass and Vespers of 1610 Monteverdi, still in Mantua, was at the lowest point in his life. He was still reeling from the lost his wife and his beloved student Caterina Martinelli in quick succession during the disastrous months leading up to the production of his second opera, Arianna, in 1608. And in surviving letters we find bitter complaints about his treatment at the hands of the Duke of Mantua.

His dire circumstances must have been particularly galling given his recent remarkable accomplishments. He had just composed and produced two operas, both of which had been phenomenally well received. His fourth and fifth books of madrigals had generated renown and controversy (a sure sign of success). And, however reluctantly, Monteverdi had found himself acting as the spokesman for the new musical style of the 17th century.

And yet, as he described himself in a letter from 1610, he was “a poor man,” unable to secure bread and wine for his sons. Physically exhausted and financially burdened, he was determined to improve his circumstances, and he channeled that determination into composing and compiling the most spectacular possible “work sample” — as his ticket out of town. Perhaps the mother of invention really is desperation, not merely necessity.

In any case, the composer’s efforts to impress were eventually rewarded. Monteverdi dedicated his collection to Pope Paul V, and it is clear from surviving letters that his initial quest was to secure a position at the Vatican and a benefice at a seminary for his son. While he was unsuccessful in Rome, he was engaged at San Marco in 1613 and, even though documentary evidence is frustratingly slim, it seems likely that the mastery demonstrated in the 1610 collection was decisive in his appointment. Beyond his successful exit from Mantua, Monteverdi also bequeathed the fruits of his labors to posterity and provided musicians of every generation with a worthy vehicle for their own creativity and imagination. And in this case, the familiarity and iconic status of the Monteverdi Vespers is, in fact, a blessing.

The chant itself varies rhythmically from long notes to the same shorter notes as appear in the other parts, and a little more than half way through, at Sicut sagittae (verse 5), the tone is transposed up a fourth, allowing harmonzations with B flat minor and G minor chords in contrast to the predominating F major and D minor triads of the preceding verses. At the same point, the meter shifts to triple time, introducing a further variant in both the cantus firmus and its polyphonic content.

The varied context of the cantus firmus depends not only on its harmonization and rhythmic organization, but also on the polychoral patterning of the other four voices. Monteverdi’s opening verse combines both choirs in a densely imitative texture, but thereafter the two choirs alternate as strict cori spezzati (which overlap at verse endings and beginnings) until mideway through verse 6, where the choirs rejoin to end the psalm. The cori spezzati section (verses 2-6) reveals a gradually growing level of rhythmic excitement and ultimately textural density as the two choirs merge.

The doxology of a polyphonic psalm is often set somewhat apart from the psalm proper. In Nisi Dominus, Monteverdi not only returns to the original duple meter, but in the Gloria Patri also transposes the psalm tone down a fifth (from  B flat to E flat) allowing for harmonization by E flat major and C minor triads. In many psalms, the Sicut erat in principio (“As it was in the beginning”) is a musical pun, reflecting the first verse in keeping with the meaning of the text, and in Nisi Dominus Monteverdi returns to F and reiterates the opening verse, giving a rounded stucture to the psalm.

[Excerpted from The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance by Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 207-208.]

Structured around Second Vespers for the Feast of the Visitation, the program will include psalm settings by Claudio Monteverdi (Dixit Dominus from the famous 1610 Vespers and Laudate pueri from his 1641 collection Selva morale), Ludovico Viadana (a four choir setting of Laetatus sum from 1612), Giovanni Rovetta (Nisi Dominus published in 1639), and Biagio Marini (Lauda Ierusalem from 1652). Each of the psalms will be preceded by a chant antiphon and followed by an “antiphon substitute” as was common in Italy throughout the Baroque period. The “substitutes” will include sonatas by Francesco Cavalli, Dario Castello, and Giovanni Legrenzi, a solo motet by Alessandro Grandi, and the Vivaldi e minor concerto for four violins. All the performers will join for Monteverdi’s beloved setting of the hymn Ave maris stella from the 1610 Vespers and Vivaldi’s g minor Magnificat, both of which will be conducted by Magnificat’s Artistic Director Warren Stewart.

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a period when the efforts to draw parishioners back into churches and solidify their faith had taken a decidedly theatrical turn, with church decorations, including marbles, paintings and sculptures, becoming evermore colorful, ostentatious and theatrical. Vesper music for solo voice with virtuoso embellishments, the use of a variety of instruments, and the colorful, sometimes highly embellished concertato psalm and Magnificat settings of Monteverdi reveal the efforts of composers to match the theatrical attractiveness of the ecclesiastical physical surroundings with an attractiveness of theatrically oriented music. Interest in the composition and publication of elaborate Vespers music accelerated through the course of the 17th century, with hundreds of collections issued from the presses of Venetian music publishers.

Marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of Monteverdi’s famous Vespers of 1610, Early Music America will be hosting a conference during the Festival that will explore the development of Vespers music over four centuries and will include both panels of noted scholars and participatory workshops. The final concert will showcase the widely varied repertoire of vespers music that followed Monteverdi’s masterpiece and the exceptional early music specialists that have come together for the 2010 Berkeley Festival. Order Tickets Here!