When, in 1673, Marc-Antoine Charpentier became the principal composer to the King’s Troupe (Troupe du Roy), he became involved in the ongoing struggle between the company’s director and chief playwright, Jean-Baptiste Molière, and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Throughout the 1660s, Molière and Lully had worked closely in providing for the king’s entertainment a series of multi-generic experiments that combined theater, ballet, vocal numbers, choruses, and machine effects. But by the spring of 1672 Lully had decided that his own future lay in opera. Having witnessed the successes of Perrin and Cambert with pastoral opera, Lully set about obtaining the royal opera privilege and, thereafter, a series of draconian decrees designed to protect his monopoly and reduce his musical competition.

Molière soon found another musical colleague in Charpentier, recently returned from Rome and his studies with Giacomo Carissimi. The revivals of earlier collaborations with Lully (La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, Le Mariage forcé) with new music by Charpentier led to a full-scale comedy-ballet, Le Malade imaginaire. This devastating musical satire would be the playwright’s last work—for during its fourth performance Molière, playing the leading role of the hypochondriac Argan, fell ill during the finale and died at his home shortly thereafter. Thereafter, musical life in Parisian theater was a struggle to survive in the face of Lully’s active opposition.

Charpentier continued on as the leading composer the Troupe du Roy after Lully evicted the actors from their theater. On 17 March 1675, the company premiered Circé, the first in a series of new machine-plays given at their new playhouse, the Théâtre de Guénégaud. Struggling to survive after Molière’s death and to justify its existence in the shadow of Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique, the actors deployed all of their scenic, musical, and choreographic resources in this spectacular and expensive production.

Whereas Louis XIV did not come personally to see it, the Gazette reported that on 4 October 1675 the king’s younger brother, together with his wife and their daughter Louise, attended a performance, and that “Their royal highnesses were marvelously satisfied with this fine spectacle, whose stage décor, aerial flights, and machines were extraordinary.”  Pierre Bayle concluded that “if they were permitted to perform with music, dance, and instruments according to their imagination, Circé would highly surpass all the operas performed until now.”

Circé brought together a team of dramatists, musicians, and artists who had wide experience in both court and public theater. The play was by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre Corneille, who would provide the Théâtre de Guénégaud with a series of machine-plays written in collaboration with Donneau de Visé (Circé, L’Inconnu, La Devineresse, and La Pierre philosophale).  De Visé had collaborated with the rival Théâtre du Marais, for which he had written a trilogy of musical machine-plays (Les Amours de Vénus et d’Adonis, Les Amours du Soleil, and Le Mariage de Bacchus et d’Ariane). He returned to the Troupe du Roy during Molière’s last season, and published favorable reviews of their productions in his newly founded gazette, the Mercure Galant.

Charpentier’s position had been established with the success of his music for Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire. The preface of the libretto for Circé (probably written by de Visé) praised “the delicacy of the music, in which Monsieur Charpentier, who has been already admired for the airs of Le Malade imaginaire, has in some way surpassed himself as much by the gracefulness of the symphony as by the noble manner in which he elevates all the words that are sung.” The ballet master Pierre de La Montagne had danced in court ballets and comédies-ballets throughout the 1660s, and with Circé he succeeded Pierre Beauchamps as maître à danser to the Théâtre de Guénégaud. Alexandre, sieur de Rieux, known as the Marquis de Sourdéac, was the scenic designer for Circé. Sourdéac was a nobleman and an amateur engineer whose hobby was designing stage machinery. He had furnished the sets for Perrin’s and Cambert’s pastoral operas, and when the Troupe du Roy relocated to the Hôtel de Guénégaud (Perrin’s former theater) after Molière’s death, the company entered into a turbulent partnership with Sourdéac and his nefarious cohort, the Sieur de Champeron.

Circé required a large number of singers, dancers, aerial artists, and instrumentalists: 6 strings and harpsichord, 10 “marcheurs” (probably so named to circumvent the 1673 prohibition on dancers), 20 aerial artists (voleurs), and 3 professional singers—which the company combined with their own singing actors.  One of the unusual features of Circé was the presence of acrobats in two numbers of the Finale (the “Chœur des divinitez des forets” and the “Rondeau pour trois figures”). For two productions given in 1674-75 (Corneille’s Le Comédien poète and Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire), the Troupe de Guénégaud had engaged a company of “sauteurs” directed by Charles Alard, the celebrated acrobat of the Théâtre de la Foire; thus it seems likely that Alard choreographed the acrobatic “figures” cued in Charpentier’s score.

Corneille’s mythological play is framed by a prologue and finale, with musical entr’actes articulating the overall dramatic structure.  Acts 1-4 all contain divertissements drawn from traditions common to the pastoral and burlesque ballet:  songs by satyrs, shepherds, shepherdesses, dryads, and fauns, and dance-pantomimes by monkeys and furies.  Moreover, the acts of the play are separated by ballet entr’actes, no doubt performed by the ten “marcheurs” that are listed in the company’s account books.  The play ends with a miniature ballet performed by the divinities of the forests and the seas.

In the Prologue Mars, Fortune, Love, and Fame complain of the honor Louis XIV is receiving.  They are convinced by Glory that it is useless to oppose him, and that they will profit by doing his bidding.  After three spoken scenes featuring Mars, Fortune, Fame, Cupid, and Glory, the Pleasures and the Liberal and Mechanical Arts  make their balletic entrance in the temple built by Glory for Louis XIV.

In the first act, Glaucus, a sea-god, has disguised himself as a Thracian prince in order to make love to Silla, who cares only for Mélicerte; but this Theban prince has disappeared and fallen in love with the sorceress Circe. Piqued by Glaucus’s indifference, Circe tries to win his love. After whisking through the air some satyrs who have been annoying her nymphs, Circe takes Glaucus to her palace in a chariot drawn by dragons. There she shows her indifference to Mélicerte’s love lament and offers her love to Glaucus.  When he remains faithful to Silla, Circe brings animals against him; but he makes them sink into the earth. The statues she animates meet with the same fate.  Circe sends Mélicerte a ring that makes him return to his love of Silla, bids that Silla continue to refuse Glaucus, and carries her off in a cloud.  Glaucus appeals to Venus, who sends some cupids to rescue Silla. Circe, finding herself powerless against Glaucus, resolves to punish him by means of the girl he loves. She first charms her so that she prefers Glaucus to Mélicerte and, when Mélicerte protests, she turns him into a tree. Then Circe makes Silla appear hideous by attaching monsters to her body. Silla leaps into the sea and Circe disappears with her palace; but Glaucus appeals to Neptune, who changes Silla into a rock and gets the consent of Jupiter and Destiny to her becoming a Nereid.  Glaucus is not allowed to marry Silla, however—for her love, caused by Circe’s charm, has departed.

Construction of the sets, stage machines, and the special magic effects required by the play began in October of 1674—a full six months before the première. The unusually high production costs caused some division among the actors and delayed the production. But with the première on Sunday, 17 March 1675, Circé proved to be highly profitable, and for one performance (31 March) the gross receipts reached a record 2775 livres. Years later, de Visé described the extraordinary popularity of this work in the Mercure Galant: “It is noteworthy that during the first six weeks the auditorium was completely filled from noon on, and that as no seats could be found, spectators gave a half louis d’or at the door solely to be admitted, and were content when, for the same sum paid for the lower boxes, one might be placed in the third balcony. Circé received 9 performances before the 1675 Lenten break, and was given 67 more times during the 1675-76 season. De Visé asserts that the production would have run longer “if the interests of one individual [i.e., Lully] has not made them cut back on singers.”

Five years later, the Troupe du Roy were joined by royal decree with the rival actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. This new company, known as La Comédie-Française, consisted of fifteen actors and twelve actresses—of which five of its new members were already accomplished playwrights.  Raymond Poisson wrote their first new comedy, Les Fous divertissants, which premiered on 14 November 1680.  This in fact was a full-scale comedy-ballet, conceived in the spirit of Molière’s final musical/balletic works and with an extensive score composed by Charpentier.

We will recall that, after he acquired the opera privilège, Lully sought to protect his monopoly by restricting the amount of music allowed in public theaters other than his own. By this time companies were limited to two singing actors, six string players, and no dancers of any kind. However, with the consolidation of the rival theaters into a single, state-subsidized institution, it would appear that a new spirit of détente arose between the Académie Royale de Musique and the Comédie-Française, and Lully’s restrictions on music and dance clearly were relaxed for this production.  In addition to the two singing lovers of the play (Léandre and Angélique, played by the actors de Villiers and perhaps Mlle Molière), three other singing actors (Verneuil, Guérin, and La Grange) performed in the intermèdes.  Moreover, Lully allowed the Comédie-Française to include parodies of excerpts from his latest two operas, Bellérophon (1679) and Proserpine (1680).

Poisson’s Les Fous divertissants followed in a series of lunatic plays that were very popular in the 17th century, and from which he borrowed freely. From Cervantes La Cueva de Salamanca Poisson derived many of his plot details—the warden’s departure, Angélique’s hypocritical farewell, the arrival of Léandre and the soldier, the husband’s unexpected return, and the use of a magical trick to rescue Léandre and the meal from a place of concealment.  Much of the dialogue for Act 3 was borrowed from the short story by Antoine Le Metel, sieur d’Ouville, entitled “Un jeune Advocat qui jouyt de la femme d’un bourgeois sous prétexte d’estre devin” (1643). And he followed Charles Beys’s L’Hospital des fous (1636) by introducing a concièrge who displays the lunatics for the public’s entertainment, and in introducing a young lover pretending to be mad to be near his beloved.

In the excerpt performed here, Monsieur Grognard, the warden of the asylum, departs to attend to his dying brother, and the inmates take this opportunity to throw a party.  Four dancing and three singing lunatics enter to the music of a march, and then one of them urges the young lovers in song to profit from her fiancé’s absence.  Meanwhile, the inmates show joy in their new found freedom in a dance, Les Fous déchaînés—for which Charpentier’s music suggests the effect of derangement by the abrupt juxtaposition of the triple-meter minuet with the furious, duple-meter pantomime.  In the next entrée, Les Geôliers, some keepers arrive to lock up the madmen, and the intermède ends with a manic “laughing trio” of infectious hilarity.

In the third act, Angélique’s lover Léandre has planned a banquet for her, for which the lunatics will provide the entertainment.  But first, he wishes to sing a little song that he has composed (“Ce n’est qu’entre deux Amans”), and asks that she respond with a minuet (“Quand la flame”).  Angélique’s maid Jacinte then brings news that their respective fathers have consented to their marriage.  When Grognard unexpectedly returns, he finds a soldier billeted in his home; he then requests something to eat, but is told that there is nothing in the house.  The soldier, having seen Léandre’s feast being brought in, pretends to be a magician, and he commands a “demon” to appear from the armoire carrying some roasted meat; then he summons the inmates to perform the concert that Léandre had prepared for Angélique.  Grognard fails to see the relevance of the first chanson (“Bacchus et l’Amour font débauche”—Bacchus & Cupid are living it up), and is mystified by the outburst of laughter caused by the even more transparent lyrics of the second song (“…the fat rogue, the drunken babbler, the big windbag, the decrepit old fool…pull the wool over his eyes, the ugly owl, the werewolf, the old hooter, the foolish cuckold”). The soldier then commands the demon to take the form of Léandre–who then departs with Angélique.  Jacinte tells Grognard of the trick, and informs him that Angélique and Léandre are to be married.  He summons his valets, only to find that the lunatics have locked them in their cells and are coming after Grognard.  The play ends with a lively ballet put on by the lunatics—consisting of a Marche des fous, a récit addressed to lovers (“Amans, vous faites bien de quitter ce sejour”), an entrée for eight fools “with caps and bells,” and a “dialogue de deux Fous amoureux” (“Je ne sçaurois vivre sans toy”).

Though Poisson’s plot is derivative, the play is remarkable for the variety of devices used for entertainment:  magic-effects, farce, drinking-songs, ballet, opera.  While it seems to have been well-received at the time of its premiere (one performance brought in over 1500 livres), the Comédie-Française gave Les Fous divertissants only eleven times between November 14 and December 2, 1680, and three times the following year.  It achieved greater success after Poisson’s death, when Florent Carton Dancourt reduced it to a one-act comedy entitled Le Bon Soldat—in which form it was performed 197 times during the early 18th century.

Charpentier, Corneille, and de Visé collaborated on four musical machine-plays for the Théâtre de Guénégaud and the Comédie-Française during 1675-81:  Circé (1675), L’Inconnu (1675), Le Triomphe des Dames (1676), and La Pierre philosophale (1681). Whereas their first three works enjoyed long and successful runs, La Pierre philosophale played there only twice (on 23 and 25 February) during Carnival of 1681.  Evidently its creators miscalculated the interests of the Parisian public with this satire on the popular cult of the ‘Cabalistes’ (Rosicrucians), for not even the spectacular machine-effects could save the production from failure.  It was soon withdrawn, and Corneille’s play was never published; all that survives is the printed libretto and Charpentier’s music.

The plot centers on a Marquis, who brings about two marriages by taking advantage of a bourgeois’s naïve belief in the occult. Monsieur Maugis and Madame Raimond are squandering their fortunes trying to discover the secret of the philosopher’s stone.  Maugis intends to use the stone’s power to regain his youth, whereupon he will marry Madame Raimond’s daughter Angélique.  Moreover, Maugis plans to give his own daughter, Marianne, to a Chevalier who seems interested in their experiments.  However, the Chevalier is merely pretending to be interested in order that he may marry Angélique himself, while Marianne loves a Marquis who plans to thwart her father’s plans. The Chevalier persuades Maugis to join the order of the Rosicrucians, and makes him believe that, when a member, he must not marry Angélique, but rather one of the invisible elemental spirits (a gnomide), while his daughter may be united to a silphe (actually the Marquis in disguise).

Act 4 takes place in the home of the Comte de Gabalis, a German residing in France who has offered to introduce Maugis to the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Charpentier’s music accompanies the appearance of “a machine composed of four elements, of the height of a Mount Parnassus,” whereby the spirits associated with the four elements provide the music for this occult ritual. First, a Choeur des Quatre Éléments celebrates the victory of love in song and dance (‘Les sages par un choix heureux’), then a smaller group of these elements address themselves to the little gnomide, whom Maugis (knowing that gnomides guard treasures) has chosen as his wife (‘Vous, sur qui de cet heureux choix’). The little gnomide sings and dances a menuet to celebrate her forthcoming wedding (‘Le bel âge’), and the Marquis, disguised as a silphe, approaches Marianne and invites her to accept him as her spouse (‘Je suis un élément léger’). The four elements then dance, and Fire and Water concur that love has the power even to bring opposites together (‘Le Spectacle est assez beau’).  M. Maugis expresses his pleasure with these signs of rejoicing—but he begs his little gnomide to grow taller. She then disappears into the ground, and a large figure gradually emerges to the musical encouragement of the Choeur des Quatre Éléments (‘Croissez, gnomide, croissez’). Maugis is so astonished by this metamorphosis that he can scarcely believe his eyes.  Eventually the gnomide becomes jealous of Angélique, whom her mother later gives to the Chevalier. The Marquis (still disguised as a silphe) offers to appease the gnomide in exchange for Marianne’s hand, and at the end the parties go off to sign the marriage contracts.

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.

Impressive display, whether of the virtuoso solo voice or of vocal sonorities and instrumental color, become an important aesthetic goal in publications of the first decade of the new century. Not only does such music begin to match the physical surroundings in ostentation, but its attraction for listeners draws worshippers into church for what were essentially concerts of sacred music. From an economic standpoint, the process was self-feeding and circular: impressive music attracted more worshippers, who in turn gave more alms and other donations that financed the elaborate and expensive music-making. On the other hand, most music for Vespers during this first decade of the century still followed the traditional models and formats of the Cinquecento, though often a basso continuo part was added, especially toward the end of the decade.

Psalms by such composers as Giovanni Gastoldi, Giovanni Croce, Giulio Belli, and Lodovico Viadana not only reflected sixteenth-century styles, but were reprinted in multiple editions for many years to come, preserving the older traditions well into the new century. It is likely that the continuation and proliferation of traditional settings served feasts of lesser significance than the most important celebrations that featured the most elaborate music (often referred to in documents as “solemn Vespers”). Nevertheless, there were certain churches where more conservative styles, especially eight-voice, double choir psalmody were required for the most important feasts.

Magnificat will perform Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers on the weekend of April 23-25 and will also participate, along with Artek, AVE, The Marion Verbruggen Trio, Music’s Recreation, Sacabuche!, and Archetti, in a concert celebrating a century of Venetian vespers music from Monteverdi to Vivaldi as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Exhibition on June 13.

Arcangelo Corelli

Few musicians of the seventeenth century enjoyed the exalted status bestowed on Arcangelo Corelli (February 17, 1653- January 19, 1713). He was called the ‘new Orpheus of Our Times’ and the ‘divine Arc Angelo’, a clever pun on his Christian name and the Italian word for a bow (arco). The Englishman musician and writer Roger North described Corelli’s music as ‘transcendant’, ‘immortal’ and ‘the bread of life’ to musicians. Renowned as a virtuoso performer, an influential composer, and sought-after teacher, Corelli commanded respect and praise throughout Europe at the turn of the 18th century.

The fifth child born to a prosperous family of landowners in Fusignano; Corelli’s first musical study was probably with the local clergy, then in nearby Lugo and Faenza, and finally in Bologna, where he went in 1666. In Bologna he studied with Giovanni Benvenuti and Leonardo Brugnoli, the former representing the disciplined style of the Accademia filarmonica (to which Corelli was admitted in 1670), the latter a virtuoso violinist.

By 1675 Corelli was in Rome where he may have studied composition under Matteo Simonelli, from whom he would have absorbed the styles of Roman polyphony inherited from Palestrina. He may have traveled to France and Spain, though neither journey has been securely documented. In 1675 he is listed as a violinists in Roman payment documents and by the end of the decade he was active as a performer and leader of small and large instrumental ensembles in Roman homes and churches and at public celebrations.

Corelli had entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden by 1679 and thanks to his musical achievements and growing international reputation he found no trouble in obtaining the support of a succession of influential patrons. In addition to Queen Christina, his Roman patrons included Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, both wealthy and influential leaders of Roman society.

In 1684, Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti became members of the Congregazione dei Virtuosi di S. Cecilia and in 1706, along with Pasquini and Scarlatti, he was inducted into the Arcadian Academy round the time that he met Handel in engagements at the Pamphili and Ruspoli palaces. He would direct the orchestra for performances of Handel’s La resurrezione shortly before retiring from public life in 1708.

Wealthy since birth, Corelli had the luxury of cultivating a personal mystique, acting more like a gentleman than a common musician. His wealthy patrons treating him almost as their equal, he was not burdened by the pressure of writing music on demand and composed selectively and at a his own pace, meticulously revising his music before publishing them late in life. This careful polishing made Corelli’s published pieces into models of economy and elegance. Their concision and urbanity contrasted sharply with the unbridled passion and unpredictability of music earlier in the seventeenth century.

Corelli’s reputation as a performer and teacher was at least equal to the reputation he achieved as a composer. Among his many students were Geminiani, Vivaldi, Gasparini, and Somis. His sonatas were widely performed and often reprinted, both as ideal practice material for students and as models for composers. For the solo sonatas (op. 5) there are several extant sets of ornaments, some attributed to the composer himself (Walsh, 1710); his works remained especially popular in England, where Ravenscroft imitated the trio sonatas and Geminiani transformed several solo and trio sonatas into concertos.

Corelli died a wealthy man on January 19, 1713, at Rome in the 59th year of his life. But long before his death, he had taken a place among the immortal musicians of all time, and he maintains that exalted position today.

The Floor of the Basilica of San Marco, Venice

In his biographical sketch of Alessandro Grandi, published previously on this blog, Steven Saunders mentions the composer’s rapid rise to positions of authority at the Basilica of San Marco after returning from Ferrara in 1617. Among the positions that he attained was capo, or head, of the Compagnia di San Marco, a group not unlike a modern musicians’ union that organized singers for “freelance work” outside the basilica.

Already in the 15th Century, musical activity outside the Basilica had been organized through confraternities known as Scuole Grandi. In his seminal article on organizations of musicians in Venice, Jonathan Glixon relates that “sometime in the years before 1553 the singers of the ducal cappella organized themselves into two companies that competed for work at the Scuole and elsewhere. The rivalry between the two became intense and bitter, making it difficult not only for them to secure engagements, but also to work together at San Marco. The solution to this problem, and the ensuing resolutions, petitions, and counter- resolutions, are preserved in a fascinating series of documents that provides unique insights into the business of music in sixteenth- century Venice.”

In spite of the official agreements drawn up in 1533, conflicts inevitably arose from time to time and by the turn of the 17th century the competition engendered by special occasions those at San Rocco led to the same problems that had initially sparked the creation of the Company. In 1601, the Company, with new statutes, was reconstituted as an official organization of the cappella: it was headed by the vice maestro di cappella and included all of the adult singers. The new bylaws dealt chiefly with the duties of the singers in their official roles as members of the cappella. As Glixon notes, “the only reminder of the previously central relationship between the Company and the Scuole, which allowed a singer who had to “go to his Scuola on ordained Sundays” to send a replacement to San Marco. He was obligated, however, upon completion of his duties at the Scuola, to return immediately to San Marco, even if he arrived while a service was already in progress.”

So, it was in this volatile milieu that Grandi and Monteverdi found themselves in the second decade of the new century. As Saunders explains:

Grandi’s quick ascent came just as rumors began swirling about the possibility that Monteverdi might leave Venice to return to Mantua. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Grandi’s rise in stature under these conditions may have occasioned resistance and even resentment.

Apparently in 1617, before Grandi’s return to Venice, the Doge had intervened in some internal disputes within the Company, ordering a thorough reorganization, including the election of new officers.  In addition, he barred Monteverdi, as maestro di cappella, from holding membership in the group.  A few months later, in July 1617, the company still was not thriving, and appealed again to the Doge for help, asking for permission to elect “someone outside of our organization, some valorous man known and beloved by the city, who will use his power and authority in our interest [by] directing our music, marking the beat and giving us new compositions according to our need.”

Monteverdi scholar James Moore has guessed that the “valorous man” might have been Monteverdi—indeed, the singers who presented the petition to the Doge may even have had Monteverdi in mind—but the date of the document confirming Grandi’s election as capo of the company (22 September 1617) makes clear that the post fell instead to Grandi.

Grandi’s leadership of the company seems not to have sat well with Monteverdi, however, as Saunders describes in the excerpted passage below.

On October 16, 1620, Doge Antonio Priuli, after having listened many times both to Monteverdi and to several singers about “diverse causes for disgust and disorder” when the company performed at churches in the city, invested Monteverdi with responsibility for supervising the singers both inside and outside the basilica.  In other words, he made Monteverdi capo of the company, presumably relieving Grandi of those duties.  In what may have been a conciliatory gesture, however, the Doge designated the vice-maestro of San Marco the vice capo of the singers’ company.

At the time of the Doge’s decision, the post of vice-maestro had been vacant for nearly a year and a half, since Marc’ Antonio Negri’s resignation on 30 April 1619.   It is not clear whether this administrative shake up in the Company of St. Mark’s was related to another change that was about to take place: Grandi’s confirmation as Monteverdi’s vice-maestro just a month later.  Tensions over the leadership of the Compagnia di San Marco notwithstanding, Monteverdi must have supported Grandi’s appointment as his assistant; just a few months before Grandi’s selection, he wrote to Alessandro Striggio boasting that the procurators did not appoint organists or the assistant director without his “opinion and report.”

In any event, Grandi’s new position as vice-maestro did not put an end to controversy.  A few months after his election, he appealed to Marc’ Antonio Cornaro, the abbate primicerio of St. Mark’s (and the official responsible for settling disputes between musicians who were not clerics) asking that his motets appear under Cornaro’s protection to repel “the haughtiness and rage of savage and hateful tongues, which shamelessly consider it nothing to disparage and destroy the fame and honor, I would say not only of others’ work, but even of [other] persons themselves.”  Whether this is a reference to his removal as capo of the Company of St. Mark’s, or to some new intrigue remains, like so much else in the composer’s biography, shrouded in mystery.

What made this tweeting encounter remarkable was that at that very moment (or at least before being distracted) I was in the process of doing just that: inserting incidental music into an opera score (albeit a Florentine opera) to allow for scene changes, extra long sword fights, flights of hippogryphs and the like. Synchronicity!

A 17th century lutenist, not Falconieri

For the upcoming Francesca Caccini opera I decided to turn the necessity of incidental music into an opportunity to explore a composer that Magnificat’s audiences hadn’t had the chance to hear before. I was fortunate that I could draw almost all the music I needed from a single collection by the lutenist and composer Andrea Falconieri – obscure even by Magnificat standards, though he does pop up sometimes in programs of early Italian music. (There are no known images of Falconieri, so the painting here is not him – but it’s a terrific expression!)

A talented lutenist and composer, Falconieri (sometimes written Falconiero) was born in Naples in 1585 or 86, making him a contemporary of Francesca, who was born in 1587. He had a long career working as a singer and composer in several Italian cities including Parma, Mantua, Rome, and Florence. He employed in Modena in 1620, where he married, and then spent the next seven year traveling widely about France and Spain, apparently without his wife.

Falconieri was employed by the Medici court on two occasions. The first was in the period after 1616, just after his first collection music, a set of villanelles, was published and around the time that Francesca was preparing her Primo libro delle musiche. He returned to  Italy in 1628 to perform in the festivities surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Parma and Princess Margarita de Medici. After several years in Genoa, Falconieri returned to his native Naples in 1639 where he remained until his death in 1656.

After several publications of vocal music, Falconieri’s first and only collection of instrumental music appeared in 1650, though many of the 58 pieces were no doubt written years, and in some cases decades, before. While the works contained in the collection are almost all relatively brief, the title is not: Il primo libro di canzone, Brandi, Correnti, Gagliarde, Alemane, Volte per Violini e Viole overo alto stromento a uno, due, e tre con il Basso continuo. While the pieces are arranged by type, as Willi Apel has pointed out, it is in fact somewhat difficult to distinguish among the correnti, canzone, and capricci; they are all brief sectional pieces with repeats – ideal for filling the gap during a scene change and creating the time for puppets to get on and off stage. Most of the pieces are unlike the emerging Italian sonata, which was characterized by structural meter and affect changes which eventually grew into the multi-movement sonata form.

One compositional technique found throughout Falconieri’s collection is the preference for so-called “feminine” endings, i.e. cadences that finish on a weak beat rather than the downbeat. I hasten to add that I noticed this conspicuous trait only after deciding to use Falconieri’s branles and canzone as incidental music in the earliest opera by a woman, but perhaps it is not entirely inappropriate!

Villa Poggio Imperiale in the 17th Century

On February 3, 1625, sometime in daylight, 160 gentildonne and their husbands, and an unknown number of foreign guests rode in carriages out the southeastern gate of Florence, and half a mile up a tree-lined avenue to a villa atop the nearest hill that had very recently been renovated as the personal palace of Tuscany’s regent, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Leaving their carriages in a grassy courtyard guarded by two squadrons of armed cavalry, the Archduchess’ guests were welcomed into the palace by a military commander, and led to bench seats in a temporary theatre built in the villa’s loggia, to hear a new commedia in musica based on a well-known plot (two sorceresses struggling over the sexual and military future of a hapless young man). The commedia was to be followed, seamlessly, by two balletti danced by members of the court, by a ballet for horses and riders in the paved courtyard, and by a reception at which the gentildonne were served by the men who rode in the final horse ballet (while their husbands watched from above). It was the first performance of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero.

So what could La Liberazione possibly have seemed to be about in 1625? First, a bit about the plot, since the story on which it’s based is not nearly as well known now as it was then.

The show opens with a prologue sung by Neptune (a figure for Medici power) and a Polish river, The Vistola, meant to praise the guest of honor in 1625, Maria Maddalena’s visiting nephew, Wladyslaw, the crown prince of Poland. Immediately afterward, the “good witch” Melissa sails up on a dolphin’s back to explain that she has come to rescue Ruggiero from the “bad witch” Alcina’s sexual spells, restoring him both to his military duty on behalf of Christian armies and to his dynastic sexual duty as the fiancée of the woman warrior Bradamante. At Melissa’s exit, Ruggiero arrives with Alcina and her retinue of singing and dancing minions. The lovers exchange perilously mis-communicated vows, and then Alcina leaves to manage government affairs while her retinue lulls Ruggiero to sleep. Dressed as his aged African teacher Atlante, Melissa returns, awakening Ruggiero with an exhortation to return to the battle for Libya. Previous victims of Alcina’s power, turned into plants by her mind-numbing spells, beg the pair to liberate them, too. After promising to return for them, Melissa leads Ruggiero away.

When Alcina and her retinue return to find him gone, a female messenger explains that Melissa has broken Alcina’s spell. Alcina confronts Ruggiero in a long scene mixed of lamentation and ire, to no avail. Enraged at her loss of power, she calls on monsters for aid. The stage is engulfed in fire, as the now monstrous Alcina rides offstage on a dragon’s back, after which creatures who had been trapped in the bodies of the island’s plants emerge to dance. One such creature pleads with Melissa to liberate the men who are plants as well as the women. They dance, and then everyone–the players and the audience–adjourn to the courtyard to watch the horse ballet, over which the triumphant Melissa presides from a centaur-drawn chariot.

My sense is that like the other comedies on which Francesca had worked La liberazione was meant to be both entertaining and serious–to give the audience the impression they were glimpsing into the ‘real’ entertainment life of the women’s court, and at the same time to engage a particular set of anxieties about that court’s relationship to public power during the regency of the 1620s.

Arch Duchess Maria Maddalena

When Grand Duke Cosimo II died in late February, 1621, the intermittent de facto regency of his mother Christine de Lorraine was replaced by a de jure regency she was to share with his widow, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Christine had quietly ruled Tuscany since late in 1606, first during her husband Grand Duke Ferdinando I’s final illness and then during her son’s long, losing struggle with what seems to have been several forms of tuberculosis. According to all diplomatic accounts, Christine had been Tuscany’s absolute ruler in this period, yet the same accounts report that she had shared decision-making with her son when he was up to it, and that she had systematically arranged for her daughter-in-law to be trained for what seemed like the inevitable regency of the 1620s. (One possible interpretation of La liberazione’s plot about the struggle of two women over a man, then, would be to imagine Ruggiero as the ailing Cosimo, his wife and his mother as the sorceress antagonists: but all diplomatic accounts also agree that the three worked well together.)

To be frank, there is not a lot of direct evidence in archival accounts to suggest that Tuscany’s patrician and political classes grumbled about either Christine’s de facto regency or Maddalena’s de jure one. But there is a lot of evidence showing that entertainments at court, from 1607 onward, focused on themes associated with female sovereignty, like

(1) foreign women who turned out to be queens, and who found safety in Tuscany;

(2) women who seemed to exceed the usual boundaries of female power, especially sorceresses like Alcina; and, as the de jure regency began,

3) virgin-martyrs whose choice to die rather than have either body or soul penetrated by heathens always also saved their city or their nation.

Moreover, sometime in late 1617, after one of Cosimo’s worst health crises, a court functionary named Cristoforo Bronzini began work on what would become an encyclopedic, 25-volume manuscript in dialogue form entitled Della dignita e nobilta delle donne, of which 8 volumes were published between 1622 and 1632. Combining proto-feminist arguments justifying women’s right and ability to rule the state with hundreds of biographies of women worthies (including the one of Francesca Caccini in the first part of this essay), Bronzini’s project was clearly intended to normalize the regency, and to normalize some of Maddalena’s peculiar ways–notably her passion for and her excellence at shooting, hunting, and horseback riding. Maddalena meant to distinguish herself from her rather genteel mother-in-law, Christine de Lorraine, in other ways as well. Unlike the Medici-descended Christine, who had centered her court at one of the Medici country villas already associated with the family’s women and children, Maddalena acquired a palace just outside the city walls as the center of her court.

Dedicated publicly in 1624 to her own Habsburg heritage, and to the leisure of future Tuscan princesses, the Villa Imperiale had once been the palace of a 16th-century Medici princess, the only daughter of the dynasty’s founder, who had been murdered there by her husband, for her outspoken political opinions, her unashamed musical and poetic performances, and her open adultery. Maddalena presumably meant to rehabilitate the memory of this gifted and transgressive woman when she ordered her palace rehabilitated, and adorned with two elaborate gardens (of roses and citrus), and 2 sets of frescoes (of historically important queens and of Biblical heroines): the palace reconciled the memory of the most intellectually ambitious and sexually dangerous Medici woman to the unquestionable virtue of the exceptional, excessive women painted on the villa’s ceilings. The site where La liberazione was first performed, Maddalena’s Villa Imperiale was simultaneously the private seat of the Tuscan regency and the newly constituted center of the women’s court.

Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine

Maddalena and her mother-in-law Christine had, in effect, long shared rule over the institution known as the “women’s court”. In the ducal and princely classes of early modern Italy, it was common practice for the wife of a ruler to live principally at a suburban villa rather than in the family’s urban palace, visited by her husband as he pleased. These wives ruled absolutely over extended households that consisted of them, their children, and any nieces/nephews or cousins who might visit, along with the elite young women who served them as dame and donne, servants of all kinds and all sexes, and male secretaries detailed from the central office in Florence. A well-known feature of such courts (one that seems (to me) inexplicably lost in standard histories) is that the women at the top of their hierarchies–the Grand Duchesses and Archduchesses– managed the marriages of their dame, donne, female relatives below princess rank, and servants of both sexes.

When I say they managed these marriages, I mean they superintended the negotiations over dowries, the payment of dowries, and the restitution of dowries if a marriage failed for whatever reason; they advocated for women whose husbands turned either physically or fiscally abusive, sometimes ordering the physical rescue of such women and the imprisonment of the guilty men; they were known to force women and men alike to marry for the sake of preserving a family’s patrimony; and they routinely forced widows under 40 into remarriages that would channel their sexuality and thus preserve their reputations for chastity. Because the women’s court over which Christine and Maddalena presided were communities in which women managed ‘the traffic in women’ to preserve a heteronormative gender order, I have described this situation as female patriarchy. Whatever one might call it, however, it was a situation that, I speculate, encouraged the formation of strong mutual allegiances among elite women, strong loyalty toward the women at the top of the hierarchy, and a shared understanding that heterosexuality was compulsory but heterosociality was not, and it was not at the core of a woman’s loyalties to her ‘tribe’. It was in service to this kind of community that Francesca Caccini passed most of her working life, providing entertainments for the women and children whose communal relations were forged by a ‘traffic in women among women’ and, as a letter by Grand Duchess Christine would eventually argue, providing through her teaching and coaching of women’s and children’s musical performances a model of female authority that was obviously legitimated by competence and mastery.

However commonplace the traffic in women among other women might have been, in a time of multi-generational regency like the one Tuscany knew from 1606 to 1636, the potential for women’s court *ruled by foreigners* to be an alternative source of power seems likely to have been frightening to the patrician class of men. For these men knew that the political (and economic) future of Tuscany depended on decisions made in such an environment, even if they were made by Medici boys being groomed for leadership there, or by ministers (like first and second secretaries Curtio Picchena and Andrea Cioli) whose rise to political power was directly the result of the relationships they had cultivated in this community of women. For men who spent too much time with women–even is as their heterosexual lovers–were understood to become gradually effeminate, to sink to the level of the pleasure-loving, singing-and-dancing, reason-abjuring level of the not-quite-human creatures among whom they lived.

To become, that is, like the plants in Alcina’s garden.

To follow “Part 3: La Liberazione di Ruggiero and the Culture of Women”.

Isabella Leonarda

Magnificat
Rob Diggins, violin
Warren Stewart, violoncello
David Tayler, theorbo
Hanneke van Proosdij, organ

live, unedited performance
February 2, 2003
St. Gregory Nyssen Church
San Francisco CA

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In 1724, the eminent theorist and collector music Sébastian de Brossard wrote in praise of the works of Isabella Leonarda that “all of the works of this illustrious and incomparable composer are so beautiful, so gracious, so brilliant and at the same time so knowledgeable and so wise, that my great regret is in not having them all.”

Isabella’s instrumental works, which appeared in 1693, are apparently the earliest published sonatas by a woman.  The collection consists of eleven trio sonatas and one sonata for solo violin and continuo.  One of her most harmonically adventurous works, the Sonata duodecima is in seven parts, including two recitative like sections.

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Jacopo Peri as Arion

August 20 is the birthday of Jacopo Peri, who was closely involved in the development of what we now call “opera”, staged drama set entirely to music. He was known affectionately as “Zazzerino” (from zazzera, mop of hair) in recognition of his striking, and long, blond hair – a sort of 16th century Robert Plant.

Though born in Rome in 1561, Peri is most closely associated with Florence, where he served along with Giulio and Francesca Caccini, Jacopo Corsi, Marco da Gagliano and many other in the extraordinary musical establishment of the Medici court. He has also been associated with the Florentine Camerata of Giovanni de’ Bardi and throughout his career was a leading voice (in all senses) for the “new music” that the Camerata was promoted.

The style promoted by the Camerata was perceived as a re-discovery of the music of Classical Greece, though there is little to suggest that the recitar cantando, the “heightened speech” that eventually became the operatic recitative, bore any resemblance to the music of the ancients. This in no way diminished the power of a musical style that sought to directly communicate human passion and emotion in a narrative context.

Peri sang an aria of his own composition in one of the intermedi that accompanied Barbagli’s comedy La Pellegrina, staged in honor of Fernando de Medici’s marriage to Christine of Lorraine in 1589. According to the commentary included with the publication of the music from the festivities, Peri captivated the audience, accompanying himself with amazing skill on the chitaronne. Peri contributed music in the new style to In 1597 Peri collaborated with Corsi and the poet Ottavio Rinucini in a production of Dafne, which exhibited the characteristics that later defined the operatic genre. Sadly the music for Dafne does not survive, but Peri’s next effort with Rinucini, Euridice, performed in October of 1600, does survive thankfully.

It has been suggested that the 13 year old Francesca Caccini may have participated in the production of Euridice along with her father and most likely other members of her extraordinary musical family. Indeed, all the great musicians of the Medici court were involved in Euridice, and there was inevitably competition among the musicians at the Medici court for bragging rights regarding the “invention” of this new style and all the key claimants had a role in the production of Euridice, particularly Giulio Caccini, who rewrote the parts sung by his family, and Emilio de’ Cavalieri, who apparently directed the production. It is likely that Peri himself sang the role of Orfeo. As noted William Porter’s article in the 1980 Grove dictionary:

“Euridice received high praise, particularly from Marco da Gagliano, who was impressed not only by the work but also by Peri’s own expressive singing. The composer’s rivals, however, found the recitatives tedious and the stage designs inadequate.”

Indeed, music criticism was already well underway even in opera’s infancy. For every accolade that survives there seems to be a corresponding slur from a jealous competitor (singers!), most notably a satirical sonnet by Francesco Ruspoli.

Peri continued to serve the Medici court for the rest of his life, primarily as a composer, though there are occasional reference to his appearances as a singer. He also maintained a close relationship with the Gonzaga court in Mantua, though his proposal for a setting a libretto by Francesco Cini for wedding festivities in Mantua in 1608, were rejected in favor of a setting of Arianna by a certain Claudio Monteverdi.

Composition was apparently a laborious and difficult taks for Peri, and he left few finished compostions, but those that survive show him to merit the praise and high esteem he enjoyed during his lifetime. Much more can be learned about Peri in an excellent 1980 article by Tim Carter in Music and Letters (Carter, Tim. “Jacopo Peri”, Music and Letters 1980 61(2):121-135; doi:10.1093/ml/61.2.12.

The 17th century was a period of pervasive upheaval, a century when the fundamental perceptions of the world in all realms of life were shaken. It was a time when alchemy and empirical science coexisted, a time when the exploration of new worlds and the investigation of the sky challenged traditional conceptions of the place of the earth in the universe, a time of religious persecution and political conflict. And like tumultuous periods throughout history it was also a time that produced some of our most treasured art, architecture, poetry, and music. I would argue that beyond a mere curiosity about the origins of our current musical universe, the music of the this period has a special resonance for us today because we also are living through a ‘paradigm shift’ comparable to the crises of the 17th century, with all the attendant upheaval characteristic of such times.

Early in the century, Monteverdi wrote that he intended to publish a treatise describing the ‘secunda pratica’ or ‘second practice,’ the new compositional attitude that he and his colleagues had adopted. Drawing on Plato, he said that his book would be laid out in three parts and would begin with a chapter on oration. How appropriate that a manifesto of the new music of the 17th century should give such prominence to the rhetorical art, given the dominant motivation that the communication of words and the emotions they express provided composers of the period. Through the experiments that led to the creation of the genres of opera, oratorio, sonata, and cantata, composers sought to integrate drama and music into new compositional approaches that reflected the immediacy and engagement so essential to the art of oratory.

Perhaps because the fruits of these experiments remain fundamental to musical perception three centuries later, they take on a special significance for us. The basic elements of what we now call “common practice” tonality, the dominance of the keyboard as the basis of musical conception, the emergence of institutions like orchestras and opera companies and the appearance of professional virtuoso performers – the very notion that the purpose of music was to move the passions and communicate emotions – all took shape in the 17th century.

The culture of late 16th century Italy was marked by sharp philosophical contrasts and an eclectic intellectual climate. Historians typically portray this culture as a confrontation of conflicting intellectual, spiritual and social forces: classical versus Christian tradition, totalitarianism versus republicanism, feudalism versus capitalism, logic versus rhetoric, mysticism versus scientific rationalism. Certainly the “crises” of the seventeenth century was no more appalling than those of other times – wars, famine, recessions, epidemics and religious controversies were not inventions of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless the constant political and economic insecurity of the 16th century had succeeded in shaking the self-confidence of Renaissance society to such a degree that awareness of a sense inescapable crisis, of the absurdity of human endeavor, could effectively replace faith in the creative forces of man as a rational creature.

Just as powerfully, the effect of the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Catholic reaction had shattered any sense of spiritual universality (though this was always a myth in any case). Religious denomination became the pretext of choice in power politics, the most horrific example being the Thirty Years War that dominated the lives of most of Europe for the first half of the 17th century. The human species’ place at the center of the universe had been challenged by discoveries of Copernicus and especially by Galileo’s experiments with telescopes. Though it would not be until the 18th century that a conception of the Earth as a speck lost in an infinite universe would be widely accepted, doubt nevertheless prevailed about the accepted Aristotelian cosmology despite the draconian efforts of the Church to maintain it.

In his influential book Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, Gary Tomlinson focuses on the dichotomy between scholasticism and humanism in charting the development of Monteverdi’s music. His observations tell us a great deal about the fundamental shift in the attitudes of artists, musicians, and poets of the period and the new techniques and genres of expression that they created. This struggle between authority and innovation can serve as a useful window into the artistic climate of the time that highlights the role of oratory and rhetoric in stimulating its artistic expression.

Scholasticism arouse in the universities of the Middle Ages and was closely associated with the teaching there of theology, philosophy, medicine and law. It was characterized by a reliance on authority in the form of Scripture and Classical texts and a faith in the absolute truth of knowledge gained through rigorous deductive logic. Aristotle in particular appeared to present a systematic exploration of the full potential of human reason itself. Many scholastic writers were confident that complete knowledge was attainable and indeed already had been attained by a few ancient and early Christian writers in their fields of expertise. It can be said that the scholastic vision assumed not only the existence of a universal order but also a substantial capacity of the human mind to grasp this order. The appeal of such a attitude is of course its fundamentally optimistic view of man’s intellectual capabilities and the fact that it reinforced the unity, perfection and authority of an omnipotent God.

However, if reality was closed, systematically ordered, and completely apprehensible as the scholastics believed, then knowledge itself must be limited. Accepting the authority of the ancients could ultimately entail rejecting the possibility of new ideas. Though it may be easy to dismiss the “Schoolmen” as hopelessly old fashioned, their arguments have much in common with the all-too-common arguments of various fundamentalists of our own day. At any rate, facing the geographical, cosmological, technological, and other discoveries of the 16th century, the scholastic deference to authority sometimes hardened into dogmatism – a dogmatism that stimulated important questions about scientific, scholarly, and artistic innovation.

Humanism, by contrast, was native to Italy – a response to the imported scholastic ideas that seems to have been nurtured by the circumstances of Italian urban life. The necessities of business and self-governance encouraged a pragmatic view of the uses and ends of knowledge – learning was applied to everyday concerns and human actions, foreign to scholastic thinkers. A whole class of educated men emerged who were employed to work out contracts and negotiate with foreign traders and man the government bureaucracies. Soon a new breed of scholars, referred to as humanisti, appeared. They stressed moral philosophy and teachings derived from poetry and above all history. The humanisti promoted a new dialectic that blurred the distinction between scientific demonstration and plausible argumentation, marking a shift from syllogistic to topical logic. In this new view, human will attained a centrality and importance that was at odds with its scholastic position as merely a mediator between reason and passion.

Petrarch, one of the first humanists, wrote that “It is safer to strive for the good and pious will, than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth. ”The Humanists esteem for man’s will and their pragmatic view of knowledge arose in interaction with the requisites of republican self-governance and commercial necessity. Through the will, more than the intellect, man’s passions could be swayed and channeled to result in right action. The importance of rhetorical persuasion to this new vision is obvious. Behind the humanistic exaltation of oratory lay a recognition of the passions as dynamic forces directing human actions and thought and a need to control and exploit these forces. The humanist had little faith in the encompassing theories of the ancients, recognizing instead the validity of practical experience and accepting its fragmentary and unsystematic nature as the inevitable impression of a complex reality on the imperfect human intellect.

This humanist perception of reality encouraged a reconsideration of the relationships among the intellectual disciplines and the consideration of their differing methods and goals. Natural philosophy or science was seen by the Schoolmen as governed by universal laws and they distinguished their discipline, characterized by its logical search for universal truth, from the lower disciplines like astronomy, which merely observed phenomena. But in the face of ever more exact and diverse empirical observation humanists tended to admit their meager understanding of the laws of nature and came to a healthy realization of the limitations of classical authority. The unpredictable actions of man, ruled as often by his passions as by his intellect, became the focus of their study.

So how did this opposition of humanism and scholasticism play out in music?

In the first decade of the 17th century a controversy has been preserved in an exchange of published letters between a Bolognese academic named Giovanni Maria Artusi, often under the guise of the pseudonym Bracchino da Todi (they were gentlemen after all) and Monteverdi. Monteverdi figures so prominently not only because he was arguably the most celebrated musician of the time but also because we are fortunate to have so much of his correspondence – so many of the composers of the 17th century left little beyond their music for our consideration. He also serves admirably as a representative of the new music of the 17th century, just as Artusi aptly represents the the old.

Monteverdi was by no means a radical like Peri or Caccini or Galileo’s father Vincenzo. Rather, he was a synthesizer, taking the avant-garde techniques of the time and fashioning them into powerful enduring masterpieces that exerted a profound influence on all that followed. Artusi objected to certain contrapuntal practices he had observed in some as yet unpublished madrigals of Monteverdi, noting that they violated the rules of correct composition as laid down in the magisterial treatise of Zarlino in 1555 that was widely accepted as the authority on musical composition.

Monteverdi eventually responded in the preface to one of his madrigal collections that was later expanded by his brother, Giulio Cesare. Essentially Monteverdi couldn’t really be bothered to engage with a pedant like Artusi but felt he must make some defense of new musical practices, which he saw as already well established by that time. It is here that he promised his treatise on the seconda prattica, or second practice, second as in following chronologically not as superior to or superseding the older or prima prattica. This new practice was not based on a compositional principle or a new set of rules but rather on a new attitude toward the respective roles of text and music.

For thinkers like Artusi, the intellect and not the feelings, were the last resort when judging a work of art. Monteverdi, by contrast, perceived the goal of music as an appeal to the emotions of the audience, not to their understanding and in attaining this goal, music was justified in using any means necessary – even if it infringed on the established rules. For Artusi ‘art’ meant artistic skill, a craft at the highest level, constrained by a theory, which established its rules and thus made it teachable and learnable, debatable and controllable.

For Monteverdi art began where it stopped for Artusi. The ingenious idea, the non-verifiable, the non-teachable, the step past the boundaries of instruction, was the essence of art – based, significantly on an otherwise compulsory set of rules, so that a transgression against them could be recognized as such. For Monteverdi a work of art distinguished itself by the very fact that it could not be completely understood, that it possessed something disconcerting, mysterious and not entirely explicable. Within this idea of the seconda prattica are found the origins of the aesthetic theory of genius in which the genius breaks the shackles of tradition and creates his own rules. Fundamental to Monteverdi’s rebuttal of Artusi is his claim that words should be the ‘mistress’ of the music and not the other way around. Later defenders of this new attitude sited with disdain composers who could write whole compositions of perfect counterpoint and afterward hang onto the notes whatever words would fit. For a musician of humanist leanings like Monteverdi, the expressive power of music was a function of its relation to its text.

The highest goal that music could seek was to form a syntactic and semantic union with its text so perfect that the distinction of musical and nonmusical elements seemed to fade before the heightened oratorical power of a single musical speech – “To speak through singing…”

In its specifics, the dispute between Artusi and Monteverdi was over fairly minor compositional procedures that strike us as arcane and inconsequential. Its importance lies in the insights it offers into the changing attitude to authority so characteristic of the period. Artusi grounded an optimistic view of the capabilities of human intellect in the comprehension of an unchanging natural order. He, and others like him, could not admit a universe so disconcerting that the sun itself had stopped moving and the earth was no longer the center of the universe. Monteverdi, as a representative of humanist inclinations among musicians of his time, understood that the artistic authorities of the past were conditioned by their own cultures to express themselves in ways not necessarily relevant to the present – he rejected the scholastic placing of theory over practice. Perhaps most importantly, Monteverdi’s concern for the joining of music to poetry in a single moving and persuasive language links him to the Humanists’ high estimation of man’s will and their urge to sway the passions, associating him with their pursuit of rhetorical eloquence, the key to those passions.

[1] This article, which originated as a lecture at the University Club in San Francisco in September, 2004, benefits substantially from several scholarly works. Due to its nature as an unpublished lecture for a general audience, I was not scrupulous about specific citations. I hope that a general citation in the following bibliography will convey my recognition of the role of the works cited in informing this article and excuse me for any unintentionally un-cited quotes.

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Select Bibliography

Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel. The Monteverdi Companion. New York, 1968.

Bianconi, Lorenzo. Music in the Seventeenth Century. Turin, 1982.

Brouwsma, William. The Waning of the Renaissance. New Haven and London, 2000.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge and London, 1957.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, 1962.

Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley, 1987.