L'Orfeo: An interdisciplinary project

Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (printed in Mantua, 1609) is one of the first operas in European music history, if not the first, and combines the idea of interpreting words through music, presenting a plot through singing - and all this over chords that are notated as basso continuo, i.e. improvised.

In Monteverdi's time, this combination was very new and groundbreaking. It encouraged composers throughout Europe to abandon the old "prima prattica" and turn to the "seconda prattica". The freedom to break away from the strict rules of counterpoint ("prima prattica") in order to interpret a text must have had an immense appeal. In combination with the basso continuo, completely new possibilities for the realization of dramatic music emerged. These led directly to the emergence of opera, a development that had already become apparent a few years earlier in the Euridice compositions by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, among others.

These new ideas were not without controversy: there is a very emotional exchange of letters between Monteverdi's brother Giulio and a music theorist named Giovanni Maria Artusi. The latter accused Claudio Monteverdi of breaking the rules with his music and thus being "hard and unpleasant to the ear". G. Monteverdi replied on behalf of his busy brother that his music was composed on a different basis, namely "that the word is the mistress of harmony and harmony the servant of the word" and that Artusi had not understood this because he assumed the reverse hierarchical order on which the "prima prattica" is based.

Interpreting texts vividly and very intensively through music had been common practice for some time, especially in madrigals, mostly polyphonic vocal compositions. Now madrigals with basso continuo were also created, resulting in new structures (e.g. solo passages with continuo between tutti passages), and solo madrigals were now also possible, as the harmony (which was still essential and necessary for the overall sound and understanding) was taken over by chordal/bass instruments.

(Prof. Isolde Kittel-Zerer)

Although not the first drama in the new style of recitar cantando, Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio's  Favolain Musica,  L'Orfeo (Mantua, 1607), represents a major advance in the depiction of conflicting human emotions within an evolving dramatic structure. After a prologue performed in heroic declamatory style by the personification (prosopopoeia) of music, La Musica, the following two acts, which depict the wedding festivities of Orfeo and Euridice in an Arcadian world of shepherds and shepherdesses, are mainly in bucolic style, mainly in a bucolic style, and culminate in a series of songs and dances accompanied by  Violeda Brazzo or  Flautini and a basso continuo consisting mainly of the clear sound of the clavicembalo, the Arpa Doppia and the Chitarrone .

The appearance of La Messagiera in the middle of the second act, who abruptly interrupts these pastoral festivities with her exclamation "Ahi caso acerbo" to announce Euridice's death backstage in the form of a narrative representation of Greek tragedy, leads to the introduction of the sombre and carrying basso continuo of the Organo di Legno and marks a clear change from the bucolic to the tragic mode, both stylistically and aurally, which dominates the rest of the work until the lieto fine of the fifth act.

The emotional tension of  L'Orfeo is considerably heightened by the structural fault line of this seismic change, initially expressed as a tense confrontation between Orfeo and La Messaggiera. In the following acts, however, this evokes a psychomachy in Orfeo himself - between his naivety and his arrogance, between exultation and despair - that reveals the limits of his semi-divinity and the extent of his human fragility in the face of loss.

Alessandro Striggio's libretto is a varied landscape of different poetic styles, rhetorical figures and metrical structures, which find an equivalent in Monteverdi's musical adaptation of recitar cantando in the sense of the stile nuovo , depending on their rhetorical, dramatic and above all their psychological function.

(Prof. Mark Tucker)