Europa Galante, Bostridge & Biondi

From Renaissance to Baroque

Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Purcell, and More

Harry Haskell

In both secular and sacred music, the early Baroque period was a time of extraordinary ferment and innovation, as composers, performers, and listeners gradually turned away from the densely textured polyphonic music of the High Renaissance and embraced the more transparent, soloistic style of monody. In the space of four short decades in the early 17th century, Baroque opera grew from a rarefied aristocratic pastime to a universally popular entertainment. At the same time, instrumental music—hitherto subordinate to the vocal genres—began to take on an independent existence, fostering the growth of innovative compositional styles and often highly virtuosic performance techniques. Much of the energy that sparked this outpouring of creativity emanated from St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. The architectural splendor of the vast and iconic Byzantinestyle basilica is mirrored in a musical heritage of equal magnificence. Both the building’s interior plan, with its intersecting naves and mosaic-covered domes, and its exceptionally reverberant acoustics favored the development of large-scale polychoral music. The basilica’s famed cori spezzati, or divided choirs, were often separated spatially as well as musically, with musicians perched in balconies and organ lofts coordinating with those near the main altar. The sumptuous repertory of choral and instrumental works associated with St. Mark’s helped define the musical style developed by Claudio Monteverdi and the other forwardlooking composers represented on tonight’s program.

The “Modern Style”

In addition to its choirs of men and boys, St. Mark’s maintained a top-notch instrumental ensemble for especially important occasions. Among its members in the early 1600s was Dario Castello, who identified himself as “head of the company of wind-instrument players in Venice” on the title page of the first volume of his Sonate concertate in stil moderno in 1621. Like Monteverdi, his colleague at St. Mark’s, Castello distanced himself from the vocal polyphony of the 16th-century stile antico. His 29 sonatas for “diverse instruments” are thoroughly up to date in their use of a harmonic base line, idiomatic instrumental techniques, and alternating homophonic and contrapuntal passages. The two four-part works that introduce tonight’s program illustrate the lively contrasts of tempos, dynamics, textures, and affects that contributed to his music’s widespread popularity.

Monteverdi—who served as maestro di capella at St. Mark’s for three decades beginning in 1613—was a seminal figure in the transition from the ornate polyphonic style of the late Renaissance to the recitative-like solo monody that laid the foundation for Baroque opera. His three surviving operas—L’Orfeo (1607), Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640), and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642–43)—are among the earliest that continue to hold the stage. Despite his innovations, Monteverdi rejected the label of revolutionary, insisting that the compositional style of his predecessors (which he referred to as the “first practice”) would never become obsolete. Yet he made it clear that his primary allegiance was to the modern “second practice,” in which words were “the mistress of the harmony, and not the servant.” It was this fundamental reordering of priorities that gave rise to the poignant dissonances and powerfully expressive word-painting that characterizes Monteverdi’s operas and madrigals.

Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda concerns the mortal combat and ill-fated love between the Christian crusader Tancred and the Saracen warrior Clorinda, as related in Tasso’s epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered”). A hybrid of madrigal, stage cantata, and ballet, it’s one of the madrigali guerrieri, or “warlike madrigals,” included in Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals of 1638. (The first performance took place in the mid-1620s as part of a private carnival celebration put on by a Venetian nobleman.) A tenor narrator, or testo, provides a running poetic commentary on the bloody fight, with brief interjections by the two protagonists and vivid scene-painting by the small instrumental ensemble. In an illustration of the so-called stile concitato, or “agitated style,” Monteverdi uses fusillades of short repeated notes to convey the excitement and confusion of hand-to-hand combat. Although the libretto is sung almost entirely in freely measured recitative, the operatic equivalent of speech, the score is rich in lyricism, drama, and color. Galloping rhythms, rapid tremolos, clanging plucked strings, and fanfare-like triads conjure a martial atmosphere, but Monteverdi’s flexible arioso is equally effective in evoking the softer emotions of pity, love, and grief.

Mimicry and Elegy

Like Monteverdi, the Italian composer and violinist Carlo Farina launched his career in Mantua on the staff of the Gonzaga family’s acclaimed musical household. By the time he published his Capriccio stravagante in 1627, he had moved to Dresden, where the italophilic Heinrich Schütz had long served as de facto kapellmeister to the Saxon electoral court. Scored for a quartet of bowed strings, the Capriccio showcases the violin’s ability to imitate the voices of sundry instruments and animals. To that end Farina marshalls a dazzling array of special techniques, from sonorous doublestops and throbbing tremolos to percussive col legno effects (beating the strings with the wood of the bow) and ethereal sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge). The series of short descriptive pieces—evoking, inter alia, the tell-tale drone of the hurdy-gurdy, the cackling of barnyard hens, the tremulous pulsations of a pipe organ, the snarling of cats, and the strumming of a Spanish guitar—are punctuated by dancelike interludes in what Farina’s German subtitle aptly characterizes as a “kurtzweilig Quodlibet” (“amusing medley”).

At the opposite end of the expressive spectrum is The Queen’s Epicedium, an elegiac memorial to Queen Mary that Henry Purcell wrote shortly before his own death in 1695. In the wake of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Purcell channeled most of his energy into incidental music for plays, semi-operas, and the first indisputably great English opera, Dido and Aeneas. Yet he excelled in virtually every realm of composition, from vividly dramatic theatrical works to deeply felt religious music, and from simple songs to intricately wrought chamber music. The scope of Purcell’s achievement is all the more impressive when one considers that his life was prematurely cut short: the 36-year-old composer was interred in Westminster Abbey in 1695, a few months after the queen’s “epicedium,” or state funeral, for which he composed some of his most sublime music. An anthology of Purcell’s songs published three years later awarded him the mythological sobriquet by which he is known to history: Orpheus Britannicus, the “British Orpheus.”

“In vain, Lesbia, do you beseech me [to sing]” begins the Latin text of The Queen’s Epicedium (translated from the original English, Latin apparently being deemed more suitable for royal obsequies than the vernacular). Purcell’s moving elegy, scored for voice and continuo, transports Mary to the mythical realm of Arcadia and likens her to its late lamented queen, whose death has left behind a world “filled with tears.” Such classicizing pastoral conceits were commonplace in Stuart England, but there is nothing commonplace or artificial about Purcell’s music. Having rebuffed Lesbia’s plea in the opening recitative, the singer nevertheless proceeds to vent his grief in a noble, melismatic C-minor aria that culminates in plangent iterations of the word moerore (mourning). Resignation gives way to urgent declamation in the concluding recitative, and Purcell’s work ends with a luminous invocation of the departed queen, whose “star, immovable, shines on in the heavens.”

Instruments and Voices

Instrumental music, as an independent genre, came into its own in early 17th-century Italy, and no artist played a more important role in its ascendancy than the composer and organist Girolamo Frescobaldi. A close contemporary of Monteverdi (both died in 1643), Frescobaldi spent most of his career in Rome, ending his life in service to Pope Urban VIII as organist of the Cappella Giulia. Frescobaldi’s singleminded focus on instrumental music—his output consisted exclusively of keyboard works—helped magnify his influence in that emerging field. In 1635 he dedicated his most famous work to the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, a noted patron of the arts. Despite its secular-sounding title, Fiori musicali (“Musical Flowers”) mainly consists of three organ masses designed for performance as part of the Catholic liturgy. The rich contrapuntal fabric of the “Toccata per l’Elevazione” (Toccata for the Elevation of the Host) conjures an appropriately contemplative, even mystical mood. By contrast, “Bergamasca” and “Capriccio sopra la Girolmeta”— both based on popular tunes of the day—are unmistakably secular in character, glorifying the prowess of composer and performer rather than God. With their dancing rhythms and lively imitative textures, they seem to have been inserted by chance at the tail end of Frescobaldi’s florilegium.

Although Monteverdi wrote virtually no freestanding instrumental music, the many fanfares, sinfonias, and other instrumental passages in his operas bear witness to his mastery of orchestration. Tempro la cetra (“I tune the lyre”) opens his Seventh Book of Madrigals, published in Venice in 1619. However, this richly lyrical cantata for solo tenor, five instruments, and continuo more properly belongs in the catchall category of “other kinds of songs” mentioned in the collection’s subtitle. Monteverdi breaks Giambattista Marino’s sonnet into bite-sized chunks—four strophes that build in intensity and vocal virtuosity over a repeating harmonic bass in a rapturous paean to romantic love (or perhaps, as one scholar has suggested, to the rhapsodic furor of artistic inspiration). The work is larded with dance-based instrumental ritornellos, or refrains, beginning with a majestic introductory sinfonia whose stately, pavane-like rhythm (long-short-short) recalls similar episodes in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.