The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Claudio Monteverdi · a favola in musica in a prologue and five acts, to a libretto in Italian by Alessandro Striggio the younger · the score as printed at Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1609, with the Apollo ending, and reprinted in 1615 · a Toccata, La Musica’s Prologue and five acts, for solo voices, chorus and instruments the print assigns by world · about two hours in performance
Mode
Favola in musica: a court pastoral tragedy in music, a prologue and five acts in which recitative, strophic song, madrigal chorus, dance, sinfonia and ritornello serve one action
Mythos
Orpheus, the founding singer: music’s power over death, the descent, the condition and the backward look; Music herself as the Prologue’s speaker; the son received by the divine father and raised to the stars
Phase
One wedding day in Thrace broken by a death, a descent to the Styx and the realm of Pluto, a release lost at a look, and a return to the fields of Thrace that ends in heaven
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in a prologue and five acts setting Striggio’s Italian, in the score printed at Venice in 1609, with the Apollo ending; words and music scored together as one work
Register
From a fanfare played three times before the curtain and a shepherds’ dance-song to a messenger’s bare recitative, an ornamented supplication to the ferryman and a duet rising to heaven
Scale
Thrace, the Styx, the realm of Pluto and the sky; shepherds, nymphs, spirits and gods; about two hours
Governing Proposition
The founding singer of myth marries in Thrace, hears in the middle of his joy that his bride is dead, goes down to the Styx and sings the ferryman to sleep, is granted her return on one condition, looks back and loses her, and is taken up to heaven by Apollo, his father. The wager of the work is that music can enact its own power over death rather than report it, and that in the enacting it shows the limit of that power: the song that moves the dead cannot keep the singer’s eyes forward.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Before the curtain rises a fanfare is played three times. The Toccata is a fanfare with muted trumpets, a ceremonial blaze unlike anything in the Florentine operas of the years before. It announces a court. The occasion was Carnival at Mantua: the opera was first performed on 24 February 1607 for the Accademia degli Invaghiti, under the patronage of Prince Francesco Gonzaga, to whom the score is dedicated. A fanfare at the door of a favola about the power of music says first what music can do in a prince’s house.
Then a ritornello, and Music herself steps forward. La Musica sings the Prologue in her own person, “Dal mio Permesso amato” (“From my beloved Permessus”), in five strophes over one bass, each framed and separated by the ritornello. Music speaks for the art the whole work will put to the test. The ritornello is the work’s first architecture. It will come back at the close of Act II, when the loss has been told, and again before Act V, when Orfeo returns to the fields of Thrace, so that the frame Music sets at the start is heard again at the points where the action turns.
The score was printed at Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1609 and reprinted in 1615; it is the unit scored here, with Alessandro Striggio’s Italian as Monteverdi set it. At its head the print lists the instruments, among them harpsichords, a double harp, chitarroni, violins, viols, wooden organs, a regal, trombones, cornetts, a recorder and trumpets, and in its body it assigns some of them by world: strings, recorders and plucked continuo for Thrace, trombones, cornetts and the regal for the realm below. Much else it leaves to the performers. The form was then seven years old: Peri’s and Caccini’s settings of Rinuccini’s Euridice had been made at Florence in 1600. This was Monteverdi’s first opera.
Movement II
Act I is Thrace on a wedding day. Shepherds and nymphs celebrate the marriage of Orfeo and Euridice in chorus, dance and ritornello. They call on the god of marriage, “Vieni Imeneo” (“Come, Hymen”), and sing the dance-song “Lasciate i monti” (“Leave the mountains”), the pastoral world at its most open. The madrigal choruses draw on the craft of Monteverdi’s five-voice books, and their sound is the community’s: the shepherds who sing the wedding will be the ones who mourn.
Orfeo sings “Rosa del ciel” (“Rose of the sky”), and Euridice answers him briefly. Her reply is short, and the shortness tells. The opera gives her too little to sing for the loss to come to be a person’s rather than an idea’s, and the archetype it builds acts through persons that are slight. Orfeo, in this act, is an office more than a man, the singer of the myth celebrating the marriage the myth will take away.
The act is long for its work. The wedding is set out beyond what the reversal strictly needs, and it is charm more than height. But it is not idle. The loss has weight only because the joy has been given time, and the music of Thrace, strophe and dance, is the music the next act will break. The kinds of song are already the kinds of world: in Thrace one sings in strophes, and dances.
Movement III
Act II opens in the same world. Orfeo sings a strophic song of joy among the shepherds. Into it the Messenger breaks. She is Silvia, and her first words, “Ahi caso acerbo” (“Ah, bitter chance”), fall into a song still in progress. The music turns from dance to lament in a few bars. The shepherds’ music cannot continue. The subtractive test meets nothing here: Orfeo’s joy exists so that this cry can break it, and the reversal is made of the break.
Her narrative, “In un fiorito prato” (“In a flowering meadow”), is in recitative, and news is heard as speech breaking into song: the death of Euridice is told, not shown. The recitative is flexible and pointed throughout: this is the craft of the work at its plainest and most exact, and it discloses by sound alone how news enters joy.
Orfeo answers with “Tu se’ morta” (“You are dead”). It begins in bare recitative and only then rises: grief in its plainest form, set as speech before it is allowed to become song. A choral lament follows, and the act closes with the Prologue’s ritornello: Music’s frame returns at the moment the loss is complete, and the story she promised has turned.
Movement IV
Act III goes down. Speranza, Hope, leads Orfeo to the Styx and leaves him at the inscription on the gate, “Lasciate ogni speranza” (“Abandon all hope”), Dante’s line set where Hope must turn back. The colour changes with the world. Trombones, cornetts and the regal sound below; the regal is Caronte’s. The ferryman refuses him passage. Then Orfeo sings the work’s centre, “Possente spirto” (“Mighty spirit”).
It is not a report of the myth’s song; it is the song, sung to the ferryman. Its strophes are variations over a recurring bass, and the print gives the vocal line twice, ornamented and plain, so that the ornament can be seen to be the elevation: the art at full stretch. The strophes are answered in turn by obbligato instruments, violins, cornetts and harp, changing from one to the next, until the last strophe, on the plain line. Caronte is not moved to pity. He sleeps. A quiet sinfonia holds the sleep, Orfeo crosses, and a chorus of spirits closes the act.
Act IV is short. Proserpina, remembering her own love, moves Plutone, and he grants Euridice on condition that Orfeo not look back. Orfeo sings his triumph on the road up. Doubt comes; he turns; Euridice sings her last words, and she is lost. The doubt that makes him look back is stated in a few lines, and the decisive act is the thinnest in the work. A chorus of spirits closes it on virtue and self-mastery: the power of song over others is not power over oneself. The song moved the dead; it could not keep the singer’s eyes forward.
Movement V
Act V returns to Thrace, and the Prologue’s ritornello comes before it. Orfeo laments in the fields, and Echo answers him; the echo effects are exact. Then Apollo descends in a cloud. He reproves his son for yielding to grief, the Neoplatonic warning against excess of passion. Father and son rise together singing, “Saliam cantando” (“Let us rise singing”). A chorus of shepherds follows, and a moresca, a dance, ends the work.
That is the ending of the 1609 score, and it is the ending scored here. It adds a second archetype, the son received by the divine father and raised to the stars, and it answers grief with a moral and a machine. The libretto printed at Mantua for the performance of 1607 ends otherwise: Orfeo flees the Bacchantes, who sing in praise of Bacchus, and his death at their hands is left to the myth. Which ending the audience of 1607 saw, and how far the Apollo ending was already in place, the record has not settled. The two endings show that the close could be exchanged.
The score was seldom heard after its first years. Its public life begins again with Vincent d’Indy’s performing version for Paris in 1904, and runs through the editions and arrangements of Malipiero, Orff and others, Harnoncourt’s recording of 1969 and his staging with Ponnelle at Zurich in the 1970s. It is now the oldest opera in regular repertory and was a founding test of the historical performance movement, because the print leaves so much to be decided: what plays where it names no instrument, how much ornament to add, which ending crowns the tragedy. Each performance answers those questions afresh, 419 years after the first.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance at the centre and gives at the edges. The Messenger cannot be cut: Orfeo’s strophic joy in Act II exists so that “Ahi caso acerbo” can break it, and the wedding of Act I exists so that the loss has weight. “Possente spirto” is the myth’s act performed, the reason the opera exists. The give is in three places. Act I sets out the wedding beyond what the reversal needs. Act IV states the doubt that turns Orfeo in a few lines, so the decisive act is the thinnest. And Apollo’s descent can be removed, as the libretto printed at Mantua in 1607 shows: an ending that could be exchanged was not compelled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and what is disclosed can be stated: the power of song over others is not power over oneself. Orfeo’s art puts Caronte to sleep and moves Proserpina to pity; it cannot keep his own eyes forward. The spirit chorus that ends Act IV states the claim, and the lament of Act V shows its cost. The Messenger scene discloses a second truth by sound alone, how news enters joy. Held below the gate on three counts. The condition is largely the myth’s, from Virgil and Ovid. Euridice is given too little to sing for the loss to be a person’s rather than an idea’s. And the Apollo ending states its meaning as a moral, so the close is told rather than disclosed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height is real and recurs at the hinges. The Toccata, played three times before the curtain, is a ceremonial blaze unlike anything in the Florentine operas. The Messenger’s entry is the sublime of shock: the music turns from dance to lament in a few bars, and “Tu se’ morta” is grief in its plainest form. “Possente spirto” is the summit, a supplication whose strophes are answered in turn by violins, cornetts and harp, the ornament itself the elevation, until the plain line of the last strophe. Caronte’s sleep is held in a quiet sinfonia; Act V closes on a rising. Held below the top on frequency: Act I is charm, the spirit choruses are dignified rather than elevated, and the crisis of Act IV is too quick to rise.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built, not evoked. An opera made seven years after the form began takes for its subject the founding singer: the myth of music’s power over death, enacted by music. La Musica speaks the Prologue in her own person, and “Possente spirto” is not a report of Orpheus’s song; it is the song, sung to the ferryman. The descent, the condition and the backward look bear the structure’s load, so the form makes the bargain of art with death audible. The Apollo ending adds a second archetype, the son received by the divine father and raised to the stars. Held below the top because the particular stays thin: Orfeo is an office more than a man until Act V, and Euridice is a name with a few lines.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Florentine favola of the decade before: Peri’s and Caccini’s settings of Rinuccini’s Euridice (1600), recitative over a sparse continuo, with the spectacle of the intermedio and the madrigal behind them. The departures are three: a full musical drama that brings every language then available, recitative, strophic aria, madrigal chorus, dance-song, sinfonia and ritornello, into one action; an instrumental ensemble specified at the head of the print and assigned by world; and virtuoso ornament written out as dramatic means. The stake was real: a first opera, in a form seven years old, while Artusi’s attacks on Monteverdi’s new manner were current. Held near the gate because the subject, the pastoral frame and the sung speech are the Florentines’, and the turn carries their road further more than it breaks from it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that music is the measure of its own power. The kinds of song are the kinds of world. Thrace sings in strophes and dances; news comes in recitative, so the Messenger’s speech is heard as speech breaking into song; supplication is ornament, so in “Possente spirto” Orfeo’s art is visibly at full stretch, the plain line printed beside the ornamented to show what the ornament adds. Instrumental colour marks the boundary: trombones and regal below, strings and recorders above. The Prologue’s ritornello, heard again at the end of Act II and before Act V, makes the loss a return to the frame. Held down by Act IV, whose form is too brisk to hold the turn, and by the Apollo ending, whose form follows ceremony more than drama.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, on a short record. The work’s examined life begins with Vincent d’Indy’s performing version for Paris in 1904 and runs through the editions and arrangements of Malipiero, Orff and others, Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s recording of 1969 and the staging he made with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle at Zurich in the 1970s. Its questions stay open: which ending the audience of 1607 saw; what each number the print leaves unscored should be played on; whether the Apollo ending crowns or betrays the tragedy; how much ornament to add; and why Orfeo turns. Every performance must answer them, because the print leaves so much to the realisation. Held below the top by the span: about a century of return, not four.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is near the top: the field was the music drama of its decade, and the work reorganised it, showing that the Florentine experiment could carry a whole drama with every resource of music, from recitative to orchestral colour. It is the work by which opera became an art and not a learned trial. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its century it led to Monteverdi’s own later stage works and stood behind the Venetian opera he served, though the public theatres of Venice took their shape from other models and the score was seldom heard after its first years. Its largest reach came after 1900. It is the oldest opera in regular repertory and a founding test of the historical performance movement. Delay is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives in print, in two editions, 1609 and 1615, with words and music whole; nothing of the scored work is lost. What is doubtful is the realisation: much of the instrumentation is left open, the continuo is unwritten, as in every such print, and the different ending in the libretto of 1607 puts the close in question from within. Presence is charged most. The score was seldom heard after its first years, and its continuous public life, from d’Indy’s Paris performance of 1904, is a little over a century. The text is whole and the presence since 1904 is wide and growing, which lifts the figure; the long absence and the open realisation hold it here.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium, to the same anchors as any desk. The recitative is flexible and pointed, nowhere more than in the Messenger’s narrative. “Possente spirto” is a feat of construction: strophic variation over a recurring bass, with the vocal ornament written out and the obbligato instruments changing strophe by strophe. The madrigal choruses draw on the craft of the five-voice books. The assignment of instruments by world is a making that bears weight, and the echo of Act V is exact. Striggio’s verse is serviceable and metrically varied, the strophic songs well shaped for setting, but it is not distinguished poetry, and words and music are scored together. Held off the top by the libretto, by the plainer choruses and by the thin carpentry of Act IV, where the craft does not build the crisis it has prepared.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the shepherds’ dance-song “Lasciate i monti” and Caronte’s refusal over the regal. One law governs them: music as the power that orders worlds, each world sounding by its own instruments and its own kind of song. The Prologue’s ritornello, heard in the frame and at the turning points, holds Thrace, Hades and heaven inside one design. The strain is the close. The Apollo ending answers grief with a moral and a machine, and lifts the work from tragedy into apotheosis by a law the first four acts have not prepared: the god who reproves excess of passion enters a work that has made passion its art. That the libretto of 1607 printed a different ending shows the close was not fixed by the work’s own law, and the axis is charged for it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Several orders are held: consciousness, in joy, grief and doubt; love and marriage, in the wedding and the loss; the community, in the shepherds and nymphs who celebrate and mourn; the natural order, in the woods and fields of Thrace and their echo; the underworld and the gods, with a second marriage in Plutone and Proserpina, whose love moves the release; father and son, in Apollo and Orfeo; and art itself, in La Musica and in the song that moves the dead. They are joined: Proserpina’s memory of her own love is the hinge on which Orfeo’s song works. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, labour and history have no place in the pastoral world, and a court favola of about two hours holds a cosmos in emblem more than a society.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 9.0. A form in which the kinds of song are the kinds of world and the ornament of “Possente spirto” is the art at full stretch; a command of recitative, strophic variation and instrumental colour that bears weight; the myth of music’s power over death enacted by music itself; and a score whole in print since 1609, its presence since 1904 wide and growing.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, marriage, the community, the natural order, the underworld, the gods and art itself are held and joined, but in emblem, with the state, labour and history absent from the pastoral world. Then The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 8.4: a wedding act longer than its work, a fourth act too brisk to hold the turn and an ending that could be exchanged; and a disclosure largely the myth’s, through a Euridice given too little to sing, closed by a moral that is told rather than shown.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate, 8.7, stands in the band of Tier IV and below the 9.0 the summit requires in any case.
Basis · the score and libretto of L’Orfeo, favola in musica, as printed at Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1609 and reprinted in 1615: the Toccata, La Musica’s Prologue and five acts, with Alessandro Striggio’s Italian as Monteverdi set it, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand, and data/texts holds nothing for this work. The ending scored is the Apollo ending of the 1609 score. The libretto printed at Mantua for the performance of 1607, which ends with the Bacchantes, is evidence, not the object, and it bears only on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Bottomless Well; the record has not settled which ending was performed in 1607. Words and music are scored together, as one work; no performance, edition or recording is the unit. Italian is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The spans of years were computed by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them bar counts, the keys of the numbers, the exact layout and size of the instrumental list, the doubling of roles and the first cast in 1607, and the history of performance between the first years and 1904, are not given. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.