The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 22 (2016) No. 1

Published 2017

Unsuspected Competitive Contexts in Early Opera: Monteverdi’s Milanese Challenge to Florence’s “Euridice” (1600). By Federico Schneider. Temi e testi, nuova ser. 141. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2016. [xix, 155 pp. ISBN 978-88-6372-876-7.]

Reviewed by Tim Carter*

1. Introduction

2. Monteverdi and Milan

3. A “Dantean” Orfeo

4. A “Petrarchan” Euridice

5. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

1.1 At least part of the main title of Federico Schneider’s new book on early seventeenth-century opera will seem straightforward: the idea that the genre was created in “competitive contexts” is familiar enough. His subtitle appears more puzzling: in what sense did Claudio Monteverdi offer a “Milanese” challenge to Ottavio Rinuccini’s and Jacopo Peri’s Euridice? The answer—that it was by way of Orfeo—compounds the confusion, given that Monteverdi’s first opera, to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio the younger, had its premiere in Mantua on 24 February 1607, the last Saturday of Carnival. This is not the first time that Schneider has tackled Orfeo, nor that he has explored how genres such as the pastoral, which tend to come low down the pecking order for those who study early modern Italian literature, merit closer attention for their intended effects.^[1] As a literary scholar himself (Schneider is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Mary Washington), he clearly brings expertise to bear on issues that might pass musicologists by. But we are still left with his troublesome subtitle that needs unpacking in various ways.

2. Monteverdi and Milan

2.1 We know a fair amount about Monteverdi’s career in Cremona, Mantua, and Venice.^[2] For his time in Mantua (1590–1612) we also look to his connections with other north-Italian courts in Ferrara and Florence, as well as with Rome (at least, around 1610). In an article that appeared in 1952, however, Claudio Sartori reminded us also to turn our gaze westward:^[3] Cremona was part of the Duchy of Milan, which in turn shared part of its eastern border with the Duchy of Mantua. We know of three occasions when Monteverdi himself was in Milan. The first was sometime in 1589, before he entered service with the Gonzagas: he refers to his being there in the dedication of Il secondo libro de’ madrigali a cinque voci of 1590 to Giacomo Ricardi, president of the Milanese senate. The third was in September or early October 1612, after his dismissal from Mantua, when there were conflicting reports about the success of his directing music at a service in the Duomo. Monteverdi was certainly in search of employment in 1589, and may have been in 1612.

2.2 The second visit, during the summer of 1607, seems to have been made under less pressure. Sartori identifies “two Milanese friends” who supported Monteverdi at this stage in his career: Cherubino Ferrari and Aquilino Coppini. Both were members of the Accademia degli Inquieti in Milan. Coppini, professor of rhetoric at the University of Pavia, produced three volumes containing spiritual contrafacta of Monteverdi’s madrigals (in 1607, 1608, and 1609); he also mentioned the composer in his letters. Ferrari was a Carmelite friar and “theologian” to the duke of Mantua. He wrote two poetic eulogies that Monteverdi included in his Fifth Book of madrigals (1605): in the first, placed immediately after the dedication to Vincenzo Gonzaga, Ferrari describes the composer’s devotion to the duke; in the other, at the end of the book (between the statement to the “Studiosi lettori” and the table of contents), he praises Monteverdi and the power of his music. I have argued elsewhere that these two poems were part of the composer’s ammunition in his ongoing controversy with the music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, and that they might also prompt a connection between that controversy and Orfeo.^[4]

2.3 Ferrari’s admiration for Monteverdi is clear also in his account of the composer’s visit to Milan in mid-1607. Monteverdi often went back to his native Cremona in the summer (when the duke and his immediate circle tended to be away from Mantua): he was there on 28 July 1607, when he wrote a letter to Annibale Iberti, and presumably also on 10 August for a meeting of the Accademia degli Animosi, when he was admitted to that academy. He then seems to have gone to Milan, perhaps in connection with the printing of the first of Coppini’s volumes of contrafacta (the dedication is dated 5 September). He took with him the materials for Orfeo (presumably a printed libretto and manuscript score), for on 22 August 1607 (not 10 August, as Sartori says), Ferrari wrote a letter to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga noting that “Monteverdi has made me see the verses and hear the music of the play which Your Highness had done,” and that there was nothing better in terms of how well the poet and the musician had “represented the affects of the soul.”^[5] No one seems yet to have looked closely at the complete text of that letter (only the first part, on Orfeo, gets quoted in the literature). In fact, Ferrari’s praise of Striggio and Monteverdi has an ulterior motive as a way of gaining a personal favor from the duke: a formal invitation to preach in Mantua from the upcoming Advent to Lent so that he can be there for the whole of Carnival. This may or may not color our reading of his fulsome remarks on Orfeo, though it places them in some perspective.

2.4 All this is based on solid evidence. However, Sartori also engages in speculation: first, that Monteverdi (and his father, Baldassare) were officially members of the Accademia degli Inquieti in Milan (as Coppini and Ferrari certainly were); and second, that on his travels in summer 1607 Monteverdi performed Orfeo both in Cremona and in Milan “either in excerpts or perhaps in a concert version, and almost certainly in the seat of the Accademia degli Inquieti.”^[6] There is scant foundation for any of this: indeed, the wording of Ferrari’s report on Orfeo—“Monteverdi has made me see …”—does not suggest any kind of public airing. However, Schneider follows Sartori (including the wrong date for the letter) and treats soft speculation as harder fact. One of the main claims of the present book is that Orfeo needs to be read in the context of—nay, somehow emerged from—debates in the Accademia degli Inquieti represented by the Discorso … sopra la maraviglia (Discourse on Marvel) that Giovanni Talentone, “primo filosofo” at the University of Pavia, presented to the academy and then published in 1597 (Milan: Francesco Paganello). Hence Orfeo is a “Milanese challenge” to Florentine opera.

2.5 Schneider might have tried to find out more about Giovanni Talentone (1542–1620), also styled Talentoni. He was, in fact, from Tuscany (born in Fivizzano, in the northwest region known as Lunigiana), and he had a somewhat peripatetic career teaching in Pisa, then Pavia and Parma. We have at least five published texts by him from 1587 to 1605 on topics ranging from philosophy through medicine into the sciences, the first of which is a lecture on Petrarch presented to the Accademia Fiorentina on 13 September 1587.^[7] He was also a member of the Accademia della Crusca, it seems. All this situates him as much in a Florentine environment as in a Lombard one, and it suggests that the topic of his lecture to the Inquieti was part of a broader portfolio of interests that may or may not have involved a consequent diluting of expertise. But while he could have geared his Discorso … sopra la maraviglia toward what he thought the members of the Accademia degli Inquieti in Milan would want to hear, one can fairly ask just how “Milanese” it might be.

2.6 Schneider’s subtitle now seems even more problematic, and it is probably untenable. But there may be a way of rescuing his argument. Monteverdi clearly had connections with various academies in northern Italy: he was defended in the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy by someone (still unidentified) with an academy pseudonym, “L’Ottuso”; his Fourth Book of madrigals (1603) was dedicated to the Accademia degli Intrepidi of Ferrara; Orfeo was performed under the auspices of the Invaghiti in Mantua; the composer was (we have seen) a member of the Animosi in Cremona; much later, in 1625–26, he was enrolled in the Filomusi in Bologna; and his Venetian operas have been associated with the Accademia degli Incogniti. Our knowledge of most of these academies tends to be sketchy at best, as it is for the Inquieti in Milan. It may not matter for present purposes: lectures such as Talentone’s were part of the intellectual discourse of the period. Mantua also had close enough connections with Milan for ideas to circulate between the two states. Thus, Orfeo can be “Mantuan”—as it clearly was—while entering into a number of broader debates, whether “Milanese” or not. We might worry, however, about whether any such “intellectual” content in the opera was due to Striggio or to Monteverdi.

3. A “Dantean” Orfeo

3.1 The subject of Giovanni Talentone’s Discorso … sopra la maraviglia was topical for the time.^[8] In later accounts of this period, marvel (or the marvelous) has tended to be tarred by the brush of Mannerism on the one hand and Marinism on the other. Giambattista Marino certainly claimed that it was the chief aim of the poet (as he announced somewhat satirically, “È del poeta il fin la meraviglia”), and it has been taken as a hallmark of his wonderfully witty poetry, or as a stick with which to beat it. Talentone, however, treats marvel as a means rather than an end. His starting point is the beginning of the fourth canto of Dante’s Purgatorio (lines 1–16): here the poet listens to the story told by Manfred, King of Sicily, and discovers, so Talentone says, the feeling and effect of marvel. But in a typical Counter-Reformation twist, marvel creates a state of suspension that grants receptivity to divine truth with less interference from the (dangerous) faculty of reason.

3.2 Schneider overstates the case. Talentone starts with Dante and continues to refer to him in passing, though only as one of a large number of sources introduced in support of his argument, ranging from classical thinkers through the Church Fathers to modern poets. This is a typical mode of sustaining an academic thesis in the period, where the virtuosity lay as much in the range of erudite citations as in the reaching of any viable conclusions. But even so, the potential connections with Orfeo are clear, given the well-known references to Dante in the opera (to which Schneider adds a few others), including the fact that Speranza (Hope) escorts Orfeo to the gates of Hades but then proclaims that he must go on alone given the inscription above the portal (with the obvious quotation: “Lasciate ogni speranza ò voi ch’entrate”). Leaving hope behind prompts Schneider to ask what might stand in its place.

3.3 He views Speranza as a dea ex machina creating one instance of what he identifies as “Mannerist peripetia” (i.e., peripeteia): a sudden reversal that prompts marvel. But in fact, Speranza is a somewhat odd character in the opera. Toward the end of Act 2, after hearing about the death of Euridice, Orfeo makes a decision: if his verses can do anything, he will descend safely to the Underworld and, after softening the heart of the king of the shades (Plutone), he will bring Euridice back to see the stars once more. Or if that is denied him by cruel destiny, he will stay with her in the company of death.^[9] Thus, there is no apparent reason for Speranza’s presence save (perhaps) to grant Orfeo a dialogue rather than monologue at the beginning of Act 3, and (definitely) to allow the play on Dante.^[10] Speranza certainly helps Orfeo by urging him to use more than just his “verses,” given that the occasion demands a big heart and a beautiful song (“hor d’uopo è d’un gran core e d’un bel canto”). But he could just as well have made his way to the Styx on his own.

3.4 The more obvious deus ex machina in Orfeo is Apollo in the finale to the opera as presented in the score published in 1609 (as is well known, the libretto has a different ending, bringing in the Bacchantes). Here peripeteia and its result, marvel, are indeed associated with some kind of divine truth as Apollo rescues Orfeo from base despair and leads him up to heaven so that he can contemplate Euridice’s beauty in the sun and the stars. As Schneider reads it (33–35), with hope abandoned and human frailty confirmed, the opera takes a sacred turn to matters of faith. He also detects peripeteia in the ending of the opera in the libretto as Orfeo flees the chorus of Bacchantes, not granting much theological weight to their claim that his escape is only temporary, and that the longer it takes for divine anger to punish the guilty, the harsher it will be.^[11] Alas, Schneider does not add anything to the debate over which ending of the opera came first, and he never delivers on his promise (16n39) to reveal something about the authorship of the text of the Apollo one. But reading Orfeo’s apotheosis as some kind of syncretic Neoplatonic-Christian allegory is common in the literature, and it makes perfect sense both in a Counter-Reformation context and even in one of a Carnival entertainment staged just before Lent.

4. A “Petrarchan” Euridice

4.1 As Schneider notes, the idea that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice could have some kind of happy ending is quite unusual.^[12] The obvious precedent comes from Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto for Euridice, where Plutone allows Orfeo to lead his bride safely from the Underworld with no trial along the way. Rinuccini justifies this both by way of poetic license (just as Dante adopts such license, he says) and because of the joyful occasion on which the opera was performed: on 6 October 1600 as part of the festivities celebrating the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and King Henri IV of France.^[13] There is another irregularity that the poet also has to explain in his dedication (to Maria de’ Medici) in the libretto: the fact that Euridice involves a change of scene. Rinuccini cites the precedent of Sophocles’s Ajax—which does indeed break the classical “rule” by having two distinct sets—but he also argues that it is necessary, for otherwise one could not stage the prayers and laments of Orpheus.^[14]

4.2 The idea that Orfeo stands in direct competition to Euridice is widely accepted. Alessandro Striggio was part of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga’s retinue attending the 1600 wedding festivities in Florence (the duke also traveled with unnamed “musici,” who may have included Monteverdi).^[15] He probably did not see the actual performance of Rinuccini and Peri’s opera on 6 October—which was done before a restricted number of select guests—but he clearly knew the printed libretto, just as Monteverdi became familiar with Peri’s printed score issued in early 1601.^[16] Thus the two operas are typically viewed as a case of emulation between two closely related north-Italian courts, and no less typically, Orfeo is regularly granted the upper hand because of its more serious tone—helped not least by the echoes of Dante—and its deeper dramatic impact and greater musical variety. As for Euridice, it is usually regarded as experimental on the one hand and, on the other, as a vessel for the political allegories appropriate to a dynastic wedding.^[17]

4.3 Schneider is not much interested in such allegories, but his view of Euridice as being in some sense Petrarchan is also familiar to the scholarly literature. Rinuccini’s libretto indeed quotes Petrarch: as the nymphs and shepherds celebrate the wedding of Orfeo and Euridice, they sing “Non vede un simil par d’amanti ’l sole” (the sun has not seen a like pair of lovers), a line taken from the sonnet “Due rose fresche, et colte in paradiso” (RVF 245, lines 9–10). Schneider also spots other Petrarchan references and idioms, which is only what one would expect from a Florentine poet. But they allow Schneider to connect Euridice to a specific academic text just as he does with Orfeo, in this case with Lionardo Salviati’s Cinque lezzioni … cioè due della speranza, una della felicità e l’altre due sopra varie materie (Five Lessons, that is, Two on Hope, One on Felicity, and the Other Two on Various Matters), published in 1575 (Florence: I Giunti). Salviati’s lectures, which had been delivered before the Accademia Fiorentina, take as their starting point Petrarch’s sonnet “Poi che voi et io più volte habbiam provato” (RVF 99), and Schneider uses this as a stepping-stone to what he claims to be a new reading of Euridice.

4.4 Lectures on themes established by dissecting Petrarch’s sonnets were the bread and butter of Florentine academic discourse—we have already seen that Giovanni Talentone/Talentoni made his publishing debut with one—and Lionardo Salviati (1540–1589) was adept at giving them. “Poi che voi” deals with dashed hopes that should prompt us to contemplate higher things, for mortal life is like a meadow where the snake lies hidden amid the flowers and grass (“Questa vita terrena è quasi un prato / che ’l serpente tra’ fiori e l’herba giace”), and anything that pleases the eye just entraps the soul. The final tercet changes tack, however, as the poet acknowledges that his reader might well accuse him of not following his own advice. Salviati treats this admission as granting Petrarch greater authority by virtue of his being self-aware. But his argument—or at least, that part of it cited here—focuses largely on the issue of hope, which might be well or poorly regulated, thereby producing good or bad fruit.

4.5 Petrarch’s image of the snake in the grassy meadow to represent the dangers of earthly life has obvious resonances for the Orpheus story, and as Schneider notes (70), Rinuccini seems to borrow from it directly in his libretto: the messenger, Dafne, describes how Euridice dances across a green meadow (“verde prato”) until bitten by a cruel, spiteful snake that lay hidden amid the flowers and the grass (“angue crudo e spietato, / che celato giacea tra fiori e l’erba”). Thus, although Salviati’s lecture was published a quarter century before Euridice was performed, and Salviati himself died eleven years before, there seems to be a clear resonance at least in terms of his reference to the sonnet. That resonance may even extend to Salviati’s commentary, which, though full of commonplaces, develops the “meadow” idea into some notion of decay: “As a matter of fact, a meadow changes with the changing of the seasons: most beautiful in the spring and unpleasant beyond belief in the winter.”^[18] Likewise, life is sweet in youth but bitter in old age.

4.6 Rinuccini picks up the thread in one of the strophic choruses in Euridice used to partition the action into the classical five sections: “Se de’ boschi i verdi onori.”^[19] This comes at the end of the third “scene”: the first celebrates the wedding of Orfeo and Euridice; the second deals with her demise; and in the third the shepherd Arcetro narrates how he followed Orfeo to the field where Euridice died. Here Orfeo fell to the ground, cried out in lament (Arcetro quotes him), saw Euridice’s blood on the grass, and sobbed repeatedly. The chorus asks Arcetro why he did not go to Orfeo’s aid, and Arcetro replies that just as he was about to do so, there was a sudden flash of light in the sky, and a heavenly woman appeared in a chariot drawn by two snow-white doves. As she reached the ground she stretched out her hand to raise Orfeo up, and his face became serene, at which point Arcetro decided to rush back to tell his companions.

4.7 The shepherds and nymphs do not recognize the “heavenly woman” from Arcetro’s description of her (they offer eternal thanks to the unknown divinity) although the two doves provide the clue: she is Venere (Venus), who then appears at the start of the next scene as Orfeo’s escort to the gates of the Underworld, leaving him there alone.^[20] Thus, she performs a similar function to Speranza in Orfeo, but with some crucial differences that Schneider does not seek to explain: she is a genuine dea ex machina, quite literally arriving in a “machine” (at least, as Arcetro describes it), and her role in transforming a bad situation is clearly defined. Unlike Striggio, Rinuccini creates a scene where Orfeo goes to lament Euridice at the site of her death, which prompts the need for some action to save him from himself. In effect, Venere does for Orfeo precisely what Apollo does in Monteverdi’s opera, but much earlier in the action, and therefore (perhaps) to much greater effect.

4.8 Arcetro’s narration of Orfeo’s grief and rescue encourages the chorus to “sing” the praises of the unnamed goddess, leading to the chorus “Se de’ boschi i verdi onori.” Schneider reads this as being about “hope,” thereby tying it in with Salviati’s lecture. But in fact, it is not, or at least, not quite. Rinuccini follows Salviati’s lead about meadows, but inverts the sequence: if horrid winter scatters the trees’ leaves across bare plains, leaves and flowers will soon arise again. The idea that good things follow bad—a fitting response to Arcetro’s description of Venere’s divine intervention—continues in the second stanza: a stormy sea may batter the cliffs, but quivering breezes will then calm it down to gentle ripples. The third and final stanza covers the other two of the four elements—air and fire—but then moves to state the general principle that what goes around comes around (“ma si volve il tutto in giro”):

Non è il ben né ’l pianto eterno,
come or sorge, or cade il giorno,
regna qui gioia, o martiro.

(Neither goodness nor lament is eternal: / just as the day rises then falls, / so joy or suffering reign here.)

Schneider reads this as a statement that evil “is not eternal, but eventually changes into goodness” (59), but Rinuccini’s point seems, rather, to be that at least here on earth (“qui”), life moves in cycles between good things and sad ones, and between joy and suffering. That is a far more “Christian” message.

4.9 Something strange is going on here in the libretto. Strophic choruses should mark the end of a given section of the action, but “Se de’ boschi i verdi onori” is unique among the five in Euridice in that the action continues. A shepherd picks up on the idea of the day’s end: given that the gods descend to ease the sufferings of mortals, then he and his companions should go to the sacred altars in the temple before Apollo (the sun) hides his rays in the bosom of Thetis (the sea), so that voices and the heart may rise up singing to Heaven (“Alzian le voci e ’l cor cantando al Cielo”). The chorus agrees, repeating that final line.^[21]

4.10 The reference to things being done well before nightfall is deliberate on Rinuccini’s part: he carefully marks the passing of time during the single day of the action of Euridice, adhering to the classical unity. But there are also other issues in play. Striggio adopts a similar “temple” strategy at the end of his Act 1, where a shepherd invites his companions to go and tender incense, offerings, and prayers (compare also the end of Act 5 in the score). Here it is a way to get some of the cast offstage. Likewise, Rinuccini seems to have realized that he had a problem. One of the differences between his libretto and Striggio’s is that there are two types of choruses in Orfeo, one that participates in the action (whether collectively or by way of its individual members), and one that comments on it at the end of each act, drawing some moral. The distinction is between what was called at the time the coro mobile and the coro stabile.^[22] This has consequences for the staging of Orfeo (we need to decide who is on or off the stage at any given moment). But Rinuccini’s strophic choruses are all delivered by the coro mobile: they are part of the action rather than commenting on it—a character invites them to sing, weep, and so forth, so this is what they do.^[23] A coro mobile, however, is by definition mobile, and Rinuccini needed to find a way to get it offstage prior to the scene-change for the Underworld.^[24] The action following “Se de’ boschi i verdi onori” seems intended to do just that.

4.11 Even if Schneider misreads “Se de’ boschi i verdi onori,” one might again wish to rescue his broader argument. The sudden arrival of Venere as narrated by Arcetro can certainly be viewed as a case of Mannerist peripeteia that generates a sense of marvel and hence an impulse to devotion on the part both of those onstage and, one assumes, of the audience. Furthermore, the presence of some Petrarchan elements in Striggio’s libretto for Orfeo, and of some Dantean ones in Rinuccini’s Euridice, does not necessarily weaken Schneider’s claim for a clear distinction between the two works along Petrarch-versus-Dante lines. That distinction is in part to do with their geographical and cultural origins, and in part a result of the different functions of a wedding entertainment and a Carnival one.^[25] But Schneider would add another layer (82): Euridice invokes “a poetics of marvel catering to a Christian ethics of hope, grounded in a Petrarchist sensibility,” whereas the “Dantean poetics of marvel” in Orfeo is “at the service of a faith-based Christian ethics” that adheres more closely to the agenda of the Counter-Reformation, also “paving the road to possibly the highest spiritual point within an intimately secular art form such as early opera.” That conclusion is less surprising than Schneider claims given how we already read these operas, but he is entitled enough to make it.

5. Conclusion

5.1 Clearly I have reservations about Schneider’s contribution above and beyond what I have suggested (gently, I hope) are misreadings in his text. The main body of his book is fairly short (83 pages); the two appendices (85–141) transcribing and translating out-of-order extracts from Talentone’s Discorso … sopra la maraviglia and Salviati’s Cinque lezzioni are not particularly helpful; his footnotes are too discursive; and he really did need a good editor to sort out his grammar on the one hand, and the innumerable typographical errors on the other.

5.2 At the same time, I cannot help but feel that Schneider has some useful and even important things to say, and indeed that we musicologists need to pay attention to what a literary historian might bring to our table. He makes some very stern remarks about our own omissions, misprisions, and errors; we might choose to reciprocate about his. But in the end, we are all much better off talking to each other if we wish to understand so complex a literary, musical, and dramatic phenomenon as early opera.