The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

Monteverdi in Mantua: The Genius of the Vespers. Presented by Simon Russell Beale with Harry Christophers and The Sixteen; produced and directed by Andy King-Dabbs. Licensed by the BBC. Coro 2014. [CORO DVD 7 COR 16131]

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kurtzman*

1. Introduction

2. Encomiums without context

3. Claims without evidence

4. Documentary or dramatization?

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Simon Russell Beale, a Shakespearean actor, and The Sixteen under the direction of Harry Christophers, have joined forces with producer and director Andy King-Dabbs in a visually and sonically stunning DVD documentary featuring gorgeous views of Mantua, Cremona, Rome, and Venice, interspersed with excerpts from the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 and a few other compositions, including the madrigals Cruda Amarilli and O chiome d’or, excerpts from Orfeo, and music from the Tenebrae of Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, Monteverdi’s teacher in Cremona. The performances were recorded in the lovely Gothic revival Church of St. Augustine in Kilburn, North London.^[1] Comments on the Vespers by Christophers and some of the singers and instrumentalists give a touching personal character to the production. The narration by Beale traces the early biography of Monteverdi, beginning with a view of his baptismal record in Cremona, through his move to Venice in 1613. Along the way we see Monteverdi’s portrait from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, letters of Monteverdi in the Archivio di Stato in Mantua, pages from Monteverdi’s original 1610 print in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, and Caravaggio’s portrait of Pope Paul V, Monteverdi’s dedicatee, in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. The film editing, accompanying both aerial and ground level scenes with musical excerpts and commentary, is imaginative, sophisticated, and beautifully done.

1.2 With the outstanding aesthetic quality of this DVD, it is all the more disappointing that the narrative—apparently written by Beale, though no credit is given—falls far short of the video’s other features. The basic historical premise of the narrative is a good fifty years out of date and displays an embarrassing ignorance of the context of the Vespers, the very context that is at the heart of the narrative’s premise. In addition, there are a number of errors of fact and one key historical claim expounded in detail that seems to be pure invention. It would have been a simple matter for Beale to have contacted John Whenham or me, both of whom have published books about the Vespers,^[2] or other scholars of north Italian sacred music of this period, such as David Bryant, Robert Kendrick, Maurizio Padoan, Licia Mari, or Jonathan Glixon, to name just a few, who could have disabused him of some of the underlying notions that govern his historical misinterpretation as well as corrected the manifest errors. The video does contain a too-brief interview with the prominent Italian musicologist Paula Besutti, a Mantuan native, in which she describes the role of female singers at the Gonzaga court, but that subject is peripheral to the principal narrative. It’s not that everything is wrong, since Beale has read some of the literature on Monteverdi and the Vespers and has accurately explained the motivation behind Monteverdi’s print. Some of the scenes, such as viewing and reading Monteverdi’s baptismal record or excerpts from a letter, or a dramatization by Beale of the robbery Monteverdi endured at the hands of armed highwaymen on his way to Venice, are dramatically effective. But Beale’s fundamental thread of interpretation is way off base, as are a number of his “facts,” causing me to question the legitimacy of classifying and referring to this recording as a documentary.

2. Encomiums without context

2.1 Beale’s starting point may be compared with the long-abandoned thesis of Leo Schrade’s 1950 book, Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music.^[3] Schrade’s knowledge of Monteverdi’s music was both extensive and deep, but in that period of musicological history there was so little known about other early seventeenth-century composers and their music that Schrade seized upon the even-then-outdated Romantic concept of the cultural hero who single-handedly changes his world. That same orientation is evident from the very beginning of Beale’s narration, where he refers to the Monteverdi Vespers with encomiums such as these: “In this ground-breaking composition he distilled all his musical skills, his genius, proving himself to be a new breed of dramatic composer, straddling the worlds of the secular and the sacred.” “The world had never before heard anything like the Monteverdi Vespers,” which was “a turning point in Western music” (a phrase he also uses to describe Orfeo). The Vespers was “one of the most revolutionary and beautiful collections of music ever published.” Monteverdi “must have known it was a truly revolutionary work, unlike anything the world had heard before.” From a violin-making workshop in Cremona, Beale observes, “It’s no coincidence that in Monteverdi’s Vespers he employed instruments that had never before been heard in church music.” The Vespers comprised music “whose bold experiments would change the way music sounds forever.”  Beale does recognize that the Vespers comprised music Monteverdi composed for a variety of occasions over a considerable span of time, proclaiming, “He would consolidate two decades of musical experimentation into a single bold statement.” Whether Monteverdi’s psalms, sacri concentus, hymn, and Magnificats can be considered “experimental” is another question (“innovative” would have been a better choice), but the terminology fits Beale’s reading of Monteverdi’s development as a revolutionary. In speaking of his first four publications, starting with the Sacrae Cantiunculae of 1582, he describes them as “each more radical than the last [despite the fact that the second, the Madrigali spirituali a quattro voci of 1583, survives only in its basso partbook], but he still knew he had a long way to go.” To describe these works as “radical” in the context of the 1580s is absurd.

2.2 There’s much that is thrilling, to use Beale’s word, in the Monteverdi Vespers and much that, rather than being revolutionary, pushes modern techniques and stylistic features to greater extremes than we see in other composers. There’s also no question that Monteverdi exerted important influence on his contemporaries and successors, but Beale’s worshipful statements so distort the historical record and context of the print as to make one marvel at the ignorance they represent. Apparently, Beale is unaware of the Gabrielis at St. Marks and the instrumental ensemble there, permanent since 1568, playing the very instruments Beale says, “had never before [1610] been heard in church music.” In fact, instruments had been used in church services from late medieval times; they became increasingly prominent in the sixteenth century, and led to salaried instrumentalists in many north Italian churches by the last third of the century.^[4] There are records of instruments performing in the Gonzaga palace church as early as 1583.^[5] Nor was the virtuoso ornamental character of Monteverdi’s instrumental and vocal parts in the Vespers innovative or unique. The many ornamentation treatises published between the early 1580s and the second decade of the seventeenth century are ample testimony to instrumental and vocal virtuosity in both sacred and secular music prior to and contemporaneous with the Vespers. What differentiates Monteverdi from most other composers is not the use of such instruments but the fact that he notates them with such specificity. Monteverdi’s instrumental writing exhibits an obvious relationship in its compositional and stylistic techniques to a significant number of the pieces in the posthumous Canzoni et Sonate of Giovanni Gabrieli, though Gabrieli doesn’t use note values as small as some of Monteverdi’s. We also don’t know in any detail what improvisatory embellishments such brilliant instrumentalists as cornettists Girolamo dalla Casa and Giovanni Bassano, or the trombonists and string players in the band at St. Mark’s, would have added to Gabrieli’s and others’ instrumental parts, although both dalla Casa and Bassano did publish ornamentation treatises in 1584 and 1585 respectively.^[6] Another feature of both the Vespers and Orfeo that Beale singles out as unique are the echo effects in Audi coelum and in the fifth act of Orfeo, which Beale says “caused a sensation when he had used it in his operas.” In fact, there is no echo in Monteverdi’s other Mantuan opera, Arianna, and we have no account of the reaction of the audience to Orfeo. Moreover, echo effects, including verbal puns such as those in Audi coelum and Orfeo, were rather common in both secular and sacred music in this period.^[7]

2.3 When it comes to the motets Nigra sum and Pulchra es, Beale goes full-bore for their origin in the Song of Songs, “the most erotic book in the Old Testament. Here is no mention of God or the Lord; this is a dialogue between two lovers, an unabashed celebration of sexual love.” These remarks immediately follow historian Evelyn Welch’s commentary on the sexual dalliances and exploits of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, and lead immediately to an excerpt from Pulchra es for two sopranos. But Beale seems not to have a clue that these texts have been interpreted in both Judaism and Christianity from early in the Common Era as a symbol for “the relationship between God and the people of God.”^[8] Rabbi Akiba is reported to have declared in 135 C.E., with regard to what books of the Old Testament were considered canonical, that “the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”^[9] The early Christian theologian Origen, writing around the middle of the third century, characterized the Song of Songs as “the relationship between God and the individual human soul” as well as “the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church.”^[10] The mid-fifth-century monk John Cassian understood in the female voice of the Song of the Songs the Church as the Bride of Christ.^[11] In the early twelfth century, following suggestions in the writings of Saint Ambrose (c. 340–397), the Song of Songs became associated with the Virgin Mary.^[12] Other contemporary exegeses included the Christian soul in its desire for Christ; a sign of the chastity of both monks and nuns in their marriage to Christ; a symbol of Mary and her Son; and Mary Magdalene’s love for the dead Christ.^[13] Subsequently the book’s text was mined for liturgical antiphons of the Virgin, expressing the devotion of the worshipper to Mary, and the texts became a significant focus of the motet repertory from the mid-sixteenth century onward.^[14] Thus, the motet texts in Monteverdi’s Vespers drawn from the Song of Songs are expansions of liturgical texts used to honor and adore the Virgin, not an “unabashed celebration of sexual love.”

3. Claims without evidence

3.1 Apart from ignorance of context, Beale makes specific claims for which there is no firm evidence or no evidence at all. One of these is Beale’s declaration that Orfeo was first performed in what is now the Gonzaga palace bookshop. But the location of the first performance has not been determined, and Paola Besutti, citing “indirect evidence,” has proposed that it may have been under the Sala Pisanello, which is where the bookshop was located in 2014 (it has since been moved).^[15] But her suggestion is merely, as she says herself, a hypothesis, and it is a misuse of Besutti’s scholarship for Beale to take such a hypothesis and declare it as a known fact.

3.2 An even more dissonant note is introduced by Beale’s visit to the palace church of Santa Barbara, which he describes, not quite correctly, as “Vincenzo’s private chapel.” In fact, it was open to the public and there are numerous references in a diary of 1561–1602, kept by a priest in the chapel, to the church’s being crowded with people.^[16] Beale then goes on to offer his own hypothetical: “If the duke ever heard Monteverdi’s musicians perform the Vespers, it would have been here.” But that “if” leads immediately to his indicating precisely where Monteverdi placed his musicians in the church! The whole sequence is loaded with problems. The diary makes no mention of Monteverdi or his music, and the only evidence that Monteverdi might ever have been active in Santa Barbara is his use of the Santa Barbara reformed version of the hymn Ave maris stella in the Vespers.^[17] Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi was the maestro di capella in the ducal church until his death on January 4, 1609; Antonio Taroni followed him; then Stefano Nascimbene, from April 1609 until July 1612; and finally, starting later in 1612, Amante Franzoni. However, one can’t prove a negative here and it is not out of the question that Monteverdi’s music was performed in Santa Barbara, perhaps even under his direction. Graham Dixon has suggested the possibility of music from the 1610 Vespers being performed in the ducal church on the Feast of Santa Barbara, for which many of the compositions in the print would also have been suitable (though not Ave maris stella), and that even the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, with a change of name, could have been used on such an occasion. There is no actual evidence to support such a speculation, but it is not outside the realm of plausibility.^[18] If the duke ever heard the Monteverdi Vespers as a complete Marian service as Beale describes, it would perhaps have been more likely in the Church of Sant’Andrea, which was the scene of various major celebrations sponsored by the duke and involving his chapel.^[19] But since the Monteverdi Vespers is a collection made up of compositions written at various times over perhaps a decade or more, there are other venues in the city, as well as chapels within the court, or even the Hall of Mirrors, where Vincenzo could have heard individual items from the collection.

3.3 Another error is my own fault. Beale refers to a visit by Pope Paul V to Mantua “a couple of years earlier” [than 1610]. This information comes from my Oxford University Press book on the Monteverdi Vespers, where I based such an assertion on a report from Ippolito Donesmondi, the Mantuan ecclesiastical chronicler, who speaks of plenary indulgences granted by the pope at the beginning of 1607 for the Church of Sant’Andrea.^[20] But I misread Donesmondi as saying the pope himself came to Mantua, when in fact, he did not. The diary of the Sistine Chapel’s Master of Ceremonies, Paolo Alaleona, confirms that throughout the first half of 1607 Pope Paul V remained in Rome, except for a few brief summer visits to cardinals’ palaces near Rome, making no visit to Mantua.

3.4 Beale claims that during Monteverdi’s visit to Rome, he never met with Pope Paul (“the two men never met”), but there is no evidence I know of to support such a statement. Certainly the pope received the 1610 print, for the Mass was copied into Cappella Sistina MS 107, and the alto partbook, leather bound with the pope’s coat of arms stamped into the cover, survives in the Archivio Doria Pamphilij. The copy contains handwritten corrections, almost certainly in Monteverdi’s hand, that in other copies of the partbook appear as printed paste-overs.

3.5 During Monteverdi’s journey to his new appointment in Venice in the fall of 1613, he and his son were attacked and robbed by three armed bandits. Monteverdi recounts the scene in detail in a letter of October 12, 1613. This is the scene Beale effectively dramatizes, though he substantially shortens and rewords Monteverdi’s account. The scene is correctly captioned “1613,” but after completing the story Beale immediately declares that Monteverdi then returned to Cremona and was unemployed for a year. However, the year of Monteverdi’s unemployment in Cremona was from mid-1612 to mid-1613, and the October 12 letter describes the continuation of Monteverdi’s journey to Venice where the letter was written and posted.

4. Documentary or dramatization?

4.1 I pass over other errors of a more minor nature to raise some important questions about this DVD and its concept of history. Beale, as a Shakespearean actor, must be thoroughly familiar with the Bard’s history plays, but neither he nor anyone else takes them for actual history. The history plays utilize historical figures and historical events as scaffolding for the creation of new artworks, not as actual representations of the characters and their stories. Although Beale’s narration presents itself as an historical account, complete with views of historical documents, it actually lies somewhere along the path toward a sensationalized historical dramatization. We hear some things that are true, others that are warped to fit the narrative of the revolutionary culture hero, and others that are either distorted to make them more dramatic and sensational or invented from whole cloth.

4.2 How are we to judge such an approach? It makes for a gripping story, though I’m not convinced that a fully accurate portrayal couldn’t be just as gripping. But its obvious claim is that it is historically accurate, and it will certainly give the vast majority of its viewers that impression. This is deeply troubling—in some respects a falsification—and it mocks the work of musicologists who specialize in this period, who spend whole careers trying to get as close to the truth as our sources will allow, using a rigorous methodology to sift and weigh the evidence, to connect the dots, to distinguish carefully between well-documented facts and speculation, which is also part of the historian’s charge. In the United States there have recently been many calls for scholars of all stripes and subjects to speak more to the public than just amongst ourselves. The problem is, for every member of the public a musicologist can reach on such a subject, this beautifully filmed and recorded BBC video probably reaches hundreds—hundreds who are given a false impression of the music’s historical context. That imbalance could have been remedied if Beale (or a BBC editor) had consulted with one of those who have enough expertise in the topic to help formulate and guide the narration, but the path they chose is disheartening, even arrogant in its disregard for accuracy, to those whose hard work places them in a far better position to know and present a more realistic portrayal. What is the object of all that effort if someone like Beale can come along and so cavalierly override it to a far wider audience?

4.3 I am informed by a British colleague that the BBC no longer relies on “experts,” but rather on “presenters.” Beale is certainly a “presenter.” This is a disturbing turn for those of us who used to place a great deal of faith in the BBC brand, whose credibility and reputation are severely damaged by videos such as this. At the very least the BBC should advertise this product as a free dramatization, as many movies and television programs do today, or insert a disclaimer in the video box making clear it’s neither a documentary nor an accurate historical portrayal. Short of that, they should withdraw this recording from circulation, but after having spent what is clearly a very large sum of money on its lavish production, there is no chance of that. There’s too much potential profit at stake.