The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

“A Free and Knightly Art”: Monteverdi’s Toccata for Orfeo and the Neo-Chivalric Ideal in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy

Nicholas Till*

Abstract

The score for Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, published in 1609, includes a preliminary “Toccata” scored for five-part trumpet ensemble. Monteverdi’s instructions are ambiguous as to how the Toccata should be performed. Investigation of trumpet manuals and related documents contemporary with Monteverdi confirm the military origins of the fanfare-like Toccata, and suggest that its inclusion in the score for what is otherwise a largely pastoral opera indicates that Monteverdi was responsive to the ideals of the neo-chivalric revival that was an important aspect of the self-refashioning of the aristocracy in the early-modern European state at the time of Orfeo.

PART ONE

1. Monteverdi’s Instructions

2. Italian Blowing-at-Table

3. Field Signals

4. “Toccata”

5. Bendinelli and Fantini

6. “All the Instruments”

PART TWO

7. Refeudalization

8. Neo-Chivalry

9. War Games

10. Oaten Reeds and Trumpets

Acknowledgments

Examples

Audio Examples

Figures

Table

References

PART ONE

1.  Monteverdi’s Instructions

1.1 A performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo usually commences with the Toccata that Monteverdi presents as the first musical number of his published score of 1609: a refulgent fanfare that kicks off with a pumping bass to which are added funkily syncopated da-da-da-da das in the middle, triadic summonses, and swirling flourishes at the top (Figure 1, Example 1). I always hear it as a swaggering announcement of Monteverdi’s taking possession not only of the new musico-dramatic form of opera, but of modern music itself, for Orfeo is the first of a number of great works in which Monteverdi seems to cast down the gauntlet to four centuries of musical posterity with the challenge, “Here are some of the things that the new music can do—now run with them.”

1.2 But what exactly is Monteverdi’s Toccata? The designations of the five parts in the score, deploying common terms of the day for the trumpet registers (Basso, Vulgano, Alto e Basso, Quinta, Clarino),^[1] indicate that the Toccata is intended for the standard five-part military-ceremonial trumpet band that was to be found in armies, cities, and courts throughout Europe at this date.^[2] But although the score details five parts, the list of instruments for the opera specifies only four trumpets: “Un Clarino, con tre trombe sordine” (a Clarino, with three muted trumpets). (Clarino refers to the high register in which the trumpet plays, which demanded a specific set of skills, not to a distinct instrument.) The trumpets play nowhere else in the opera (as we shall see, trumpets were not generally considered to be “musical” instruments at this date) so must be listed for the Toccata alone.

1.3 Ingenious explanations have been given for the missing trumpet part in the instrumental listing. The early-trumpet historian Peter Downey believes that “con tre trombe sordine” is a misprint for “con [qua]trɇ[o] trombe sordine” or “un Clarino[,][qua]trɇ[o] trombe sordine.”^[3] In the Cambridge Opera Handbook to Orfeo, Jane Glover argues that the two lower pedal parts were probably played on trombones, although this would have required only clarino and two trumpets, and there is no evidence that trombones ever mixed with trumpet ensembles of this period.^[4] In The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi Joachim Steinhauer seems to accept Glover’s suggestion as a given when he writes that “muted trumpets and trombones are reserved for the ceremonial Toccata,” although there is no reference anywhere to the trombones being muted, and they are clearly identified in the score as specifically accompanying the Act 3 and 4 choruses of Infernal Spirits only.^[5] Caldwell Titcomb attempted to explain the anomaly by arguing that, since kettledrums were invariably a component of a courtly trumpet ensemble, the basso part for the Toccata would have been allocated to the drummer.^[6] Although he was right about the presence of drums, which became a standard component of the military and ceremonial trumpet band from the mid-fifteenth century,^[7] it must be questionable whether a tuned kettledrum alone could provide sufficient harmonic grounding for the drone-like bottom of the ensemble, and it is probable that the drums followed the more punchy quinta or alto e basso parts.

1.4 I think it most likely that the listing of only four trumpets is simply a mistake, like the different quantifications of trombones in the instrumental listing (four) and then in the score (five). But Monteverdi’s full instruction for playing the Toccata seems to offer us a simpler explanation that has been curiously overlooked by these scholars. He writes “Toccata che si suona avanti il levar de la tela tre volte con tutti li stromenti, & si fa un Tuono più alto volendo sonar le trombe con le sordine” (Toccata which is played three times before the raising of the curtain with all the instruments, and it makes it one tone higher if wishing to sound [the] trumpets with [the] mutes).^[8] So if this indicates that all of the orchestral instruments should play the Toccata, all five parts would clearly be covered. But the instruction is ambiguous: does Monteverdi mean by the conditional construction that it is the trumpets that are optional, or the mutes? Since in the instrumental listing the trumpets are detailed as being muted, this would suggest that it’s the trumpets (with their mutes) that are optional here, rather than the mutes. But Monteverdi may have simply been listing the instruments as they were played, rather than prescribing how they should be played—a distinction that seems to occur throughout the score, when Monteverdi sometimes writes performance instructions in the past tense, and sometimes in the present, implying a distinction between description (this is how it was) and prescription (this is how it should be).^[9] And why would the trumpets be played with mutes anyway? Monteverdi doesn’t tell us.

1.5 And if it is the trumpets that are optional, why would Monteverdi suggest that a classic trumpet fanfare can be played without trumpets? Perhaps for performance in situations where a trumpet band was not available? But must not “all the instruments” surely include the trumpets in the instrumental listing? Any conclusion seems to be contradictory. In this discussion of Monteverdi’s Toccata, I will deploy these conundrums, and some of the other puzzles it presents, as a means of investigating how Monteverdi’s incorporation of a traditional military-ceremonial trumpet fanfare, which harks back to the age of medieval chivalry, in the score for his decisive contribution to opera, a distinctly modern form, conveys an aspect of the self-definition of the Italian ruling classes in the era of post-Renaissance political retrenchment. That aspect is customarily designated by Italian historians as “refeudalization”: the paradoxical reimposition of the apparatus of medieval feudalism by modernizing absolutist rulers intent upon centralizing their power.

2. Italian Blowing-at-Table

2.1 Writing in the Cambridge Opera Handbook for Orfeo, John Whenham describes the Toccata as “a series of flourishes which may be derived from authentic military signals,”^[10] and many commentators observe that the quinta and alto e basso parts of the fanfare indeed sound like sections of the army trumpet calls that once issued commands to mounted troops on and off the battlefield.^[11] But in his study of the musical topics associated with military signaling, Raymond Monelle argued for caution about the signaling attribution in the Orfeo Toccata, suggesting that the tradition of the “improvised ensemble of trumpets” exemplified by the Toccata needs to be distinguished from that of military signaling.^[12] This distinction does sometimes seem to have been made. When Henri of Valois stopped in Venice en route from Poland to France to claim his throne as King Henri III of France in 1574, the Venetians pushed out the boat (literally and figuratively) for the visiting dignitary, calling for musicians from outside Venice to make up numbers. The Capitano of Padua had orders to send to Venice all of that city’s trumpeters and drummers, but it was made clear that musically trained trumpeters, not military signalers, were required.^[13] At the imperial court in Vienna fifteen trumpeters were employed between 1566 and 1577, four of whom were designated as “musikalisch” to distinguish them from field trumpeters.^[14] A similar distinction was made at the Swedish court in 1587, where three trumpeters were described as musicus.^[15]

2.2 But more usually trumpeters were not included with musicians in court records.^[16] The musicians listed variously in the Gonzaga court accounts for 1606–1608, who would largely have constituted Monteverdi’s ensemble for Orfeo, included five wind players; a cornettist and trombonist are specified, but only one trumpeter, identified as a clarino player, a particular skill for which there was no demand on the battlefield since military signalers used lower trumpet registers.^[17] The 1592 payroll lists 22–25 musicians, but none of them are trumpet players, although we know there to have been a ducal trumpet band at this date.^[18] Other documented references to court wind bands in the ducal centers of Mantua and Casale, two by Monteverdi himself, refer only to mixed wind bands rather than trumpet bands. Since musicians were often multi-instrumentalists, it is possible that some of those listed also played the trumpet, and Jeffrey Kurtzman and Linda Maria Koldau find occasional evidence for trumpets in mixed wind bands,^[19] but there is no evidence of this from Mantua and Monferrato (the proper designation of the state whose ruler Monteverdi served). In a letter of 1609 Monteverdi discusses recruiting cornett and trombone players for Prince Francesco Gonzaga’s wind band in Casale, indicating that a father and two-son duo “play all the wind instruments.”^[20] But in another letter of 1611, when Monteverdi mentions finding a fifth player for the band, he is to play “recorder, cornett, trombone, flute, and bassoon”—no mention of trumpet. Monteverdi indicates the nature of this mixed wind ensemble repertory, telling us that the prince liked to have his band play “in the chambers and in church, along the streets and on the fortresses, now madrigals, now chansons, now airs, and now dances,” a repertory that would have mostly excluded trumpeters of the day.^[21]

2.3 Trumpeters, it seems, were not considered to be part of the court cappella. They were either detailed separately, or, more tellingly, they were listed in army accounts instead. The complete surviving accounts for the Duchy of Mantua for the year 1577 ­show two different entries related to trumpets. Amongst the military costs of the permanent garrison to defend the city are two trumpeters, who would certainly have been signalers.^[22] Another entry refers to “il dazio delle trombe”: the “trumpet duty.”^[23] The editor of the accounts suggests that this was a tax to pay for the civic trumpet band, and a record of 1589 indeed refers to payments for the “Trombetti della Città,”^[24] the duties of which would have included service as watchmen on the city gates (for fire as well as external dangers),^[25] accompanying civic processions and proclamations, and marking the morning and evening hours.^[26] In some instances city trumpeters were also detailed to accompany militias on drill or maneuvers, so would have had military training.^[27]

2.4 The ducal accounts do occasionally record one-off payments to trumpeters,^[28] and the 1589 record also details payments to the “Trombetti del Duca” alongside the Trombetti della Città. But the omission of trumpeters from the record of the ducal musicians in Monteverdi’s time (from around 1590) makes it more probable that the Orfeo trumpeters, undoubtedly the Trombetti del Duca, were military trumpeters. We know from seventeenth-century imperial edicts that members of the imperial court trumpeters guild were standardly required to have served in the field to qualify for membership,^[29] and the Trombetti del Duca would certainly have accompanied Duke Vincenzo on his military expeditions in 1595, 1597, and 1601. This suggests that, contra Monelle, most ensemble trumpeters would have been trained as signalers, although evidently not all signalers were also ensemble musicians, hence the distinction often made between musical and non-musical trumpeters. This relationship between field signalers and trumpet ensembles (as well as the Italian origin of such ensembles),^[30] is confirmed in a letter of 1557 from King Christian III of Denmark to the elector of Saxony. The Danish king, who took great interest in brass instruments, is asking the elector whether he can send him any Italian trumpeters, and writes of the custom of “Italian blowing-at-table,” for which Christian sought players who could play both cavalry signals and six-part ensemble trumpet music “in the Italian style.”^[31] Moreover, we know from some of the earliest surviving trumpet manuals that the music played by trumpet ensembles for civic and court events was the same as that played for military occasions. In the trumpet manual entitled “Volume di tutta l’arte della Trombetta” of 1614 by the Munich-based Italian trumpeter Cesare Bendinelli, preserved in a manuscript in Bendinelli’s home town of Verona, Bendinelli details the occasions on which a “Sonata a Sarassineta” might be played: “in the field, at princely courts, or in other places.”^[32]

2. 5 Trumpet ensemble music is often described, as by Monelle, as “improvised,” which seems to be confirmed in a letter from 1584 in which Wilhelm of Bavaria writes to his sister explaining that he is unable to send her written music performed by his trumpeters, as she has requested, since their table music is not written down, “and they make it only out of their heads.”^[33] But it is probably more accurately described as semi-improvised according to memorized formulae.^[34] The trumpeters did not play from written music, and many were probably not musically literate. But although the Elector of Saxony was unable to send King Christian III of Denmark any of his Italian trumpeters, he was able to send him written examples of some Italian cavalry signals, and music for a six-part sonata for “blowing-at-table,” which suggests that at least some of Christian’s trumpeters could read music.^[35] And writing in 1615, Michael Praetorius can require that the clarino and quinta (and ideally the alto e basso) players in an ensemble should be able to read music.^[36] But most often the notations for ensemble music in the trumpet manuals by Bendinelli and the Florentine trumpeter Girolamo Fantini (the latter of 1638 being the first published trumpet manual)^[37] provided only one part, the quinta, and sometimes a clarino part, the rest evidently following standard formulas (Figure 2). Monteverdi’s Toccata is therefore the first fully notated example of such a piece for trumpet band in “the Italian style.”

3. Field Signals

3.1 The Orfeo trumpeters would almost certainly have been trained as signalers, which makes it all the more likely that their semi-improvised fanfares would have been at least “associated” with battlefield signals, as Tim Carter puts it.^[38] But it is difficult to say whether Monteverdi included actual signals in the Toccata, since we have so few independent sources of verification. We only know about military trumpet signals at all prior to the seventeenth century from their imitation in vocal music by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, or Clément Janequin, whose La Bataille de Marignan of 1528 incorporates widely-used commands such as the boutez selle, the instruction to “saddle up” (Example 2), and indeed, Monteverdi himself in many of his madrigals in which war is employed as a metaphor for love. These include Gira il nemico from the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (Eighth Book of Madrigals, 1638), whose text again includes actual commands such as “butta la sella” (Janequin’s “boutez selle”), Example 3; Non più guerra, pietate from Il quarto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Fourth Book of Madrigals, 1603), in which Monteverdi recalls military-style signaling in the sharply articulated rhythmical quick-fire exchanges that run throughout the madrigal; and other madrigals with references to war from the Eighth Book, such as Armato il cor d’adamantina fede, Ogni amante è guerrier, and Se vittorie sì belle.^[39] But the authenticity of these signal-like motifs cannot be established.

3.2 The military historian J.R. Hale suggests that the scarceness of official military manuals that might have recorded such signals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due to ruling regimes’ understandable reluctance to put information about their armed forces into print.^[40] With regard to signaling, a particular premium seems to have been placed upon secrecy, to ensure that the enemy didn’t obtain information about one’s commands, which would enable him to figure the movement of one’s troops and one’s battle tactics. In an English military handbook of 1562, in manuscript only, described by Hale as “a practical handbook for amateur captains” (such as Falstaff, who has to muster and train troops in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays), maintaining secrecy is listed as a crucial attribute of the military signaler, who, if he falls into the hands of the enemy, must resist “gyftes and greate rewardes, also bankettes and plentie of wyne” and sometimes even “payne and cruell torments” intended to make him disclose his signals.^[41] Secrecy continued to be a premium through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the 1795 trumpet manual of the Saxon trumpeter Johann Ernst Altenburg, Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroisch-musikalischen Trompeter- und Paukerkunst (Essay on an Introduction to the Heroic and Musical Trumpeters’ and Kettledrummers’ Art), Altenburg declines to publish musical examples of trumpet signals for fear of being reproached for revealing “secrets” (although this may have referred rather to the secrets of the trumpeters guild, guarded as jealously as the craft secrets of operative masonry, than to military discipline).^[42]

3.3 For this reason the earliest known records of military signals for trumpet are the manuscript collections by the German trumpeters Magnus Thomsen and Hendrich Lübeck, working at the royal court in Denmark (ca. 1598).^[43] They undoubtedly reflect a growing need to regularize and document the system of signals that was part of the increasing professionalization of army discipline in Europe in the later sixteenth century.^[44] But they, and the first printed volumes listing signals by Fantini and the French scientist, mathematician, and music theorist Marin Mersenne that appeared in the 1630s, were non-official, and it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that signals started to be codified systematically by national armies as part of the more general reform of army discipline that was initiated by Prussia, leading to the standardization of signals for the Prussian army commanded by King Frederick William II in 1787, which was then followed elsewhere in Europe.^[45]

3.4 The collections by Thomsen, Lübeck, Bendinelli, Fantini, and Mersenne include a selection of the same five or six familiar cavalry signals such as buta sella / boutes selles (saddle up); mont’a cavallo / á cheval (mount); cavalche/cavalquat (march cavalry); allo stendardo / á l’estendart (to the standard); l’augetto / au guet (the watch),^[46] to which were sometimes added calls such as the charge and the retreat.^[47] These core signals all have clear family resemblances that suggest that, since there were as yet no printed collections available, there may have been at this date what Peter Downey calls a “pan-European” system of signals in operation.^[48] Nonetheless, Lübeck and Bendinelli both indicate a distinction between French and Italian signals, and when in Monteverdi’s Gira il nemico, in which the poem’s male lovers deploy military metaphors to describe laying siege to their sweethearts, each verse ends with such standard battle commands as “butta la sella” or “tutti a cavallo,” their ringing settings by Monteverdi sound convincing enough, but they do not match any of those recorded by the manuals (Figure 3, Figure 4; compare Example 3). It is possible that by this date, as Raymond Monelle claims, armies and regiments had already begun to develop their own particular signals (why else would there be such need for secrecy about signals?),^[49] and we certainly know from later practice that signals were specific not only to armies, but to regiments, companies, and platoons, to avoid the risk of confusion on the battlefield as to whom was being signaled.^[50] So it is possible that Gira il nemico, published in a collection dedicated to the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand III, refers to the signals of the imperial army, of which we have no independent record. However, there is more direct evidence for the military sources of the signal-like motifs in the Orfeo Toccata.

4. “Toccata”

4.1 A toccata is a musical title that most familiarly implies a kind of free-form fantasia with rapid, digitally dextrous (the word toccata derives from toccare, to touch) figurations, usually for keyboard instrument, such as those made famous by Girolamo Frescobaldi (and later, of course, J.S. Bach), or for plucked instruments, such as those for lute or theorbo by Johann Hieronymous (Giovanni Girolamo) Kapsberger and Alessandro Piccinini. Toccatas for lute are found from the early sixteenth century, and keyboard toccatas from later in the century, becoming something of a craze subsequent to the first published example in 1591.^[51] Monteverdi’s toccata evidently doesn’t conform to this genre. But the term was, in fact, originally used for trumpet fanfares: an account from as early as 1494 refers to “una toccata de trombette” being sounded for Alfonso II of Naples.^[52] In this context toccata was a generic term that could refer to any kind of trumpet flourish or fanfare, solo or otherwise, although it seems to have been used in particular for a unit with rapid quarter notes, such as we find in Monteverdi’s alto e basso part, often actually described by the composer’s contemporaries as the “toccata” part.^[53] The fanfare derivation of the toccata for keyboard or plucked strings is clear from the title of one such work: “toccata a modo di trombetta.”^[54]

4.2 Both Bendinelli and Fantini designate the field signals with which their collections open as toccatas (Bendinelli “tocade di Guerra”).^[55] But rather than just using toccata/tocada as a generic term for signals, as does Fantini, Bendinelli also uses the term more specifically to refer to a kind of call to attention for the standard field commands, often adding the rider “con la sua tocada” in association with the command signals,^[56] and providing a number of tocade suitable for “all sorts of occasions.”^[57] Shakespeare’s frequent use of the English transliteration of toccata, “tucket,” indicates a similar function. Thus, in Henry V the Constable of France orders the trumpets to “sound the tucket sonance and the note to mount” (4.2.35). Here, as in Bendinelli, the tucket/toccata would seem to be a call to attention.

4.3 However, in other contexts in Shakespeare’s plays, a tucket can refer to a personal trumpet call to announce someone—as in The Merchant of Venice, when the stage directions indicate “tucket” and Lorenzo says to Portia “Your husband is at hand; I hear his trumpet” (5.1.121), or in King Lear when Goneril’s arrival is announced with a tucket: “Cornwall. What trumpet’s that? Regan. I know’t, my sister’s…” (2.4.186–87).^[58] Monteverdi’s Orfeo tucket may have been as closely associated with the Gonzaga family in this fashion as their coat of arms or the personal imprese, or emblems, that are to be found everywhere in the decorations of the ducal palaces in Mantua. Trumpets, as Timothy J. McGee writes in his study of civic music in Florence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were “the accepted symbol of authority,”^[59] a visual and sonic signifier of wealth and power, and the status of a prince or nobleman was often reflected in the number of trumpeters who accompanied him or her. If necessary, rulers would borrow trumpeters from elsewhere to make a suitable splash, as did the reclusive Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, who didn’t like noisy (strepitoso) music, and having dispensed with his own court trumpets, had to borrow some trumpeters from Innsbruck for the wedding of his son Vincenzo to Eleonora de’ Medici in 1584.^[60] As we have seen, Vincenzo had evidently restored the trumpeters by 1589, and it was standard on public occasions in Mantua for the duke to be accompanied by a band of trumpets and drums announcing his presence or passage: in the court chronicler Federico Follino’s account of the festivities for the wedding of Prince Francesco Gonzaga (the patron of Orfeo) to Margherita of Savoy in 1608, we read a number of times of Duke Vincenzo setting out from his palace “con buon numero di trombe, e di tamburri.”^[61] And Monteverdi reuses the Orfeo Toccata (replacing trumpets with more “musical” cornetts) in the opening number of his Vespers, published in 1610 while he was still in the employ of Duke Vincenzo, quite possibly with the intent of stamping his employer’s identity on the work (although we know that trumpet ensembles were also sometimes employed in church services at this time,^[62] in which case Monteverdi’s innovation would have been to combine such a fanfare with the opening chorus of the Vespers).

4.4 It may be that, like Goneril’s tucket, Monteverdi’s Toccata could have served as a signal heralding the entrance of Duke Vincenzo to the auditorium where Orfeo was due to be performed, the effect of which is captured in Andrew Parrott’s 2013 recording of the opera, where the Toccata is sounded at first in the distance, then with muted trumpets as it enters the performance space, finally announcing the performance itself with all of the instruments playing.^[63] It is, however, more likely that the whole Toccata, played three times, served this latter purpose. In his preface to his opera Dafne, presented in Mantua in 1608, Monteverdi’s Florentine contemporary Marco da Gagliano says that just such a call to attention was advisable for a theatrical performance: “Before the falling of the curtain, in order to get the audience attentive, a sinfonia should be played by the different instruments that serve to accompany the choruses and play the ritornelli,” although it appears that Gagliano did not consider that the standard trumpet fanfare would serve this purpose (nor that recitative instruments should join in).^[64] But this function of the fanfare is clearly evident in Follino’s description of the trumpet soundings for the performance of Guarini’s comedy L’Idropica at the 1608 wedding celebrations in Mantua, where he explains that, played from behind the stage, these heralded the performance: “At the third statement of the sounding, the large curtain that concealed the stage disappeared…” ^[65] A preparatory trumpet flourish (invariably triple) was customary to announce most theatrical performances at that time. The very well-documented 1585 performance of Sophocles’s King Oedipus at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza commenced in a similar fashion,^[66] as did performances in the public theaters of London (although with more modest musical forces). In Ben Jonson’s play Cynthia’s Revels (1600), Jonson specifies in the metatheatrical “Induction” (which commences “after the second sounding”) where “the third sounding,” announcing the formal Prologue, is to occur.

5. Bendinelli and Fantini

5.1 Bendinelli’s and Fantini’s manuals make clear that a toccata has quite specific military associations. Yet most of the pieces presented in Fantini’s book are not, in fact, military signals or pieces for military or ceremonial trumpet ensemble. For the novelty of Fantini’s collection was that, in addition to the signals and sonatas for ensemble found in Bendinelli, Fantini also presents a whole catalog of “musical” trumpet pieces, with titles such ricercata, balletto, or sonata, which are for solo trumpet and keyboard continuo, the genre that made Fantini famous as a performer.^[67] The pieces are all given the names of prominent Tuscan families that read like a Debrett’s Peerage of the Tuscan nobility: Bentivogli, Riccardi, Bardi, Piccolomini, Salviati, Del Monte, and “Renuccini,” the family of the librettist of Jacopo Peri’s and Giulio Caccini’s Euridice and Monteverdi’s Arianna. Such appellations were not uncommon in instrumental collections of the period—such as Biagio Marini’s collection Affetti musicali (1617), which lists a comparable panoply of Venetian nobility and cittadini—and are probably courtesy appellations recognizing patrons or subscribers, perhaps to curry favor with the families in question, or simply designed to add distinction (in both senses of the term) to the pieces themselves.^[68]

5.2 But although they are not for multi-trumpet ensemble, the standard trumpet figurations in these “musical” pieces are often close to those found in Monteverdi’s Toccata, such as the four-sixteenth-note upward flourishes at the beginning of the “Balletto prima parte detto dello Spada” (Figure 5), which are similar to those in Monteverdi’s clarino part, suggesting the transposition for solo trumpet of techniques derived from trumpet ensemble playing, based on a performance tradition of long-established formulas.^[69] And some of these figurations appear again in the “Sonata detta del Gonzaga” (Figure 6), one of the few works in the collection that is ascribed to a non-Tuscan family.^[70] Although it cannot be established that Fantini had any direct link with Mantua, the portrait of Fantini that prefaces his collection shows him wearing a medal with the name of the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II, whose court in Vienna Fantini is believed to have visited and whose wife was Eleonora Gonzaga. It is likely that the Gonzaga sonata is named in her honor.^[71]

5.3 The sonata is not close enough to Monteverdi’s Toccata for the two to relate to an “official” Gonzaga fanfare. But amongst the Fantini collection are two pieces designated as “Entrata Imperiale per sonare in concerto” (i.e., for a trumpet choir) and “Seconda Imperiale” (Figure 7 with Audio 1 and Audio 2; Figure 2).^[72] These titles may indicate that they were intended as ceremonial accompaniment for the entry of the emperor, although the designation “imperiale” was common for fanfares played at any grand occasion associated with imperial ceremony, emperor or no emperor,^[73] and the title of Entrata may simply indicate the intrada section of a trumpet sonata, rather than its suitability to accompany the “entrance” of the ruler. The modular trumpet-band sonata of the period normally consisted of an intrada, a sonata proper, and a rotta, and Peter Downey points out that the Orfeo toccata is, in fact, a version of the intrada section of a sonata.^[74] There are clear parallels between Fantini’s “Entrata Imperiale” and Monteverdi’s Toccata, most notably in the quinta parts. And Monteverdi, like Fantini and Bendinelli, uses the relatively standard designations given to indicate the trumpet partials in identifying the registers of his own five parts, although there are some variations (and Fantini and Bendinelli both list six possible registers, reflecting the fact that trumpet ensembles could occasionally be larger). See Table 1.

5.4 It will be noted that the one term used with absolute consistency of both word and orthography by all three is “quinta”—a standard musical designation for any fifth part added to a regular four-part ensemble. In a trumpet ensemble, however, the quinta was the leader of the group, providing the identifying thematic material that the rest followed, as explained by Praetorius: “The Principal, Quinta, or the Sonata as some call it, is the true tenor which leads the entire choir of trumpeters and military kettle drummers.”^[75] This material might come from popular songs, or even sacred music,^[76] but most often it consisted of a variant of what was clearly a standard intrada formula, found in Thomsen and Bendinelli (Figure 8) as well as in Fantini’s two Entratas Imperiale and Monteverdi’s Toccata.^[77] In Fantini the quinta is often the only part of an ensemble notated fully throughout, the rest being fitted to it according to the formulas that we duly find replicated in the Toccata. Bendinelli sometimes scores an alto e basso part,^[78] but in Fantini the only other part that may be notated, placed after the quinta part on the page, is the equivalent of Monteverdi’s clarino, a florid series of runs within a five-note range rather than the fixed harmonic intervals played by the other trumpeters, techniques that are only possible in the highest register of the trumpet, using a special mouthpiece. It is left to the player of the clarino part in Fantini’s presentation to fit it to the quinta part supplied, although Bendinelli provides one example to illustrate how a clarino part should fit with the quinta (Figure 9).

5.5 It is Bendinelli who also provides us with the necessary information as to how the five-voice trumpet sonata, only partially presented in his and Fantini’s scores, actually worked. According to Peter Downey, the thematic materials of the sections of a trumpet sonata were usually presented, often in unison by all the players, before the accompanying parts were added;^[79] and appended to Bendinelli’s “Sonata a Sarassineta [which] one can play long or short and can be adapted to various actions/occasions” is a further instruction:^[80]

I wish to point out that a single player begins and others follow in order, as is the custom.… First the grosso player, second the vulgano, third alto e basso, that is, he who imitates the sonata [i.e., the quinta] with his notes, only lower, and who has to be quite expert; fourth, the one who leads [the quinta], and fifth the clarino who should avoid parallel octaves.^[81]

Bendinelli’s description implies a sequence of staggered entries, allowing the members of ensemble to join in as the specific material for the sonata made itself evident. However, although the sequence starting from the bass and working up makes sense, one wonders how the alto e basso could “imitate” a part whose entry follows it. But if the thematic material had been presented monophonically first, then the players knew what material was being used, and quinta parts were generally standard anyway. Although Monteverdi starts his Toccata with one-and-a-half beats of basso and vulgano alone, the remaining instruments enter together so that the parts all play simultaneously (as would have happened eventually with Bendinelli’s ensemble). Otherwise Monteverdi’s Toccata matches Bendinelli’s instructions for the “Sonata a Sarassineta” exactly: the basso and vulgano pump out a drone bass, the quinta part leads with the distinguishing intrada material, the alto e basso part (which is similar to other toccata parts found in both Bendinelli and Thomsen)^[82] shadows the quinta a fifth below, while on the top the clarino exercises its high-wire act.

6. “All the Instruments”

6.1 The trumpeters who accompanied Duke Vincenzo on his various forays out of his palace in 1608, the Trombetti del Duca, were almost certainly the same trumpeters who had played the Orfeo Toccata the year before. Their fanfares would have been semi-improvised according to the formulas that Bendinelli and Fantini partially transcribe or explain, probably learned and transmitted by ear. It may indeed be the case that the Orfeo Toccata was similarly transcribed rather than composed by Monteverdi. In his account of the performance of L’Idropica at the 1608 wedding celebrations, Follino describes how “when all the people that the theater could hold were gathered together … and once the torches were lit in the theater, the usual signal by the sounding of the trumpets [il solito segno del suono delle trombe] was given from behind the stage.”^[83] It is unclear whether the fanfare is “solito” because it is usual to have such a fanfare, or because the fanfare was the usual (i.e., standard) one. Either way, the “usual” trumpet fanfare was most likely the same as, or similar to, the Orfeo Toccata. We know that Monteverdi composed the music for the Prologue to L’Idropica that followed, with a text written for the occasion by Gabriello Chiabrera, so he would have been on hand to supply a new toccata too if necessary. But it was more likely a standard court fanfare, used alike for Orfeo and L’Idropica, and probably on many other occasions.

6.2 The martial origins of such a fanfare are clear. And they would have been entirely suitable to the well-known military pretensions of Monteverdi’s employer, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, who, as the Venetian ambassador to Mantua reported in 1588, had “an inclination toward the military, of which he is so enamoured that he does not speak or think of anything else, and thus he seeks the occasion to fulfil this his keenest desire.”^[84] According to one historian, Vincenzo “spent much of his life trying to live up to the dimensions of the chivalric heroes galloping out of the pages of Ariosto and Tasso.”^[85] Vincenzo had personally commanded his troops in no fewer than three expeditions against the Turks in Hungary and Croatia, in emulation of Torquato Tasso’s crusading leader in Gerusalemme liberata, Godefroy de Bouillon (in Italian Goffredo di Buglione), and in 1600 he planned to decorate his palace in the town of Goito with a series of sixty paintings depicting scenes from Tasso’s epic.^[86] At that time Andrea Mantegna’s superb six-panel depiction of a Roman Triumph, crowded with trumpeters lifting their bells to the sky, was hanging in the new Galleria del Mostre in the Ducal Palace, a reminder to Vincenzo of the military triumphs to which he too aspired.

6.3 But such strident military associations are much less obviously appropriate to the pastoral-mythological narrative of love, loss, supplication, and lamentation that follows in Striggio’s and Monteverdi’s opera itself. The contrast between the raucous flourishes of the Toccata and the graceful string Ritornello that opens the opera proper is striking. And indeed, if we examine the published score more closely, we find that the Toccata is not in fact paginated with the rest of the score; the first page to be numbered is that which contains the Ritornello and Prologue on the opposite page to the Toccata, numbered as page 1, while the Toccata is included in a separate fascicle with the title page, dedication, and cast and instrumental listing. These elements of a book (along with components such as contents page, foreword, or index) are described by book historians as “paratextual” materials; they were often added after the main text was printed, explaining why they were outside the pagination of the main text.^[87] That paratextual components were added at the end of the publishing process suggests that, although important, they were not seen as integral to the literary or musical work itself. The fact that Galileo’s exculpatory preface to the Dialogue on the Two World System—the work that earned his condemnation by the Inquisition—in which Galileo made an expression of his Catholic piety, was so obviously printed in a different typeface from the rest of the book (and was also not paginated), was a crucial aspect of the Inquisition’s charges against Galileo that the preface was insincere, and that its inclusion as paratextual material “rendered it useless inasmuch as it was alienated from the body of the book.”^[88]

6.4 The paratextual status of the Orfeo Toccata is further indication that it should not be considered as an integral part of the score for the opera itself; that it announces the opera on the page musically in the same way that it would have announced the opera sonically in the theater. To modern ears it would be quite normal for an operatic performance to be prefaced by some sort of overture, often indeed in Baroque opera no more than the kind of “festive noise” (in the words of Reinhardt Strohm)^[89] that is represented by the Toccata. And indeed, several composers of early opera refer to the need for some sort of prefatory music before the performance of an opera proper starts. In the “Avvertimenti” to Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima, e di corpo, we read that “at the beginning, before the curtain drops, it will be good to perform a full music with doubled voices and a large quantity of instruments,”^[90] and we have already seen Marco da Gagliano’s advice for such prefatory music before Dafne. Although the court performance of Dafne for the Mantua Carnival of 1608 would almost certainly have been prefaced by “il solito segno delle trombe,” Gagliano, like Cavalieri, implies that there should also be an instrumental piece. But neither Cavalieri nor Gagliano offer anything to fulfil this role in their scores, implying that they weren’t fussed what piece of music was played in this slot, and it was not customary for such prefatory music to be included in the score in early operas; many operas of this period apparently launch straight into recitative without even so much as the instrumental ritornello with which Monteverdi introduces his Orfeo Prologue. Gagliano’s ritornellos for the Prologue of Dafne are perfunctory in comparison—no more than a few transitional chords between verses. In his edition of Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, Howard Mayer Brown added an Orfeo-Toccata-like reworking of the Fantini sonata “known as the Renuccini,” on the assumption that at least some sort of fanfare or introductory music would have been played on such an important occasion. But neither Peri’s, nor Giulio Caccini’s, published score for Euridice offers anything of the sort. If Monteverdi’s Toccata was indeed to be played by all the listed instruments, it would imply that he had conflated Cavalieri’s and Gagliano’s expectation of an instrumental prelude with the standard ceremonial fanfare.

6.5 The expectation of an instrumental prelude to an opera has led music historians to some anachronistic ways of interpreting Monteverdi’s Toccata, despite the indifference of composers such as Cavalieri and Gagliano as to what should be played, the piece’s clear lineage in the standard trumpet fanfare formulas, and its paratextual status in the score. Assuming that the Toccata was integral to Monteverdi’s score, and applying nineteenth-century expectations of musical unity based on “organic growth and coherence,” the English musicologist Robert Donington sought to demonstrate that the Toccata contained the thematic material for the whole opera in nuce.^[91] I don’t need to spell out Peter Kivy’s demolition of Donington’s thesis, in which he shows that such thematic similarities are to be expected of any tonal or modal music of the period, and are just as evident in Peri’s Euridice, which Donington had judged to be a lesser work precisely because it was supposed to lack the necessary organic growth and coherence.^[92] Moreover, although Monteverdi’s instruction that the fanfares should be played “with all the instruments” might be taken as further evidence of his desire to link the Toccata to the rest of the opera, as might the raising of the pitch to the key of D if trumpets with mutes were employed, thus conforming to the key of the Prologue that follows, the instruction is, as we have seen, ambiguous. At face value it means that the fanfares should be played by the whole instrumental ensemble for the opera, thus creating an especially sumptuous racket. (The Italian word for racket or din is “fragore,” often used as a term of approbation in descriptions of trumpet and drum fanfares.^[93]) But when for the Act 1 chorus “Vieni Imeneo” Monteverdi similarly details that the instrumental accompaniment was performed “with the sounding of all the instruments” (“concertato al suono de tutti gli stromenti”), he presumably meant all the instruments relevant to that section of the opera—the bowed and plucked string instruments (and later recorders) that he designates as suitable to the pastoral mode, and not the somber lower brass and rasping regal organ that are deployed to convey the infernal world in Acts 3 and 4 (let alone the martial trumpets of the Toccata). So is it possible that, in the instance of the Toccata, knowing that the regular way of playing a sonata intrada was with monophonic statements followed by each line played additively, Monteverdi wanted to make clear that the parts were to be played by all of the trumpets together, rather than all of the opera’s instruments? In which case it would be clear that it is the mutes, not the trumpets, that are optional. This reading would certainly solve some of the problems raised by any of the other interpretations of Monteverdi’s instruction. Either way, “all the instruments” must include the trumpets that are included in the instrument listing, so this again implies that it is the mutes that are optional, despite the reference to muted trumpets in the orchestral listing. If they were definitely to be muted, which, as the composer explains, raises their pitch by one tone, then, for the convenience of the other instruments (if they were to play along), might he not have written the Toccata in D rather than the standard C of trumpet music (since the trumpeters would not have been playing from a score)?

6.6 Which brings us back to the question of why one might want to play the trumpets with mutes. In his compendious Harmonie universelle of 1636, Marin Mersenne informs us that mutes could soften the “violence and noise” of trumpets, and were used in battle to stifle trumpet commands “when you don’t want the trumpet to be heard from places where the enemy may be located.”^[94] In civilian contexts it seems that muted trumpets were sometimes employed for funeral processions and burials.^[95] But Mersenne’s description of other ways to soften the trumpet so that it can “take away the desire to hear the softness of the lute and other instruments in those who love harmony”^[96] indicates that he is also thinking of the potential of the trumpet as an instrument for domestic art music—still very novel at this date, and for which Mersenne acknowledges Fantini as the pioneer. And indeed, on the title page of Fantini’s collection of trumpet pieces, Fantini explains that the work contains “Modo per Imparare a sonare / DI TROMBA / TANTO DI GUERRA / Quanto Musicalmente in Organo, con Tromba Sordina, col Cimbalo, e ogn’altro istrumento”—i.e., it is a manual for learning to play the trumpet, whether for war or musically with organ, with muted trumpet, with cembalo, and with any other instrument—muted trumpet evidently being preferred for “musical” performance. The Shakespeare scholar Christopher Wilson observes that when Shakespeare’s later plays were presented in indoor theaters, the stage instructions in the folio editions tend to specify the softer cornett rather than the trumpets previously detailed for open air performances,^[97] and Monteverdi’s recommendation of mutes is probably not primarily intended to raise the Toccata to the pitch of the following Ritornello, but to render it suitable for “musical” performance in a confined interior space (such as, we are told in Monteverdi’s dedication of the score, the one where Orfeo was presented) if full-throttle trumpets were going to make too much fragore. If Monteverdi meant by “all the instruments” not “all the orchestral instruments” but “all of the trumpets together,” with the option to play with or without mutes, then this would make much more sense of his otherwise highly confusing presentation of the Toccata in the score.

PART TWO

7. Refeudalization

7.1 The Orfeo Toccata almost certainly did not belong exclusively to Orfeo and was not “composed” by Monteverdi in the normal sense. Nonetheless, it would have been heard in conjunction with the opera at its first performances, and it sits alongside the rest of the opera in the published score—which was surely Monteverdi’s decision. I want to suggest that the apparent disjunction between the rousing, martial Toccata and the (largely) pastoral opera that follows is indicative of two aspects of the self-fashioning of the ruling classes in early seventeenth-century Italy. In particular, it points to elements of what has standardly been called “refeudalization” in the historiography of later sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Italy: firstly, the cultivation of an ideology of rural landownership and a lifestyle of otium (or leisure) that went with the acquisition of feudal land tenures, of which all forms of pastoral art are an expression; and secondly, an anachronistic revival of the trappings of medieval chivalry, which the British Renaissance scholar Frances Yates, referring to what a more recent historian calls “the spectacular revival of chivalric ideals and practices” in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,^[98] once described as the “imaginative re-feudalisation of culture.”^[99]

7.2 Refeudalization is a term that was originally coined by the Italian historians Ruggiero Romano and Rosario Villari in the 1960s, Romano to explain aspects of land reclamation in seventeenth-century Italy,^[100] and Villari to explain the causes of the Neapolitan revolt of 1647.^[101] According to Villari, the Spanish rulers of Naples ensured the loyalty of the local aristocracy by awarding them feudal fiefdoms in the government’s control that had often previously been administered by local communes. Given the impossibility of generalizing from one Italian state to the next, there is no absolute agreement on the extent or nature of refeudalization in Italy. But it appears that the Medici regime in Tuscany was engaged in a very similar process of reallocating feudal dues and jurisdictions to loyal followers,^[102] and that the Venetian state awarded Venetian patricians feudal tenures on the conquered terraferma, dispossessing the local nobility who had resisted Venetian expansion.^[103] In both cases feudal fiefdoms and their accompanying titles were particularly desirable since membership in the Florentine patriciate or the Venetian nobility carried no title, and bearing a title was becoming the only internationally recognized marker of aristocracy.^[104] In Mantua itself the most extensive refeudalization took place in the principality of Monferrato, inherited by the Gonzagas in 1531, where Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga initially imposed his rule on the local nobility by force, stripping them of traditional feudal rights when they resisted, and using their former feudal jurisdictions to raise money for his coffers. His son Vincenzo I in turn “pulverized the territory in a myriad of feudal jurisdictions,”^[105] and endowed loyal supporters with the confiscated fiefdoms, a process described by the historian of Mantua Paul Grendel as “a classic example of the refeudalization of an Italian state.”^[106]

Refeudalization was also associated with what another historian has described as “aristocratization,”^[107] a process in Italy whereby mercantile urban patriciates and redneck rural lords were transformed into “a disciplined courtly aristocracy”^[108] owing its status and rewards directly to the new-style absolutist rulers of Italy. There was, indeed, from Machiavelli onward, a standard political belief that the modern prince required such an aristocracy to bolster his own status and legitimacy. In this process, as Jonathan Dewald puts it, “the nobles became a coherent social class.”^[109] The extent of refeudalization itself has subsequently been questioned,^[110] as has the Risorgimento-era narrative, propounded by the nineteenth-century literary scholar Francesco De Sanctis, that the chivalric revival, and the aristocratic academies to be found in every Italian city (such as that which commissioned Orfeo), were symptomatic of the decadence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy after the glories of the Renaissance, due to a formerly productive urban business class adopting “the mores and trappings of an idle aristocracy, squandering its wealth on landed estates, pageantry and the bucolic pleasures of a country villa” (in Domenico Sella’s critical rendition of the narrative).^[111] But the reemergence of pastoral arts in the sixteenth century, and the revival of chivalry, were both quite clearly part of the cultivation of a new, neo-feudal class ideology.

7.3 The “pageantry” that Sella refers to consisted primarily of the neo-chivalric displays that took place in obverse relation to the actual engagement of the Italian nobility with warfare during the second half of the sixteenth century, a period of sustained peace on the Italian peninsula after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, which ended sixty-five years of hostilities in Italy between France and the Habsburgs. In his study of chivalry, the historian Maurice Keen argued that military chivalry had ceased to be a vital social force by the sixteenth century, offering economic arguments related to the decline of the older feudal nobility, and the growth of a courtly aristocracy more interested in offices and benefices than in military service.^[112] Changes in warfare also meant that the military values promoted by chivalry were increasingly redundant: developments in weaponry, in particularly heavy artillery, had shifted emphasis from pitched battles, in which mounted cavalry (the mainstay of the chivalric ethos) had played a crucial role, to siege warfare;^[113] combat with lances, of the kind that was practiced at jousts and tournaments, was dying out.^[114] From the mid sixteenth century, states were beginning to establish what would effectively become national standing armies, which would come to replace the mustering of troops through the summons of feudal landowners and their retainers.^[115] And with this went an increased professionalization of army business in areas such as training and regimental organization.^[116] We find modern warfare’s threat to the values of knightly chivalry expressed in literary texts such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which includes an anguished reference to decline of chivalric values in the era of gunpowder,^[117] and in Don Quixote’s lengthy imprecations against modern warfare, in particular artillery.^[118] In this climate chivalry could survive only as an elaborate form of play acting (or the sublime delusions of a madman). Nonetheless, the chivalric revival was an indication of significant social changes that were real enough.

7.4 As part of the establishment of a modern aristocracy, the sixteenth century saw a plethora of treatises discussing the nature of nobility (Claudio Donati notes in particular that the decades either side of 1600 produced works on this topic in a number “without precedent”),^[119] as well as behavior manuals for the new courtly aristocrats (a sure sign of status and legitimation anxiety), starting with the definitive work in this genre, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528). Such treatises debated the essential appurtenances of aristocracy: were they family and lineage, prowess in war, public service, leisure, or culture and learning? Ideally to be aristocratic would encompass all of these qualities.^[120] But in reality partisan theorists tended to privilege one aspect over another, which led to some standard rhetorical debating points, e.g., between birth and culture; between birth and civic duty; between arms and letters—a topic of some import in Italy, where the military humiliations of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were often attributed to the Italian ruling classes’ interest in intellectual and cultural pursuits over warfare);^[121] sometimes between arms and music (as in Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger’s “Discourse on the foundation of an academy professing letters, arms, and music,” in which Buonarroti attempts to dispel doubts about the masculinity of music by citing all the famous warriors who were also musicians);^[122] or between arms and agriculture, the latter the topic of a letter of 1542 by the Venetian landowner and agronomist Alvise Cornaro to the writer Sperone Speroni,^[123] in which Cornaro argued the superiority of “holy agriculture” over arms or imperialism (conveniently ignoring that it was military conquest that had given Venetian patricians such as Cornaro access to estates on the terraferma to bolster their declining commercial incomes from trade). Arms and agriculture: Toccata and pastoral opera.

8. Neo-Chivalry

8.1 The relationship between refeudalization, early opera, and pastoral arts must be the subject of a different essay, for here I am concerned with that aspect of the first performance of Orfeo that relates to the chivalric revival, a “model of corporate class behavior that [the aristocracy] could still cling to as relevant to their lives in a period of rapid social and political change,”^[124] and that contributed to the establishment of a new set of standards for what it was to be noble, often in conscious opposition to the mercantile values from which so many of the new aristocracy originally derived their wealth and from which they now wished to distance themselves. The dominance of commercial city states in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their exclusion of feudal lords, and their resultant tendency to employ mercenary armies, meant that chivalry had played a less important role in Renaissance life in Italy than in some other parts of Europe.^[125] But if, as Castiglione and many others averred, “the first and true profession of the courtier must be that of arms,”^[126] military prowess would again become an essential appurtenance in the age of the courtier. Thus, as Dewald argues, values of “generosity, courage and indifference to calculation” were promoted as a counterfoil to commercial instrumentality (as indeed, pastoral otium came to stand as a set of values in opposition to urban negotium).^[127] Books dedicated to the revived cult of chivalry poured off the press in the latter half of the sixteenth century: titles such as Della origine de’ cavalieri by Francesco Sansovino (1566, 1570) and Il cavaliere of 1589 by the Bolognese mercenary soldier and fortifications expert Domenico Mora. Mora (ironically, given his expertise) lamented the decline of chivalry in Italy, which he believed to be due to the exaggerated value placed upon literature and learning, and proposed that chivalric training schools should be established all over Europe for the defense of Christendom.^[128] In Ferrara, perhaps the center of the cultural revival of chivalry, the writer Giovann Battista Pigna (of bourgeois origin) wrote books extolling the values of the chivalric romance represented by Orlando furioso (originally published in Ferrara), defended the aristocratic right to duel, and argued for the diplomatic precedence of the d’Este rulers of Ferrara due to their illustrious feudal genealogy over the grubby mercantile origins of the Medici rulers of Florence.^[129] The aristocratic academies that sprang up all over Italy in the later sixteenth century were often also training grounds for chivalric ideals, augmented by more specialized military academies, such as the Collegio dei Nobili established in Parma in 1601,^[130] or those founded in cities in the Veneto, with the support of the Venetian government, between 1608 and 1610—although their chronicler J.R. Hale suggests that they were more akin to “finishing schools,” to keep young terraferma nobles who were excluded from political activity out of trouble, rather than sites of rigorous training for future cavalry officers.^[131]

8.2 Perhaps the first sign of the association of the new-style princely regimes in Italy with the revival of aristocratic chivalry was the foundation in 1561 by Duke Cosimo I of Florence (later Grand Duke of Tuscany) of the chivalric Ordine di Santo Stefano, one of the most obvious of Cosimo’s attempts to impose, in the words of R. Burr Lichfield, “a military and feudal façade upon the city”^[132] (meaning Florence, although the Order’s headquarters were, in fact, in Pisa, since its military duties were primarily naval). Supposedly open only to those of noble birth (with at least four quarters to their coats of arms),^[133] it was founded in emulation of the seafaring Knights of Malta, which itself closed ranks to exclude applicants from “mercantile” families, and tightened the scrutiny process for evidence of nobility, only a few years later.^[134] Not to be outdone, as part of his own “remilitarization of state and court,”^[135] in 1607, the year of Orfeo, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga initiated plans for an order of knights in Mantua, dedicated to the most precious relic in the city, the sacred blood of Christ that had supposedly been spilled by the spear of the Roman centurion Longinus as Christ hung on the cross. The order was in clear emulation of the Order of St. Stephen and of a similar neo-chivalric order in Piedmont, the Order of the Knights of Santi Maurizio e Lazzaro,^[136] founded in 1573 by the House of Savoy, with whom the Gonzagas were now establishing a diplomatic relationship through dynastic alliance, the marriage of Vincenzo’s oldest son Francesco to Margherita of Savoy. Vincenzo’s relationship to the notoriously hot-headed Duke Carlo Emanuele of Savoy seems to have largely been one of rivalry and one-upmanship, and Vincenzo was so desperate to get the new order launched when Carlo Emanuele was in Mantua for the wedding that he stalled his protracted and unseemly haggling with the Pope over terms (a trade-off between benefices for the knights and the Pope’s chastity conditions) and went ahead with establishing the order without formal papal approval. The Order of the Redentore was duly instituted on 25 May 1608 at a ceremony in the basilica of S. Andrea in the presence of Duke Carlo Emanuele.^[137]

8.3 Vincenzo’s Act of Foundation for the order declared, with good Counter-Reformation rhetoric, that it was established “to encourage not only virtuous works of chivalry, but particularly that for our order and for themselves [the knights] are obligated to show themselves with their strength and worthy actions the most bitter enemies of the enemies of the Holy Faith.”^[138] Another clause requires that members of the order “honor and defend women … and in all things conduct themselves with knightly actions that show themselves worthy of the name of the order that they bear.”^[139] This last stipulation in particular would have been heartily applauded by that exemplary knight errant Don Quixote, who had made his first appearance in print in 1605. For the terms were a clear attempt to revive the values of medieval chivalry, albeit derived from later literary imaginings of chivalric courtly love presented by the irrepressible chivalric romances that were the object of Cervantes’s mockery in Don Quixote.

8.4 The Mantuan author of such chivalric romances Ludovico Arrivabene tells us that Vincenzo Gonzaga first conceived the idea of a military order in Mantua as early as 1589, the year in which Arrivabene published his own study of the chivalric orders of knighthood, Dell Origine de’ Cavalieri del Tosone, e di altri Ordini, de’ Simboli, e delle Imprese (On the Origins of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, and of other Orders, of Symbols and Emblems). The book was dedicated to Vincenzo when the duke received (for a considerable price—300,000 scudi) the order of the Golden Fleece from King Philip of Spain.^[140] Many of Vincenzo Gonzaga’s forbears were condottiere, and Vincenzo clearly sought to emulate the military feats of his illustrious ancestors, such as those illustrated in the series of eight large paintings made for Vincenzo’s father, Guglielmo Gonzaga, in the 1570s and ’80s by the Venetian painter Tintoretto, the greatest painter of battle scenes of his day, that still hung in the Ducal Palace in Monteverdi’s time;^[141] or the feats of some of his contemporaries such as Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and governor of the Spanish Netherlands, or his cousin Vespasiano Gonzaga of Sabbioneta, whose military prowess had earned him governerships in Spain. The huge sum paid to the king of Spain for his Golden Fleece was given by Vincenzo as a “loan” in the hope (unfulfilled) that Vincenzo might be offered the generalship of Flanders in addition to the Golden Fleece.^[142]

8.5 Instead, in 1595 Vincenzo responded to an appeal from the emperor Rudolf II for a league against the Turks, leading his Mantuan troops to the battlefront and commanding them in the siege of Visograd before abruptly returning home due to illness. Vincenzo embarked on a second expedition in 1597, which ended equally abruptly due to a disagreement about authority between Vincenzo and the commander of the imperial troops.^[143] In 1601 Vincenzo responded a third time to a request for troops to recapture the fortress of Canissa from the Turks, although this expedition was even less glorious for the Christian allies, Vincenzo and his fellow Italians (the Florentines led by Don Giovanni Medici and the Papal troops under Pope Clement VIII’s nephew Gian Francesco Aldobrandini) being blamed for the siege’s failure by their German allies.^[144]

8.6 Despite their lack of glory, Vincenzo’s first two campaigns were fully documented by the Mantuan chronicler Fortunato Cardi, with poems in honor of Vincenzo’s exploits.^[145] Even as the third campaign was being undertaken in the autumn of 1601, back in Mantua Federico Follino, as master of ceremonies for the court, wrote to Vincenzo at the front in October to establish Vincenzo’s wishes for the upcoming Carnival festivities in Mantua (did he want a comedy, or an example of the newly fashionable pastoral, as the main entertainment?), and again in November, suggesting that the chosen play might have an intermedio celebrating Vincenzo’s hopefully imminent victory at Canissa,^[146] and detailing the spectacular sonic effects that might be achieved (“dei colpi d’artiglieria, e del suono di trombe e tamburi”: artillery shots, and the sound of trumpets and drums).^[147] Alas, events meant that the planned victory celebrations never took place (although Vincenzo’s campaign is nonetheless commemorated prominently in an inscription on a ceiling in the duke’s apartments in the Ducal Palace). Had they done so, no doubt Monteverdi, who had accompanied Vincenzo in the duke’s musical entourage on the first campaign, would have provided some of the music for Follino’s vision of the finale as a “phantasmagoria of music and fireworks.”^[148]

9. War Games

9.1 In lieu of glory in battle the Italian nobility in the early seventeenth century had to content themselves with largely theatrical displays of their military skills, such displays being described variously as barriera, quintana, battaglia, torneo, giostra, giuoco, battuto, or sbarra. In 1615 the Florentine poet and dramatist Andrea Salvadori, in his preface to the published account of La guerra d’Amore, one of the many chivalric sbarre presented during the Carnival in Florence that year, insisted upon the value of such spectacles in promoting a bellicose spirit against the “ozio della pace” (the “otium” of peace), comparing such activities to the war games of the Homeric heroes.^[149] Salvadori proposed­ that the best sports for the aristocracy are those on horseback, pointing to the equestrian basis of chivalric knighthood. (The Italian name for a knight is cavaliero, from cavallo ([horse], from which the Italian term for chivalry, cavaleria, derives, just as the English term chivalry derives from cheval.) Neo-chivalresque events were invariably mounted, and by the seventeenth century consisted of more than the rowdy, and often bloody, jousting that had characterized medieval chivalry. Late Renaissance jousts and tournaments had become sophisticated theatrical events involving dramatic scenarios, equestrian ballets, and, invariably, music.^[150] The theatricality of seventeenth-century jousts is evident from the lengthy literary accounts of many such sbarre, which became a regular feature of annual Carnival festivities, as well as weddings and ceremonial entries. In the case of Salvadori’s La guerra d’Amore, both the text and a descriptive account survive; the latter includes engravings by Jacques Caillot depicting the event, with ground plans showing the elaborate choreography of the battle scene.^[151] This event, which was staged in the piazza in front of the church of Santa Croce, has a narrative in which the hand of Lucinda, the Queen of India, is being fought for by the Kings of Asia and Africa (played by the young grand duke Cosimo II and his brother). The performance had extensive music, including settings of lengthy arias, by a team of composers that included Jacopo Peri, although as is almost invariably the case with such productions, the music is lost. The ruling family took such spectacles seriously: we have the correspondence that records the negotiations between Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger and the grand duchess Cristina concerning a sbarra that was due to take place in Pisa in 1607, which shows that the grand duchess was closely engaged with both the practicalities and the precise allegorical meanings of the event.^[152]

9.2 Music played such a crucial part in these performances that Paolo Fabbri coins the term “opera-torneo” to describe such extravaganzas (albeit disclaiming any desire to establish a new subgenre of opera by the term).^[153] For the tournament that was presented at the 1608 wedding in Mantua, Follino lists at least forty instrumentalists, typically prominent of course being trumpets and drums (including three long trumpets “all’antica,” as depicted in Mantegna’s “Triumph”).^[154] Francis Markham and other English authors of military textbooks remind us that the trumpet was used exclusively for cavalry signaling, infantry having to make do with drums alone (“drum and fife” are usually referred to together, but the fife’s purpose was “to excite cheerfulness, and alacrity in the Soldiers, not to signal”).^[155] Cavalry being exclusively aristocratic, trumpets were, by association, a sign of nobility. Timothy J. McGee suggests that when, after the plebeian Ciompi revolt in Florence the patrician Signoria and Priorate were restored in 1382, they appropriated the civic trumpet band as a personal sign of nobility, rather than merely of civic authority.^[156] And just as ruling regimes attempted to define and demarcate the indicators of aristocracy through such means as neo-feudal titles, chivalric orders, institutes for genealogical and heraldic documentation, rules of court etiquette, or sumptuary laws, so in some parts of Europe attempts were made to limit the playing of trumpets and kettle drums to aristocratic contexts. From 1623 a number of imperial edicts confirmed the privileges (but also responsibilities) of trumpeters and drummers in the imperial domains: “Because trumpeters and kettle drummers perform solely for the Emperor, Kings, Electoral and Imperial Princes, counts and lords of knightly rank, and similar persons of quality” they were to be forbidden to play with “jugglers, tower watchmen, caretakers and the like.”^[157] Trumpeters, one writ declares, are a “knightly kind,” their calling not a trade but “a free and knightly art.”^[158] Conversely, comedians, jugglers, and other such riff-raff were forbidden to play on trumpets or military kettledrums, and even official city trumpeters were forbidden to play their instruments outside their “stages, stands or towers.”^[159]

9.3 According to Giulio Cesare Monteverdi in the “Dichiaratione” appended to his brother’s Scherzi musicali a tre voci (1607), Monteverdi was regularly employed in composing music for the frequent tornei that took place in Mantua,^[160] and one such project, in Parma rather than Mantua, is well documented. Monteverdi contributed music to a theatrical tournament to celebrate the wedding of Duke Odoardo Farnese to Margherita de’ Medici in 1628. The event took place in the cavernous Teatro Farnese, which had been constructed in 1618 in the old military riding school (a telling detail in its own right), and although the Teatro is often designated as the first surviving permanent theater with a proscenium, it was intended as a multi-purpose space, able to accommodate a tournament as comfortably as a drama. The title of the tournament was Mercurio e Marte. The music is again lost, but we have a detailed account of the event in addition to Monteverdi’s own correspondence, and the libretto survives.^[161] Mercurio e Marte presents the reconciliation of Mercury and Mars—representing the princely virtues of letters and eloquence (Mercury) and those of arms (Mars), the latter with which Odoardo was as obsessed as Vincenzo Gonzaga—after Discord has sown a rift between them.^[162] Mercury lays out the conflict in terms of the musical instruments associated with the two qualities:

Che paraggio v’è mai
fra le trombe, e le cetre,
fra timpani, e viole,
fra le lingue, e le spade
tra funesti cipressi, e vivi allori
O quanto mai più vale
il fulmine felice,
d’una lingua oratrice,
che di brando guerriero alta ferita.

(What choice is there ever / between trumpets and lyres, / between drums and viols, / between speeches and swords / between gloomy cypresses or living laurels? / Oh how much better is / the happy thunderbolt / of words of oratory, / than the deep wound of a warrior’s sword.)

Monteverdi, who liked to set contrasting groups of instruments against each other (as in Act 3 of Orfeo, or the madrigal “Con che soavità” from the Seventh Book of Madrigals, with its three groups of instruments), would surely have seized the opportunity to oppose trumpets (or the nearest substitute) and lyres, drums and viol[in]s. As, indeed, happens in the opening musical numbers in the Orfeo score.

9.4 In Mercurio e Marte reconciliation is brought about after a mock equestrian battle. In the battle of La guerra d’Amore love triumphs over war. At the height of the battle Mars and Venus arrive in chariots in great fury. Mars calls for the combatants to cease fighting, and Venus, in a long aria, expresses her horror at the warlike activities:

Ma deh, che si feroce orrendo aspetto
d’armi, d’odio, di sdegno, e di furore.
Troppo, forti guerrier, mi turba il petto,
troppo m’offende, e m’atterisce il core.^[163]

(But gods, what ferociously horrifying appearance / of weapons, of hatred, of indignation, and of fury. / Too much, strong warriors, troubles my breast, / too much offends me and terrifies my heart.)

She then urges the rival parties to lay down their arms and to dance instead. The work closes with an equestrian ballet accompanied by a choral ode extolling the triumphs of love, at the end of which Lucinda departs still a maiden. Courtly love was, of course, as much an ideal of the chivalric code as was warfare; and it was, after all, the value of the warlike games of the sbarre, with their display of masculine strength, rather than war itself, that Salvadori was promoting.

10. Oaten Reeds and Trumpets

10.1 The conflict of love and war was as integral to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Tasso as to those of Homer and Virgil, and the triumph of love over war, exemplified by Venus’s seduction of Mars, was a common topic of classical and Renaissance art. In Botticelli’s depiction a post-coital Mars sprawls naked and comatose while baby satyrs gleefully make off with his armor. One of the dedicatory poems in Fantini’s trumpet manual similarly describes Fantini’s passage from military trumpeter to musician of love:

Hor ecco come in Musico concento,
fàr addolcendo gl’impeti più fieri,
languir di goia e Dame, e Cavalieri
volto in amore il Martial talento.

(Hear now how, in concerted music, / he sweetens the fiercest impulses, / he makes both Ladies and Knights languish with joy, / his martial talent transformed into love.)

And the theme of love triumphing over arms also underpins Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals, in which Monteverdi introduced his discovery of the genere concitato, the agitated style suitable to the depiction of anger, war, or courage. In his preface to the Eighth Book Monteverdi explains that he has developed the new concitato style in an attempt to find a modern equivalent for Plato’s description of the warlike meters in Greek poetry, suitable to convey “the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare.”^[164] A justification for this might be to fulfil the tripartite categorizations of classical rhetoric whereby there were three genera: the high, the middling, and the low, described by Monteverdi (according to a number of classical authorities)^[165] as representing anger, moderation, and humility. Within the new rhetorical regime of the seconda pratica, it could be judged remiss if music didn’t have an appropriate “high” style to represent the neo-feudal values of a revived aristocratic chivalry, one that would be suitable for a book dedicated to the Emperor Ferdinand as “a paragon among warrior-princes.” Indeed, Monteverdi himself says in his preface that his experiments in the concitato style were “so necessary to the musical art” since, without this style, music is “imperfetta.” As Richard Wistreich has demonstrated in his study of the soldier and singer Giulio Cesare Brancaccio (1515–86), the imperative of establishing a suitably masculine, aristocratic, and even “chivalric” style of musicianship haunted Brancaccio’s career as courtier and musician,^[166] and Monteverdi might similarly have been responding to Tasso’s plea, made in his literary dialogue La Cavaletta (1587), for his musical contemporaries to re-establish a more weighty style (gravità) in Italian secular music.^[167] It is surely no coincidence that Monteverdi turns to Tasso for his own attempt at the high style, referring to him in his preface as “the divine Tasso,” and placing his setting of the tragic final encounter of Tancredi and Clorinda from Gerusalemme liberata as a cornerstone of the collection.

10.2 The Eighth Book of Madrigals was published in 1638, but Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda had been performed in Venice in 1624, Monteverdi wanting to ensure that his readers knew that he had invented the style some years earlier since so many composers were now copying it. But he was being a little disingenuous in his account of the supposedly laborious (and frankly pedantic) research he undertook to find the concitato style for Il combattimento. In the Prologue to Orfeo La Musica already names “nobil ira” (noble anger, as opposed, presumably, to common-or-garden anger) along with love as one of the two emotions that music can arouse, Monteverdi giving her some tetchy semiquavers to underline the point. In Arianna a year later he had employed the rapid repeated semiquavers that characterize the genere concitato when, in her famous lament, Ariadne, in her rage, invokes storms and sea monsters to drown the departing Theseus.

10.3 But in the Eighth Book Monteverdi associated the developed style specifically with war, for which the frequent references to military trumpet signals in the madrigals were as important as signifiers as his technical experiments in the concitato mode. In the Virgilian invocation of his muse at the opening of his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser declares his intention to graduate from pastoral to epic: “For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, / And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds.”^[168] (He means gentle as in chivalrous, rather than as in mild.) In assembling the pieces for his collection of madrigals of war and love, Monteverdi may have considered too that it was time to lay aside his oaten reeds for trumpets. The composer had introduced his Seventh Book of Madrigals with a poem by his contemporary Giambattista Marino in which, like Virgil and Spenser, the poet attempts to “raise his style and songs” to sing of Mars. But despite the fact that in his epic L’Adone of 1623 Marino had presented a contest between a lovelorn nightingale and a lutenist in which the musician defeats the bird through his deployment of a battery of warlike musical gestures to convey “the bellicose uproar and clash of arms,”^[169] it is now in vain; he himself is always defeated by the subject of love. In the Eighth Book Monteverdi re-girds his loins to assert more forcefully that although others sing of love, he will sing of war (“Marte,” the word repeated over-emphatically)—although it quickly becomes apparent that war is still primarily a metaphor for love as war (a way, perhaps, of reclaiming the emasculating forces of love for masculinity).^[170]

10.4 As advocated by Spenser, the Toccata for Orfeo literally deploys trumpets, instruments otherwise banished from art music until the innovations of Fantini, and it signifies through a complex web of military associations. Yet it is what it is: a stand-alone fanfare. It would become increasingly important that the music of the seconda pratica, based upon the principle of representation, should be able to represent autonomously all aspects of the ideals of the early-modern ruling classes, including the heroic emotions associated with chivalric courage and combat. In Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda the concitato mode thus conveys combat and courage directly: Tancredi and Clorinda galloping onto the stage, the challenge, the clash of weapons; it is representational music in the modern style. And the music now serves to aestheticize war in the same way as did theatricalized tournaments, choreographed horse ballets, and the new art of equestrian dressage.^[171] Il combattimento was originally performed in the Mocenigo palace in Venice in 1624—before the War of the Mantuan Succession of 1630, the first significant war on the Italian peninsula for many years, and before the more extended horrors of the Thirty Years War began to ravage all Europe, starting with the entry of the Swedes, also in 1630. Theodore Rabb has noted that whereas Tintoretto and the younger Peter Paul Rubens painted scenes that glorified war during periods of relative peace, the later Rubens, in a painting such as The Horrors of War of 1635, and Diego Velázquez—in The Surrender of Breda (1634–35), with its emphasis upon the compassion of the Spanish victor for the defeated Dutch, or Mars Resting of 1638–40, a portrayal of Mars as a war-weary old soldier—painted what can only be described as anti-war images.^[172] The revival of chivalry from the mid-sixteenth century may have been part of the broader socio-political project of refeudalization and aristocratization, but it was also the fruit of a relatively peaceful era that was sufficiently removed from the real horrors of war for its protagonists to be able to play at artful war games instead.

10.5 This essay is part of a more extensive study of early opera and early modernity, charting the relationship between opera and socio-economic aspects of early modernity, in particular aspects such as early capitalist state formations, the scientific revolution, and colonial exploration. We might want to ask how the Orfeo Toccata (I’m not sure we can confidently designate it “Monteverdi’s” Toccata any longer), a fanfare recalling the age of medieval chivalry, was appropriate to announce such a distinctively “modern” art form as opera? Perhaps the point here is that, understood dialectically, a crucial element of modernity, and in particular of its need for legitimation, is, in Eric Hobsbawm’s famous formulation, “the invention of tradition.”^[173] For it is the novelty of the present, the consciousness of being modern, that causes people not only to consider the present’s distinctness from the past, but also what is of value from the past that can be recuperated to legitimate the present. Writing about the problems of constructing a secular terminology in the early modern era, Hans Blumenberg noted that in the need for legitimation of the new, old terms and concepts often linger, leading to a “retrospective interpretation and integration into the new context of meaning, which in the process makes use of and secures, above all, its sanctioned status as something that is beyond questioning.”^[174] This was, after all, the project that Renaissance humanism had introduced, and it was under the aegis of just such a revival of antiquity that opera itself had come into being. But the revival of chivalry was the restoration of a more recent past that could be presented as a fiction of continuity rather than the story of rupture, loss, and only partial retrieval that was all that early opera could claim.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tim Carter, Susan Parisi, and Peter Downey for the invaluable help they have given in the preparation of this study. Tim Carter, typically generous in his support of academic colleagues, read an earlier draft and pointed out some key flaws and oversights in its argument that I have attempted to address in this version. Susan Parisi very kindly answered some queries about musicians in Mantua, and even more kindly dug around in the notes from her PhD research on the subject to give me full chapter and verse. Had I located a copy of trumpet historian Peter Downey’s PhD thesis, “The Trumpet and Its Role in Music of the Renaissance and Early Baroque,” earlier, I could have saved myself a good deal of trouble at the outset of my research, and Peter Downey also kindly sent me a copy of an unpublished article on the Orfeo Toccata that further answered several key questions, and responded at length to my many subsequent queries. I would also like to thank the anonymous JSCM readers for their very helpful suggestions (and, in some cases, corrections), and JSCM editor Lois Rosow for her encouragement, extensive practical advice and help, and meticulous and astute editing. Research for much of this article, which is part of a larger project on early opera provisionally entitled “Opera, Myth and Modernity,” was made possible by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship held between 2012 and 2015.

Examples

Example 1. Monteverdi, Toccata from Orfeo

Example 2. Janequin, “La Bataille de Marignan”

Example 3. Monteverdi, Gira il nemico insidioso Amore

Audio Examples

Audio 1. Opening of Fantini, “Entrata Imperiale”

Audio 2. Excerpt from Fantini, “Entrata Imperiale”

Figures

Figure 1. Monteverdi, Toccata from Orfeo

Figure 2. Fantini, “Seconda Imperiale” quinta part

Figure 3. Bendinelli, “Buta sella”

Figure 4. Fantini, “Sparata di butta sella”

Figure 5. Fantini, “Balletto prima parte detto dello Spada”

Figure 6. Fantini, “Sonata detta del Gonzaga”

Figure 7. Three excerpts from Fantini, “Entrata Imperiale”

Figure 8. Bendinelli, “Quinta o Intrada”

Figure 9. Bendinelli, “The correct mode of playing the clarino above the sonata”

Table

Table 1. Trumpet registers: Bendinelli, Monteverdi, Fantini