Monteverdi's Legacy: Program Notes

To provide some perspective on the Folger Consort’s Golden Jubilee at 50, we’ve chosen music from almost ten times that many years ago (Shakespeare’s time, of course), a truly golden age of music in and around Venice in the 17th century. We will hear concerted madrigals and canzonettas in the new fashion for various combinations of voices and instruments, as well as virtuoso instrumental music for keyboard, guitar and above all violins that powerfully influenced later music.

Without question Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) is one of the true giants of our musical past and stands on the cusp of the transition to what we call Baroque style. He embraced the revolutionary techniques of monodists like Peri and Caccini, using them in both chamber music and opera, and brought the new developments in theatrical music to church forms as well. By the 1590s Monteverdi was employed at the Mantuan court as a string player. By 1600 his reputation as a madrigalist was well established, and the famous attacks on his harmonic innovations by the conservative theorist Artusi soon appeared.

Monteverdi’s views on the freer treatment of dissonance in the service of the text (so upsetting to Artusi) is present in the works of other contemporary composers, but Monteverdi and his brother Giulio Cesare met the challenge head-on: In the Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605) they issued a famous defense, describing the two “practices,” the traditional one of Renaissance polyphony and the second based on ancient Greek principles. The highest goal of the latter was that of moving the affections, of using music in the service of the text. It is safe to say that this principle is apparent in all of Monteverdi’s music, whether it is in the strictest Palestrina-style polyphony or the stark declamatory recitative of the radical Florentine humanists.

In 1613, the post of maestro di cappella became open at San Marco in Venice. Monteverdi auditioned for and won the position and remained in Venice for the rest of his life. By the 1630s Monteverdi had become much less active in the day-to-day affairs of San Marco and had turned over most of his compositional duties to his younger colleagues, including Giovanni Rovetta and Francesco Cavalli, whose music figures prominently in our program this evening

Monteverdi had taken holy orders in 1632 and seemed ready to enjoy an old age of quiet contemplation and retreat. However, the last few years of his life witnessed an incredible burst of creative activity, including the Eighth Book of madrigals, his last operas, and a monumental compendium of concerted sacred music, the Selva Morale e Spirituale.

Monteverdi left us nine books of madrigals, of which the first five are Renaissance style for the most part, usually with five voices and no obligatory accompaniment. The sixth adds chordal instrumental accompaniment, and the final three books are wholly in the new concertato style of the Baroque, with various numbers of voices accompanied by figured bass and frequently with independent instrumental parts. While his first opera L’Orfeo was composed in Mantua for the court, two later operas survive written for the first Venetian public opera houses. His masterpieces Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea reflect the operatic transition from courtly spectacle to public entertainment.

Biagio Marini (1594–1663) was from Brescia, although he traveled widely in the course of his career. Employed at San Marco in Venice from 1615 to 1620, he worked under Monteverdi for a time. It has been suggested that another Brescian instrumentalist in Venice, Giovanni Battista Fontana, may have been his teacher. Marini wrote a good bit of vocal music, and especially later in his career focused on the larger concertato forms combining instruments and voices. But it as a composer of violin music that he is best known; Marini’s sonatas are skillfully composed and always musically interesting. An accomplished violinist himself, he is credited with having contributed substantially to the development of violin technique.

Francesco Corbetta (ca. 1615–1681) was a guitarist, teacher, and composer. The best known exponent of a combination of strummed and plucked texture on the guitar, he amazed the court of Spain with his playing during his time there. Corbetta spent his early career in Bologna, Mantua, Germany, and the Spanish Netherlands before settling in Paris in 1654. He then accompanied the English King Charles II to London at his Restoration and spent the rest of his life dividing his time between Paris and London. Corbetta had another business, too—he was a professional gambler and was awarded a lucrative monopoly by Charles on a game called L’accia di Catalonia, similar to roulette!

Giovanni Battista Fontana (1589–1630) was, along with his student Biagio Marini, one of the first important composers of sonatas for violins. We know very little about Fontana. He was born in Brescia, worked in Venice and Roma and died in Padua because of “the voracity of the pestilence” that swept across northern Italy in 1630 and 1631. We have only one collection of his music, printed posthumously in Venice in 1641. This print consists of six sonatas for solo violin and continuo but also ensemble sonatas for two and three violins and continuo, which often include a part for bassoon. These sonatas are constructed from distinct contrasting sections best performed with varied tempi and affects, so like Frescobaldi’s compositions (described below) the kaleidoscopic character of Fontana’s violin music makes it a natural for spontaneous and colorful performance.

If any single musician best represents Monteverdi’s legacy, it is Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676). His father, Giovanni Battista Caletti, was an organist in Crema and Cavalli’s first teacher, who was brought to Venice under the protection of the Venetian governor of Crema, Federico Cavalli (whose name the younger musician later adopted). Francesco entered the San Marco musical establishment, already under the leadership of Monteverdi, in 1616 as a soprano (when the boy’s voice broke he continued in the San Marco cappella as a tenor) and became second organist at San Marco in 1639. Cavalli had a close association with Monteverdi for twenty-five years, although it isn’t clear whether he ever formally studied with him. But he was the likely editor of Monteverdi’s Messa a quattro voci et salmi (posthumously published in 1650), which includes Cavalli’s wonderful Magnificat a sei. Also, parts of the Venetian manuscript of L’incoronazione di Poppea are in Cavalli’s hand. Of course, in the San Marco cappella he sang and worked with Rovetta and other performer-composers represented on this program.

Cavalli married the widow of a wealthy Venetian, who brought him a substantial dowry and property, and this financial security enabled him to invest in operas and remain in Venice. Cavalli’s debut as an opera composer coincided with his 1639 appointment at San Marco, with a piece performed at the newly opened Teatro San Cassiano, Venice’s first public opera house. His third opera, Didone (1640), was written on a libretto by G.F. Busanello, famous for the libretto for Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. We include here an aria from that work, as well as the Prologo to L’Ormindo (1644), sung by Harmony herself, and a lovely and amusing duet from Elena (1659). All of these works, like most post-Monteverdi Venetian opera, owe a large debt to the commedia dell’arte tradition. Elena, for instance, focuses on the early life of Helen of Troy, in which Menelaus disguises himself as an Amazon wrestling instructor to woo Elena (Helen). By the 1650s, Cavalli was known as a prolific opera composer and impresario, very much a part of the rapid development of public opera and the most performed composer in Venice in the mid-seventeenth century.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) was a native of Ferrara and studied with the influential madrigalist Luzzaschi. He was not, apparently, a well-rounded or well-educated person; a contemporary theorist said that he “was a very coarse man” and that “all his knowledge is at the ends of his fingertips.” Be that as it may, his playing was highly regarded, and he is best known for his keyboard works today. The toccata performed here is from his second collection of keyboard works, published in 1627, and in a revised edition ten years later. We have asked Joseph Gascho to perform it in this, our 50th anniversary concert season, since this toccata was performed on our very first Italian program in 1977. The word toccata means “to touch,” implying at least a sense and spirit of improvisation. This work is typical of Frescobaldi’s toccatas in that it consists of distinct sections of alternating textures—rapid and virtuosic passages, chordal and often quite chromatic sections, and fugal ones as well. Frescobaldi was articulate in his instructions about how to play these pieces, recommending varying tempi at will and playing the different sections in different orders. In this way, Frescobaldi challenges performers to make these often quite difficult works their own. One of the other toccatas in the 1627 publication is preceded by the warning “not without toil will you get to the end.”

Giovanni Rovetta (c1595–1668) may have started his career as a choirboy at San Marco in Venice. He remained at San Marco for the rest of his life, as a bass singer from 1623, and assistant maestro di cappella under Monteverdi in 1637. Upon Monteverdi’s death Rovetta succeeded him as maestro. Rovetta was active in other churches and provided music for festive occasions around Venice. For instance, he organized the music performed in San Giorgio Maggiore to celebrate the birth of Louis XIV in 1638. Rovetta attracted international attention; two Vespers services he directed in 1647 were described in some detail by the visiting German composer Paul Hanlein. Rovetta’s stylistic debt to Monteverdi is clear in his sacred music, evident in the hymn setting Conditor alme siderum. In spite of his Monteverdian lineage, however, Rovetta’s individual and very lyrical voice is on display in his music, illustrating that Monteverdi’s legacy was not of a constraining but rather of a freely generative nature.