The Oracle Of Music

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31382, 30 May 1967, Page 7

The Oracle Of Music

(By WILLIAM MANN, muaia critic of "The Times”) PLAUDIO Monteverdi was baptised on May 15, 1567, i.e, 400 years ago. His contemporaries acknowledged his greatness; they called him “the glory of our century” and “the oracle of music.” But soon after his death in 1643 his popularity and then his fame declined. Padre Martini, in the mideighteenth century, possessed a quantity of Monteverdi’s music and showed some of it to Dr. Burney who wrote about it They recognised him as a revolutionary composer, a sort of Gesualdo who broke all the rules and made the listener’s hair stand on end. But Monteverdi’s true recognition as one of the great composers of all. time, not merely a historical curiosity, is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Chief credit for this has to go to his compatriot Gian Francesco Malipiero, who edited a complete edition of his works. But England has played some part in the rediscovery and acclamation of Monteverdi, partly through the advocacy of Sir Jack Westrup from the mid-1920s onwards (when he conducted “Orfeo” andt “Poppea” at Oxford), partly through Hans Redlich and Walter Goehr, who left Germany to assume British nationality and, “inter alia,” to propagate the cause of Monteverdi. Redlich and Goehr between them made > Monteverdi’s “Vespers” of > 1610 a standard popular, big . choral work. Within the last , few years Raymond Leppard , has produced scholarly and attractive performing editions , of two Monteverdi operas, i “Orfeo” at Sadler’s Wells and “L’lncoronazione di Poppea” , at Glyndebourne. These three . great works have stuck, like i barnacles, to British musical receptive faculties. If I mention Orpheus’s prayer to the spirits of Hell, “Rendete il mio ben, tartar! numi,” or the Messenger’s “Ahi, caso acerbo,” I can expect that a good many readers of this page will recall the passages, and will feel the same senstion of physical emotion as I do, writing the words. The same applies to moments in '‘Poppea,” “Non morir, non morir, Seneca,” “Bocca, bocca” and “Ahi, destin!” “Oblivion soave” or “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo”— last a golden sunset of selfindulgence, the perfect music to end a happy evening at Glyndebourne, even though the opera’s “denouement” is monstrously immoral, even perverse, and though we should not have spent so much money on attending it. Of late we have had less occasion to enjoy the “Vespers” which Monteverdi confusingly published together with a Mass and some The Australian baritone, domestic chamber motets that Denis Stevens has firmly shown to he quite irrelevant in “Vespers” (but as the redundant movements are so much the most enjoyable, I think we should regard the collection as Monteverdi’s

statement on his range as an ecclesiastical composer -in s 1610, and accept the whole ■ anthology with the utmost I gratitude). If one includes 3 “Il ritorno d’ulisse,” the St. t Pancras production of which * has just been revived in * Sunderland, Monteverdi's sur--3 viving operas can be declared 3 saved for the mid-twentieth century—we may add “Il . hallo delle Ingrate” and “11 i combattimento di Tancredi e i Clorinda,” both produced by , the English Opera Group > within recent years and both 3 musically unforgettable. , Monteverdi published nine > books of madrigals, the first > in 1587 when he was 19 (it was by no means his first - publication: the “sacrae cant tiunculae” date from 1582), t the last in 1651, after his , death. They represent, better r than any of his other works, r his progress and range as a - composer, from the old poly- - phonic manner, through his s new interpretation of polyphony as group counterpoint I over a harmonic bass to the r vocal and Instrumental * monody, brilliant and highly ! varied and tuneful, of the * later collections. These make J a feature of the agitated, powerfully dramatic “stile * concitato” manner inspired * by Monteverdi’s wartime exf periences in Hun g,try in ; 1595, and developed with re- , ference to war. as a symbol j of love (Thurber fans will * understand perfectly what ; Monteverdi meant), not only , in the madrigal books but in ! the last two operas, “Ulysees” I and “Poppea.” I Monteverdi showed off his i modern manner (which he , called his’ “second practice” I as distinct from the “first * practice” of his polyphonic - > predecessors) in his church > music as well. His masses I were old-fashioned, though in those of 1640 and 1651 there i are moments of startling , modernity. He could write I affectingly in simple as well sas ornate styles. Nothing - could be mope fiery, in sacred s music, than the solo exploits s of the “Gloria” with which he ! gave thanks for the end of the I plague in 1631, and nothing * more simple and beautiful * than the “Christe redemptor” i published In the same volume ’ of 1640. Monteverdi has no need of rediscovery in 1967, only .dls- ’ covery by those who have not ' yet found out how eloquently : he speaks to us across 400 ' years. I do hope that his , church music and madrigals ' will become more familiar , after the quatercentenary ’ celebrations. And most of all I hope that the Italian Gov- , emment will offer some ' irresistibly huge monetary ' prize to any scholar who ; will discover Monteverdi’s , “Requiem,” and his “Licdri flnta pazza” (the first ever comic opera) and the whole of the operas “Arianna” and ; “Armida.” Accounts of all . these are so tantalising that > I cannot reconcile myself to ir eternal loss. It Is as if i we had all of Wagner except “The Ring.”