IS there a composer in the European classical tradition, apart from the sublime Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music transports us closer to the voice of God than the great Baroque pioneer Claudio Monteverdi? T he It alian genius might be considered to have done for music what his contemporaries Shakespeare did for theatre and Caravaggio for painting.
We in Scotland have been blessed this summer where the music of Monteverdi is concerned. In the week just past, the outstanding American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the superb Italian period instrument ensemble Il Pomo D’Oro gave two glorious concerts, including arias from Monteverdi’s operas, at the Edinburgh International Festival.
On September 15, as part of the annual Lammermuir Festival, which is held in carefully selected venues across East Lothian, Scotland’s internationally acclaimed Baroque ensemble the Dunedin Consort will present a programme of Monteverdi’s secular music. The programme, which will also include pieces by Monteverdi’s Baroque contemporaries Dario Castello, Barbara Strozzi and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, will be presented in the lovely surroundings of St Mary’s Parish Church in Haddington.
The celebrated tenor Nicholas Mulroy is associate director of the Edinburghbased ensemble, and he is director of the concert. For him, the genius of Monteverdi lies, not only in his immense, technical virtuosity, but also in his overwhelming need to express that which is seminal to the human experience.
“It doesn’t matter whether the subject is love, or anger, or lust, or loss,” the director explains, Monteverdi’s music is always concerned with “human emotion, humanity and what is to be alive”.
Mulroy pictures Monteverdi, “sitting in his study, just working out, again and again, almost obsessively, what is the best, clearest way of setting these words to music. He’s like Shakespeare or JS Bach [in that] he’s just so interested in what it is to be alive and in showing that to us.
“I think that’s one of the things that sets him apart as one of the greatest composers that we have.”
That’s the thing about Monteverdi, his music is written with such emotional intensity that it evokes a similar passion, both in musicians and audiences.
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MONTEVERDI wa s bor n in Cremona , in northern Italy, in 1567, some three centuries b e f o r e t h e creation of the Italian state as we know it. He moved to Mantua, as a court musician, in 1591, and on to the great city state of Venice in 1613.
“He was in Mantua at a really important time,” says Mulroy. “People like [the great painters] Titian and Rubens would have passed through. We think he might have met Galileo there.”
In Venice, the director says, Monteverdi was “absolutely at the top of the tree”, holding the most elite posts as a musical director. However, that success was not achieved entirely without adversity.
The composer was an innovator who, Mulroy explains, “found the music of the Renaissance overly florid”. Consequently, between 1600 and 1603, he found himself embroiled in controversy.
The musical theorist and composer Giovanni Maria Artusi attacked the “chaos”
of Monteverdi’s music. This, the director elucidates, was on the grounds that “it didn’t follow all of the very specific rules about Renaissance polyphony”.
Monteverdi’s younger brother, Giulio Cesare, who was himself a composer and musician, wrote what Mulroy considers a “brilliant and gracious defence of him”.
In that defence, the director remembers, Giulio wrote, “he’s not doing this to be radical, he’s doing it for the sake of music, and for the sake of truth”.
In Mulroy’s opinion, it is that sense of musical truth, of essential humanity, that explains the continued success of Monteverdi’s work down the ages.
“One of the miracles is that Monteverdi walked the same Earth that we do all those days ago. It’s a long time ago, and yet his music feels to me incredibly real and incredibly present.”
Italy’s Baroque-era pioneering composer, Claudio Monteverdi
Much has been lost of Monteverdi’s music, but of that which we have, Mulroy is fascinated by how little of it is purely instrumental. The composer’s concentration on the human voice made him, not only the pre-eminent writer of operas in the early-Baroque period, but also the creator of a great many individual songs.
“It’s his range that makes him unique,”
the director says. “He writes perfect, little miniatures, but he also writes an almost Shakespearean tragicomedy in [the opera] Poppea.
“He’s able to do it all. That’s what sets him apart from his contemporaries, he’s absolutely brilliant at everything.”
That brilliance certainly extends to madrigals, eight books of which Monteverdi wrote throughout his working life. The Haddington concert will draw upon more than 30 years of these songs from the later books.
“The word ‘madrigal’ is a bit misrepresented in the English language. It’s not at all ‘whoops, there go my hose!’,” Mulroy jokes.
The director is right, of course.
The brilliant BBC TV comedy series Blackadder II, for instance, famously joked about madrigals with such titles as Hey Nonny Nonny, I Love You and Love Madrigal, In The Middle Of My Tights.
Far from such silliness, Monteverdi’s madrigals are, Mulroy contends, like the cantatas of Bach or Schubert. “They feel to me like an intimate expression of the composer.”
MULROY and the C on s or t a r e pleased to be bringing such w o r k t o Haddington as p a r t o f t h e L ammer muir Festival. The company has, to the best of the director’s recollection, played at every edition of the East Lothian programme since it was established in 2010.
One of the attractions of the festival for the company is, Mulroy explains, that “it allows us to propagate our work beyond the normal centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh.” Even more importantly, he says, “we get to play and sing in these incredibly beautiful places that the festival seeks out”.
St Mary’s Parish Church is, he says, “small, intimate, and acoustically clear and warm”. Perfect, in other words, for what the director describes as the “medium-sized, chamber concert” of Monteverdi that the Consort has in store.
The Lammermuir Festival plays at venues across East Lothian, September 7-20: lammermuirfestival.co.uk
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