about Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, for New York City Opera’s 2000-2001 season guide
Summer 1999: the green hills of Cooperstown: far in the rearmost rows of the Alice Busch Theatre. All eyes are turned to a light-drenched stage, an island floating brilliant in a dark lagoon of instruments: through the surface of which the threaded spine of a theorbo pierces like the fin of some fanciful sea creature known only to medieval cartographers. Onstage, in grave and lyric accents of an overjoyed grief, a woman and her husband reunite:
Sospiro mio sole, Rinnovata mia luce porto, quiete e riposo, bramato, si, ma caro…
As this Glimmerglass reading of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria spun to its close, I whispered to my friend, “Even Mozart seems sequined and meretricious by comparison, doesn’t it?”
Monteverdi haunts composers, if only because Monteverdi the composer can only be incompletely pieced together from the glittering fragments of genius arranged under his name. Orfeo we know is his, but the most moving moments of L’incoronazione de Poppea —the unblinking, heartbroken forgiveness of its final duet for criminals in love—may be the work of other hands, other ears: and Il Ritorno is even more of a tangled web of versions, a veritable Rashomon for actors and harpsichords. As always in opera, we never know how much to ascribe to the language, and how much to the music that embodies and completes it. We treasure these scores for their amused, unblinking, sophisticated acceptance of human frailty (and human strength): but are those qualities primary to Monteverdi, really, or to Busenello (in Poppea ) or Badoaro (Ulisse?) And the elegant minimalism we ascribe to his texture—the singing voice, those plucked, ringing, perfect chords, no more—is indubitably a millennial sentimentality. Most of Monteverdi’s elegance is the creator of his present-day executants: the scores were suggestions only, cryptic even by the standard of Broadway lead-sheets— which is why the indelible character of what remains only adds to the mystery. We must be wary of observing a composer working merely with the most advanced instruments available and ascribing to him a refined refusal to overwrite, to overscore. Were Monteverdi writing in the nineteenth century, might the suitors in Ulisse announce themselves with the stentorian braggadocio of a sextet of horns? Were he scoring today, might he have set himself the task of making a contemporary technology into a voice of art, as Liszt did with the steel-framed piano, Wagner with his “tubas,” his covered orchestra pit, and—heresy of heresies—Adams, Rouse, and Corigliano have with the musica diabola of our time, the microphone?
We don’t know: we can’t know. All we have are the scores; their incomparable effects; and the way they seem to offer sophisticated correctives to the excesses of later work, even as they engage them on their own terms. Wagner bursts onto the nineteenth-century scene, his liquid chromatic harmonies the aural equivalent of Dali’s clocks, and a continent stands agape as the old quantities of recitative, ensemble, aria dissolve in the heat, yield their power to the German genius’s molten flow. And yet: in quiet 1640, Monteverdi’s Penelope makes her quiet way through an entire leading rôle in naught but inflected recitative, the formal asymmetries of her song the very aural image of careful self-consciousness, until at last, reunited with the returning Ulisse, she can afford the luxury of relaxing into the lilting strophes of duet. Verdi struggles all his life with Italian and Austrian censors, having at the last to encase his embattled courtesan Violetta in the historical amber of the seventeenth century to bring her morally complex struggles to the stage. Monteverdi, in contrast, enjoys the luxury of spinning an exquisite romantic comedy about a blithely murderous emperor and his equally blithe—and murderous—courtesan, and basking in the appreciative first-night applause of its (royal) attendees.
How easy it must have seemed then! Rene Jacobs, describing his bold and clear-eyed reconstruction of Il Ritorno for Concerto Vocale, calls seventeenth-century opera “a perfect baby, before reaching a crisis of puberty that never ended.” Then, there was no orchestra to speak of: what accompanied the singers was what was on hand. Riotous, unstable baroque harmony, still struggling toward the basic level of aural consistency in which A-flat and G-sharp were comparable quantities, counted itself lucky to confine itself to a dozen or so cadences. The idea of opera as the cherished Grail of warring artistic tribes—it’s a singer’s form! A composer’s form! A librettist’s/ director’s/ conductor’s form!—was, literally, technically impossible: this was an art form not yet embodied in anything approaching an industry.
So, four hundred years later, looking up from one’s own desk—struggling to make one’s own lines and harmonies coalesce and evanesce as effortlessly as that of the author of Arianna— one revisits Monteverdi with a weird mixture of envy, luxury, and wonder. Envy—and wonder— because no one, before or since, working with consciously limited materials—Bach, Webern, Reich—has done so much with so little. Luxury, because the world in which we make music now is a universe of color: the lines and sounds and chords and meters with which we can sing what we see and write what we sing are so numerous, rich, and exciting that poor Monteverdi seems like a potential Monet, doomed by history to paint and repaint the same poignant grisaille. Envy again, too, though, for his blithe unself-consciousness: when we as artists are near-deafened from adolescence by a raucous chorus of opinion-makers telling us what can do—or must do—or must never do again— to merit baptism in the Temple of Music, Monteverdi, led only by imagination and the sense of what’s possible, seems to enjoy a mental luxury unimaginable to those who came after him. Luxury again, though, and finally, definitively: for having these scores as a model, a benchmark, and a challenge in a way Monteverdi himself never did. “A perfect baby” Monteverdian opera may have been. But adulthood is what’s interesting. If the child is father to the man, all of us working—and playing—in the green hills of opera, enjoy the luxury of, as the saying goes, having picked at least one of our parents very, very well.