Program Notes 

In the first part of the seventeenth century, Italian music experienced a dramatic reconfiguration that saw a traditional, highly controlled form of polyphony challenged, and in some contexts over-run, by a musical language of the passions, imbued with an emotional dynamism and sense of motion that was dramatic, text-centered, and liberated from the constraints of academic counterpoint. We often associate this impassioned modern style with the advent of opera and its creators: composers like Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, and Claudio Monteverdi, who in courts at Florence and Mantua, animated the stories of ancient myth with musical declamation and harmonic daring.

A liberated style in church music would, for a while, co-exist with the traditional modes of counterpoint, acknowledging that the Church’s conservatism was not easily overturned in some places. Tellingly, for instance, upon becoming maestro di cappella at Venice’s famed basilica of St. Mark’s, Monteverdi ordered partbooks of music by sixteenth-century polyphonists like Lassus and the iconic Palestrina. Additionally, in Monteverdi’s famous 1610 collection of church music, he includes a six-voice setting of the mass based on a motet by the Renaissance composer, Nicolas Gombert. And yet, the new impassioned style rather quickly found its way into the liturgical repertory, as well. Monteverdi’s 1610 collection demonstrates the extent of this with affective solo motets that are tinged with the spiritual eroticism of the Song of Songs and concertato psalm settings that combine instrumental forces, solo vocal virtuosity, and choral splendor. Additionally, in 1607, the same year as Monteverdi’s first opera, L’Orfeo, some of his secular madrigals were published with new sacred texts, another example of the modernity of the devotional repertory.

That the ecclesiastical walls proved porous and easily breached by stylistic innovation resonates with seventeenth-century notions of the liturgy, a liturgy that drew strongly on court practice for its idioms. The love of theatre and opera seems to have shaped liturgical sensibilities, as well. As the liturgical scholar Louis Bouyer notes:

We must remember here that the great cultural creation of the period, and its most popular one, was the Opera. And in the Opera an exaltation of sensual passion is combined with a mythological kind of imagery, almost completely decorative, flowering in courtly music and ballet. So the faithful of the same period sought to find a religious equivalent of the Opera in the liturgy.

We sense this new, impassioned, and dynamic expression in sacred visual arts, as well. For example, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), a man of the theatre and the predominant sculptor in the orbit of Pope Urban VIII created in his figures of David (1623-24) and the “Damned Soul” (1619) characters alive with dramatic expression, psychological depth, and a striking physicality. Notably “operatic” is his “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1647-52), the altar piece of Rome’s Cornaro Chapel. In an image that teems with a deep sensuality, he depicts an ecstatic “love scene” between the Carmelite nun and an angel, while sculpted patrons observe this spiritually operatic scene from what appear to be theatre boxes at the sides of the chapel. We can easily imagine that the modern affective style of Monteverdi and his contemporaries would be much at home here, bringing emotional depth and dynamic motion to a liturgy disposed to receive it.

Monteverdi’s famous collection of 1610 offers, as the title page proclaims, “A Mass for six voices and Vespers for more, with some sacred concertos—works suited to the chapels or chambers of princes.” The “Vespers” has in its historical reception—and likely in its historical intent—crystalized into an objective entity: it has become The Vespers of 1610. As such, it is a monumental work, indeed. (This 1610 Vespers was recorded by The Thirteen in 2022 and has been recently released by Acis Productions.) But The Thirteen’s program of Monteverdi’s “Lost Vespers” does not seek to recover another monumental work lost to the vagaries of time. Rather, it imagines the way one might configure a vespers program composed of various psalm settings and other liturgical material taken from Monteverdi’s liturgical collections other than that of 1610, a possibility that the late Monteverdi scholar, Denis Stevens, brought into view in 1978. Two collections invite such a harvesting: the posthumous Messa a quattro Voci et Salmi of 1650 from which most of this concert’s musical material is taken, and the Selva Morale e Spirituale of 1641.

Much in the sound world of the pieces is impelled by color and contrast, as richly scored tuttis alternate with solo passages, as instrumental textures are juxtaposed with vocal ones, as florid and virtuosic writing emerges alongside vocal phrases shaped by declamatory simplicity. Within this broad framework there is much to which the ear will be drawn. For example, in numerous instances Monteverdi’s musical gestures aim either to depict individual words or to enhance their meaning. For example, in the bass solo setting of “Laudate Dominum,” impressive flourishes with a notably wide range invest the word “all” (omnes) with emphasis and meaning. Similarly, in the psalm “Nisi Dominus,” the word “rise” (surgite) elicits animated ascending contours, much as one would find in a madrigal. More dramatically perhaps, in this same psalm, the text “for so he giveth his beloved sleep” (cum dederit dilectis suis somnum) finds the voices in low, somnolent tessitura with neither harmonic nor melodic motion; just a very slow reiteration of one chord to depict the inertia of sleep. It is madrigalistic in its effect—rendering the meaning of the text in the sound of the music—and in fact is the same device he used in the opening of his 1638 madrigal, “Hor che’l ciel e la terra” to depict slumber. The large-scale “Magnificat” embodies similar text-oriented gestures. For example, in the phrase “and his mercy is on them that fear him,” the word “mercy” (misericordia) receives expressive chromaticism—motion by anguished half-steps—that musically reminds that the mercy itself is connected to those who fear. More theatrical, perhaps, is the passage devoted to “He hath shown strength with his arm; He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Fecit potentiam . . .). Here Monteverdi constructs a battle scene with voices imitating trumpet fanfares in chordal arpeggiation; at the scattering (dispersit), the singers erupt into quick melismas, with notes rapidly fleeing across the page. Sometimes the gestures are harmonic ones, such as the achingly beautiful chain of suspensions in “Nisi Dominus” that underscores the word “pain” (doloris).

The emphasis on text, be it the clarity of its declamation, the iconic depiction of the word in sound, or the musical underscoring of its meaning, is a strong manifestation of a modern aesthetic and also a compelling example of the porosity of boundaries between secular and sacred genres. But the ear will be drawn to other things, as well. In both the psalms “Dixit Dominus” and “Lauda Jerusalem” there are brief unadorned quotations of Gregorian chant in the upper voice at the beginning of the psalm, an aural salute towards tradition. Imitative counterpoint—the answering of one voice by another singing the same melody—is a hallmark of the traditional style, as well. And while it is surely part of Monteverdi’s contrapuntal vocabulary here, it is telling that it can be uncomplicated and relatively light, as at the beginning of “Nisi Dominus,” counterpoint free of the aura of academic constraint.

In some of the pieces, notably the two hymns, “Ut queant laxis” and “Sanctorum meritis,” there is a congenial simplicity and clarity of form. Each of the hymns consists of strophic poetry—texts in uniformly structured stanzas—with the music repeating for each successive stanza. The clarity of the repetition is marked by instrumental interludes—ritornelli—that articulate the stanzaic structure and provide a momentary contrast.

Taken as a whole, this “vespers” has a tight unified focus in its structure and contents: in the main, liturgical psalm settings from two collections, both of which appeared either late in Monteverdi’s life or posthumously. And yet, when one gives the ear free reign, one is perhaps more struck by the dazzling variety in play, as color, contrast, passion, and the heightening of text combine to awaken the ear that it might arouse the soul.

Steven Plank

Program note by Steven Plank.

Steven Plank is the Andrew B. Meldrum Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College & Conservatory