How Monteverdi Made The Coronation Deliciously Creepy

[Music] foreign is the coronation of papaya in Coronation an amazing last opera of monteverdi's career which was first performed in Venice in 1643 when Monty Verdi was in his 70s and it was first performed in the Carnival season of that year there's a lot of debate about how much the Opera is actually by monteverdi it used to be thought to be monteverdi you know pure genius working for a single human being we now have a different view of Renaissance Artistry and in music it's not dissimilar to the kind of thing that happened in Fine Art which is to say that the artist would normally work in a kind of Studio system with other artists we know that Rubens did this and Titian and we know that michelangeli did this and it seems as if monteverdi May well have done something similar he was 70 years old and he'd who probably employed assistance to help him write sections of the Opera so it challenges the kind of modernist idea of the the great artist in a way but I don't think it it really matters human creativity is about expertise um manifesting itself through the craftsmanship that comes through years of experience and this is certainly a masterpiece that's born of years of experience there are two scores of the coronation of papaya one comes from the original performance in Venice and later on from a few years after that in Naples was revived for another performance and neither of them are very specific about instrumentation in fact they don't say what the instruments are it's very interesting this because it looks as if pieces during that period dramatic pieces like this how to kind of do-it-yourself quality you put together an orchestra out of whoever was available and you cut numbers or you added numbers according to taste or whoever was available to sing so there's a much more open-ended quality to the score than than there would have been in later centuries in some ways that's almost a more modern approach almost like an open score and the story that the Opera sets is a fantastically modern one really it's about the emperor Nero who of course is a famous villain of History and it plots the appalling story of how he got rid of people who were near to him including the empress Octavia who is exiled in the Opera and he makes his teacher his mentor the philosopher Seneca he has to drink poison because he advises Nero in a way that Nero disapproves of so the Opera is full of these terrible things where decent people perish or are sent away and then the Opera ends with this sort of horrific celebration of lust and power with Nero and his mistress papaya who was crowned at the end so there's a coronation and then they sing this Rapture us love to you at and once extraordinary is that um it's not a duet that seems villainous in any way you know it's not written with a kind of ghastly dark tinged qualities actually absolutely beautiful ravishingly beautiful and that is a wonderful way of of enhancing the ironic moment at the end of the Opera we're all feeling very uncomfortable about what's happening and yet monteverdi is real enough and dramatically authentic enough to set it in this rapturous way so that we're simultaneously loving it enjoying it and also feeling very uncomfortable about what's happening oh really so the music for the final duet is written just in three parts most of the Opera is most of the Opera is just written in terms of vocal Parts with what's called basso continue just a baseline with figured bass in other words numbers written for the continuo players to realize to extemporize over the Baseline according to the numbers which tell them what the vertical Harmony is on top of the written bass note for example at the beginning you can see that there's just this bass line I'm playing in G flat because that's closer to the the likely pitch of Monte Verdi's time and it also fits with recorded bits that we're going to play later so we we see this descending tetrachord just to fall out repeating Baseline ground base and it's the simplest thing it's just dropping from G down to D and then the figures so the second chord is figured six so that gives us D major first inversion X on his e-maker the e d in the bass that's C major first and then the D has a suspension which results to to D root position and then back Round We Go That Base continues in that way turning round and round and then over the top we have the two voices and they're singing these beautiful back and forth phrases uh I adore you I adore you I desire you I embrace you by a chain you that's a slightly Sinister and you can hear the sort of chaining of the dissonant notes crossing over each other I embrace you I shame you with these long that's really fantastic word painting painting the next bit no more no grief the harmony becomes more dissonant um no more grief and then again [Music] loves these dissonant minor seconds resolve away from those collisions and then it turns towards the the dominant I wish we break away for a moment from the ground base to the dominant and then all my life around the circle of fifths to the subdominant C and the final case and then immediately after that we go into a more breathless middle section where the whole Tempo Edition becomes more odd and there's a yearning quality and then the music comes around again to a recap of this extraordinary opening with the ground base and everything slows down into this magnificent conclusion we're going to hear a couple of real singers performing this with uh William Christie and his group you can see a theorbo player and various other beautiful Renaissance instruments and we'll just hear the end of the duet performed by these musicians unfortunately due to a copyright claim we are unable to show this recording on our Channel the full performance is linked in the video description below thanks for watching

Channel: The Music Professor

Views: 2,609

Keywords:

Id: QzKVsRIhDUQ

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023