George Burrows
Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses) is one of the most unusual, fascinating, and powerful pieces of musical theater of the seventeenth century. It represents the earliest extant example of an opera based on an extant Ancient Greek source text, as it is an adaptation of books 13–24 of Homer’s Odyssey. To adapt this epic for the Venetian operatic stage, a first‐time librettist, Giacomo Badoaro (1602–1654), teamed up with an aging but renowned composer, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), who had not produced an opera in some years.
In Il ritorno, Monteverdi produced an opera that utilized an unusual musical style: full‐blown arioso (lyrical song) generally took second place to a hybrid style of recitativo (speech‐like song) that featured only snatches of arioso‐styled music. This unusual balance has been articulated by musicologists like Tim Carter (2002) with Monteverdi’s brilliant reframing of Penelope as the central character of the drama. However, this chapter will argue that Monteverdi’s approach had as much to do with his representation of contemporary understandings of Ancient Greek tragedy that prevailed in Florence and Venice as it did with recasting Homer’s narrative for a 1640s’ Venetian audience.
Michael Ewans (2007) has argued that, in updating Homer, Badoaro and Monteverdi transformed the theodicy of the original myth into contemporary Christian ideology. However, the second enterprise of this chapter is to extend Ewans’ reading by considering the way that both Monteverdi and Badoaro were steeped in understandings of the way Ancient Greek sources offered models (in their spirit if not their letter) for the “modern” musical‐dramatic practices of seventeenth‐century Venice. Thus, Monteverdi’s take on Badoaro’s reception of Homer will be shown to resound with markers of both the Ancient and modern worlds that are at once dissonant and concordant and thereby powerfully discursive.
The first production of Il ritorno was undoubtedly a success by contemporary standards because the opera not only toured to Bologna but it was granted an unprecedented second run of performances in the very next season in Venice. No other Venetian opera of the whole century enjoyed such an honor but, until relatively recently, Il ritorno was overlooked by opera companies, despite it being one of the most fascinating, emotive, and illuminating representations of the reception of Ancient Greek myth for the operatic stage (Rosand 2007a, 7).1
Part of the trouble was that until the 1920s the somewhat contradictory sources for Il ritorno were confined to archives. This made it difficult to assess the form and merits of the opera. When the score was eventually published for the first time in 1922, scholars cast considerable doubt on Monteverdi’s authorship of Il ritorno because of its seemingly uncharacteristic musical style (see Osthoff 1956). Thus Monteverdi’s other works for the musical stage, notably Orfeo (1607) and L’incoronatione di Poppea (1643), overshadowed Il ritorno, as the authorship of these seemed more certain. However, it is now generally accepted that Il ritorno is an unjustly neglected masterpiece by Monteverdi, who crowned Badoaro’s mediation of Homer with wonderful music and an astute understanding of how to handle such received material from the Ancient world for the musical stage of his time and ours.
This chapter will attempt to account for the extraordinary handling of the Ancient Greek myth by Badoaro and Monteverdi.2 Their treatment of the narrative is unusual both in its faithfulness to what they understood of the performance style of Ancient Greek tragedy and the way their adaptation served to further the meaning and emotional depth of the original narrative for their contemporary audience. So, part of the agenda here is to illuminate some of the mediations that occurred between the Ancient text and the particular treatment of the narrative by Badoaro before considering how Monteverdi made this work within and beyond the conventions of the Venetian musical stage of the 1640s.
This will allow for a historically appropriate understanding of the reception that the Ancient narrative received as it became musical theater in the hands of a novice librettist and an experienced composer. However, in order to put this special interdisciplinary theatrical form into its own appropriate context, it is also necessary to impart something of the contemporaneous culture and discussions that lay behind Badoaro and Monteverdi’s approach to writing musical theater. This is informed by a discussion of the textual sources for Il ritorno, which draws on much of the insightful musicological detective work that has been directed at the contemporary manuscripts in recent years.
The chapter ends by considering Monteverdi’s musical treatment of the central role of Penelope as a metaphor for the meeting of Ancient and modern cultures that is exemplified in the musical style of the opera as much as its changed narrative. This serves to illuminate how interconnected tensions between musicalized speech and full‐blown song and between love and abstinence are at the heart of understanding the way the power of musical theater is harnessed by Monteverdi and Badoaro to re‐sound Homer’s narrative in a new operatic context.
Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria contains nearly three hours of music. It is scored for a company of at least 14 singers (assuming some covered several roles) and an accompanying ensemble of strings (scored in five‐parts) supported by various continuo instruments.3 It is hard to relate much more than this about the form and content of the opera without first detailing something of the fascinating but often contradictory sources through which we have come to know the work. Uppermost in this consideration is the only surviving contemporaneous manuscript score of Il ritorno, which has long been held in archives of the Austrian National Library. Alan Curtis has determined that, although a Viennese library has held this score since around 1675, it was actually produced in Italy some decades earlier by a copyist who was most probably working from Monteverdi’s autograph manuscript (Curtis 2002, vii–viii).
At first glance this copy‐score seems to represent a three‐act opera that is at odds in its form, prologue and ending with any of the 12 surviving libretti manuscripts.4 These libretti all present Badoaro’s drama in five acts and the two copies that are most contemporaneous with the first production of Il ritorno show that there are bits of Badoaro’s text missing in the copy‐score, including a whole scene (Badoaro’s act V, scene 2). However, on closer inspection, the copy‐score can be seen to contain at least two “layers” of amendments. These markings, in two different shades of what now appears as brown ink, represent a typical second‐copying pass, which served to fill out inessential details of the score (e.g., accompanying instrumental lines) that were not completed in the initial draft, and a further editorial pass, which transformed the score from one originally in five acts to one in three and added associated rubrics such as scene designations (see Rosand 2007a, 69–88).
In fact there is further evidence to support this notion of an opera that was changed from five to three acts and this supports the notion that the copy‐score shows that Badoaro’s text was edited into a new form during the course of the opera’s production.5 The copy‐score thus represents a working document that shows something of the process of refinement of the opera. As Rosand puts it:
It is a fluid document that not only shows two versions simultaneously, the five‐act original and a three‐act revision, but demonstrates how and at what point – though not why – the one was transformed into the other. It also provides information about how it was copied and the reasons for some of its alterations and inconsistencies. What is more interesting, we can see that much of the editing was made to prepare or facilitate the actual process of production and performance.
(Rosand 2007a, 70)
The copy‐score thus demonstrates that early operas were as much “works‐in‐process,” to use Bruce Kirle’s (2005) term, as the musicals of our era and, like the deals offered by supermarkets and window‐replacement companies of nowadays, this copy‐score represents (via some philological detective work) two scores for the price of one.
The 12 surviving manuscript copies of Badoaro’s libretto offer variants of the text of the opera. However, only two of these drafts are roughly contemporaneous with the early 1640s, while the others are later eighteenth‐century copies. One of these two contemporaneous libretti is particularly significant, not least because it contains a preface by Badoaro. This reveals a great deal about the poet’s motives for producing his libretto.6
Badoaro explains that, at the time of writing his preface, Il Ritorno had already enjoyed a run of ten performances (a great number by seventeenth‐century Venetian standards) and that his central motivation in writing his libretto was to lure Monteverdi back to the operatic stage. Monteverdi had held the high‐profile post of maestro di cappella at St Mark’s basilica in Venice since 1613. However, despite his prevailing reputation as the father of opera, as Badoaro characterizes him, in Venice he had concentrated on producing music in other genres and had not contributed to the new and burgeoning culture of public opera that was gripping the city by the late 1630s. The demand for new Venetian operas had thus so far been met by other composers, which Badoaro casts as mere imitators (“painted suns”) of Monteverdi’s original mastery in the operatic field. From this perspective, Badoaro’s choice of narrative has been read as a powerful metaphor for Monteverdi’s return to opera to restore his rightful place as the original master (“sun”) of the genre; after all, Ulysses returns to his rightful place by slaying all pretenders to his wife and crown (see Rosand 1994).
A comparison of the copy‐score with the contemporary libretti is revealing because it illuminates the way Monteverdi applied his experience and good theatrical sense to adjust the work of his young first‐time librettist. Even Badoaro had to admit in his preface that he hardly recognized some of his own writing in the opera (Badoaro in Curtis 2002, xx–xxi). Whether it is cast in three or five acts, the action of the opera proceeds following an allegorical prologue, a typical framing device in seventeenth‐century theater. The prologue in the copy‐score is entirely different from that in Badoaro’s libretti and it serves to illuminate the overriding effect of Monteverdi’s refashioning of Badoaro’s reception of Homer.
The prologue in the copy‐score foreshadows the underlying moral scenario of the drama by presenting Humana Fragilità (human frailty) at the mercy of Tempo (time), Fortuna (fortune), and Amore (love). When the action of the opera begins, this moral scenario is then played out with respect to Penelope’s character rather than any other. So, as Carter notes, in bringing in a new prologue, Monteverdi places Penelope rather than Ulisse at the center of the opera. (Carter 2002, 248) As we will see, this also brings seventeenth‐century Christian‐humanist values to Homer’s narrative.
The entirely different prologue in Badoaro’s text emphasized the hopelessness of man’s bravery and prudence in the face of fate. This allegory returned at the end of Badoaro’s text in a final chorus but this is cut in the copy‐score in favor of ending with a joyful duet for the reunited couple.7 This change illustrates Monteverdi’s desire not to preach humanist values, as in Badoaro’s text, but to demonstrate them via an all‐important empathy with the human characters at the center of the drama. This change also makes good theatrical sense because it establishes a narrative “trajectory of desire,” which allows the audience to believe characters’ emotions are motivated by the obstacles they must surpass. It is specifically in the songs of musical theater that such emotions are portrayed and this explains why it took an experienced musician to realize these aspects of Badoaro’s text needed adjusting for the musical stage. However, before we can consider any more of Monteverdi’s treatment of Badoaro’s text, we need to relate its narrative to Homer’s original.
Act I of the Il ritorno opens in the Ithacan palace. Penelope longs for her husband, Ulisse, to return from the Trojan wars and even her trusted nursemaid, Ericlea, is unable to console her. In the face of Penelope’s frustration and constancy, Melanto, who is a daughter‐figure as much as a maid to Penelope, reflects on the contrasting nature of her own – more naive – love for the shepherd Eurimaco. At the seaside, the angry gods Netturno and Giove turn the Pheacian’s (Feaci) ship into a rock for bringing the sleeping Ulisse to the Ithacan shore. Ulisse awakens disorientated and abandoned but Minerva appears disguised as a shepherd and informs him that he has arrived home. She astonishes Ulisse by assuming her godly form to convince him to bathe in a sacred fountain in order to transform into an old beggar to pass unrecognized into his palace and outwit the suitors (Antinoo, Pisandro, and Anfinomo), who have designs on his wife and crown. Minerva promises to fetch his son, Telemaco, back from Sparta in the meantime.
Back in the palace, Melanto urges Penelope to forget Ulisse and love another. Out in the fields, Ulisse’s loyal servant, the shepherd Eumete, argues with the social menace Iro, who always seems to cause trouble. On Iro’s exit, the disguised Ulysses arrives and warns Eumete of the immanent return of his master. Minerva then brings Telemaco to Ithaca on her chariot and Eumete introduces the old beggar to relate his news of Ulisse’s return. A heaven‐sent thunderbolt momentarily reveals Ulisse in his true form to Telemaco.
Back in the palace, Melanto and Eurimaco discuss Penelope’s unfaltering devotion to Ulisse. Penelope continues to resist the advances of the suitors who become unsettled when Eumete arrives and announces the imminent arrival of Ulisse and Telemaco. They plot Telemaco’s murder but drop the plan when Giove’s eagle is seen flying overhead, which they take as a sign and decide instead to redouble their efforts to woo Penelope.
Back in the fields, Minerva gives Ulisse a plan to get rid of the suitors and Eumete reports of Penelope’s faithfulness before he and Ulisse set off together for the palace. At the palace, Telemaco tells Penelope of his travels and that Helen of Troy has foreseen Ulisse’s return. Antinoo and Iro meet Eumete and the disguised Ulisse. Antinioo is rude towards them and Ulisse is provoked to thrash fat Iro in a fight but Penelope orders that the beggar be made welcome in the palace. The suitors intensify their efforts to impress her with rich gifts but she vows she will only marry the one who can string Ulisse’s great bow. The suitors all fail this test but the beggar, who had already renounced the prize, succeeds and, calling on Minerva, kills the suitors with arrows shot from the bow.
Iro grieves melodramatically for his suitor friends. Penelope doesn’t believe Eumete’s claim that the beggar is Ulisse and even Telemaco cannot convince her. Minerva and Giunone, worried that the suitors’ deaths will be avenged, petition Giove for Ulisse’s happiness. Wrathful Netturno is duly placated, prompting choral rejoicing from heavenly and watery spirits. Ericlea ponders how to help Penelope see sense but suspects a trick even when Ulisse arrives in his true form. Ericlea claims she recognized a scar when he was bathing but Penelope is only convinced of Ulisse’s true identity when he accurately describes the embroidery covering their nuptial bed. They celebrate their longed‐for reunion in a joyful final duet.
Those readers who are familiar with Homer’s Odyssey will immediately notice the fundamental changes that Baodaro and Monteverdi made to the Ancient Greek narrative, notably in the different characterizations and ending.8 In this regard, Michael Ewans has made an insightful comparison between the Homeric source for Il ritorno and its adaptation by Badoaro and Monteverdi in Opera from the Greek (2007). This comparison enables Ewans to make two fundamental points; that the authors try to fit the theodicy of the original with the astrological‐Christian values of their own era (Ewans 2007, 12–16) and that the now central character of Penelope is transformed from one representing the Ancient Greek wifely ideals of sophrosyne (chastity and self‐restraint) to a Renaissance woman concerned with contemporaneous questions of love’s constancy and sexual fidelity within a Christian social context (Ewans 2007, 16–22).
Ewans documents how the latter feature necessitates the further altering of the characters of Eurymachus (Eurymaco) and Melantho (Melanto) in the opera: the former is removed from Homer’s group of loathsome suitors (reduced in number from one hundred or so in Homer to just three) to become the bona fide lover of Melanto. She is thereby no longer figured as an unfaithful woman of Ulysses’ household, as in Homer, but as a loyal daughter figure to Penelope who supports the vengeance that is eventually meted out by Ulysses (Ulisse) on the suitors (Ewans 2007, 19). But that brutal vengeance is itself somewhat muted in the opera because, from Ewans’ perspective, this doesn’t fit the Christian ideology of Monteverdi’s time. Ulysses’ characteristics are thus, like Penelope’s, softened. Ewans asserts that, “Badoaro has weakened the original character’s strength, feistiness, and power of deception” (Ewans 2007, 23), and shows this only further serves to mark the characterization of Jupiter (Giove) in the opera’s narrative as the omnipotent and merciful Christian God behind the characters’ actions.
Ewans’ reading of the Christian reception of Homer in Il ritorno is illuminating and in many ways highly appropriate to the 1640s social context9 but it somewhat bypasses the all‐important cultural context in which Badoaro and Monteverdi were working as creative artists. For one thing, Rosand has suggested that Badoaro probably did not draw directly on Greek sources but on a sixteenth‐century Italian translation of the Odyssey, which already included many of the changes made to the Ancient story (Rosand 2007a, 133–140). We might thus develop Ewans’ analysis by considering more specific ways in which Italian (specifically Florentine and Venetian) society of the seventeenth century concerned itself with the Ancient world and the motivations for doing so. In particular, we will consider the relationship between the contemporary study of models from Antiquity and the concern to develop new forms of dramatic‐vocal expression from the perspective of two learned‐creative societies that were active in the cultural centers of Florence and Venice respectively. Of particular interest here is Venice’s cynical but libertine Accademia degli Incogniti, of which Badoaro was a leading member. However, before discussing this literary academy, it is useful to consider the so‐called “Florentine Camerata” and their influence on the earlier development of dramatic solo song, as this was highly influential on Monteverdi and indeed on the whole enterprise of creating works for the musical stage. This has the merit of showing that the culture of looking back to the Ancient world for inspiration was a longstanding one that went hand‐in‐hand with the development of opera in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Italy.
The roots of Monteverdi’s approach to composing opera are often traced back to discussions that occurred in Florence in the last three decades of the sixteenth century about the nature of music deployed in Ancient Greek tragedy.10 It was in Florence that a rather informal gathering of young noblemen with interests in music started to meet regularly in the house of the musical Count of Varnio, Giovanni Bardi to discuss such things. There they would “pass the time in honorable recreation, with delightful singing and praiseworthy discussions” (Vincenzo Galilei in Palisca 1989, 3).11 Many of the participants in this “Florentine Camerata” would go on to compose the first works resembling operas (pastorals and intermedi).12 Palisca explains that the group had an educational function:
[It] served to introduce sons of noblemen to literature, philosophy, science, music, and antiquities and to induce them to study these in depth. Some of the older members acted as preceptors, while others mainly listened and debated. It probably prepared young men for participation in the more formal academies and for university studies.
(Palisca 1989, 4)
However, there are problems with the notion that opera was born directly out of the discussions of the applicability of Ancient culture by Bardi’s circle in Florence. For one thing, this group did not have a shared objective in that or any other direction and it was not the only such group in Florence concerned with developing dramatic song. In fact, as Nino Pirrotta has demonstrated, rivalry between those within Bardi’s circle and those in another group of young aristocrats surrounding the nobleman, Jacopo Corsi, helped spur on the development of the form of expressive solo song (monody), which was in any case already emerging in the theater of the period (Pirrotta 1984, 218). Nevertheless, even the skeptical Pirrotta concedes that the influence of the discussions of Bardi’s group on the dramatic works of the likes of Giulio Caccini (1551–1618) and Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), is undoubted and had far‐reaching implications: Peri’s Euridice (1600), was certainly known to Monteverdi (Carter 2002, 13).
Caccini first referred to Bardi’s group as a “Camerata” in the preface to his manual of monody, Le nuove musiche (1602), and then again in the preface to his score of the pastoral L’Euridice (1600), which was dedicated to Bardi.13 In his 1602 preface, Caccini recalled that his motivation to produce monody was inspired by Bardi who “had spoken of a style of music that the ancient Greeks used in representing their tragedies and other tales (favole)” (Palisca 1989, 3). Bardi’s surviving writings on Ancient Greek music and tragedy make for interesting reading more for what they tell us of contemporary attitudes than of precise stylistic features (see Palisca 1989, 78–151). Palisca explains that:
The [Camerata’s] focus on ancient Greek music probably became most intense from around 1572 to 1578, when Vincenzo Galilei [father of Galileo] and Bardi were corresponding with Girolamo Mei [an authority on Ancient Greek sources], each of whose letters brought fresh discoveries about Greek music to stimulate new rounds of debate.
(Palisca 1989, 5)14
Caccini evidently felt that his monodies were indebted to the study of Ancient Greek culture that Bardi encouraged. However, no matter how rigorous such study was, it was based on comparatively little source material from the Ancient world.15 This led to what now appear as quite basic misconceptions: most notably the idea that opera should follow Greek tragedy in being through‐sung.16 Nevertheless, the challenges posed by the research of Bardi’s Camerata were met by the creative talents of Caccini (and later Monteverdi) that, as the likes of Pirrotta and Carter have shown, were at least as indebted to existing Italian forms of accompanied vocal music, like the villanella and canzonetta, as they were to their knowledge of Ancient Greek culture (Carter 1992, 191; Pirrotta 1984, 221).
So, the departures from what we now know of Greek myth, which Ewans notes in his comparison of Il ritorno with Homer’s Odyssey, are actually the result of a longstanding and broader culture of the reception of Ancient Greek sources by Italian theorist‐practitioners of the period. The development of monody and related early operatic forms, which Monteverdi drew upon and developed himself, are themselves as much part of the mediation of Greek myth as the opera’s narrative. As we will see, when read this way, at the heart of the 1640 opera is an aesthetic‐ideological debate about the relationship between the Ancient world and contemporary art and society. This discourse is surely as relevant now as it was in late sixteenth‐century Florence or in 1640s Venice, where it was a central concern for the debates of the Accademia degli Incogniti, of which Badoaro was a leading member.
Venice’s Accademia degli Incogniti was a much more formally constituted creative think‐tank than the “Florentine Camerata” groups of the previous century. It was the most important literary academy of its type in Venice and it generally attracted the more seasoned and rigorous thinkers. It offered topical debate and motivated the publication of numerous texts that were concerned with a whole range of Ancient sources. Rosand explains:
[T]he academy comprised a group of mostly aristocratic writers united by libertine attitudes; they debated moral, political, and social issues at weekly meetings and in streams of publications – religious pamphlets, philosophical tracts, and novels. Their innumerable writings conveyed their commitment to the exploitation of history for political purposes. They investigated the lives of the ancient rulers as models of good government, applicable to present‐day circumstances. And they sought moral exempla in literature of the past, which they subjected to a variety of treatments, ranging from straightforward translations to freely embellished reinterpretations.
(Rosand 2007a, 20)
The main thing that united the members of this academy was their commitment to the Venetian Republic. They were effectively patriotic cheerleaders for this comparatively democratic system of governance. Their interest in Ancient texts and myths was thus concerned with demonstrating the way the Republic reflected or could reflect lessons learned from studying antiquity. Members of the academy thus produced opera libretti on Classical themes (including the libretti to all three of Monteverdi’s late operas) precisely because they felt this form of musical theater had a direct lineage from the styles employed in Ancient Greek tragedy.17 Furthermore, Venice’s opera houses were relatively democratic places because ticket prices were low enough to attract a wide cross section of Venetian society (Worsthorne 1954, 6). Thus, the academy’s members saw opera as a high‐profile forum in which to demonstrate the connections that they perceived between the Ancient world and the current Venetian one.18
One of Badoaro’s colleagues in the academy was Frederico Malipiero (1603–1642). His writings form part of the evidence for the dating of the first production of Il ritorno to 1640 and they even suggest some of the features of that production via some tantalizingly indirect references. In a preface to his novel La peripezia d’Ulisse overo la casta Penelope (1640) Malipiero explicitly states that he was motivated to write his novel by experiencing Monteverdi’s opera (see Rosand 2007a, 55–56). The novel conveys Homer’s narrative prior to the point at which the opera picks it up, but Malipiero went on to offer a (more than) complete version of the Odyssey in a subsequent publication. This was something of an elaborated translation of Homer entitled L’Odissea d’Omero trapportata dalla greca nella toscana favella (published posthumously in 1643). In this Malipiero goes beyond Homer in several respects and Rosand has suggested that Malipiero’s many additions, mostly contained in his editorial marginalia, indicate the profound influence that Il ritorno had on his reception and re‐interpretation of Homer (Rosand 2007a, 140–141).
Malipiero’s description of Melanto is especially illuminating for the way it follows the opera in portraying this secondary character as a lascivious daughter figure to Penelope rather than the unfaithful servant that she is in Homer.19 However, Malipiero’s particularly picturesque description of Penelope, which first reflects the flavor of the opera’s first scene and then reads like her stage directions, seems to hint at details of that first Venetian production. The pseudo‐stage‐directions read (in Rosand’s translation) as follows:
[…] after getting up, accompanied by two maids who supported her between themselves, she left her bedroom and went, more beautiful than Beauty herself, to show herself to the Suitors […] She had covered her head with the thinnest of veils, which not only covered her eyes, but – like a cloud of finest vapor – veiled her cheeks, and these and those through the transparent veil appeared to be moons or stars in the heavens covered by a delicate pure mist. At this unexpected appearance, the suitors fell stunned upon the ground. Every one of her lovers at this point felt his heart pierced by a thousand amorous arrows, his soul lit by one thousand passionate flames.
(Malipiero in Rosand 2007a, 142)
Rosand suggests that such visual detail could well have been inspired “by the appearance of Badoaro’s Penelope or even the reactions to her on the part of her audience: on stage and in the theater” (Rosand 2007a, 142). This admittedly speculative analysis might well explain why Venetian audiences made the extraordinary demand for a second chance to see this retelling of Homer. Malipiero was himself clearly influenced by the very modern portrayal of the women in Il ritorno and thus doubtless received a version of Homer that resounded with a powerful and unresolved dialectic of Ancient and contemporary meanings. It thus might well be this central tension of the opera, emoted by Monteverdi’s deeply expressive monody, which sang/spoke to the Italian audiences of the 1640s of Homer’s narrative in a gloriously contemporaneous way. Let us turn now to consider Monteverdi’s musical treatment of this ancient/modern dichotomy in the opera to conclude this odyssey.
When compared to Monteverdi’s earlier operatic writing, the music of Il ritorno offers a much less clear distinction between musicalized speech (recitativo) and lyrical‐vocal set pieces (arioso). Instead Monteverdi seems to slip swiftly and effortlessly between these two styles while using devices like repeated refrain lines and emotive triple time to render this hybrid style cohesive.20 The overriding stylistic fluidity for Carter:
suggests a degree of acceptance of the musical conventions of opera on the part of audiences, chiefly, one assumes, by virtue of their increasing familiarity with the genre, and of newly emerging expectations of its desired aesthetics and other effects. Singing rather than just musical “speaking” is now both natural and inevitable.
(Carter 2002, 249)21
However, one of the ways Monteverdi characterizes the central character of Penelope is precisely by denying her the artifice of full‐blown song (arioso). This functions as something of a musical metaphor for the frustrated position of her character for the audience.
In the opera’s lengthy first scene (after the prologue) Penelope laments for her absent husband almost entirely in brooding minor‐key recitativo. Only briefly does she escape this style to “sing” in fully‐fledged arioso, at the line “Torna il tranquillo al mare” (“Quiet returns to the sea”). In she is momentarily freed by a remembering of past times that contrast her current situation. It seems she won’t allow herself to give in to full‐blown “song” and Carter reads this as emblematic of her unfaltering love for her husband in the face of the aggressive wooing of her by the suitors. Thus, when she responds to the suitors’ later advances with a “foot‐stamping refrain” featuring the line “Non voglio amar, no, no” (“I won’t love, no, no”), it quickly returns her to the safety of recitative, as if she has calmed the momentary quickening of her pulse (Carter 2002, 258). By contrast, Melanto’s more lascivious outpourings in song act so as to frame such proud resistance to passionate love (“song”) as unnatural and, crucially, somewhat old‐fashioned. As the end of opera approaches, Penelope admits she is numb to all feeling and it takes considerable effort for her to reawaken her vocal faculties and her libido and thus recognize her husband in song: he first encourages her to “loosen her tongue” and then has to describe their nuptial bed to convince her their love is restored and it is okay to “sing” again.
Penelope’s hybrid recitativo‐styled music is perhaps nearer to the ideal style that was envisaged by what the Florentine Camerata and the Incogniti knew of Ancient Greek tragedy than that of any other contemporaneous operas. In these arioso was the dominant style.22 By generally denying Penelope arioso, except at certain strategic points, Monteverdi was thus not only characterizing Penelope’s pain and frustration but also highlighting a stylistic fidelity to Ancient Greek tragic expression in the face of audience expectations of a contemporary “operatic” one. Only at the very end of the opera is the audience’s stylistic expectation fulfilled with a fully committed “song” (“Illustratevi o cieli”) for Penelope – even if it does become a duet. When the opportunity for this music eventually arrives, in Penelope’s final clinch with Ulisse, it certainly comes as a great relief after several hours of music that contain only tantalizing snatches of arioso for the leading lady. It is testament to Badoaro and Monteverdi’s reception of Ancient Greek texts and practices, however mediated, that the power of such Ancient and modern expression resounds as palpably today as it did in 1640 or even in Homer’s day.
Ewans (2007) offers an interesting comparison of Monteverdi’s opera with Homer. Rosand (2007a) offers by far the most detailed textual study of the opera complemented by her two chapters in (Rosand 2007b and 2007c). Carter (2002) offers a fascinating musicological consideration of the opera that clearly influenced some of Rosand’s reading. Carter’s work is itself indebted to several of Rosand’s fascinating articles including Rosand (1992) and Rosand (1994). Alan Curtis’s Novello edition of the full score (2002) is by far the most comprehensive yet published and it contains a useful discussion of sources (some included and translated) in its preface and the full text of the opera. The Novello edition features Anne Ridler’s translation, which is a poetic interpretation rather than a literal one. It can thus be useful to consult the translations in the liner notes to unabridged recordings of the opera. The old Faber libretto (Badoaro 1973), with a translation by Geoffrey Dunn, represents Raymond Leppard’s early‐1970s “realization” that involves various cuts. These are also evident in the filmed Glyndebourne Production starring Janet Baker and directed by Peter Hall (1973). Several audio recordings of the opera are also cut but some of these offer good performances, notably René Jacobs’ 1992 version on Harmonia Mundi. Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s complete version for Teldec (1973) is still a fairly reliable classic recording but it has been overtaken by more recent unabridged recordings made by the likes of Gabriel Garido’s mainly Italian ensemble (K617, 1998) and Jacobs, whose 2011 complete version offers the five‐act scenario. William Christie’s French theater production (2004) is still widely considered to be the best of the filmed versions of the opera.