Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
17 - Operatic passions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 A debut
- 2 Berio
- 3 Paths to Montsalvat
- 4 Carter
- 5 Da lontano
- 6 Gubaidulina
- 7 A handful of pianists
- 8 Purcell 1995
- 9 Around New York
- 10 Tippett
- 11 Being in Assisi
- 12 Boulez
- 13 The composer's voice
- 14 Mozart 1991
- 15 A decade of Don Giovannis
- 16 Henze
- 17 Operatic passions
- 18 Vivier
- 19 At the movies
- 20 Schoenberg on the stage
- 21 Five British composers
- 22 Lachenmann
- 23 Mapping Mtsensk
- 24 Stockhausen
- 25 Behind the rusting Curtain
- 26 Verdi at the Met
- 27 A quintet of singers
- 28 Schnittke
- 29 How it was, maybe
- 30 Reich
- 31 Tracks in Allemonde
- 32 Birtwistle
- 33 A departure
- Further reading and listening
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
Arianna, or Rewriting Monteverdi
Monteverdi's second opera, Arianna, somehow got abandoned when musical history sailed away. It was written in 1608 for a Gonzaga wedding, and revised by the composer for later productions, but until recently nothing was known of it except for Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto and a fragment of the music—though a substantial fragment, the heroine's lament, comprising fully a tenth of the score and surely representing the opera's apex. How that apex was approached and left could only be imagined. Now, however, the whole opera has been imagined for us, in what the title page of the vocal score aptly describes as a ‘lost opera by Claudio Monteverdi … composed again by Alexander Goehr’.
For Goehr, whose father was a leader of the Monteverdi revival in Britain, the recomposition of Arianna is the culmination of a slow progressive encounter that began in the 1950s with incidental evocations of style, moved in the 1960s to emulation of genre (in the music-theatre piece Naboth's Vineyard) and wholesale translation (a clarinet ‘paraphrase’ on Tancredi e Clorinda), and just a few years ago reached a thorough-going modern Monteverdianism in the cantata The Death of Moses. Influence and imitation presume separation, but The Death of Moses begins to suggest the earlier composer working from just under Goehr's skin: if Monteverdi had been alive in the 1990s, and commissioned by the Proms, this is the work he woul have produced.
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- The Substance of Things HeardWritings about Music, pp. 160 - 183Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005