CD 5: Claudio Monteverdi: Il Ballo delle Ingrate
Claudio Monteverdi: Il Ballo delle Ingrate
BG-567, original LP cover
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was a pioneering composer who bridged the musical eras of the High Renaissance and the early Baroque. He brought the art of the Italian Renaissance madrigal to its highest level and simultaneously broke new ground in his famous operas for what would later be called the Baroque style. His influence in Italy was enormous; he served the ducal court in Mantua from 1590 to 1612, and then was the maestro di capella of St. Mark's in Venice until his death in 1643.
It was in the dispatch of his secular duties in Mantua that he wrote the two works on this recording. The Gonzaga family of Mantua, famed since the early 14th century for their lavish festivities on ceremonial occasions, surpassed themselves in the late spring of 1608 when Francesco Gonzaga, heir to the dukedom, married the Infanta Margherita of Savoy. The wedding took place at Turin on February 19, but it was not until May 24 that the noble pair made their triumphant entry into Mantua. Four days later, Monteverdi's opera Arianna was given its first performance, taking the audience by storm (in spite of the Duchess Eleonora's prediction, based on an advance reading of Rinuccini s libretto, that it would be dry and lacking in action). Fortunately, the arioso-lament from this opera, sung by its heroine, became so vastly popular that Monteverdi later reworked it into its present form, a four-part madrigal cycle for five voices, and included it in his Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614). The music of the opera itself has since been lost.
The pre-festival criticisms by Duchess Eleonora may have influenced Rinuccini and Monteverdi to prepare their ballet Il Ballo delle Ingrate as an unexpected and exotic item in a festival plan which, in spite of its magnificence, adhered to most of the artistic conventions of the time.
Il Ballo delle Ingrate (The Dance of the Heartless Ladies) is a unique Italian example of a ballet in the French style, and it probably owes its existence to the theatrical performances that Rinuccini witnessed during his visits to the court of Henry IV of France. Monteverdi had also travelled a good deal, and although he never visited Paris he certainly heard the best of French music when he stayed at Antwerp and Brussels in 1599.
The composition of Il Ballo was unusually rapid, since it, the whole of Arianna, and the Prologue to Guarini's Idropica had been set to music in five months. This period included most of the rehearsals, saddened at the very outset by the death of Monteverdi's pupil Caterina Martinelli. In her place he engaged Virginia Andreini, whose singing of the lament in Arianna and the similarly moving envoi at the end of Il Ballo brought tears to the eyes of many men and women in the audience at the first performance of Il Ballo on Wednesday, June 4, 1608. But beauty and sympathy were not the only emotions experienced at that performance. Everyone in the audience knew who the Heartless Ladies on the stage were meant to represent, so that sidelong glances in the direction of known offenders, muttered innuendoes, and the retailing of court scandal took up no small part of the assembled company's attention.
The central feature of the work was a ballet proper that was danced by eight ladies and eight gentlemen, including the prince and his father, Duke Vincenzo. Monteverdi s music for this section of the work is based firmly on French models, the emphasis being on a pair of contrasted dances, each of which was capable of considerable rhythmic variation. At one point Monteverdi becomes even more subtle than the French, by re-using the ground bass of the second dance but superimposing a completely new melody.
Flanking this central group of dances are the purely narrative parts of the work. Before it comes the introductory matter, with Venus and Cupid begging Pluto to release some of the Heartless Ladies so that the audience may be warned by their fate; Venus and Cupid sing a touching duet as they see the Ladies emerge from the mouth of Hades. After the dance section, Pluto assumes the major role, addressing first the Duchess of Mantua and paying her courtly compliments, and then the audience, who are entreated not to follow the example of the pitiful figures, in ashen garments bedewed with tears, standing by him on the stage. At the end comes the magnificent farewell, charged with the quintessence of Monterverdian passion, and as the other Heartless Lades echo their leader for the second time, the ballet comes to an end.
The edition used for this recording was commissioned in 1953 for the Third Programme of the BBC (now BBC Radio 3). It is based on the text in Monteverdi's Eighth Book of Madrigals (1638) preserved in the Library of the Conservatorio di Musica G. B. Martini, Bologna. The vocal ornaments were taken from Giovanni Conforto's Breue et facile maniera d'essercitarsi … a far passaggi (1593). In a detailed account of the Mantuan festivities of 1608, the Duke's secretary Federigo Follino mentions wind instruments in Il Ballo, but the resources suggested in Monteverdi's 1638 publication have been followed in preference: five stringed instruments (with a viola da gamba for the recitatives), harpsichord, and lute. The last two instruments are both by Thomas Goff of London.
– Denis Stevens
Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-567