Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Il combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda is a setting to music of stanzas from the Twelfth Book of the epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), completed in 1575 by the Ferrarese poet Torquato Tasso. The subject is from the history of the First Crusade against the Saracens, in the 11thcentury. The Norman crusader Tancred (1078-1112) is the hero of this part of Tasso’s epic. Tasso gives an idealized portrait of the military leader Tancred, who became the ruler of one of the Christian principalities established in Palestine – Tancred is portrayed in accord with the ideal of the Christian soldier and courtier, as it was cultivated in Ferrara. Tasso’s is a Christian epic, written at a time when the Turks were still a threat to Europe, and probably aiming to inspire a new crusade to liberate the Holy Land. But above all it is a grippingly told story,
‘Great minds against themselves conspire’, words said of Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, could equally apply to the dramatic core of Monteverdi’s Combatimento . Tancredi and Clorinda fight to the death, and she dies, but the tragic irony is that it is night, she is a warrior in armour, and he fails to recognise her as the woman he loves until he takes off her helmet – too late. This is a moving story well told in music, and it is also a ‘freak’ or a ‘sport’ in the history of music.
Il combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda (1624) is not an opera. Monteverdi included it in the Eighth Book of his Madrigals, the ‘Madrigals of Love and War’ published in 1638, and it has been variously called a ‘scenic madrigal’ a ‘scenic cantata’ or even a secular oratorio. What is it?
Il combatimento di Tancredi et Clorinda is a setting to music of stanzas from the Twelfth Book of the epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), completed in 1575 by the Ferrarese poet Torquato Tasso. The subject is from the history of the First Crusade against the Saracens, in the 11thcentury. The Norman crusader Tancred (1078-1112) is the hero of this part of Tasso’s epic. Tasso gives an idealized portrait of the military leader Tancred, who became the ruler of one of the Christian principalities established in Palestine – Tancred is portrayed in accord with the ideal of the Christian soldier and courtier, as it was cultivated in Ferrara. Tasso’s is a Christian epic, written at a time when the Turks were still a threat to Europe, and probably aiming to inspire a new crusade to liberate the Holy Land. But above all it is a grippingly told story, a romance of chivalry, modeled partly on the earlier epics of Boiardo (Orlando innamorato, 1486) and Ariosto (Orlando furioso, 1516). Behind all three of these poems lies the model of Virgil’s Aeneid. The episodes of Tasso’s story were designed to be both delightful and serious; they breathe the atmosphere of the Catholic reformation of Tasso’s time.
In the uplifting Christian ending of the Combatimento, the mortally wounded Clorinda asks her victor Tancredi to pray for her and give her baptism. He fills his helmet with water from a stream, and ‘returning sadly to the sacrament’, removes her headdress – this brings the moment of recognition: that she is a woman, his beloved. Readers of an earlier part of the poem, not set by Monteverdi, will know that just before her final fatal encounter, the old eunuch Arsetes, who had charge of Clorinda’s upbringing, had revealed to her the secret of her royal birth as the daughter of a Christian Ethiopian king. The queen, fearing her husband’s jealousy when she gave birth to ‘a daughter fair and bright’, substituted ‘a negro’s babe late born’, and gave Clorinda to the eunuch ‘to foster in some distant place’. The eunuch brought up Clorinda as a pagan, but as she lay dying she craved the Christian baptism she was denied.
Clorinda, the warrior maiden, loves no one, but as for Tancredi, since he first saw her by a stream with her helmet off:
Her shape, her gesture, and her place in mind
He kept, and blew love’s fire with that wind
(Fairfax translation, 17th century).
On the night of the encounter, Clorinda in disguise has set fire to the fort of the crusader chief Godfrey of Bouillon, but the Saracen king cuts off her retreat by shutting the gate of his fortifications against the Christians. Tancredi has spotted her, and thinking her a man and a worthy opponent, he pursues and confronts her. They fight, and in the intervals of fighting, taunt each other. The fighting, the ‘combatimento’, is what attracted Monteverdi to set this story to music. In the preface to the book of madrigals containing this piece, he explains:
I took the divine Tasso as a poet who expresses with the greatest propriety and naturalness the qualities he wishes to describe, and selected his description of the combat of Tancredi and Clorinda as an opportunity of describing in music contrary passions, namely warfare and entreaty and death. In the year 1624 I caused this composition to be performed in the noble house of my especial patron and indulgent protector the Most Illustrious and Excellent Signor Girolamo Mocenigo, an eminent dignitary in the service of the Most Serene Republic, and it was received by the best citizens of the noble city of Venice with much applause and praise.
An excerpt from Edward Fairfax’s English translation, made not long after Tasso published his poem, shows the opportunities it gave Monteverdi:
Their swords together clash with dreadful sound,
Their feet stand fast, and neither stir nor start,
They move their hands, steadfast their feet remain,
Nor blow nor loin they struck, or thrust in vain
Setting this description of the fight to music, Monteverdi claimed to have ‘rediscovered the warlike genus’. He had found a musical counterpart of the pyrrhic measure, recommended by ‘the best philosophers’ for ‘excited and bellicose dances’. He laid out this metre – two short syllables per foot – as sixteen semiquavers per bar, ‘struck one after the other’. This fast repetition gave an impression of breathless, furious strife, and communicated a great excitement. Monteverdi named this music ‘stile concitato’ – an excited, aroused style, and it is found throughout his Madrigals of love and war, though nowhere in a more striking and concentrated form than in the Combatimento. The style had its precedents, in Monteverdi and in earlier composers. He had always loved concrete, realistic imagery, and he certainly would have known the battle pieces for instruments of the Venetian Andrea Gabrieli, and perhaps Janequin’s realistic vocal imitation of battle in his La Guerre (La Bataille de Marignan) of 1528.
The Combatimento is a tour de force in the stile concitato, and as Monteverdi’s proud words indicate, it did not fail in its effect on the listeners. They were excited by a piece like nothing they ever heard before, and they were moved to tears. But the poem is primarily a narration – Tancredi and Clorinda fight much more than they speak. The bulk of the singing falls to the Testo, or narrator, a baritone singer who takes the voice of the poet. The scenic dimension, then, is inevitably limited, but it was there, and intentionally so. Monteverdi reported that the Combatimento was introduced into the soirée after some madrigals had been performed, without any theatrical presentation. His instructions were:
from the side where the musicians were placed, suddenly Clorinda should appear fully armed but on foot, while Tancredi, also armed, should appear on a horse. All the actors express the meaning of the text in steps and gesture, and theinstrumentalists accurately distinguish between the parts that are concitati et molli (excited and soft). The Testo recites rhythmically and in such a manner that all three acting parts are united, in one. Clorinda speaks when her turn comes, and the Testo is silent, as is Tancredi.
Monteverdi’s solution to the problem as to how to present the poem was to personify the narrator. Others of his madrigals in Book VIII had dramatic elements, but the Combatimento is the only one where the singing parts are presented entirely in monody (just one voice singing at a time). In this respect the Combatimento comes close to opera, but it stands aside from the development of the operatic form, since the only points where the singers act are where the story-telling goes into direct speech. The same pattern is to be found in oratorio settings of biblical narrative, as practised by Carissimi, Schütz and later Bach. And we have seen that Monteverdi and Tasso’s story, too, has a religious dimension.
It has always been a matter for debate whether such works are better staged and acted, or performed in concert or in church, letting the audience imagine pictures evoked by word and music. The Monteverdi authority Denis Stevens, after he had directed many concert and studio performances of the Combatimento, conducted a stage performance for the first time, and was deeply impressed how the perfect matching of mimed action to the music added to the emotional impact of Monteverdi’s score. No doubt that is what Opera Australia is hoping will happen in their staged presentation. Either way, the work demonstrates Monteverdi’s power of scenic representation with music.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2004