Vivaldi, Antonio (1678–1741)
On the face of it, this should be quite sensational, even shocking. Perhaps the name Judith doesn’t evoke nowadays what it did, when the bible was part of most people’s fund of stories. But in lovers of the arts ‘Judith’ may well evoke one of the very many representations by painters of her heroic deed. She is shown either in the act of cutting off Holofernes’ head, or, with even more frisson-inducing horror, stuffing it into a bag to carry it away as a trophy. She did these things, both of them – at least so the biblical story goes. Artists’ fascination with Judith begins with this grizzly deed being done by a woman, but there’s surely more to it than that. A smattering of psychoanalysis will associate the image with male fear of castration, rarely depicted in art except through symbolic displacement – it is the head that is cut off, as in the legend of Salome. Judith’s story expresses the fear in its simplest form, with the woman as the aggressor.
You might think this was not a very suitable subject to be performed by an all-girls’ school, but that’s exactly what it was in Vivaldi’s oratorio Juditha triumphans. Judith as a role model? Well, for her heroism, certainly, and it’s reassuring to find that Judith is an allegorical figure, so that the girls were celebrating the victory of their city. All the same, the choice of a story set in a bloody war was deliberate, as part of the sub-title of Vivaldi’s oratorio tells us: ‘A Sacred Military Oratorio Performed in Times of War by the Chorus of Virgin Singers, to be sung in the Church of the Pietà, Venice 1716.’ Now read on…
The story of Judith is found in the Apocrypha of the bible, accepted as part of the canon of scripture by Catholics, but not by Protestants. Judith saves the Jewish people in an extreme situation, brought on when Holofernes, an Assyrian general, makes war on them on the instructions of his ruler King Nebuchadnezzar, whom they have failed to support in another of his conflicts. At first the Jews decide to resist, but when their city of Bethulia is besieged, they are on the verge of capitulating, and beseech their high priest Ozias to give the city as spoils to Holofernes. Judith, who for three years has been a widow, god-fearing, and of great beauty even though she wears widow’s weeds, upbraids Ozias and promises a drastic step if she is allowed to go outside the city gates – ‘enquire ye not’, she warns, ‘of my act’. She puts off her widow’s garments, and adorns herself ‘to allure the eyes of all men that should see her’. The first Assyrians she encounters are duly captivated, and take her to Holofernes’ camp, and to his tent. He in turn is smitten with a barely concealed lust, and when he welcomes her she veils her purpose in mystery. Holofernes lays on a feast in her honour, from which she abstains, while he, led on by her guile, drinks ‘much more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born’. When finally Judith is left alone with Holofernes in his tent, he falls on his bed into a stuporous sleep. Her plan taking its purposed course, Judith takes down Holofernes’s sword from the pillar of his bed (more Freudian symbolism?), cuts off his head, calls her maid and gives the head to her to put ‘in her bag of meat’. They slip out of the camp unobserved, and when they enter the gates of Bethulia, Judith takes the head out of the bag and shows it. She tells her people to hang the head from the walls. The besieging Assyrians, after discovering the decapitated body of Holofernes, and realizing who has done it, are demoralised and routed by the pursuing Hebrews. Judith’s use of her beauty in her courageous act is celebrated, as that of a woman who preserved her honour (and did so for the rest of her life ‘though many desired her’). A suitable subject after all, for the virgin girls of the Ospedale della Pietà, who were under Vivaldi’s musical charge.
It was toned down a little, in the version given by the oratorio’s libretto, the work of Giacomo Cassetti. The Book of Judith has some of the character of a spy thriller, since Judith’s motives in crossing to the enemy are not revealed until the grizzly deed is done; Holofernes receives her as a deserter, and his desire is mixed with tactical opportunism. In Cassetti’s libretto, on the other hand, Judith arrives to sue for peace. Holofernes detains her not because of the sign from God she promises him, but because he has fallen in love with her. His genuine and her feigned love are treated in the manner of a familiar genre, the oratorio eroico – this is one of the many features bringing Juditha triumphans close to opera. Cassetti’s liberty with the source is not to be frowned on, since the Book of Judith is in any case wildly unhistorical, and probably not intended to be read as history. The meaning of Judith’s name, ‘jewess’, already suggests an allegorical reading, and Cassetti has given his allegorical interpretation a topical relevance. The maritime republic of Venice had been at war, since 1714, with its old enemy in the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire. The Turks had laid siege to the Venetian island fortress of Corfu, and on 22 August 1716 the Venetians managed to relieve the siege. An oratorio about the relief of the siege of biblical Bethulia was a neat parallel to the events, and in the character of Holofernes there was a counterpart in the reputedly brutal Turkish commander Ali Pasha, who was killed earlier in the month in a battle won by allied Christian troops under Prince Eugene at Petrovardin in Serbia. Already the final chorus of the oratorio, in celebrating Judith’s triumph, makes the allegorical link clear, ‘The Thracian barbarian thus defeated, the queen of the sea shall triumph’. The Queen of the Sea, ‘Adria’, is Venice, and an ‘allegorical poem’ appended to the libretto (but not set to music) spells out the meaning:
‘War is upon us and a fierce enemy threatens:
Judith is Adria, and her companion Abra the Faith,
Bethulia is the Church, and Ozias the Supreme Pontiff,
The union of Christians and the honour of virgins,
Holofernes is the Turkish ruler, the eunuch his general,
And so the whole Venetian fleet will have a very great victory.’
This poem gives a cast list, for the Venetian worthies who would have thronged the Church of the Pietà for the first performance, in November of the same auspicious year. The performances given by the girls of the Ospedale della Pietà in ‘their’ church were major drawcards – they were one of several charitable institutions for orphans, abandoned and illegitimate girls, which specially emphasised music in their curriculum. It was a convent-like school, and the concerts had the intriguing dimension that the girls sang and played behind a screen, presumably to discourage members of the audience who came for extra-musical reasons – though in the city of masks it no doubt sometimes had the opposite effect!
Juditha triumphans is the only oratorio, of three Vivaldi is known to have composed, of which both the text and the music have survived. When this score was found in the Foà collection of musical manuscripts in Turin, and revived in 1941, the implications of its performance at the Pietà were not fully grasped: that all the solo parts were sung by women, including that of Holofernes, and – in a reversal of the usual attribution to a castrato – that of the eunuch. The ‘mistake’ occurred partly because Vivaldi’s chorus parts included tenor and bass clefs, but modern scholarship has established that these parts also were sung by girls. Several of them were ‘stars’ comparable to prime donne in opera. This explains the somewhat unexpected distribution of arias to singers, who usually got a number corresponding to their importance in the drama. Judith has the most arias (seven), but second comes Vagaus (the eunuch), who has six, one more than Holofernes. The contralto Apollonia, who sang Holofernes, was a celebrity, but the soprano Barbara, who sang Vagaus, was apparently particularly in favour at this time (being foundlings, the Pietà girls remained without surnames) .
In the first recording of Juditha triumphans the parts of Holofernes, Vagaus and the priest Ozias were all taken by men of low voice. The Pinchgut opera production restores them all to women, as intended, with the exception of Holofernes, sung by a male alto, no doubt for reasons of dramatic plausibility. Which raises the question what kind of musical genre Juditha triumphans represents. The ‘hiding’ of all the performers behind grills draped with black gauze suggests that the dramatic element is downplayed, though another view of it is that this required from composer and performers a sharper characterization by musical means: contrast of voice type within the limitation to women, contrast of musical expression. Vivaldi was well placed to provide this. He had joined the staff of the Pietà in 1703, as a violin teacher, only a few months after his ordination as a priest. In the years preceding 1716 and Juditha triumphans, however, Vivaldi’s relationship with the Pietà had been strained, partly by his increased activity as an opera composer. Because of gaps in the staff, he was able to have himself appointed Maestro de’ Concerti early in 1716, crowning his increasing work with the choir. It may be that Juditha triumphans was Vivaldi’s celebration of his own recognition not just as a famous violinist composer but as a composer of dramatic sacred music.
For some time in the middle of last century, Juditha triumphans was Vivaldi’s one work in the sacred genre known to the general public (the famous Gloria was soon added, but this is a work of a different, non-dramatic type.) When Vivaldi’s operas came to be explored and even revived, their resemblance to Juditha triumphans probably helped add to their appeal. Throughout Italy in the early years of the 18th century, there was a close relationship between oratorio and opera – sometimes, indeed, only the sacred subject of oratorio tells them apart, and as Juditha shows, ‘sacred’ can encompass a rattling good war story, and a strong erotic interest. The libretto by Cassetti drops the figure of the ‘Historicus’ found in many 17th century oratorios to Latin text – the ‘story-teller’ , called ‘testo’ (witness) in oratorios in the Italian language (one of the most famous examples is in Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda of 1624, a ‘secular oratorio’ where there is a war setting and a sacred dimension to an erotic story). Dispensing with the story-teller means that the drama is presented, as in opera, by the characters in their own words. The same convention obtained in oratorio as in opera: that the action was advanced in recitative, while arias explored more statically the attitudes and emotions of the personae of the drama. In Juditha triumphans, the majority of the recitatives are accompanied only by the continuo (albeit a richly furnished group of instruments, as we shall see). Orchestrally accompanied recitative is saved for particularly intense moments, and in Judith’s preparation for an execution of Holofernes’s decapitation the sequence of recitative, accompanied arioso, and aria, amounts almost to a dramatic cantata for this crucial section. The convention means that Judith’s bloody act is given in accompanied recitative, tellingly enough, though the discovery by Vagaus of what is left of Holofernes, which follows Judith and her maidservant’s decamping with the head, is even more chilling (and also in recitative). This is the climax, but it takes a long, long time to get there – the beheading occurs in the 48th of the oratorio’s 56 numbers, lasting the best part of three hours in performance.
Great musical resourcefulness is needed to maintain interest in a story unfurling at so leisurely a pace, and Vivaldi’s musical variety and inventiveness makes Juditha triumphans most attractive from a musical point of view. It will be illuminating to experience whether a staged production can find material in the musical treatment for its ideas. The oratorio was clearly aimed at an audience of connoisseurs – the choice of Latin as the language, the Vivaldi authority Michael Talbot suggests, was both to give local poets a chance to show their mastery of Latin verse, and to enhance the religious and academic credentials of institutions like the Pietà. Since the singers, behind their screen, were reading their parts from music, there was no need for the composer to make the music easy to memorise. Both the recitatives and the choruses tend to be more complex and less formula-bound than in most Baroque operas.
About one in nine of the girls and women, numbering several hundred, who were wards of the Pietà received special training in music. The celebrated coro comprised not only the singers but a large group of instrumentalists. ‘No instrument big enough to frighten these girls’ reported one admiring foreign tourist. The unlady-like coping with instruments like the double bass and the bassoon was veiled from the observers, who must have been repeatedly surprised then enchanted by the variety of sounds which came to their ears, since the singers and instrumentalists performed with a competence which would put many a professional to shame. Right at the beginning (most scholars now believe Vivaldi here dispensed with a opening sinfonia as overture) the military chorus, with its thudding kettledrums and pair of trumpets, establishes the context, which will lead to the introduction of Holofernes and his Assyrians, apparently about to be victorious. As the action begins (and the libretto presents Judith already approaching the Assyrian camp), the aura surrounding Judith puts emphasis on her charms of physique and character. At the end of the first of the oratorio’s two parts, the focus shifts briefly back to the virgins in the besieged city of Bethulia, praying for Judith’s triumph ‘as soft as possible throughout, with the voices in the distance’, another effect for which the layout of the Pietà gave opportunity.
In his operas, Vivaldi was rarely able to indulge his love of instrumental colour, but with the resources of the Pietà he had opportunities he exploited very fully. Among the instruments featured in arias and choruses are two clarinets, suggesting dissoluteness in a drunken chorus of Assyrian soldiers (this is the first known instance of the clarinet’s orchestral use). A chalumeau, a kind of elder cousin of the clarinet, is used in an aria to suggest the cooing of the turtle-dove, while a viola d’amore in another aria expresses the sweetness of Judith’s character; two recorders conjure up the nocturnal breezes outside Holofernes’s tent. The leisurely pace of this oratorio sometimes takes on the mood of an idyll, making Judith’s fell deed all the more horrifying. Further contrast comes by varying the continuo accompaniment, associating different combinations with each character. There are two harpsichords, organ, four theorbos (deep-voiced lutes), and even a mandolin, which appears as an obbligato instrument in one aria, its pungent rapid notes conveying the image of ‘flying’. At the dramatic crux of the piece, the instrumentation takes on its most striking and affecting colour, as a consort of viole all’ inglese, with sympathetic strings (akin to violas d’amore) support Judith’s prayer immediately before her deed.
Musically, then, Juditha triumphans is a rich experience, of vocal and instrumental display. A celebration of a Venetian military victory, as the conclusion quickly reminds us, Holofernes having been dispatched: this triumphant Judith is Venice, our city. A celebration of the Pietà, also, and its girls whose skills and musical charms can sustain interest through such a rich, lavish and unhurried musical performance. Whether the oratorio worthily celebrates its biblical story is something to be tested, perhaps by a dramatically conceived staging. Unlike the modern audience, everyone in 1716 knew where the story was heading, and Vivaldi had no need to dwell on the horrific details. Judith, and Venice, would soon return to peace, in which such music could be enjoyed. Perhaps some may have a glimmer that Vivaldi was musical dramatist enough to make us feel sympathy even for Holofernes. There could still be some spine-tingling shock, in Vivaldi’s edifying sacred oratorio, but surely not fear of the chopper.
Article for Opera~Opera December 2007