HIP Department online Symposium:
Musical Highlights from the Years 1624-1625 & 1724-1725
16:00-17:00:
Claudio Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (Venice, 1624): Misconceptions and Misinterpretations. By Tim Carter
17:00-18:00:
Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625): Receptions of the 1625 first performance at Villa Poggio Imperiale in Florence. By Christine Fischer
18:00-19:00:
Giovanni Picchi’s Canzoni da sonar con ogni sorte d’istromenti (1625): Venetian instrumental Music in the footsteps of Giovanni Gabrieli. By Peter Van Heygyen
ABSTRACTS
Claudio Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (Venice, 1624): Misconceptions and Misinterpretations. By Tim Carter
Monteverdi was proud of his Combattimento, first staged during an evening’s concert at the residence of Girolamo Mocenigo in Venice in Carnival 1624(–25?). In it, he said, he first developed the notion of the concitato (aroused) genere to complete the three generi used by the ancients, though only the molle (soft) and temperato (temperate) were currently in use by modern composers. He probably sent a manuscript copy of the work to Vienna in 1636, and he published it in his Eighth Book of madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi (1638). Its text was taken from a version of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), canto 12, with additions from Tasso’s revision of his epic as Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). The musical sources are complex, however, with interventions clearly from someone other than Monteverdi (I shall suggest who), sometimes in an effort to correct the composer’s own “mistakes.” There are a number of performance problems as well that need to be handled very carefully indeed. All in all, then, a work that we think we know well becomes much more challenging, and also—dare I say it—interesting.
Francesca Caccini´s La liberazione – Receptions of the 1625 first Performance at Villa Poggio Imperiale in Florence. By Christine Fischer
Whether the 1625 performance of Francesca Caccini´s La liberazione was indeed a “musical highlight” at the Medici court of the year 1625 is hard to judge. We have very little evidence on the contemporary reception of the performance that took place at a freshly renovated villa outside Florence, the home of the two interim rulers Christine de Lorraine and Magdalene of Austria. What surely makes it a highlight from today’s perspective, is that it went into print the very year it was performed for the first time. And we can presume that the ballet opera was performed again later and also outside of Florence.
The fact that La liberazione went into print gave the piece and its composer a place in music history adorned by superlatives. The “first opera written by a woman composer” is the most famous among them. This paper introduces the peculiar musical, scenic and performative features of the ballet opera, and focuses on peculiar questions of performance practice and the reception of the piece—which has been treated since its first appearance as something extraordinary, opposing “normality,” and reversing common notions of music theatre.
Giovanni Picchi’s Canzoni da sonar con ogni sorte d’istromenti (1625): Venetian instrumental Music in the footsteps of Giovanni Gabrieli. By Peter Van Heyghen
The 1625 Canzoni da sonar by Giovanni Matteo Picchi are less forward-looking, and therefore less famous today than the works by players of melodic instruments who were active during the early seventeenth-century in Venice, such as Dario Castello and Biagio Marini. These compositions are the last examples of canzonas and sonatas composed by a generation of Venetian organists greatly indebted to the style of Giovanni Gabrieli.
In my presentation, I will discuss Picchi’s instrumental ensemble works in relation to those of his contemporaries Francesco Usper, Giovanni Battista Grillo, Giovanni Priuli, and Giovanni Battista Riccio. Special emphasis will be given to Venetian instrumentation practices during the first three decades of the seventeenth century.
BIOGRAPHIES
Tim Carter (David G. Frey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has published extensively on opera and musical theatre ranging from the late sixteenth century through Mozart to Rodgers and Hammerstein. His latest book is Monteverdi’s Voices: A Poetics of the Madrigal (Oxford University Press, 2024); his next, Mozart: A Tale of Two Keys, is currently in production. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and at the National Humanities Center. In 2013 he was awarded by the American Musicological Society both the Claude Palisca Prize and the H. Colin Slim Prize for his work, respectively, on Kurt Weill and on Monteverdi. He is an honorary member of the American Musicological Society, the Royal Musical Association (U.K.), and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.
Prof. Dr. Christine Fischer, M.A.
Christine Fischer is Lise Meitner fellow at the department of musicology at Vienna University. After having studied musicology, history of art, Italian literature and ethnomusicology, she worked at University of Berne, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences – Music and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Her research focuses on the intersection of disciplines and arts as well as, in her latest project (IMAGinations of the nation – Amy Beach´s Gaelic Symphony), on decolonial approaches to European art music.
Peter Van Heyghen
After his training as a recorder player, Peter Van Heyghen developed into an internationally renowned specialist on the Performance Practice of 16th, 17th and 18th century music. He regularly performs as a soloist and with his ensembles More Maiorum and Mezzaluna and is also active as a conductor and teacher. For more than ten years he was the house conductor of the Brussels-based baroque orchestra Les Muffatti. Since 2016, he works on a regular basis with the Belgian baroque orchestra and vocal ensemble Il Gardellino. He focuses on the rediscovery of forgotten masterpieces. Both as a recorder player and a conductor he recorded numerous CDs for labels such as Accent, Eufoda, Opus 111, Passacaille, and Ramée.
He holds teaching positions for Culturally Informed Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, the Conservatory of Amsterdam, and the Kunstuniversität Graz. In addition, he is regularly invited worldwide as a guest conductor, to lead masterclasses and workshops, and to present lectures and papers.
