More accurately, this is a
contingent from Tempesta di Mare, a Philadelphia-based ensemble
specializing in Baroque music played on “historically-informed”
instruments. Checking out their YouTube channel, you can find several videos of
the fuller ensemble playing this suite by French composer, Jean-Fery Rebel or, if you prefer the more familiar, Pachelbel’s Canon (and its
accompanying Gigue).
I will leave the two burning questions posed by the program’s title – who is Amaryllis and why is she cruel? – to Richard Stone, one of the lutenists as well as a co-founder and co-director of the ensemble-at-large.
Suffice it for me to say, the ensemble takes its name from one of Vivaldi’s more programmatic works, part of the dozen that includes his Four Seasons, the Violin Concerto in E-flat Major, Op. 8 No. 5, La tempesta di mare (published in 1725) which translates as “The Storm at Sea” (something lagoon-bound Venice and its far-flung maritime empire would’ve been well acquainted with). (He also used the title for a flute concerto in Op. 10, a completely different work from a few years later.) This particular program itself takes its name from one of the most popular poems of the day, Crudele Amarilli, by Battista Guarini, a poet and diplomat from Farrara, a poem we know was set to music at least 22 times by different composers between 1590 and 1626 including the one on this weekend’s program by Sigismondo d’India written in 1609. The composer was not, as his name might imply, from India: more likely, he was born in Palermo, Sicily, but is mostly associated with Turin in the northwestern region of Piedmont, then the Duchy of Savoy. The poem, incidentally, comes from a rustic romance, the play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd), which was first staged in Turin for the Duke’s wedding in 1585. Whether as a series of poems, the play itself, or just the imagery of its name (and fame), the title turns up among numerous composers of the age, including a set of flute sonatas long attributed to Vivaldi, and to an opera of Handel’s in 1712.
Since this is a different kind of program – and I highly recommend reading Richard Stone’s guest program notes – I thought, since it's more difficult for me to get “behind the scenes” with 11 different composers, I would present a “pre-concert essay” on the background to the times in which these different composers lived and worked.
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Historically speaking, if it’s written after 1600, that's “Baroque” Music but since most American concert-goers hear “Baroque” and think “Bach and Handel,” this is actually from a century or more before that. Technically, this is “Early Baroque” and when ensembles specializing in the music of Bach, Handel or Vivaldi are often called “Early Music Groups” (especially when using instruments made to match the period that music was written in) I guess that makes Tempesta di Mare an “Earlier Music Group. (As a former musician, I have to admit to me “Early Music” means anything you have to play before 9am... but I digress.)
The truth is, as with most trends in history, Baroque Music did not make the official change from Renaissance Music on January 1st, 1600. Most of these composers and poets were often as much in a Renaissance frame of mind as they were aware of what new ideas were gradually coming into play as the style (in all the arts) was clearly evolving. The question, then, is to what?
A span of 42 years might seem rather narrow for a program of classical music which is usually expected to range from Mozart to the 20th, maybe even the 21st Century, a span of maybe 240 years. A string quartet program that might include one of Beethoven's Op. 18, published in 1800, some early Mendelssohn (or we could throw in his Octet instead), plus one of the quartets Schumann composed in 1842 and – well, there you have it: a span of only 42 years. Today, that would cover the equivalent of a program including the world premiere of a brand new piece, where the earliest piece on the program dated all the way back to 1982 (which, to many young people today, is now being considered “the Late 1900s”).
Call it “cultural saturation,” if you want: a capsule of a particularly interesting time in music, and then only from one country, Italy (given global music and political awareness today, not only limited to White Male Composers from Europe but only from the Western Hemisphere). And historically, it seems Humanity goes through some kind of convulsion whenever it sees a year-ending-in-'00 when the local reaction tends to think it's hit Rock Bottom: with 1800, it was the aftermath of the French Revolution and 15 years of near-constant warfare as Napoleon tramped across Europe which ended in not only his defeat but an establishment of political boundaries that set up the next conflict, reaching its boiling point in 1914 with World War I, the War that turned out, alas, not to End All Wars. Counting not only the political but economic fall-out of the solution to that one, resulting in the inevitability of World War II, then with the Cold War stirring the pot and terrorism on the rise, that we are now in the 2000s. You can turn on the news to follow the latest developments there: not even the weather forecast is a respite from anxiety.
So what was going on in 1600? What would Giovanni Publico be thinking if he could turn on some contraption like a television set and see what was going on in his local and world news?
By comparison to the previous century, there were fewer wars involving Italy, but as a result of a near-constant succession of these wars between 1494 and 1595, there were few parts of the Italian peninsula not directly affected by their outcomes. Primarily between France on one side and the Hapsburgs of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (or sometimes just Austria) on the other, much of Italy was caught literally and figuratively in the middle. Keep in mind, Italy was not a nation-state like it is today: like “Germany,” it was a collection of smaller states, some more powerful than others, and if they weren't fighting the French or the Hapsburgs, they were fighting each other.
For much of this time, France occupied Lombardy (Milan), the Holy Roman Empire (or, simply, The Empire) controlled Tuscany (Florence), while Spain conquered Southern Italy after invading Naples and Sicily. The Papal States, a large swath across Central Italy, stretched from Rome to Ravenna on the edge of Venice, but they were heavily involved in various factions against both the French and The Empire to maintain its hold on its secular lands. Venice, a Republic with an elected Doge who ruled for life, was a maritime power frequently dealing with attacks from the Ottoman Empire especially along its Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean possessions.
All of this military and political turmoil brought with it frequent plagues which helped to ruin the Italian economy by the start of the 1600s. Perhaps all this turmoil might explain the popularity of such idyllic poetry as Il pastor fido and the vagaries of love, with or without our lovely Amaryllis.
Also, keep in mind there was no unified Italian language at the time: what we consider Italian today resulted primarily in the selection of a novel published in the 1820s, Alessandro Mazoni's I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”) which was written in an upper-class Florentine dialect which, as the Risorgimento gradually absorbed all these states into a unified nation, was adopted as the basis for some serious language reform. Thus, while Naples and Venice might have their own dialects. In fact, Venetians argue Venetan is a language spoken in a large area of northeastern Italy called The Veneto which pre-dated Italian by centuries. It did not mean they could easily understand each other, all these different regions of the peninsula, something very different from, say, a man from New Orleans and a woman from Vermont reading the same article in the New York Times but in their own individual accents (then throw in ethnic and generational slang and… well, never mind, as usual I digress.)
Curiously, Manzoni's novel is set in Milan in the 1620s during a particularly challenging time of political struggles complete with an ensuing plague! (Manzoni, by the way, was the man Verdi memorialized in his famous Requiem of 1874.)
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Now, just to put some of those famous Italian artists we’re all familiar with into some kind of perspective, here is a time-line for you to compare with our concert's span between 1601 and 1643:
Perhaps the most famous Italian poet is Dante whose Divine Comedy (especially The Inferno) is considered one of the Great Works of Western Literature. He was Florentine, ran afoul of the politicians there and was exiled, and died in Ravenna (then part of Venice’s wider-ranging Republic) in 1321.
Two other famous poets of Italy were Petrarch who is often credited with the evolution of Renaissance Humanism in his Sonnets and other poems. He was from Florence and, after traveling around Northern Italy and living for some years in Avignon (during the years the Papacy abandoned Rome and settled in southern France), before dying in Padua in 1374. And Boccacio, represented by his Decameron, was also from Tuscany (the area around Florence) and who died there in 1375.
Two authors that survive in our cultural consciousness are Machiavelli who wrote The Prince about life in politics (once the guiding light for those seeking to attain, then maintain power, his name provides the adjective Machiavellian which today is not considered a compliment); and Torquato Tasso with his epic poem Jerusalem Liberated set in the Crusades which was a major work in its day if largely overlooked today. Machiavelli was a Florentine who died in 1527; Tasso, a Neopolitan, born in Sorrento, died outside Rome in 1595.
Among the painters and sculptors who come to mind when we think of Renaissance Italy are Leonardo (from the town of Vinci in Tuscany) who died in 1519; and Michelangelo (Buonarotti), also a Tuscan though mostly associated with Rome through his masterpieces at the Vatican, who died there in 1564. Two other painters perhaps less familiar to the General American Public are Titian and Tintoretto, two Venetians: Titian died in the Plague Year of 1576 and Tintoretto, in 1594.
The musicians I'll mention are more specific to our given Time Period: perhaps the most famous of the Renaissance composers was Palestrina, known by the name of his birthplace near Rome. He was a leading figure of what was known as the Counter-Reformation, following on Martin Luther's Reformation which tore up so much of Northern Europe earlier in the 16th Century. His musical style became the standard when we think of Music for the Church in the Renaissance. He died in 1594.
Given to summaries and glib generalities, “Introduction to Music Literature” and “Music Appreciation” courses (the latter geared more for those majoring in non-music) mention a few other famous names: Claudio Monteverdi who was born in Cremona – they made violins there! – and spent most of his career in Venice, and died in 1643. He was involved in the development of a new art form called Opera – when I was a student on a university tour passing through Florence in 1970, I stumbled upon the Casa Bardi, the house where Count Bardi and various artistic friends of his were supposed to have met and formulated the basic tenets of writing an opera around 1600, one of the earliest of which was Jacopo Peri's Orfeo – which embraced a New Style of harmonic and textural simplicity as opposed to the complex counterpoint of Renaissance polyphony. But he also composed one of the glories of the choral repertoire in his clearly no-longer-Renaissance style in his “Vespers of 1610.”
One news story from Monteverdi’s day, by the way, affecting the first piece on the program, was the 1630 Hapsburg invasion of Mantua (not far from Venice) already dealing with a major outbreak of the plague. A friend of Monteverdi’s was involved with a delegation from the Venetian Embassy to the city, and that delegation brought the plague back to Venice, resulting in the deaths of some 45,000 people there over the next three years. Among those victims were Monteverdi’s assistant at St. Mark’s, and possibly Monteverdi’s younger brother who died at the same time (presumably of the plague). Book 8 of his “Madrigals of War and Love” were published in Venice in 1638. One of them opens this weekend’s program.
Another famous name of the day was Giovanni Gabrieli, a member of a family of Venetian musicians who, a generation before Monteverdi, also worked at St. Mark's. The major cathedral in Venice had all these nooks and crannies which offered opportunities to place small groups of singers and instrumentalists that created such an amazing layering of sound (long before there was such a thing as “stereo”), the music reverberated through every one of those nooks and crannies. (Again, forgive me for mentioning my own student days, but we sang one of Gabrielli's motets in St. Marks in the very place for which it was composed and the experience of hearing it there and being at the heart of all those reverberations remains one of my most intense musical memories).
And who could forget an actual Prince: the Prince of Venosa, Don Carlo Gesualdo who hailed from southern Italy (Venosa was part of Naples). He wrote mostly madrigals and short motets in a dense and often chromatic style that still makes people wonder what this must have sounded like to the ears of the late-1500s with the chromatic harmony moving (or rather, slipping) in ways that sound modern even today. Of course, because in 1590 he caught his wife and her lover deep in the old flagrante delicto and killed them both – he was quickly found not to have committed a crime – he is usually described as “a composer and murderer.”
While most of the composers on the Tempesta di Mare's program would draw blanks after seeing Monteverdi as first and last – I'll let the performers fill you in on their details – you might notice what looks to be an interloping German named Kapsberger. He might be Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger but then, keep in mind, German composers often styled their first names in French or Italian – there are many manuscripts bearing the name Luigi Beethoven – but in Kapsberger's case, he was born and spent most of his career in Italy. His father was involved with the Austrian military diplomatic corps in Rome – think back to all those Italian wars of the 16th Century – and while his composer-son was born in 1580 in either Rome or maybe Venice, he also later traveled through much of Europe himself involved in diplomacy for The Empire, all the while becoming one of the foremost performers of (and composers for) the lute.
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One more historic discipline to mention: science, in this case, a major facet of the Renaissance which was not just about art. This “rebirth” came as the result of discovering many of the ancient scientific treatises of the Ancient Greeks (many only preserved in the libraries of Arabic universities in Baghdad and in Spain who were experiencing a Golden Age when the rest of Europe loaned its cultural state to what was often called “The Dark Ages”).
Between the poems of Dante and Petrach in the early-1300s and the mid-1600s, there evolved a new way – a modern way – of thinking about man and the world and Man's place in that World, that Man (as in Humanity but, in essence, a gift rarely offered to Woman) was the Center of his own Universe.
This became most significant in the work of the astronomer Nikolas Copernicus born in a German family in what was then part of what would eventually become Poland (again, with the fluid political boundaries and itinerant ethnicities). He began work on it around 1514 though he was hesitant to publish it well into the 1530s for fear of the controversy it would cause: that it wasn't the Earth at the center of the Universe, but the Sun!
Suddenly Man was not at the Center of Everything but living on a planet somewhere out there, rotating around the sun with a bunch of other planets. While it didn't go over well with those who felt the World revolved around Them, one scientist (among other things), Galileo – whose father was a composer – championed Copernicus theory and went before a Roman Inquisition in 1615.
And the world-at-large was still reeling, as all this wealth pouring into Spain from the New World, from the adventures of an Italian sailor named Columbus who'd argued that, even in 1492, the world was not flat...
The world has always been involved in the ups-and-downs of history, of cultural as well as political and social change. The tumultuous years of the Renaissance (complete with its “rebirth”) gave way to simplifications in the Early Baroque before becoming the gaudy splendor of the Late Baroque in the first half of the 1700s – and on into another simplification with the Classicism we associate with Haydn and Mozart, followed by the transition of Beethoven on into the chromatic complexity of Wagner and Schoenberg, in turn followed by the simplification of Ravel or later-Stravinsky’s “Neo-Classicism” and a bit of “minimalism” which, as we live and breathe today, finds us at yet another crossroads. With each of these shifts – whether history moved in circles or a series of waves – we find numerous events that shaped that artistic life. And somehow that artistic life survives, sometimes outside its social context, but it survives.
Let’s take a moment to immerse ourselves in but a small slice of that Time-Line to experience what happened during one of those periods of change: the Early-1600s.
– Dick Strawser
