# Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Monteverdi)



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

IL RITORNO D'ULISSE IN PATRIA

Composer: Claudio Monteverdi

Libretto: Giacomo Baodaro

First performed: Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, 1639-1640 Carnival season

_Il ritorno d'Ulisse _is rather like a Shakespearean Romance: a part-melancholic, part-comic story of gods, castaways, shipwrecks, transformations, perilous voyages, and disguises, which ends, after many years, with a family reunited.

Based on Homer's _Odyssey_, the opera tells of the hero's return to his island kingdom of Ithaca after 20 years. His wife, the constant Penelope, is besieged by courtiers who want to marry her. Disguised as a beggar, and with the help of his son Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus, and the goddess Minerva, Odysseus kills the suitors, and is reunited with Penelope.

Along the way, there are sonorous gods, comic servants and spongers, and the dramatic scene where Odysseus confronts the foppish Suitors.

It's also surprisingly free of shepherds in Arcadia. (There is a swineherd.)

_Ulisse _is, in fact, Ellen Rosand claims, "the first Venetian opera to diverge from the mythological pastoral".






Opera in its early days was often a mixture of mythology with shepherds and shepherdesses - or aristocratic ideas thereof (rather like Marie-Antoinette playing at milkmaids at the Petit Trianon).

The earliest surviving opera, Peri's _Euridice_ (1600), and Monteverdi's first opera, _La Favola d'Orfeo _(1607), both fit into this genre: pastoral pieces composed for ducal or royal weddings.

Opera, though, has gone commercial, moving from private performances for princes to public opera houses packed with paying punters. And they want something more robust than pastorals: "crowd-pleasing stage effects, spectacular arias, fast-moving, accessible plots, and occasional comic relief" (Cohen).

Monteverdi's own _Proserpina rapita _(1630, now lost) was the impetus. The performance at Girolamo Mocenigo's Venetian palace was one of the most magnificent spectacles hitherto seen, both for its music and for its pomp.

Could such a good thing be kept from a wider audience - particularly if there was a chance of making money?

Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Mannelli thought not. Italy's first opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, Venice, opened its doors in Carnival 1637, with _L'Andromeda_, music by Mannelli and libretto by Ferrari.

Three more operas by the pair, and one by Francesco Cavalli, followed. And Monteverdi - Italy's most famous opera composer - soon appeared before the Venetian public.

"Where strong emotions are concerned," the nobleman and librettist Giacomo Baodaro wrote, "there is a vast difference between a painted image of the sun and the sun itself".

A resurrection of _L'Arianna_ (1608, now lost) in 1640 tested the waters; it was apparently found too old-fashioned, too courtly.

_Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria_ and _Le nozze d'Enea con Lavinia_ (lost) (both 1641), and _L'incoronazione di Poppea_ (1643) met with much greater success. Together, Rosand suggests, these operas form a historical trilogy moving from the aftermath of Troy (Homer), and the founding of Rome (Virgil) to the decadence of the Roman Empire (Tacitus), and the power of love.

_Ulisse_ was "much-applauded"; it was performed 10 times at SS. Giovanni e Paolo in 1641, toured to Bologna, revived in Venice the next year, and possibly staged in Vienna later that century.

The opera was then lost until the end of the 19th century; the score was found at the Vienna State Library in 1881, but not performed until 1925, in an edition by Vincent d'Indy. Despite some doubts, most scholars agree these days that it is Monteverdi's work.

Today, _Ulisse _is the most obscure of Monteverdi's three surviving operas, and it has generally been ranked below _Orfeo _or _Poppea_. Denis Arnold (_Monteverdi_, J.M. Dent, 1963) called it an "ugly duckling", an inventive score saddled with a diffuse libretto; while Jeremy Noble (_Gramophone_, September 1971) thought its music less full of character and imagination.

This is unfair; _Ulisse _is delightful. It is arguably more lyrical than _Poppea_, though dramatically weaker. Act I alone has Penelope's moving lament; an exquisite little love duet for the servants; Neptune's "Superbo e l'uom"; Ulisse's spirited "O fortunato", rejoicing at reaching Ithaca at long last; and a serene duet with the swineherd Eumete.

The courtly, serio-comic trio of the Suitors - ancestors of Mozart's Three Ladies, Meyerbeer's Anabaptists, and Puccini's Ping, Pang, and Pong - liven the middle act. Too genial and amusing to be really nasty, even when plotting Telemachus's murder, one feels rather sorry for their deaths; the cunning Odysseus, one remembers, was also a pirate.

The opera is also an allegory of the human condition. "I am mortal, created in human form," announces l'humana Fragilità (Human Frailty) in the prologue. Through Time, which bites; fickle Fortune; and the tyrant Love, man is frail, wretched, and distressed. Suffering, it seems, is the human lot. Penelope waits for her husband to return; "sorrow and trouble never end for me, miserable queen! … time is lame for whoever lives in anguish". Odysseus faces many obstacles in his quest for home and love.

Yet man triumphs over adversity: over the gods, and over his mortal enemies. And at last he finds his safe harbor.

"Man is proud, and is the cause of his own guilt though remotely," Neptune proclaims. "Human freedom wages war against Destiny, fights with fate, dares all, risks all, makes itself indomitable, and the will of man struggles against heaven."

Odysseus, as Tennyson would write a couple of centuries later, strives, seeks, finds, and does not yield.

*Suggested recordings
*
Listen: René Jacobs' 1992 recording, with Christoph Prégardien (Ulisse) and Bernada Fink (Penelope). Harmonia Mundi.





Watch: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1978 Zürich production, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with Werner Hollweg (Ulisse) and Trudeliese Schmidt (Penelope). Deutsche Grammophon DVD.





*Further reading
*Denis Arnold, _The Master Musicians: Monteverdi_, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1963

Mitchell Cohen, _The Politics of Opera: From Monteverdi to Mozart_, Princeton University Press, 2017

Ellen Rosand, _Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy_, University of California Press, 2007

John Whenham & Richard Westreich, _The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi_, Cambridge University Press, 2007


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