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Notes 58.1 (2001) 173-175



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Review

La morte d'Orfeo:
Tragicommedia pastorale


Stefano Landi. La morte d'Orfeo: Tragicommedia pastorale. Edited by Silvia Herzog. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 98.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, c1999. [Introd., p. vii-xvi; text and trans., p. xvii-xxxviii; 4 plates; score, 129 p.; crit. report, p. 131-33. ISBN 0-89579-444-6. $65.]

As has often been the case with the huge repertory of baroque operas, a recorded performance of Stefano Landi's La morte d'Orfeo: Tragicommedia pastorale con le musiche came out a good ten years before the appearance of any complete modern edition (ensembles Currende and Tragicomedia/ Stephen Stubbs, Accent ACC 8746/47 D, 1988). Silvia Herzog offers an attractive, modernized transcription of the original 1619 Venetian edition in this volume of Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era published by A-R Editions, with critical notes, the Italian libretto with a welcome translation into English (there is none in the Accent CD issue), and an eight-page introduction distilled from her dissertation "Strophic Discourse and Stefano Landi's La morte d'Orfeo: Syntax in Music and Poetry during the cinquecento and seicento" (University of Southern California, 1996). Libraries with the Accent recording or the subsequent Musical Heritage Society release of the same performance (MHS 522441F, 1989) can now provide a score for listeners to follow or consult.

As in Claudio Monteverdi's earlier opera Orfeo, the role of Orpheus, who has already lost his Eurydice, is written for a tenor. Otherwise, the opera in five short acts calls for eighteen brief roles. Of the seven sopranos, six are female roles and one male (probably sung by a boy). Bacchus and Mercury sing in an alto/tenor range. The rest of the casting calls for four tenors in male roles and four basses, one of whom is Charon (Caronte), who sings the well-known drinking song, "Bevi, bevi." A basso continuo ensemble is joined in the ritornellos by equal treble instruments, minimally two solo violins, and there are no independent instrumental pieces. Many vocal ensembles enliven the score, such as the three Euretti (southern breezes) set for two sopranos and alto and probably sung by boys, a double quartet of satyrs, and a quartet of vengeful maenads. Each act closes with a chorus, the largest of which is also a double quartet. The solo vocal and choral requirements were probably designed so that the singers could perform multiple roles or parts, since only a few characters are ever on stage at the same time.

Landi's score (published as his op. 2) belongs to that rare category of operas written between Monteverdi's 1607 Orfeo and the institution in the 1630s of annual court opera in Rome and subscription theater in Venice. La morte d'Orfeo remains a mystery, for even after the archival work of Silke Leopold, Tibor Tallián, and Gerda Panofsky-Sorgel, we still do not know for what occasion or patron the score was produced, where or if ever it was staged, or who wrote the libretto. The sole surviving copy of the original edition (Venice: Bartolomeo Magni, stampa del Gardano, 1619), owned by the Roman Borghese family, was sold to the British Library early in the last century. At the time of its publication, the composer was in the Veneto, in the retinue of a cardinal. After changing patrons at least three more times, he gained a place in the Sistine Chapel choir in Rome and joined the musicians of another cardinal, Francesco Barberini, for whom he trained putti cantori and composed sacred and chamber music as needed. In 1632, thirteen years after his Orfeo, the Barberini family staged Landi's Il Sant'Alessio, an opera on the life of St. Alexis. Cardinal Francesco published it two years later for the 1634 revival (Rome: Paolo Masotti). A Roman bookseller's inventory of 1676 still lists Orfeo for sale, a generation after the composer's death in 1639.

The obscure origins of the opera--published by a Roman temporarily working in...

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