Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity

Prelude: L’Orfeo, or the Anxiety of the Moderns

prelude L’Orfeo, or the Anxiety of the Moderns Oh! pour voir un moment, une seule fois, la nature divine, complète, l’idéal enfin, je donnerais, toute ma fortune, mais j’irais te chercher dans tes limbes, beauté céleste! Comme Orphée, je descendrais dans l’enfer de l’art pour en ramener la vie. —frenhofer in balzac, “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” chromaticism and monody, the two main new musical means developed in the late sixteenth century by those who dreamed of bringing ancient music back to life,only rarely come together in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, where, for the most part, the monody stays chastely diatonic. All the more pregnant are the moments when they do meet, and nowhere more so than at Eurydice’s parting words, when, struck by Orpheus’s unlawful glance, she is condemned to “go back to the shades of death” (Torn’a l’ombre di morte), one of the opera’s most vividly realized moments. “Ah, too sweet a sight, and too bitter . . .” (Ahi vista troppo dolce e troppo amara . . . ),she says (Example 1), making no distinction between the sight in front of her eyes and that in front of his, and her melodic line just manages to hold to the diatonic outline of the G-Dorian frame.1 But it is a struggle,and she almost loses grip at the caesura (at the word “dolce”), where her chromatic passing g#' is supported by the equally chromatic upper-neighbor en in the bass. (The fluidity of the sixth scale step is characteristic of Dorian mode at this time, but in the context one tends to hear the eb as the diatonic step. Regardless, the choice of the “hard” version of the step for “dolce” and of the “soft” one for “amara” compounds the verbal oxymoron with a musical one.) The same g#' against en threatens again to dissolve the diatonic modal frame at “misera ,” as Eurydice turns her attention now unambiguously to herself (it is hard to undermine the modal stability more profoundly than by inflecting the final), and again it is with great effort that she regains her grip on the frame, resting first on the fifth scale step as she names what she is about to lose, “vita,” and then on the first as she names what is even more precious to her than life,her “consorte.” Orpheus sees her obscured by a shadow (“but what eclipse, alas, obscures you?” [Ma qual Eclissi oime v’oscura?]), and as 19 her body evaporates into a cold shade, the musical coherence of her diction, too, threatens to dissolve, going in and out of tonal focus. The monodist learned from the madrigalist: one of the most common ways of introducing chromatic progressions in the madrigal was to juxtapose two triads a minor third apart, with both triads, or at least the lower 20 / Prelude de re E di lu ce e di vi ta, e per do in sie me Te d’o gni ben più ca ro ò mio con sor te. Co sì per trop po a mor dun que mi per di? Et io mi se ra per do il po ter più go Ahi vi sta trop po dol ce e trop po a ma ra example 1. Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio, L’Orfeo, Act 4, Eurydice’s “Ahi vista troppo dolce e troppo amara”; with analytic sketch one,being major.In the chiaroscuro of modal clarity overshadowed by chromaticism Monteverdi found the aural equivalent of Annibale Carracci’s representation , ca. 1600, of the scene in the fresco medallion of the Farnese Gallery depicting the firm outline of a female body beginning to be transformed into rising mist (Figure 3), or of Bernini’s 1624 Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery, where the female body transmutes into the bark of a laurel tree (Figure 4). I am mixing my myths deliberately here. Two stories dominate the first decade or so of opera history: the story of Orpheus and Eurydice told by the Florentine poet Rinuccini and performed in Florence with music mostly by Peri in 1600, and with music by Caccini in 1602 (the same story in a version told by the Mantuan poet Striggio was performed with Monteverdi’s music in Mantua in 1607); and the story of Apollo and Daphne, again told by Rinuccini and performed with music by Peri...