The power of song?

'Was Claudio Monteverdi the last great composer of the Renaissance or the first great composer of the Baroque?' is one of those 'Discuss'-type exam questions that used often to appear on undergraduate examination papers (including my own), at least until our discipline so undermined its basic premisses as to make it no longer tenable: concepts of both 'greatness' and style-periods are now well out of favour. In 1951 Leo Schrade famously called Monteverdi the 'creator of modern music', while in 1987 Gary Tomlinson (Monteverdi and the end of the Renaissance) switched direction. But whether the composer was looking forwards or backwards (or both), he remains standing on some kind of borderline still regarded as somehow epochal for the history of Western music.

Conventionally, borders are sites of anxiety: Tomlinson in particular articulates Monteverdi's complex, ambivalent responses to a world racked by political, social, economic, cultural and spiritual crises, as Renaissance certainties became overwhelmed by (early) modern doubts. 'Crisis' has long been a label of choice for the 17th century, while for critics from Benedetto Croce on, if not before, the Seicento cannot escape the taint of Seicentismo. However one views the 16th century (itself an interesting question), the rot had definitely set in by the 17th. For Tomlinson, the villain of the piece was the poet Giambattista Marino, whose relentless search for meraviglia debased the Petrarchan currency by flagrant eroticism on the one hand, and by conceit-ridden flim-flammery on the other: art was replaced by artifice. Even a 'great' composer such as Monteverdi could not resist the consequences as the arts began a relentless downhill path from their Renaissance heights.

In 1994, Suzanne Cusick articulated a different set of anxieties in Monteverdi. In her "'There was not one lady who failed to shed a tear": Arianna's lament and the construction of modern womanhood' (Early music, xxii (1994), pp.21-41), the issue is one of containment, as powerful women, whether represented on the operatic stage or viewing such representations in an audience, needed to be brought under the reins of patriarchal control. Here, as also (if somewhat differently) for Susan McClary, one crisis of the 17th century lay in the complex nexus of power, identity and gender. Taking her cue from a contemporary comment (by Federico Follino) on the audience response to Monteverdi's opera Arianna (1608), performed for the wedding of Prince Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy, Cusick teased out the need for Arianna to voice her lament on being abandoned by Theseus, and the equal need for that voice to turn into silence, a glorious swan-song immediately prior to metaphorical or physical death.

Music is an ideal focus of such critical enquiry, not just because of its power to move (in both senses) beyond words, but also because of its own gendered ambivalences, a strongly feminized art placed in the service of a strongly masculine rhetoric. Cusick, like Catherine Clément before her, also notes the necessary paradox of powerful female operatic voices: we glory in their singing while the patriarchy glories in their silencing. What sustains the paradox, and adds spice to its dangers, is that music's emotional extremes are often most convincingly linked to 'bad' women whose punishment by gagging can somehow be justified on conventional moral grounds: Dido may deserve condemnation for taking an illicit lover and forestalling the founding of Rome, but please can we hear just one little lament before she dies? What undermines the paradox is music's unerring tendency to attract sympathy for those who give it voice: it is hard not to feel for a devil with the best tunes. At that point, the misogynists mumble into their beards, while the feminists seek cause for (temporary) celebration. Containment turns to liberation as the female voice takes wing, or in even more dangerously triumphalist terms, those glorious high notes are signs not just of resistance but even of redemption. Purcell's Dido makes the point with those top Gs on her final...