Monteverdi's 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 (that is, the employment of the unusual and unstable "black-key" tones in addition to the usual and stable "white-key" diatonic ones) and monody (the employment of a single melodic line with accompaniment), 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 opera 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. To hear this passage, go to The Hopkins Review website, http://www.jhu.edu/hopkinsreview), making no distinction between the sight

Example 1.

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. (In the musical example, the upper system provides Monteverdi's music—the vocal melody and the supporting bass line; below there is my analytic x-ray picking out the skeleton of the structurally most important notes. Even the non-musicians among readers should have no difficulty getting the main point of the few analytical remarks I shall now make, if they keep in mind the distinction between the diatonic tones which are the most basic, solid, stable tones a musician can use, and the chromatic ones, marked in notation by a sharp or a flat placed before a note, which inflect the diatonic ones, bending and destabilizing them so that one wishes they would move on to a more stable diatonic neighbor. In the melody of my analytic sketch, for instance, the third note, g^I', chromatically sharpens the diatonic second note, g', so that one wants it to move on to the next higher diatonic one, a'. G-Dorian is the "mode" of this excerpt—a selection of the diatonic tones it uses, a selection that centers on the tone G as the most stable point, the mode's "final.") But it is a struggle, and Eurydice almost loses her grip at the caesura (at the word "dolce"), where her chromatic passing g^I' 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 e^b 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^I' 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 her body evaporates into a cold shade, the musical coherence of her diction, too, threatens to dissolve...