INTERMEDIO VI - Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640), Act V, scene 10

Summary

Ulisse has repeatedly turned to song to express his growing optimism – with Minerva, with Eumete, with Telemaco, and in his defeat of the Suitors. His confrontation with Penelope, so long awaited by him and by us, will be different. Resourceful Ulisse will not attempt to reach her with music, but with speech, the mode of expression she herself had adopted, we imagine, ever since his departure. Monteverdi takes special pains with Ulisse's speech, mustering his most carefully controlled eloquence. Here, notably, Badoaro's libretto is adequate to the task; the composer adds very little, content to exploit rhetorical emphases – parallelisms, repetitions, enjambements, images – already built into the text.

In a series of brief speeches, each countered by Penelope's stolid denial of her feelings and refusal to trust her senses, Ulisse enlists all his powers of persuasion, an effort marked, among other things, by repeated attempts to dislodge Penelope from her fixation on D, symbol of her faith – he moves several times to A, finally to G. He presses his suit with wide-ranging, strongly shaped melodic lines, extended phrases and expressive harmony. Her resistance, in contrast, is expressed in speech-like music of narrow compass placed low in her range, short phrases, strongly cadential harmony, and uniformly slow harmonic rhythm.