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Rinuccini the craftsman: A view of his L'Arianna*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Bojan Bujić
Bojan Bujić
Affiliation:
Magdalen College, Oxford
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Extract

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 18 , October 1999 , pp. 75 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 Follino, Federico, in his Compendio delle sontuose feste fatte l'anno MDCVIII nella città di Mantova(Mantua, 1608), p. 65Google Scholar, states that ‘Durò la rappresentatione di questa Favola lo spatio di due ore e meza’ (‘the performance of this Favola took two and a half hours’). On 9 January 1620 Monteverdi wrote to Alessandro Striggio: ‘and you know from Arianna that after it was finished and learnt by heart, five months of strenuous rehearsal took place’. See Stevens, D., trans, and ed., The Letters of Claudia Monteverdi (Oxford, 1995), p. 160Google Scholar. For a sceptical view of the context, implications and reliability of Monteverdi's statement, See Reiner, S., ‘Lavag' Angioletta (and others)’, Analecta Musicologica, 14 (1974), p. 82 n. 182Google Scholar; also Pirrotta, N., Music and Theatre in Italy from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge, 1982), p. 257 n. 74Google Scholar.

2 Tomlinson, G., Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1987), Ch. 5, pp. 21–41Google Scholar; Cusick, S., ‘“There was not one lady who failed to shed a tear”’, Early Music, 22 (1994), pp. 21–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Westrup, J. A., ‘Monteverdi's “Lamento d'Arianna”’, Music Review, 1 (1940), pp. 144–54Google Scholar.

4 Italian Secular Song 1606–1636: A Seven-Volume Reprint Collection, ed. Tomlinson, G., vii: Venice 2 (New York, and London, 1986), p. xGoogle Scholar.

5 Godt, I., ‘I casi di Arianna'’, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 29 (1994), pp. 315–39Google Scholar.

6 See Solerti, A., Gli albori del melodramma (Milan, 1904; repr. Hildesheim, 1969), i, Ch. 9: ‘Le feste di Mantova nel 1608’, pp. 75–103Google Scholar; and Reiner, ‘La vag'Angioletta’.

7 Solerti, , Gli albori, i, p. 83Google Scholar.

8 For more detail about Caterina Martinelli, see Strainchamps, E., ‘The Life and Death of Caterina Martinelli: New Light on Monteverdi's “Arianna”’, Early Music History, 2 (1985), pp. 155–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Carlo Rossi, in a letter to Vincenzo Gonzaga of 27 February 1608: ‘Madama è restata con il Sig. Ottavio di arrichirla con qualche azione essendo assai sciutta.’ Solerti, , Glialbori, i, p. 92Google Scholar. The duchess, Leonora Medici, who was also her husband's first cousin, was the daughter of Francesco de' Medici and Giovanna d'Austria and must have retained vivid memories of the intermedi performed in Florence in 1589, as well as of the opera performances on the occasion of her younger sister Maria's wedding to Henri IV in 1600. In comparison with the splendour of the performances for the Medici weddings, Rinuccini's new libretto must indeed have struck her as rather understated.

10 Follino, , Compendio, pp. 30–65Google Scholar.

11 The numbering of lines in L'Arianna and in L'Euridice follows the edition by Luigo Fassò(see note 14 below).

12 A cautious view may be expressed that ‘the lady who reigns over the Mincio’ may not be Margherita, who, strictly speaking, is not yet in a position to reign, but Leonora de' Medici-Gonzaga. Be it as it may, later editions stress the importance of the house of Savoy at the expense of the Gonzagas.

13 Solerti, , Gli albori, ii, pp. 143–87Google Scholar. Corte, A. Delia (ed.), Drammi per musica dal Rinuccini allo Zeno (Classici italiani), (Torino, 1958), pp. 107–56Google Scholar. The volume reproduces Solerti's text, already published by Della Corte in Drammi per musica (1926).

14 Fassò, L., ed., Teatro del Seicento, Letteratura italiana: Storia e testi 39 (Milan and Naples, 1956), pp. 51–87Google Scholar. For a more detailed account of the discrepancies between the original prints and the modern editions, see Appendix 1.

15 Arianna. Tragedia in a Prologue and Eight Scenes by Ottavio Rinuccini, trans. Boyde, P., Royal Opera Texts (London, n.d. [1995])Google Scholar

16 Ariadna, tragedia Gosp. Giva Frana Gundulichia, Vlastelina Dubrovackoga (Ariadna, Tragedy by Mr Ǵ F. Gundulić, a Nobleman of Dubrovnik) (Ancona: M. Salvioni, 1633)Google Scholar. Modern edition with textual commentary in Djela Ǵiva Frana Gundulića, ed. Körbler, Dj., rev. M. Resetar, Stari Pisci Hrvatski 9 (Zagreb, 1938)Google Scholar.

Ǵivo (Ivan) Frano Gundulić (?1589–1638) was an aristocrat born and educated in Dubrovnik (Ragusa). He combined various administrative duties in his native city with literary activity which must have started before 1620. In the history of Croatian literature he is particularly remembered for his pastoral play Dubravka (performed in 1628) and the unfinished epic Osman, which, inspired by Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, describes Polish resistance to the Turks. In the preface to Pjesni pokorne kralja Davida (Penitential Songs of King David), published in Rome in 1621, he self-critically names various works, among them Ariadna, as the ‘fruits of darkness'. The translation must therefore date from before 1620, and later he must have softened his critical stance as he released it for publication in 1633. Translating L'Arianna towards the end of the second decade of the century, Gundulić followed in the foosteps of, or worked in parallel with, his contemporary and fellow-citizen Paskoj Primović, who published a translation of Rinuccini's L'Euridice in 1617. See Bujić, B., ‘An Early Croat Translation of Rinuccini's Euridice’, Muzikoloŝki Zbornik, 12 (1976), pp. 16–30Google Scholar. A closer examination of the relationship between Rinuccini's originals and Primović's and Gundulić's translations is to be found in Bujić, B., ‘Pastorale o melodramma? Le traduzioni di Euridice ed Arianna per le scene di Dubrovnik’, Musica e Storia, 6 (1998), pp. 477–99Google Scholar.

One of Gundulić's teachers was Camillo Camilli (?-1615), who was appointed in the late 1590s as a ‘rettore delle scuole e professore di umane lettere’ in Dubrovnik. Before that he had become well known as a continuator of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, having published in Venice in 1583 his Cinque canti… aggiunti al Gofredo del Signor Torquato Tasso. Camilli's translations of Ovid's Heroides and Fasti appeared in 1587. Since the interest shown by the young Dubrovnik poets in the works of Ottavio Rinuccini dates from the end of Camilli's residence there, it is possible to speculate that he might have been instrumental in introducing them to Dubrovnik. On Camilli, See Chersa, T., Degli illustri Toscani stati in diversi tempi a Ragusa (Padua, 1828), pp. 16–18Google Scholar, and Dizionario biografico degli italiani, XVII (Rome, 1974), pp. 210–12Google Scholar.

17 See also note 16 above, and Djela Ǵiva Frana Gundulića, p. 17.

18 Dubrovnik, Croatia, Franciscan Monastery Library, MS 254. See Djela Ǵiva Frana Gundulića, p. 137.

19 Following the practice established in ‘“Figura poetica molto vaga”: Structure and Meaning in Rinuccini's Euridice’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), pp. 29–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar where the forms ‘Orpheus’ and ‘Eurydice’ were used to refer to the characters from the Greek mythology, whereas the italianised forms ‘Orfeo’ and ‘Euridice’ referred to Rinuccini's characters, in this paper the same distinction is adopted between the forms ‘Theseus', ‘Ariadne’ and ‘Teseo’, ‘Arianna’.

20 In the chronological order of Ovid's works the story of, or brief references to, Ariadne, Ariadne and Theseus, or Ariadne and Bacchus are to be found in (1) Heroides, letter X: ‘Ariadne Theseo’; (2) Ars amatoria, Books i, 525–64, and iii, 35–6; (3) Metamorphoses, Book VIII, 151–81; (4) Fasti, Book iii, 459–516. In Plutarch's Lives (Vitae parallelae) the episode of Ariadne's escape from Crete and her abandonment by Theseus is treated in the life of Theseus, sections xix-xxi.

21 Catullus, Poem 64, 52–264; Ariadne's lament encompasses lines 132–201.

22 Tasso, T., Gerusalemme liberata, xvii, otave 36–59Google Scholar.

23 Bianconi, L., Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Bryant, D. (Cambridge, 1987), p. 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the purpose of this study I consulted an eighteenth-century edition: Epistole eroiche di P. Ovidio Nasone tradotte da Remigio Fiorentino (Paris, 1762)Google Scholar.

24 Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 217–219; Fabbri, P., Monteverdi (Turin, 1985), p. 141Google Scholar; English edition, Monteverdi, transl. Carter, T. (Cambridge, 1994), p. 96Google Scholar; idem, Il secolo cantante (Bologna, 1990), pp. 23–24.

25 For the life of Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara (c. 1517-c. 1572), see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, iii (Rome, 1961), pp. 306–9Google Scholar. The first book of Anguillara's Metamorfosi was completed in 1551; in 1554 the first three books were printed in Paris, during Anguillara's stay in France. The translation/reworking of Ovid he completed in Lyons in 1560. All references to and quotations from Anguillara in this paper are according to Le Metamorfosi di Ovidio. Ridotte da Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara in ottava rima. Con le annotationi di M. Gioseppe Horologgi, & gli argomenti, & postille di M. Francesco Turchi (Venice: Giunti, 1584)Google Scholar. The spelling and punctuation have been modernised (including the prose extract in Appendix 2). In the copy I consulted (in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) on p. 280 ottave 106–15 are erroneously numbered 146–9, 140, 141–5; the correct numbering resumes at ottava 116.

26 See Sternfeld, F. W., ‘The Birth of Opera: Ovid, Poliziano and the lieto fine’, Annales Musicologiques, 19 (1979), pp. 30–51Google Scholar.

27 The following editions have been used as sources for quotations form Ovid and Ariosto: Ovid, , Heroides, Select Epistles, ed. Knox, P. E. (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, ed. Segre, C. and Caretti, L., 2 vols. (Torino, 1992)Google Scholar.

28 ‘Half waking only, languid from sleep, I turned upon my side and put forth hands to clasp my Theseus – he was not there! I drew back my hands, a second time I made essay, and o'er the whole couch moved my arms – he was not there!’ Trans. Showerman, G. in Ovid, , Heroides and Amores, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1914), pp. 121–3Google Scholar.

29 The original source of this phrase is in Ovid, , Heroides x.31Google Scholar, which in Knox's critical edition reads: ‘ut uidi indignam quae me uidisse putarem’. However, the sense of ‘As I saw a sight such as I thought I did not deserve to see’ is difficult to reconcile with the straightforward ‘she saw or she thought that she saw’ which is the basis of the Cinquecento renditions. Indeed, this difficult and often corrupt line of Ovid was in sixteenth-century sources given as either ‘Aut vidi, aut certe cum me vidisse putarem’ (Epistole Heroidum, (Venice: Tridino, 1516) or ‘Aut vidi, aut certe quia me vidisse putavi’ (Pub. Ovidii Nasonis Heroides (Venice: Caesanus, 1552), and it is this basic construction that served as a model for Remigio Nannini's ‘o per ch'io vidi, o che veder mi parve’. Anguillara's version is a mixture of influences coming from both Nannini and Ariosto. Indeed, there are many other detailed points of similarity between Nannini and Anguillara which seem to suggest that he was aware of Nannini's translation of Ovid. He was, indeed, working on this part of the translation of the Metamorphoses when Nannini's translation of Heroides came out.

30 All quotations are from Petrarca, Francesco, Canzoniere, ed. Santagata, M. (Milan, 1996), here abbreviated RVF (for Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Petrarch's own title for his Canzoniere)Google Scholar.

31 Guarini, Battista, Il pastor fido, ed. Bonora, E. (Milan, 1977), p. 261Google Scholar.

32 I have referred to the recurring phrases in Rinuccini's L'Euridice in my ‘ “Figura poetica molto vaga” ’, pp.45–6.

33 L'Euridice, ed. Fassò, line 441. See my ‘ “Figura poetica molto vaga” ’, p. 39.

34 Sannazaro, Iacobo, Opere volgari, ed. Mauro, A. (Scrittori d'Italia, 220), (Bari, 1961), p. 169Google Scholar

35 Tansillo's Canzone could have been known to Rinuccini from C. Zabata, ed., Rime di diversi autori (Venice, 1575). For a modern edition, see Tansillo, Luigi, Il canzoniere edito ed inedito, ed. Pèrcopo, E. and Toscano, T. R., 2 vols. (Naples, 1996), i, p. 260Google Scholar. (Vol. i of the 1996 edition set is a reprint of the volume originally published in Naples in 1926.) ‘Mercés'impetre’ in line 30 is a Petrarchism borrowed from RVF 126, ‘Chiare, fresche et dolciacque’, line 37: ‘sí dolcemente che mercé m'impetre.

36 See my ‘ “Figura poetica molto vaga” ’, pp.44–5.

37 Igor Stravinsky, speaking to Robert Craft about Oedipus Rex: See Stravinsky, I. and Craft, R., Dialogues and a Diary (London, 1968), p. 24Google Scholar.

38 For a possible literary source of this misogyny, see Appendix 2.

39 If the importance of political expediency in the story of Teseo and Arianna is borne in mind, then the choice of the subject and its treatment by Rinuccini were, to say the least, curious. The account of the plight of an abandoned bride was likely to raise many an eyebrow in Mantua and stir the memory of the bridegroom's father, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga. In March 1581 he had married Magherita Farnese, but when doubts arose that she could provide him with an heir the marriage was dissolved, and the young bride was sent back to Parma in 1583 and became a nun. This caused long-lasting bad blood between the Farnese and the Gonzaga. Vincenzo then married Leonora de' Medici in 1584. For an account of this episode in the history of the Gonzaga family, presented not without some narrative licence, see Bellonci, M., Segreti dei Gonzaga (Milan, 1991), pp. 44–103Google Scholar.

40 The sources are conveniently listed in Arnold, D. (rev. T. Carter), Monteverdi, The Master Musicians (London, 1990), p. 199Google Scholar. A particularly interesting case of a conflation of Rinuccini's and Anguillara's poetry is to be found in a cycle of twelve madrigals taking up just over a half of Claudio Pari's Il lamento d'Arianna. Quarto libro de' madrigali a cinque voci (Palermo: Maringo, 1619)Google Scholar. Pari opened his cycle with a setting of lines 783–7 from Rinuccini's L'Arianna, while for madrigals 2–12 he turned to Anguillara's Metamorfosi, viii, 117, 118 (lines 1–6 only), 131, 129, 133–6, 138, 140 and 141. In the introductory study to his edition of Pari (in the series Musiche Rinascimentali Siciliane, 1: Rome, 1970)Google Scholar, P. E. Carapezza failed to identify Anguillara as the author of these texts, which instead he labelled ‘anonymous verses of very little value, of the worst kind to be found in Italian literature of the period’, and ‘clumsy imitations of the rest of Rinuccini's very effective text’ (p. xv). Carapezza's introductory essay, printed in this edition in Italian and English, has been separately published as ‘L'ultimo oltramontano o vero l'antimonteverdi (Un esempio di musica reservata tra manierismo e barocco)’, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, 2 (1970), pp. 213–43 and 411–4Google Scholar. The identification of Anguillara as Pari's source has been made recently by Lorenzo Bianconi and, independently of him and at about the same time, by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, and I am grateful to both of them for communicating their discoveries to me.

41 Rinuccini may have based Arianna's ‘moral’ on Anguillara's ‘Ben cieco è 'l occhio mio, s'ancor non vede/ quanto puo donna ad uom prestar di fede’ (Metamorfosi, viii, 126.7–8), while Anguillara in turn based his version on Ovid, Fasti, 3.475, and Catullus, 64.143. I owe this point to Leofranc Holford-Strevens.

42 See the Preface to L'Euridice in Solerti, , Gli albori, ii, p. 107Google Scholar. The text of the Preface with a parallel English translation is available in a recent edition: Composing Opera, ed. Carter, T. and Szweykowski, Z. M., Practica Musica 2 (Cracow, 1994), pp. 16–19Google Scholar. The English text only is available in Strunk, O., Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, ed. Treitler, L. (New York and London, 1998), pp. 659–62Google Scholar.

43 See, for example, Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ii.v.3: ‘Quorum omnium endecasillabum videtur esse superbius, tam temporis occupatione quam capacitate sententie constructionis et vocabulorum’ (‘Of all these lines the most splendid is clearly the hendecasyllable, both for its measured movement and for the scope it offers for subject-matter, constructions and vocabulary’). Dante, , De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, S. (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 60–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 The text quoted here restores line 837', missing from Solerti's and Fassò's editions.

45 ‘And all the while I cried out “Theseus!” along the entire shore, and the hollow rocks sent back your name to me; as often as I called out for you, so often did the place itself call out your name.’ Trans. Showerman, G. in Ovid, Heroides and Amores (see note 28 above), p. 123Google Scholar.

46 Preface to L'Euridice; see note 42 above.

47 In another paper (‘Pastorale o melodramma?’; see note 16 above) I have proposed a different explanation of why Rinuccini does not use echo in L'Arianna, arguing that the relationships and symmetries in the layout of the play militated against it. This may suggest my uncertainty as to how this particular aspect of the play may be interpreted, and I freely admit that my thoughts on this subject are not yet fixed. Meanwhile, Ruth HaCohen has proposed yet another explanation, anchoring her argument not in the structure or genre but within a wider context of symbolic representation. I am grateful to Dr HaCohen for allowing me to see her as yet unpublished paper ‘Sympathetic Echoes: Musical Responses to Narcissus's Reflections’.

48 ‘Ariadne moved us because she was a woman, and similarly Orpheus because he was a man, not a wind.’ Letters of Claudia Monteverdi, ed. Stevens, , p. 110Google Scholar.

49 J. Sannazaro, Arcadia, Eclogue vi, lines 4–8. See also Sannazaro, J., Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Nash, J. (Detroit, 1966), p. 114Google Scholar. A good example of the contrast between the Arcadian tranquillity and the turmoil of war is the episode of Erminia's encounter with the shepherd in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, xi, 6–9.

50 Here quoted in the English translation as printed in Strunk, , Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, p. 541Google Scholar. G. C. Monteverdi's original reads ‘e appogierarsi parimente sopra il comando del oratione, signora principal del arte nella perfetione della melodia considerate’. See Monteverdi, C., Lettere, dediche e prefazioni, ed. De'Paoli, D. (Rome, 1973), p. 401Google Scholar, and the facsimile reproduction in Monteverdi, , Tutte le opere, ed. Malipiero, F., x (Asolo, 1929; repr. Vienna, 1965), n.p.Google Scholar

51 Following the established convention, the words which use the international phonetic script appear in square brackets. The sign [:] indicates length. I am grateful to Prof. Giulio Lepschy for helping me to understand the historical aspects of the accentuation of ‘Teseo’.

52 See Petrarch, Trionfo d'Amore, cap. 1.116, and Trionfo della Fama, cap. 2.93: ‘Teséo’; Trionfo della Fama, cap. 2.31: ‘Téseo’. For a discussion of the shifts in the tonic accent, including a reference to the stress of ‘Teseo’, See Menichetti, A., Metrica italiana. Fondamenti metrici, prosodia, rima (Padua, 1993), p. 512–14Google Scholar.

53 The words ‘una bell'aria da ballo’, and ‘un'altra parte de’ Soldati prese ad accompagnar il suono, e'l ballo con le seguenti parole' refer to ‘Spiega omai, giocondo Nume’ at the beginning of Scene 8. See Follino, , Compendio, p. 63Google Scholar, and Solerti, , Gli albori, ii, p. 185Google Scholar.

54 See ‘Ariadne’, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn, ed. Hornblower, S. and Spawforth, A. (Oxford, 1996), p. 156Google Scholar.

55 ‘As thou hast shared my bed, so shalt thou share my name, for in thy changed state thy name shall be Libera.’ Quoted after Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex. Edited with a translation and commentary by Sir Frazer, J. G. (London, 1929), i, pp. 148–9Google Scholar. For Frazer's commentary, see iii, pp. 109–10.

56 Compare Ovid, , Fasti, iii, 512–13Google Scholar: ‘sintque tuae tecum faciam monumenta coronae, /Volcanus Veneri quam dedit, illa tibi’ (‘and I will see to it that with thee there shall be a memorial of thy crown, that crown which Vulcan gave to Venus, and she to thee’). See Fasti, ed. Frazer, ibid.

57 Anguillara, , Metamorfosi, viii, 108Google Scholar.