The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

School of Music

RECOVERING QUEEN PENELOPE:

A CULTURAL AND MUSICAL REINTERPRETATION OF MONTEVERDI’S

IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA

A Thesis in

Musicology

by

Kyle Masson

© 2014 Kyle Masson

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

May 2014

The thesis of Kyle Masson was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Marica Tacconi Professor of Musicology Thesis Advisor

Charles Youmans Associate Professor of Musicology

Sue Haug Professor of Music Director of the School of Music

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

iii

ABSTRACT

Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) constitutes a unique source for

understanding Venetian norms concerning the nature of marriage, love, and the emergence of

public opera as a popular form of entertainment in 17th-century Venice. Monteverdi’s first foray

into public opera demonstrates the composer’s ability to adapt to shifting expectations from the

audience while fulfilling his own personal aesthetic. This study seeks to understand the plurality

of meanings embodied in a particular character, Queen Penelope, in an effort to recover period

listening practices and receptions of operatic character. In the historiography of Il ritorno studies,

Penelope acquires a degree of autonomy more closely correlated to her Homeric counterpart than

her textual and musical treatment suggests. Augmented by an investigation of the social

conditions and aesthetic shifts of the time, a study of Penelope’s music in its dramatic contexts

reveals a systematic objectification of her character. By examining these representations as

deliberate actions of the composer, one concludes that the opera focuses more on women as

objectified symbols worthy of pity than on chastity, prudence, constancy, or any other such

virtues.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF MUSIC EXAMPLES ............................................................................................... vi  

LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................. viii  

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................... ix  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... x  

Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1  

A Brief Synopsis ...................................................................................................... 4  

Chapter 1 Complex Origins: The Sources of Il ritorno .......................................................... 6  

A Living Document .......................................................................................................... 6  Sequencing the Sources .................................................................................................... 10  

Chapter 2 Monteverdi as Editor: What Do the People Want? ................................................ 12  

Monteverdi: Deus ex Machina ......................................................................................... 13  Shifting Expectations: An Appeal to Modern Tastes ....................................................... 18  

Chapter 3 Signifying Penelope: Monteverdi’s New Prologue ................................................ 29  

A Signifying Prologue ...................................................................................................... 31  A Homeric Heroine .......................................................................................................... 43  

Chapter 4 Penelope’s Lament: Blistering Tirade? .................................................................. 48  

The Lament in Scholarship .............................................................................................. 50  Penelope’s Lament: Formal Structure .............................................................................. 53  “Torna, deh torna, Ulisse” ............................................................................................... 57  The Lament in 1640: Emblem, Convention ..................................................................... 63  Juxtaposed Laments: Penelope, Ulysses, and the Question of Agency ........................... 67  

Il Lamento d’Ulisse .................................................................................................. 68  

Chapter 5 The Accademia degli Incogniti and the Spirit of the Times ................................... 78  

A Little German Pamphlet ............................................................................................... 79  Badoaro and the Accademia degli Incogniti .................................................................... 81  

The Incogniti, Women, and Venice ......................................................................... 83  Carnival Culture in Venice ............................................................................................... 86  

Chapter 6 Tempted, Liberated, Conquered: The Multifaceted Queen .................................... 91  

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Penelope’s Chastity: A Sexual Death .............................................................................. 92  Penelope’s Problematic Companion ........................................................................ 94  

Warrior and Lover ............................................................................................................ 96  Penelope Tempted ............................................................................................................ 98  

Penelope and Her Maid ............................................................................................ 99  Penelope and the Suitors .......................................................................................... 102  

Act II, Scene 12 ................................................................................................................ 106  Act III: An Imbalance of Power ....................................................................................... 110  

Scene 10: Penelope’s Final Capitulation .................................................................. 113  

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 124  

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 128  

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LIST OF MUSIC EXAMPLES

Example 2-1: L’Orfeo Prologue – Io la Musica son ................................................................ 25  

Example 3-1: Prologue – Human Frailty’s Opening Line ....................................................... 31  

Example 3-2: Prologue – The Power of Love ......................................................................... 32  

Example 3-3: Prologue – Ritornello for Human Frailty (in d) ............................................... 33  

Example 3-4: Prologue – Ritornello for Amore (in a) ............................................................ 33  

Example 3-5: Act I, Scene 1 – The Music of Euryclea ............................................................ 34  

Example 3-6: Prologue – The Weight of Mortality ................................................................. 35  

Example 3-7: Prologue – Time’s Lyricism .............................................................................. 41  

Example 3-8: Prologue – The Madrigal of the Allegories ....................................................... 42  

Example 4-1: Act I, Scene 1 – Opening Sinfonia .................................................................... 58  

Example 4-2: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope’s Opening Line ........................................................ 59  

Example 4-3: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope’s Trademark Key ..................................................... 60  

Example 4-4: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope Longs for Ulysses ................................................... 61  

Example 4-5: Lamento d’Arianna, mm. 76-84 ........................................................................ 66  

Example 4-6: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses Blames Himself ......................................................... 69  

Example 4-7: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses Addresses Slumber .................................................... 70  

Example 4-8: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses’s Curse of the Phaeacians .......................................... 71  

Example 6-1: Act III, Scene 1 – Iro Begins His Lament ......................................................... 95  

Example 6-2: Act I, Scene 7 – Ulysses Blesses His Good Fortune ......................................... 97  

Example 6-3: Act I, Scene 8 – Melantho’s Aria ...................................................................... 100  

Example 6-4: Act I, Scene 8 – Penelope Confirms Her Grief ................................................. 101  

Example 6-5: Act II, Scene 5 – Antinous Sings of Love and Beauty ...................................... 103  

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Example 6-6: Act II, Scene 5 – The Beginning of Penelope’s Discord ................................... 104  

Example 6-7: Act II, Scene 5 – Penelope Feels Love’s Heat .................................................. 104  

Example 6-8: Act II, Scene 5 – Penelope Maintains Her Vow (mm. 143-5 and 159-63) ....... 105  

Example 6-9: Act II, Scene 12 – Penelope Acquiesces ........................................................... 107  

Example 6-10: Act II, Scene 12 – Penelope Announces the Challenge of the Bow ............... 109  

Example 6-11: Act III, Scene 2 – Penelope Grieves over the Suitors ..................................... 112  

Example 6-12: Act III, Scene 1 – Iro Ends His Life ................................................................ 112  

Example 6-13: Act III, Scene 10 – Ulysses Coaxes His Wife ................................................. 117  

Example 6-14: Act II, Scene 12 – Ulysses Strings His Bow ................................................... 118  

Example 6-15: Act III, Scene 10 – Penelope Rejoices ............................................................ 120  

Example 6-16: Act III, Scene 10 – The Final Duet ................................................................. 121

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2-1: Allegory of Divine Providence (Triumph of Divine Providence) by Pietro da Cortona ............................................................................................................................. 20  

Figure 2-2: Allegory of Divine Wisdom by Andrea Sacchi ..................................................... 22

Figure 4-1: Formal Structure of Penelope’s Lament ............................................................... 57  

Figure 5-1: The Emblem of the Accademia degli Incogniti .................................................... 82  

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1-2: The Prologue of Il ritorno – Allegorical Comparisons ......................................... 9  

Table 3-1: The Keys of the Il ritorno Prologue ...................................................................... 39  

Table 4-1: The Formal Alterations to Penelope’s Lament ...................................................... 54  

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Throughout this process, I have incurred several debts, both professional and personal.

The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the significant insight and

support given to me by Dr. Marica Tacconi. It was her class on Claudio Monteverdi and her

passion for the composer that sparked my initial interest in music of the Baroque Era, and for that

I am deeply indebted to her. As my thesis advisor, she has proved consistently patient with my

oft-unrealistic deadlines, writer’s block, and many of the other issues that plague prospective

academics. Her advice helped me to navigate these and other challenges. Throughout the

process, she asked insightful questions that allowed me to center my thoughts and keep a grip on

an ever-increasing load of conflicting source materials. This task would not have been completed

without Dr. Tacconi, and for that I am greatly indebted to her.

I also owe Dr. Charles Youmans, my academic advisor and second reader for this thesis,

my gratitude. His insights and understanding of my thought processes as a young scholar

encouraged me to place this thesis in context of a hopefully long career in academe.

Additionally, his comments on my writing helped me to avoid discussing complex concepts using

turgid prose. His mantras on clarity and conciseness not only influenced the writing of this thesis,

but will also serve me well in future work.

Thank you to Dr. Ellen Rosand, Dr. Tim Carter, and Dr. Wendy Heller, whose prolific

work on early Venetian opera helped me to frame my thoughts and arguments throughout the

writing of this thesis. I hope to one day attain their level of accomplishment within this field, and

cannot thank them enough for their inspiration.

xi

I wish to thank my family and friends, who over the years have stimulated my

imagination, fostered critical thinking skills, and encouraged a love of learning that has served me

well during my graduate studies. I thank them for their support of my academic decisions,

whether understood or not, and their ability to always help me keep things in perspective.

Finally, the constant support and unconditional love of Allyson Wunsche, my fiancée and

best friend, enabled me to persevere through the ups and downs of the writing process. This

thesis is dedicated to her.

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Introduction

In 1640 at Venice’s Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno

d’Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland) took the nascent commercial opera

business by storm, with successful runs in Venice and Bologna sparking a revival in the Floating

City the following year.1 Il ritorno not only continued the string of commercial successes at

Venice’s public opera houses, but also initiated a run of Monteverdi operas in the theatre that

included Le Nozze d’Enea e Lavinia (1641, hereafter Le Nozze), now lost, and L’incoronazione di

Poppea (1643, hereafter Poppea).

Perhaps surprisingly, Poppea receives the lion’s share of scholarly attention in this

critical developmental period of a young art form. While generally seen as better-written than the

preceding operas, past scholarship has also been drawn to the amorality of a tale in which a

courtesan seduces an emperor. Yet, as the title of Ellen Rosand’s comprehensive Monteverdi’s

Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy suggests, one can and should analyze these final operas by

Monteverdi as a conceptual unit.2 Viewed in this light, the necessity of understanding the

characters and themes of Il ritorno increases dramatically. If the political, social, and musical

constructs embodied in Poppea represent the culmination of a tripartite drama, one must examine

the roots, similarities, and differences of these constructs in the initial episode. This will reveal

potential dimensions of the works as a unit and explore larger themes of Venetian cultural life in

the early modern era.

At the center of this initial episode is a Classical female of great reputation: Queen 1 Until as recently as 2007, scholars had assumed that Il ritorno premiered at the Teatro di San

Cassiano. In his introduction to the critical edition, Rinaldo Alessandrini thanks Ellen Rosand for correcting this assumption in Chapter Three of Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

2 Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

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Penelope of Ithaca. Most scholars argue that she represents a paradigm of nuptial virtue, as she

does in the patriarchal society depicted by Homer in the Odyssey. As we will see, however,

Monteverdi’s Penelope ultimately personifies a flawed character, weak and frail. The questions

raised by a thorough analysis of Penelope’s dramatic and musical representations suggest an

abundance of conflicting statements about Venetian norms concerning love, women, and

morality.

In this study, I will scrutinize Penelope, the operatic heroine of Il ritorno, investigating

the ways in which she embodies specific political, social, and moral concepts valued by those

involved in creating this dramma per musica. My inquiry reveals an opera-going public

clamoring for spectacle, an intellectual and libertine elite fascinated by women, and a composer

who crafted a masterful drama as he explored the inherent tensions between music and language

on the operatic stage. All these elements combine to produce a profoundly altered Penelope, a

transformation from Classical paradigm to objectified symbol of Venice’s patriarchal code. She

becomes a woman with no voice, no self, until Ulysses, absent for twenty years, returns and

commands her to “release her tongue” (Act 3, scene IX: “sciogli, o lingua, deh sciogli”). By

textually and musically crafting an objectified Penelope, so vastly different from her Homeric

counterpart, librettist Giacomo Badoaro and Claudio Monteverdi provide modern audiences an

ideal lens through which to view the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of 17th-century

Venetian opera at its roots, and Monteverdi’s compositional style itself. Thus, since Penelope is

an object of pity, or perhaps even ridicule, one must reconsider her aesthetic function within the

opera, which in turn has profound implications for examining the historical reception of this

opera and for future manifestations of Il ritorno on the operatic stage.

In pursuit of these aims, this study will begin with an overview of the primary sources

relevant to Il ritorno. I will suggest a working chronology for an important restructuring of the

opera that occurred, I argue, sometime after the opera’s premiere. This in turn suggests a

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deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the librettist and/or the composer, resulting in a new

drama with new thematic and character emphases.

Afterwards, I will provide a brief discussion of the shift from private court opera to

public opera. The success of the new operatic venues depended largely on the whims of popular

taste. Although this sentiment bears more weight in subsequent decades of operatic productions

in Venice, one finds the origins of this sentiment even at the beginning of the genre. The need to

appeal to commercial tastes, I argue, affected Monteverdi’s conception of the opera’s plot and the

musical crafting of the opera’s characters.

In Chapter Three, we move to a discussion of Il ritorno’s “new and improved” Prologue,

where an analysis of the semiotic devices – musical and literary - embedded in the score

demonstrates Monteverdi’s emphasis on tonal relationships and in relating the Prologue to the

opera proper. This emphasis in turn signifies a focus on Penelope rather than Ulysses.3

Subsequently, I will suggest ways in which this shift reflects negatively on the events the

Prologue forecasts.

Subsequent chapters will focus on various important scenes that contribute to an accurate

assessment of how and what Penelope signified to audiences of the time. In a chapter on the

lament, I consider the ways in which the historiography of musical laments has in some way

obscured our understanding of them today. Additionally, I nod to past scholarship in assessing

the musical precedents of Baroque laments. However, I also suggest that Penelope’s lament

signals a new era for the genre, one in which Monteverdi recognized the lament as thoroughly

conventionalized, ripe for exploitation. In this light, I consider Penelope’s lament against another

prominent lament within the opera, showing how various dramatic and musical devices –

3 For the purposes of this study, I will use the Anglicized “Ulysses” when referring to the king of

Ithaca rather than the Italian “Ulisse.” However, “Ulisse” is maintained in any quotations from sources that use the Italianate spelling, as well as in any quotations from the libretto or score.

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decisions on the part of Monteverdi – help deprive Penelope of agency by marking her as

anachronistic, amusical, and an issue to be confronted by the other characters of the opera.

The final phase explores the assault of Love on Penelope through the efforts of various

characters in the opera. There are, I argue, two ways of reading this assault. On a more

immediate level, one can see the assault as indicative of debates swirling around women in the

Venetian academic circles to which the librettist belonged. However, I will also suggest the

possiblity of a more politicized viewing of Penelope’s seduction that demonstrates Venice’s

position both in Italy and abroad, As we will see, Penelope’s music and language plays a key role

in framing Il ritorno’s position within this polemic.

The study will culminate with an investigation of Penelope’s two capitulations to Love in

Acts II and III. Rather than reinscribe Penelope’s chastity, the music and drama emphasizes

Penelope’s weaknesses, her utter dependence on male authority, and therefore an utter lack of

self.

A Brief Synopsis

Giacomo Badoaro, the librettist, sets the scene of Il ritorno in the Argomento, located in

librettos I-Vmc 564 and I-Vmc 220 (see Table 1-1 below):

Ulisse, together with the other Greeks having buried the city of Troy in ashes, was forced by various misfortunes during the journey home, to wander at length. In the course of these wanderings, Ulisse incurred the wrath of Neptune since, to escape from a cave where he and his companions were imprisoned, he blinded the one-eyed Polyphemus, son of the God Neptune. As punishment, the indignant Neptune condemned Ulisse to an even longer and more difficult journey home.4

As the Argomento reveals, Badoaro follows the general story given by Homer. Finding himself

back on Ithaca, courtesy of the Phaeacians, Ulysses encounters Minerva, his protector. She 4 Alan Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,” libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, English

version by Anne Ridler, ed. by Alan Curtis (London: Novello Publishing, 2002), xxv.

5

disguises him as a beggar, whereupon he meets his old servant Eumete and his son Telemachus,

to whom he reveals himself. Upon arriving at his palace, Ulysses finds his wife Penelope beset

by a number of suitors who seek her hand and the kingdom that comes with it. Through

Minerva’s inspiration, Penelope institutes the challenge of the bow, which Ulysses wins. He then

turns the bow upon the suitors, slaying them and reclaiming his kingdom. Penelope, however,

remains skeptical that Ulysses is her returned husband. Finally, Ulysses describes the

embroidered coverlet on their bed, a detail known only to him and Penelope. Having finally

convinced Penelope of his identity, Ulysses urges Penelope to break into song, and the opera ends

with a love duet between the reunited lovers.5

5 One notices that Badoaro’s Argomento does not actually begin where the opera itself begins. He

neglects to mention the opening Prologue, Penelope’s lament (Act I, Scene 1), or the scene between Melantho and Eurymachus (Act I, Scene 2). He does mention exactly why Neptune (Nettuno) is angry with Ulysses (Ulisse). Later in the Argomento, he states: “Meanwhile Penelope, anguished and mournful over her husband’s long absence, as well as over having to counter the suitors’ amorous advances, is also annoyingly urged by her lascivious handmaid Melantho to forget Ulysses and love another.” However, given its context, this sentence seems to refer to Act I, Scene 8, in which Penelope briefly implores heaven to aid her suffering and instead Melantho tries to sway her.

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Chapter 1

Complex Origins: The Sources of Il ritorno

As with any artistic object, Il ritorno signifies to the viewer on several different levels. A

purely closed reading of the opera, while useful, prevents one from comprehending the full scope

of the work’s development. In the case of public opera in the 17th century, deliberately composed

as ephemera, a deeper understanding of the specific contexts surrounding the work becomes

critical to our understanding today. While capturing the “spirit of the times” remains implausible,

an attempted reconstruction can help to explain how the multifaceted audiences of the time may

have understood the themes of Il ritorno as embodied in its characters. The sources of Il ritorno

offer insight into the compositional process both before and after the opera’s premiere, leading us

to new insights regarding the themes illustrated by this operatic epic.

A Living Document

When addressing operatic characterization in Il ritorno, the issue of its librettos looms

large. A thorough understanding of this topic is critical to our understanding of the opera today,

and imperative to a proper contextualization of the opera. Ellen Rosand suggests one of the main

concerns:

As the case of Poppea attests, the distinctive and cohesive character of the Venetian operatic tradition is exemplified by the nature of its surviving documents. These fall into two general categories: manuscript and printed, categories that themselves implicate a set of further distinctions, between the musical and the textual, the professional and the public.6

In the case of Il ritorno, the problem centers on the absence of any extant autographs or printed

texts of the libretto; no library contains any example of “public” source material. Still, Alan

6 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1991), 25.

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Curtis tells us that the Il ritorno librettos “circulated in manuscripts in literary circles long after

Monteverdi’s music had been forgotten.”7 Unfortunately, one finds further problems with each of

these manuscripts: they vary in content. The result has been an inability to establish a definitive

text for the libretto.8

Table 1-1: The Libretto Manuscripts of Il ritorno9

Source Location Listed Performance

Date

Chronological Provenance (?) of

Source I-Mb 3077 Milano, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense 1641 18th century I-Mb 5672 Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense 1641/164210 18th century I-Pci Padua, Biblioteca civica 1641 18th century I-Rig Rome, Instituto storico germanico 1641 18th century I-Vcg Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr 1641 18th century I-Vmc 192 Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr 1641 18th century I-Vmc 220 Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr 1641 18th century I-Vmc 564 Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr None listed 17th cent. (confirmed) I-Vnm 909 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 1641 18th century I-Vnm 1294 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 1641 (Probably) 18th cent. I-Vnm 3449 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 1641 18th century US-LA II Los Angeles, University of California None listed 17th cent. (unconfirmed)11

The relationship between the extant libretto sources and the musical manuscript further

complicates matters. One must focus on these differences, because they emphasize a conversion

from potential acclaim of Penelope to pity for her character. The reasons for the alterations seem

7 Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” viii.

8 See Claudio Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, English version by Anne Ridler, ed. Alan Curtis (London: Novello Publishing, 2002); and Claudio Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, ed. Rinaldo Alessandrini (New York: Bärenreiter Kassel, 2007). Curtis provides variances between the librettos and musical manuscript at the bottom of the relevant page in the score. Alessandrini provides a useful critical commentary on pp. 156-60 that lists corrections to possible scribal errors in the musical manuscript.

9 See Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” xx, and Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 53. Both contain tables with the source information, although Rosand’s includes a greater level of detail than Curtis’s. Rosand’s table is the most recent and therefore up to date. Also see Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre. Although Carter does not provide a table, he references the source names when relevant to his discussion, particularly I-Vmc 564.

10 The manuscript contains both dates. It lists “1641” on the inside title page, but the gives “1642” on the cover.

11 See Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” xi. Carter suggests that the “florid script” of this source indicates it originated in the mid-17th century. However, subsequent scholarship has been unable to corroborate this claim, and it therefore remains at best an educated guess.

8

to be twofold. First, they brought the opera into closer alignment with Monteverdi’s personal

dramatic aesthetic. Secondly, they resonated with the aesthetic of contemporary audiences,

which highlights Monteverdi as a craftsman, or perhaps even a salesman in the new artistic order.

This transformation rests in part on a significant change to the Prologue of Il ritorno that

I suggest occurred after the opera’s premiere. As a result of this alteration, the thematic emphasis

of Il ritorno might have been quite different in ten Venetian performances that occurred in 1640

than in revivals in Bologna that same year. A subsequent Venetian revival in 1641 (a rare

occurrence indeed) confirms the varied themes. In general, however, scholars have failed to

acknowledge this significant alteration in their interpretations of the opera. Chafe provides an

example in his work on the use of tonal allegory in Il ritorno: “The most obvious general

allegorical feature in Monteverdi’s operas is, of course, the relationship of the prologue to the

dramatic action. The prologue to Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria sets three allegorical ‘deities,’

Time, Fortune, and Love, in opposition to the human condition, represented allegorically by

Human Frailty.”12 Chafe does not acknowledge the complexity of the Prologue’s development.

For years, musicologists and theorists like Chafe focused predominantly on the text of Il ritorno’s

musical manuscript, even though only one musical manuscript survives, located in the

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.13 Thus, our only surviving source covers what

Rosand would call the “professional” category. Reconstructing public consumption of the opera,

although essential, becomes exponentially more challenging. To complicate matters further, this

12 Eric Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 261. 13 One would think the sole musical manuscript might be somewhere in Italy, if not Venice itself.

There are, after all, no records of a Viennese performance, while current data suggests frequent Italian performances (hence the “improbable” location of the score). However, Curtis suggests an aristocratic collector may have acquired the manuscript sometime later in the 17th century, resulting in its Viennese location.

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score is also the sole representative of the Prologue discussed by prevailing scholarship.

Interestingly then, its “uncertain provenance […] has caused scant musicological anxiety.”14

As stated, only the musical manuscript represents Human Frailty opposed by the trio of

Time, Fortune, and Love (the TFL Prologue). In every libretto manuscript, Prudence, Fate, and

Fortitude argue about their respective roles in the lives of men (the FPF Prologue).15

14 Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 2002),

237. 15 Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” viii.

Table 1-2: The Prologue of Il ritorno – Allegorical Comparisons

Prologue: Extant Libretti

Prologue: Music Manuscript

Allegorical

Figures

Prudence Human Frailty

Fate Time

Fortitude Fortune

Love

What, then, is the provenance of the musical manuscript? Does it predate the libretto

manuscripts, or is it a response to the libretto sources, which may have had music associated with

them at one time? If one can reasonably assert, as I do, that the alteration occurred after the

premiere – that Time, Fortune, and Love replaced Prudence, Fate, and Fortitude – then one can

justify an interpretive analysis of the existing Prologue. The crucial question omitted by scholars

is what motivated the alterations. We wonder whether the author (Monteverdi?) of the new

Prologue sought to fulfill specific aesthetic criteria that the old Prologue simply failed to address,

or if there were more practical concerns. As is most often the case, the true answer probably lies

somewhere in between. Regardless, the slippage between thematic emphases gives rise to the

version known today, and bears heavily on how one interprets Penelope’s role, or rather lack of a

role, in the opera.

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Sequencing the Sources

Based on the current state of research, establishing a chronology of the sources of Il

ritorno remains problematic. Yet determining or at least suggesting a general sequence of events

is crucial to understanding the differences amongst the extant sources. Thankfully, scholars have

established some basic facts about the libretto manuscripts:

As far as the date and venue are concerned, the librettos disagree among themselves, and therefore the authority of any one of them is undermined by the others. […]. But their points of agreement are even more significant: indeed, despite numerous small textual differences among the Ritorno librettos, they confirm the major discrepancies with the score. Their title pages may be far from uniform, but the texts themselves agree in most important particulars.16

As Rosand’s statement suggests, the musical score adds another wrinkle to the tale. According to

Curtis it was “most likely copied in Italy some decades earlier,” but “first came to Vienna around

1675, perhaps together with a score of similar format and nearly identical binding, Cavalli’s 1643

opera L’Egisto (Mus. Ms. 16452), copied by his wife, Maria, who died in 1652.”17 No other

research has emerged to question this claim, but even Curtis admits to its speculative nature.

Additionally, an arrival date in Vienna over thirty years after the premiere performance hardly

explains the differences between the music and libretto manuscripts. The differences are

extensive, to say the least. Strikingly, the libretto manuscripts all contain five acts, whereas the

musical manuscript only contains three. Secondly, as mentioned, the Prologues differ drastically

in content.

The claims of this study, which focus heavily on dramatic and aesthetic concerns, assume

that the FPF Prologue actually predates the TFL Prologue. I base this conclusion on the recorded

performance history of the work. Three performance runs of Il ritorno concern this study: the

16 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 52. 17 Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” xi. Rosand contends Curtis’s claim, stating, “At present it is

impossible to know how it ended up in Vienna – along with some other Venetian opera scores, including Cavalli’s Egisto.”

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premiere performance, which occurred in 1640 in Venice at the SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and ran for

ten performances; a run in Bologna (presumably) by Francesco Manelli and his company later

that same year (1640); and a return to Venice the following Carnival season, resulting in one of

the few operatic revivals to occur in the first decades of public opera.

According to Curtis’s hypothetical timeline the alterations occurred prior to the 1640

Venetian performances. This would suggest that audiences perhaps never saw an operatic

treatment of Badoaro’s original libretto.18 However, Rosand reveals that the title pages of seven

of the librettos mention that a performance had already taken place. In conjunction with the listed

date on almost all of the libretti – 1641 – this fact would seem to support a performance the

previous year; the libretti reflect the revival rather than the premiere. Moreover, scholarly

analysis of the musical score has shown an original five-act division subsequently altered to

include three acts.19 As the libretti all contain five acts, this cements the belief that the score

followed the libretti.20 If this is the case, the reasons for the alteration come to the fore. By

understanding these motivations, it becomes possible to capture a more holistic image of the

meaning of the opera’s characters.

18 To be fair, Curtis doubts the occurrence of a 1641 revival. However, in Monteverdi’s Last

Operas, Ellen Rosand demonstrates that this performance actually did happen. 19 No definitive reason for this alteration has been provided, although presumably it has largely to

do with the appeals to modern taste that one finds throughout the writings of Incogniti members during this period. The tension between five acts – the classical norm – and three acts, which were more appealing to early modern audiences, was not restricted to northern Italy. In his translation of Ovid’s Amores, English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe writes, “We which were Ovid’s five books, now are three, For these before the rest preferreth he: If reading five thou plainst of tediousnesse, Two tane away, thy labor will be lesse.” 20 Another possibility regarding the relationship between libretti and score is that the score solely reflects the Bolognese performance of Il ritorno, while the libretti reflect performances in Venice. It would seem that the seven libretti that refer to an earlier Venetian performance support this claim in that they are attached to the five-act play without the alterations found in the score. Tim Carter explains in depth how the three-act opera creates a Penelope-centric show, although I disagree with his reasons for her centricity. With this in mind, the piece of evidence we have supporting a 1640 Venetian production – a letter from Incognito writer Federico Malipiero – suggests a Venetian emphasis on Ulysses, praising the “prodigious efforts of Homer’s hero presented in recitative.” Although further documentation supporting this claim has yet to appear, it seems worth mentioning as a plausible alternative.

Chapter 2

Monteverdi as Editor: What Do the People Want?

In the literature on Il ritorno, one finds a consistent emphasis on Monteverdi’s role in the

alterations to the opera. Like the proverbial deus ex machina, Monteverdi appears to intervene on

the behalf of artistic sensibilities, saving the opera from the bumbling librettist and demonstrating

his role as a creative genius. Alan Curtis emphasizes this aspect of the alterations in his

hypothetical timeline:

Monteverdi set most of this text [Badoaro’s original libretto], re-arranging the opening scene, eliminating much unnecessary or undramatic dialogue, cutting even the comically charming attempt of Irus to string the bow (praying to Bacchus after the suitors have unsuccessfully invoked Cupid, Mars and Beauty) in the interest of maintaining dramatic pacing, and requesting from Badoaro (or an assistant), a new, more dramatic, more powerfully emotional as well as symbolic prologue, for the ten Venetian performances during Carnival in 1640 [which would include the premiere performance].21

Similarly Rosand, an unashamed Monteverdi apologist, describes her motivations for forging a

link between Monteverdi’s three public operas:

But I confess to being tired of the recent temporizing, of the constant reminders of the contingent aspects of the sources, by scholars readier to dismantle than construct, to puncture rather than reify or reinscribe. […] – but, considered together, these sources nonetheless demonstrate the hand of a master musical dramatist.22

I do not intend to refute such claims in the current study. Still, it seems prudent to identify what

might have been some of Monteverdi’s underlying aesthetic assumptions when he executed the

changes to the libretto. Indeed, one can easily view Monteverdi’s personal aesthetic as fueled by

the changing aesthetic throughout Italy at the time, which manifested itself in the public reception

21 Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” xx. Rosand has touched on some of the issues in Curtis’s

timeline in Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 49-58. Most notably, she notes that Curtis has doubts about whether or not a 1641 revival of Il ritorno actually occurred (56). As the quote shows, he seems to think the changes occurred prior to the first performance of the show, while I suggest that the changes did not happen until at least the Bolognese performances, and perhaps even the 1641 revival.

22 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, xvii.

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of new works. I do not, however, raise this fact to refute Rosand’s assertions of Monteverdi’s

superb skill as a dramatist, or to deny that he acted as a key player in the fashioning of the operas

as they appear in their “final” form. In fact, it was precisely his skills as a dramatist as well as his

own aesthetic preferences that motivated the drastic thematic shifts in Il ritorno. Most

importantly, the TFL Prologue, guided by Monteverdi, signifies new meanings for the opera as a

whole. Thus rather than a useless criticism of the work, exploring potential motivations behind

this theme-changing alteration helps us recover potential meanings of the work for contemporary

audiences.

Monteverdi: Deus ex Machina

Unsurprisingly, one can easily affirm Monteverdi’s role in the establishment of the opera

as we view it today. The birth of public opera gave Monteverdi the ideal opportunity to preach

his well-developed aesthetic creed to a larger populace.23 Perhaps surprisingly then, Monteverdi

initially avoided the genre.24 Instead, in 1637, Francesco Manelli’s L’Andromeda premiered at the

Teatro San Cassiano, setting the stage, so to speak, for the whirlwind of operatic activity that

23 See Denis Stevens, ed., The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, trans. Denis Stevens (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1995). For some of Monteverdi’s most quoted aesthetic claims, such as referring to the “just lament” of Arianna, see Monteverdi’s communication with Alessandro Striggio, placed chronologically throughout the book. In addition, a modest consumption of Monteverdi’s music offers the best exposure to his aesthetic preferences.

24 See Nino Pirrotta, “Monteverdi and the Problems of Opera,” Music in Culture (1962): 251, and Ellen Rosand, “The Bow of Ulysses,” The Journal of Musicology 12 (Summer 1994): 376-77. Rosand notes that the contracts of the two musicians preceding Monteverdi as maestro di cappella at the Basilica di San Marco forbade participation in commercial ventures. Writers have presented multiple other reasons for Monteverdi’s abstention over the years as well, including that he had recently taken holy orders, he still had to fulfill contractual obligations at San Marco, and that he was over 70 years of age. The real reason will perhaps remain unknown, and is most likely a combination of these suggestions. I find it likely, however, that even though Monteverdi’s contract did not specifically prevent him from taking on commercial ventures, it was probably not encouraged. Additionally, public opera being a new institution, Monteverdi probably wished to gauge the potential of the genre before putting his reputation on the line.

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followed in La Serenissima.25 Yet in the eyes of many, including members of the omnipresent

Accademia degli Incogniti (discussed further in Chapter Five) the productions lacked the quality

the genre deserved. As Giacomo Badoaro elaborated in a letter to Monteverdi included with

libretto I-Vmc 564:

From the beginning it was not to compete with those luminaries who these days are setting forth their compositions in the theatres of Venice that I undertook to write ‘Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,’ but rather to incite your Lordship’s virtues to make known to the people of Venice that where strong emotions are concerned, there is a vast difference between a painted image of the sun and the sun itself. […] Finally completed, I gave you my work so that my poetical perseverance might unleash your musical passion, knowing that even the vaporous clouds in the sky can be clad in stellar vestments: from which I hoped that my verses, when painted by your harmony, might be brought to pass for praiseworthy. For in truth the world knows that I use my pen to overcome idleness rather than to seek glory.26

In poetic fashion, Badoaro shifts all the praise for Il ritorno onto the composer, Monteverdi. In

this way Badoaro maintained the quasi-mysterious position of Incogniti members in society, even

while he traversed the highest social and political circles of Venice as a member of the Capi of

the Council of Ten – a powerful Venetian governing body.

Despite his false modesty, Badoaro nevertheless sheds light on Monteverdi’s tendency to

significantly alter the source material presented to him by the librettist.27 This in turn might lend

25 Although opera was eventually pursued as a profitable venture, one must remember that L’Andromeda and Manelli’s next opera, La maga fulminata, were produced at the expense of the performers. Additionally, although the Teatro S. Cassiano had opened its doors to the public, it was still owned by the Tron family, one of the wealthiest noble families in Venice.

26 Giacomo Badoaro, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (libretto), quoted in Alan Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,” xxi. “Non per farmi concorrente di quelli ingegni che negli anni adesso hanno pubblicato le loro composizioni ne’ veneti teatri, ma per eccitare la virtú di Vostria Signoria a far conoscer a questa cittá che nel calore degl’affeti vi é gran da un sol vero a un sol dipinto, mi diedi da principio a comporre Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. […]. Perfezionate alfine, a lei le donai, acció con il mio poetico perseverare sfogasse il Suo musicale furore; sapendo che anco I vapori aerie colassú vestono d’espresso abiti di stelle: da che sperai i miei versi, raccoloriti dall’armonia di Lei, fossero portati a passare per rigaurdevoli. Ad ogni modo, il mondo sa che la mia penna combatte per vincer l’ozio e non per guadagnar gloria.” One should note that this letter survives in only one of the extant librettos (I-Vmc 564), and does not precede the music manuscript. Wolfgang Osthoff used this discovery to prove Monteverdi’s authorship of Il ritorno. Additionally, Alan Curtis suggests that this libretto seems to have been copied close to the actual 1640 premiere, as opposed to other libretto manuscripts, most of which were copied in the 18th century. Rosand confirms this in Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 53.

27 I label Badoaro’s modesty false because it overzealously deflects attention from his own efforts, which actually has the effect of highlighting his role in the process. The writings of the Incogniti are rife

15

credence to the notion that the libretto manuscripts predate the score used today. Denis Stevens

remarks on Monteverdi’s relationship with his librettists:

He admired their genius, prized their friendship, enhanced their creations, and never ceased to rewrite, rearrange, and refurbish what they so willingly gave him. No mean judge of literary talent, he was for that very reason rarely afraid to criticize – with intent to improve – whatever came to hand; and the results invariably justified the means.28

Friends of the composer undoubtedly found an enthusiastic and energetic participant in the music

business, but one who demanded complete control over the aesthetic process.29

Of course, the propensity for editing librettos to suit the composer’s needs was nothing

new, and it was hardly unique to Monteverdi. John and Beth Glixon describe the collaborative

nature of operatic endeavors in some detail, noting: “The text of a libretto was still subject to

change even after the author had turned it over to the composer and later, to the printer. Quite

often, it became necessary during the composition of the score, or during rehearsals, to cut out

sections of text, especially portions intended to be set as recitative.”30 Like a modern day

screenplay adapter, composers edited the story to suit their specific dramatic and musical needs.

Even though Il ritorno never made it to the printers to be published, the discrepancy between the

libretto manuscripts and score manuscript are enough to reveal an intentionally malleable

product.

Above, Badoaro ostensibly establishes an aesthetic hierarchy; his writing suggests the

final result belongs more to Monteverdi than himself.31 As he later states: “We admire with great

with these types of constructions. I find it odd that a group supposedly taken with secrecy and would publish a pamphlet called “The Glory of the Incogniti,” which included a list of members – most of them actually non-Venetian – along with brief biographies.

28 Stevens, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, 318. 29 Generally, scholars accept this as the best evidence that the new Prologue represents

Monteverdi’s influence, especially in light of other verified editorial decisions, many of which I will discuss in subsequent chapters.

30 Jonathan Glixon and Beth Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 125.

31 Ibid. I use the term “ostensibly” because in spite of Monteverdi’s clear importance both behind the scenes of public opera prior to Il ritorno and in his actual operas, one cannot avoid the following statement by Rosand: “As printed scenarios, librettos, and reports of performances make increasingly clear,

16

wonder such concerting of voices and instruments, yet not without disquiet, for I no longer

recognise this work, which continues to be applauded in spite of its small merits, as my own.”32

Clearly, Badoaro confirms Monteverdi’s role in editing the work, and indeed supports it, given

the improved quality of the final product.

All of this evidence serves one purpose: to demonstrate that someone – almost

undoubtedly Monteverdi – deliberately sought to tease out specific themes he felt the original

libretto did not emphasize heavily enough. If viewed practically, the change makes sense, and

demonstrates Monteverdi’s sense of the newly public nature of his art. One can see with ease that

the TFL Prologue establishes greater emotional stakes in the drama. It creates an antagonistic

relationship between the deities and humanity that Ulysses, a mortal man, must work to

overcome.33 The Prologue in the libretto manuscripts blatantly foretells the ultimate triumph of

Ulysses – hardly the most gripping beginning for an audience. As Tim Carter, one of the few to

address these alterations, explains:

The prologue containing Fato, Fortezza, and Prudenza proclaims the power of fate over men, the uselessness of bravery and prudence without the support of Fate, before anticipating the events of the opera to come: that Ulisse will overcome travails and dangers, that he will be supported by Minerva, that he will reach his homeland safely, and will regain his wife, and that Nettuno will be placated.34

Even before the opera ends, the audience knows the outcome. If this were not enough, one can

observe the disparate ending between the libretti and score as well. In the libretti, an Ithacan

chorus proclaims the victory of returned Ulysses, singing:

the librettist was considered "l'auttore." It was his text that was immortalized through print—usually, as we know, at his own expense (Appendix II.6bb)—and his name that was associated with the opera in the mind of the public.

32 Giacomo Badoaro, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (libretto), quoted in Curtis, “Prelude to Il ritorno,” xxi. “Ammiriamo con grandissima maraviglia i concenti cosí pieni, non senza qualche conturbazione, mentre non so piú conoscere per mia quest’opera, che conferma per contrasti al suo merito gli applausi che l’accompagna[no].” This letter is unique to libretto I-Vmc 564, which for many scholars helps confirm its relative proximity to the opera’s premiere.

33 Norbert Dubowy, “Bermerkungen zu einigen Ulisse-Opern des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Claudio Monteverdi und die Folgen. Bericht über das Internationale Symposium Detmold 1993, eds. Silke Leopold and Joachim Steinheuer (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 215-43.

34 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 246-7.

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Fortune and Fate often fight against man, Often one sees Destiny become angry, But Fortune is defeated, and also Fate, If a wise, brave man arms himself with virtue.35 By altering Badoaro’s original Prologue – not to mention the other omissions and edits

throughout the opera - Monteverdi offered the audience greater dramatic tension from the outset

of the work. 36 Monteverdi’s correspondence supports his primary focus: moving the passions of

his audiences. Additionally, they confirm Monteverdi’s practicality in matters of theatre.37 In

this instance of deliberate intervention, which functions on both practical and aesthetic levels,

Ulysses becomes the obvious antithesis to Human Frailty. Through his resourcefulness, he

navigates his way back to the seat of power in Ithaca, showing himself the master of Time, Fate,

and Love themselves. In stark contrast, Penelope falls prey to the vicissitudes of Time, has no

power through which to change her Fate, and thus submits to, rather than chooses, Love not once,

but twice.38 Rather than being part of the solution by helping Ulysses reclaim his throne, she

becomes part of a problem that Ulysses must solve, or an object to (re)obtain – a role undoubtedly

foreshadowed by the new Prologue.

35 Quoted in Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Stevens, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, 125-6. In this letter from 6 January, 1617 to

Alessandro Striggio, the librettist for L’Orfeo, Monteverdi discusses various issues regarding the staging of intermezzi: “However in my opinion it does lack – at the very end after the last line which runs: Let heaven regain its serenity, and the sea its calm – it lacks, I would say, a canzonetta in praise of the princely bridal pair, the music of which could be heard in the heaven and earth of the stage [the mezza la scena], and to which the noble dancers can dance, since a noble ending of this kind seems to me suitable to a noble scene such as I have proposed.”

38 As of yet, no secondary source material contains an analysis of the original libretto text, or even a reproduction of the text. However, both Tim Carter and Ellen Rosand have closely examined and compared the primary sources. Still, the history of the libretto manuscripts and their relation to the surviving musical score in the Vienna National Library certainly warrants further study.

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Shifting Expectations: An Appeal to Modern Tastes

While Monteverdi’s involvement in the editing of Il ritorno deserves substantial credit,

one must also understand the external forces that may have contributed to changes. Given these

conditions, the changes to the opera, resulting in disparate interpretations of Penelope, suggest a

connection with Venetian norms and expectations of widows, wives, and women in general. It

also shows Monteverdi’s, and to a lesser extent Badoaro’s, skill in interpreting and adapting to

the aesthetic demands of a newly public genre. To this end, some modern viewpoints detract

from the period conception of public opera as ephemeral:

The ambitions of Monteverdi’s Venetian librettists were especially lofty, even more so than those of the humanist “creators” of opera at the beginning of the century. They aimed at nothing less than the recreation of ancient drama, the particular power of which they understood to have been conveyed by music. Such ambition endowed Monteverdi’s trilogy with a special stature, distinguishing his operas from more purely commercially motivated works that were explicitly designed to meet the requirements of the public stage.39

Unfortunately, casting these operas in such terms fabricates a dichotomy between them and other

17th-century operatic ephemera that did not necessarily exist at the time. As Glixon and Glixon

note, “The authors of librettos, then, were a diverse group, men active in the political, economic,

and cultural worlds of Venice. For most of them, writing librettos was secondary to their main

careers, a way to occupy their spare hours and to show off their poetic skills and erudition.”40 I

do not suggest that Badoaro, Monteverdi, and the rest never considered posterity as they worked

on Il ritorno.41 Still, in the case of Badoaro, a member of the Venetian Collegio who eventually

served on the powerful Venetian Council of Ten, one can see where his most substantial efforts

lay. Considerable research by Edward Muir, among others, has led to the label of

“libertarianism” for Badoaro and his contemporaries in the Accademia degli Incogniti. In fact, 39 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 211. 40 Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, 113. 41 In fact, Monteverdi’s advanced age might suggest further that he considered his works against

the background of his historical reception. However, there is nothing in his correspondence or continued interactions with students, etc. to suggest that he neglected his omnipresent practical side.

19

Muir notes, “The pervasive skepticism of the time finally led to doubts about the very capacity of

language to mirror reality, to represent things. Writers concentrated on creating marvels rather

than on reflecting nature […].”42 This situation can be best understood as a shift in audience

preferences, manifested in the artistic movement now called “baroque.”

The Baroque movement was not, of course, restricted to Venice. Thus, it should surprise

no one that in Rome we find two paintings whose relationship with each other shows direct

parallels with the aesthetic movements involved in Venetian public opera. Certainly, some might

argue that an aesthetic debate that took place in Rome has no place in a discussion of Venetian

opera. However, I would quote Harris, who argues that the Allegory of Divine Providence (see

below):

benefitted enormously from Cortona’s brief visit to Venice in 1637 [the first year of public opera in Venice]. […]. Cortona was impressed by Veronese’s systems for depicting figures overhead without using too much distorting foreshortening and his vivid characterization of the allegorical women celebrating the city of Venice.43

It would seem, therefore, that a close connection between the two cities existed at the time, with

common artistic and/or aesthetic trends.

The two paintings - The Allegory of Divine Providence by Pietro da Cortona and The

Allegory of Divine Wisdom by Andrea Sacchi – reside in the Palazzo Barberini. Completed in

1633 by Gianlorenzo Bernini, the palazzo served as the residence of the powerful Barberini

family. Since the election of Maffeo Barberini to the papacy in 1623, the family’s growing

influence allowed them to purchase the palace from the declining Sforza family. The two

paintings in question show a changing preference for spectacle as well as changing conceptions of

acceptable dramatic narratives.

42 Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, Opera, The

Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.

43 Ann Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Pearson Education, 2005), 120.

20

Painted between 1633 and 1639 by Pietro da Cortona, The Allegory of Divine Providence

(Figure 2-1) appears on the roof of the grand salone, the most public room in the palace. Its sheer

size and impressive array of allegories overwhelms the viewer. Divided into five sections, the

four framing sections “spill over” into the main center section. Providence, Immortality, the

Muses, Faith, Hope, and other figures all appear in this magnificent fresco that depicts the role of

Fate (or divine mandate) in the Barberini family’s rise to power: 44

Although the many “subplots” of imagery can be confusing, one can observe bees flying in

formation – the most obvious of Barberini family symbols – as well as major allegorical figures:

44 Walter Vitzthum, “A Comment on the Iconography of Pietro da Cortona’s Barberini Ceiling,”

The Burlington Magazine 103 (Oct., 1961): 426-31.

Figure 2-1: Allegory of Divine Providence (Triumph of Divine Providence) by Pietro da Cortona

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Faith, Hope, and Charity, Divine Providence, and Religion, holding the papal keys. On a grand

scale, the painting represents to viewers the apotheosis of the Barberini family, and an ode to their

power and influence. Evil will lose out to Wisdom, Strength, and the rest, while the divinely-

mandated reign of Pope Urban VIII, guided by all the virtues, will lead to the glorification of the

church, and subsequently Urban’s own reputation. But as Ann Harris notes:

Identifying the main figures […] hardly begins the work of interpreting the meaning of the mythological characters in a papal context. What is Venus doing lolling in her lush garden retreat, where she is receiving some abuse from Chastity? Why does Piety regard the drunken orgy of Bacchus and Silenus so benignly?45

Later, she outlines the central issue:

Even in the seventeenth century, most visitors could not grasp more than the essential pro-Barberini message unless they were given a tour by a member of the Barberini household […]. Only the more learned cardinals and intellectuals attached to the papal court would have grasped the intricate references woven into this lavish pictorial spectacle.46

Here indeed, we see what Lillian Zirpolo has called a “theatrical mode of representation.”47

According to Pietro da Cortona and his followers, art should contain a multitude of images

threaded together by a common theme. However, within this thread, various subplots and

locations appear, each with its own story or purpose.

In a more intimate space of the palazzo – the antechamber for the family chapel – one

finds a fresco from a bygone era. Dispensing with the epic poetry evoked by Pietro da Cortona’s

dynamic Allegory, this fresco follows “the Aristotelian rules of tragedy:” unity, clarity, and a

sense of austere grandeur.48

45 Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture, 120.

46 Ibid. 47 Lillian Zirpolo, Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture (Lanham, MD:

Scarecrow Press, 2010), 173. 48 Ibid. See Aristotle, Poetics, with an introduction by Francis Fergusson, trans. S.H. Butcher

(New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). Parts VI-XI provide the most information on Aristotle’s opinions on dramas, tragedies, and etc.

22

Completed in 1633, Sacchi’s Divine Wisdom offers an antithesis to Pietro da Cortona’s fresco. A

brief visual analysis confirms this; the limited number of figures leaps out immediately. The

Classically inspired painting depicts Divine Wisdom reigning over the world with the assistance

of her divine archers. Various women representing qualities of wisdom direct their attention

towards the picture’s center, including Nobility, Strength, and Beauty. Here, in a more intimate

space of the palazzo, obvious symbols of propaganda do not arrest the viewer’s eyes as they do in

the grand salone. Indeed, the picture presents a rather different aspect of Barberini influence than

the grandiose power on display in Allegory of Divine Providence.

To tie this debate into Venetian opera, one should first note the dates of completion of

these two frescoes: 1633 for Sacchi’s Divine Wisdom and 1639 for Pietro da Cortona’s Divine

Figure 2-2: Allegory of Divine Wisdom by Andrea Sacchi

23

Providence.49 These paintings and the aesthetic debates crystalized in their conflicting styles find

significant parallels in the contemporaneous debates concerning opera. The tension between

adhering to classical sources versus appealing to modern sensibility led to published and

unpublished justifications from both sides. If Monteverdi’s role in the shaping of Il ritorno is on

one side of the coin, these aesthetic debates are on the other. Furthermore, the debate on style

underscores the importance of allegory as a mode of rhetorical discourse in 17th-century Italy.

Artists, or at least patrons, chose their allegories for specific purposes, seeking to drive home

specific qualities of said patron. Citizens, particularly the upper classes, understood and

appreciated it as a mode of representation in the arts, and actively engaged with symbols as a part

of everyday life. What they wanted as opposed to what they understood, however, is a different

matter entirely.

The aesthetic debate implied by the disparate frescoes of Palazzo Barberini encapsulates

a shift, or perhaps a struggle, to cope with the emergence of “modern taste” alongside the theories

of ancient authorities in 17th-century Italy.50 It would not be inappropriate to label da Cortona’s

fresco a “spectacle,” which is something Aristotle cautions against in his rules for tragedy.51

Meanwhile, Sacchi’s understated creation deliberately avoids such pretensions. More

importantly, perhaps, Pietro da Cortona’s Divine Providence demonstrates the multitude of levels

on which allegories could function. It could impress the masses while containing subtle messages

noticed only by the initiated. Furthermore, one can understand the function of these paintings as

relational to the function of the spaces that they decorated. Sacchi’s more abstract, subdued work

49Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture, 120. 50 While some might argue that an aesthetic debate that took place in Rome has no place in a

discussion of Venetian opera, I would quote Harris. In a sentence on Divine Providence, she mentions that the fresco, “benefitted enormously from Cortona’s brief visit to Venice in 1637 [the first year of public opera in Venice]. […]. Cortona was impressed by Veronese’s systems for depicting figures overhead without using too much distorting foreshortening and his vivid characterization of the allegorical women celebrating the city of Venice.”

51 Aristotle, Poetics, 61-94. Aristotle breaks the tragedy genre into its separate components to discuss how effective tragedies achieve their result.

24

decorates the antechamber for the Barberini chapel, whose location within the palace implicates it

as a personal space (as differentiated, for example, from a public chapel within a private

residence). Its subdued statement of Barberini wisdom suggests an air of contemplation that

befits its interior location. Contrast this with Pietro da Cortona’s massive fresco in the most

public space in the palace: the grand salone. The fresco’s massive scope, overwhelming in its

multiplicity of intricately woven subplots, nevertheless overtly emanates an aura of wealth and

influence. That is not to say that subtlety does not exist, as suggested above, but that the overall

impact is more visceral that the quietude of Divine Wisdom.

Monteverdi’s oeuvre demonstrates a comparable development. Operatic prologues

served a specific function within Monteverdi’s output beginning with L’Orfeo, his 1607 opera for

the ducal court in Mantua. This function relates in some ways to the “Sacchian” school of

thought; simple austerity reigned supreme, with an emphasis on coherent unification. In the

opera, the allegorical figure Music appears onstage, declaiming to the audience in no uncertain

terms what amounts to an aesthetic manifesto. In her words lies the key to Monteverdi’s musical

philosophy:

Io la Musica son, ch’a i dolci accenti, Só far tranquillo ogni turbato core, Ed hor di nobil ira, ed hor d’amore, Posso infiammar le piú gelate menti. I am Music, who, in sweet accents,

Can make peaceful every troubled heart, And so with noble anger, and so with love, Can I inflame the coldest minds.52 In addition to its didactic role, opera also served to present a summary of the plot. Consider

Music’s fourth stanza:

Quinci à dirvi d’Orfeo desio mi sprona: D’Orfeo che trasse al suo cantar le fere,

52 Claudio Monteverdi, L’Orfeo: favola in musica, SV 318, libretto by Alessandro Striggio, ed.

Claudio Gallico (New York: Eulenberg, 2004), 3. Translation in Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 56.

25

E servo fè l’Inferno a sue preghiere, Gloria immortal di Pindo e d’Elicona. Hence desire spurs me to tell you of Orfeo Of Orfeo who tamed wild beasts with his song, And made Hades answer his prayers, To the immortal glory of Pindus and Helicon.53

Musica’s bold claims speak of elevating and depressing passions. Yet even as she declaims her

abilities to alter emotions, she maintains a sense of decorum: she states her lines in the stile

recitativo. In the name of verisimilitude – approximating rhetoric, or elevated speech - Musica

herself avoids “music,” as shown in the example below:

As the continuo instruments strikes a d minor chord, Music declaims her lines syllabically.

Monteverdi emphasizes Music’s textual rhetoric rather than her music. Here, Monteverdi

addresses the same concerns that confronted Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini when they labored

on L’Orfeo’s precursors in Florence a mere seven years earlier: “imitar col canto chi parla” or

“imitating speech in song.” By weighing the movement of the singing voice against the fluid

53 Ibid., 5.

Example 2-1: L’Orfeo Prologue – Io la Musica son

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movement of Italian speech, these two composers arrived at the stile recitativo. In this way, they

saw themselves as recovering ancient practices as handed down by Aristotle in Poetics.

With the advent of public opera in 1637, one can detect a desire to adapt to audience

expectations and to abandon the pretense of reviving ancient tragedy. In the revisions of Il

ritorno, we find significant evidence for this shift, and perhaps the strongest motivation for the

edits Monteverdi pursued. Tim Carter, among others, suggests a particular emphasis on the

presence of music. Regarding L’Orfeo, he says,

The careful positioning of (near-)diegetic arias and similar set pieces in Orfeo, which thus distinguished song from musical speech, shifts in favor of more fluid, and often quite rapid, movement between various styles now available to the theatrical composer. This increasing […] in turn suggests a degree of acceptance of the musical conventions of opera on the part of audiences.54

One can track these concerns in Monteverdi’s correspondence in the intervening years between

his opera L’Arianna (1608) and Il ritorno. As Carter mentions, these letters “reveal his

[Monteverdi’s] eminently practical concerns.” In fact, they demonstrate a newfound concern for

the paying customer. Monteverdi’s main concern in his dramatic works is how they will appear

on stage; he composes as though he himself were sitting in the audience.

One of Monteverdi’s most telling letters on this count dates from December 9, 1616.

Addressed to Alessandro Striggio, the letter criticizes aspects of the fable Le Nozze di Tetide.

Intended as part of a celebration for a ducal wedding in Mantua, the maritime story nonetheless

fell short of Monteverdi’s demands. In this excerpt, he questions the possibility of composing

music for the winds (the Zephyrs and Boreals):

How, dear Sir, can I imitate the speech of the winds, if they do not speak? And how can I, by such means, move the passions? Ariadne moved is because she was a woman, and similarly Orpheus because he was a man, not a wind. Music can suggest, without any

54 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 249. Of course, part of this shift has something to do

with the varying locations of these two operas: Mantua and Venice. In Mantua, the duke reigned supreme, while Venice championed itself as a city of Republican ideals. See James Grubb, “When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography.”

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words, the noise of winds or the bleating of sheep, the neighing of horses, and so on and so forth; but it cannot imitate the speech of winds because no such thing exists. Next, the dances which are scattered throughout the fable do not have dance measures. And as to the story as a whole – as far as my no little ignorance is concerned – I do not feel that it moves me at all [emphasis mine] (moreover I find it hard to understand), nor do I feel that it carries me in a natural manner to an end that moves me. Arianna led me to a just lament, and Orfeo to a righteous prayer, but this fable leads me I don’t know to what end.55

Among the ideas that emerge, Monteverdi reveals his perspective as a consumer of art.

Eminently practical, and yet convinced of his own taste, he knew that if the subject matter did not

appeal to him, it likely would not appeal to noble audiences. Otherwise, to Monteverdi, a

supreme craftsman, his endeavors were pointless.

The claim that Venetian tastes might have driven some of the changes to Il ritorno

receives additional support from Badoaro’s open letter to Monteverdi (in Libretto I-Vmc 564),

which describes an interesting situation:

Who can then condemn my Muse, accustomed to inhabiting the heights of Parnassus, for having chosen as residence the eminence of a ‘Monte’ [Monteverdi] that overpowers the evil forces aroused in the flames of an insidious critical disdain, when I only tried to give to this entire city the richest banquet that musical art has ever known? Though it is true that not even in this can I be proud without some note of fraudulence, since the honour I have received from his music would not have come to be without the mediation of those Illustrious Gentlemen […] showing that even more in art than in nature, love is forceful.56

This strong language suggests a strong negative reaction to Badoaro’s efforts.57 What exactly did

critics attack in the initial version of the play? The antiquated aspects of the play – the five-act

division and the classically restrained dialogue – may have influenced the initial outcry.

Badoaro’s future writings not only suggest that he learned a lesson from this experience,

but that he too came to recognize the importance of appealing to modern taste. In the preface to

Ulisse errante, a libretto on the first half of the Odyssey that Badoaro wrote in 1644, the Venetian

nobleman states:

55 Stevens, The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, 117. 56 Curtis, “Preface to Il ritorno,” xxi. 57 I disagree with Curtis’s more literal interpretation of Badoaro’s language. In the preface to his

edition of Il ritorno, he implies that someone may have set fire to the theatre.

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It is normal today for the purpose of pleasing the spectators […] to introduce improbable situations so long as they do not disturb the main action. [W]e cannot avoid the implausible, namely, that men should carry on their most important transactions while singing. Moreover, in order to enjoy variety in the theater, we are used to music for two, three, and more voices, which causes another unlikelihood: that several people conversing together should suddenly find themselves saying the same thing simultaneously.58

Here, we see an aesthetic claim echoing those made by Badoaro’s contemporaries, including

Torcigliani and Busenello, the librettists for Le Nozze and Poppea respectively.59 However, one

must take note that we have no writings by Badoaro prior to the premiere of Il ritorno. It would

seem that his initial operatic effort taught him several lessons, including the importance of

catering to the audience. Not only did Il ritorno convince him of the importance of modern taste,

it caused an abrupt about-face in his thought process, bringing it more in line with the

increasingly popular tendency to discard or manipulate myths for one’s own individual ends. As

Badoaro notes, “In every age the road of invention has been shown to be open, and we have no

other obligation in regard to the precepts of the ancients than to know them.”60

With this in mind, the changes to Il ritorno make even more sense. In the history of this

opera’s development, the tensions between classical drama and modern tastes play out in an

observable sense. This was not the world of the princely court. Here in Carnival season,

spectacle and music reigned supreme. In Il ritorno, as we shall see, music spills over the edges of

the dramatic framework (much like Cortona’s painting), signifying a triumph of the sensuous, of

new over old, and of love over chastity.

58 Giacomo Badoaro, “Preface to Ulisse errante,” in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century

Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 31. 59 See the Preface to Le Nozze, in which Torcigliani makes both a justification for the classical

five-act division as well for the abundant deviation from classical norms 60 Quoted in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth Century Venice, 59.

Chapter 3

Signifying Penelope: Monteverdi’s New Prologue

In the previous chapter, I investigated motivations behind the alterations to Il ritorno,

which results in the current version of the opera. Now, I will consider the beginning of Il ritorno

as Monteverdi might have envisioned it. The newly inserted Prologue of Il ritorno offers viewers

the key to understanding the themes of the opera. Since Badoaro and Monteverdi intended this

particular Prologue to replace the Fate/Providence/Fortune (FPF) Prologue, we must assume they

did so with specific aesthetic goals in mind. Through their new Prologue, the artists emphasized

Penelope’s presence in Il ritorno. However, rather than crafting a heroine, Monteverdi utilizes

tonal and rhetorical procedures to equate Penelope with Human Frailty and to draw our attention

to crucial events in the opera proper that cement this association.

In general, scholars have analyzed Monteverdi’s Penelope through the lens of Homer’s

Penelope, which seems unwarranted. Consider, for example, Marianne McDonald’s assertion

that “Penelope is a heroic predecessor for Poppea and yet is opposite of Poppea in being a model

of virtue. Penelope’s task is to fight so that her virtue is not so overwhelming as to become a vice

[…]. She must overcome her habits and doubts, and learn to share rule with another, her newly

rediscovered husband.61 She continues: “In this opera, Penelope is more heroic than Ulisse: she

has more songs to sing, more contests to fight; she protects her honor, which is constantly

assailed by both her maids and suitors.”62 Tim Carter also emphasizes Penelope’s use of Chastity

as a weapon and shield against Time, Fortune, and Love: “Instead, the message of the opera – if

61 Marianne McDonald, Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 74. There seems to be a slight problem in comparing a married noblewoman, Penelope, with Poppea, a courtesan. Also, this quote seems a bit confusing in that it unintentionally suggests something I am actually arguing: that Penelope’s virtue is outdated and unnatural, at least within the context of this particular drama.

62 Ibid.

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message we need – is that Human Frailty, so belaboured in the prologue and through Penelope in

the opera, has one invincible weapon against Time, Fortune, and Love – Constancy.” 63 Despite

the clever rhetoric, this statement garners little support from either the content or the music of the

Prologue, and fails to account for the deliberate alterations of the Prologue.

The Prologue constitutes one of the least discussed sections in the literature on Il ritorno.

Those who have addressed this section of the work typically provide a cursory overview of the

music before moving on to other sections of the opera, especially Penelope’s Act One lament.64

Yet in many ways, the Prologue serves as the most important thematic device of the entire opera,

and one can see in its juxtaposition with Penelope a deliberate emphasis on her character. The

events of the Prologue ultimately foreshadow Penelope’s ineffectuality and failure throughout the

opera in a musical process that establishes her as a problem to be solved. On an immediate level,

the Prologue asserts the woes of mortal humans, who fall prey to the vicissitudes of Time,

Fortune, and Love over the course of their short lives. The audience becomes aware that the

opera will center on the grappling of the main characters with these allegorical figures—themes

that all humans must face. Specifically, one can see a parallel between the confrontations of the

allegories in the Prologue with the plight of Queen Penelope in the opera. Badoaro and

Monteverdi seized an opportunity, or listened to audience demands, using the Prologue to set up a

powerful dichotomy between the characters of Ulysses and Penelope. Monteverdi, always

seeking ways to sway the passions of his audience, creates tension in the Prologue from which

Ulysses ultimately emerges triumphant at the end of the opera. The inverse of this triumph is the

defeat of Penelope, her devolution from literary heroine to operatic nobody. Her chastity 63 Tim Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno

d’Ulisse in patria,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5 (March 1993): 15. For a reworked and updated version of this same argument, see Carter, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,” in Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 237-62. 64 See Mark Ringer, Opera’s First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2006); and Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Ringer’s study is in fact a survey rather than a critical interpretation of Monteverdi’s dramatic works. Although Tomlinson offers excellent critical discussions of several other parts of the opera, the Prologue does not figure in his analysis.

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defeated, only Ulysses can save her, a result that is either poignant or disturbing, depending on

one’s perspective. Indeed, however one interprets it is somewhat beside the point; the conclusion

is reflective of the arguments that riveted Venice’s libertine elite at the time of the opera. With

the stage thus set, they were free to divorce Penelope from any semblance of agency she may

have had in Homer’s Odyssey.

A Signifying Prologue

The Prologue begins with the figure of Human Frailty alone on stage proclaiming,

“Mortal cosa son io, fattura umana (‘A mortal thing am I, man-made human’).”65

65 I utilize scholarly convention in referring to the major/minor system within Monteverdi’s

output. See Chafe, “Basic Issues in Seventeenth-Century Tonality,” in Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 21-37; and Chafe, “Mode and System,” in Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 38-55. In these chapters, Chafe addresses the issues involved in studying 17th-century modal and tonal practices. While Chafe establishes the use of modal hexachords by Monteverdi, he also makes use of the major/minor convention in his analyses of specific works. Indeed, in Monteverdi’s oeuvre from his Fourth and Fifth Books of Madrigals, an increasing trend towards major/minor practice, if not theory, emerges under the guise of cantus durus and cantus mollis. 66 Unless otherwise noted, all score examples for Il ritorno are taken from Claudio Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, English version by Anne Ridler, ed. by Alan Curtis (London: Novello Publishing, 2002).

Example 3-1: Prologue – Human Frailty’s Opening Line66

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Monteverdi then alternates utterances by Human Frailty with those of three allegorical deities:

Time, Fortune, and Love, respectively. All three describe the challenge they pose to humankind.

Most powerful, or perhaps influential, of the three is Love, who emphatically asserts his power

over Human Frailty in no uncertain terms:

Chafe suggests that through the music, “Love […] is set apart from the other allegories in a

variety of important ways.”67 He highlights Love’s appearance last of all the deities, and that it

receives its own ritornello. The only other allegory to receive a ritornello is Human Frailty.

Chafe quite rightly demonstrates that “when it [Human Frailty] introduces and follows Love’s

solo, however, Human Frailty loses its ritornello, yielding it, so it appears, to Love.”68

67 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 261. This raises the issue of what type of emotional love

the allegory Love represents. This reflects the somewhat humorous debates held between members of the Accademia degli Incogniti. However, Love’s text suggests an emphasis on seduction: “non val difesa oscudo.”

68 Ibid., 262.

Example 3-2: Prologue – The Power of Love

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For audiences of the time, the appearance of Human Frailty onstage would have stood

out, as it is unprecedented in dramatic vocal music. What associations might they have made

with this new character? Human Frailty does appear in one of the sentenze of the translation of

the Odyssey by 16th-century scholar Lodovico Dolce, the translation Badoaro probably used when

writing Il ritorno. These sentenze contain a number of allegorical figures given lines that offer

commentary on the events of the epic. One of these allegories in Dolce’s translation is Human

Frailty.

Figure 3-3: Prologue – Ritornello for Human Frailty (in d)

Example 3-4: Prologue – Ritornello for Amore (in a)

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Standard allegorical imagery depicts Human Frailty as an elderly, afflicted woman.69

Although Badoaro and Monteverdi maintain Human Frailty’s gender in the opera, the music hints

at a different connection than with an old, decrepit woman. Il ritorno, of course, contains an

elderly female character: Penelope’s nurse Euryclea. If Monteverdi desired an association with

Ripa’s L’umana fragilità, he could have created one here. However, Euryclea’s music does not

match Human Frailty’s, nor would such an association make dramatic sense. Euryclea is, after

all, an elderly nurse, already a stock character at this point in the history of the genre.

Beginning in B-flat, Euryclea moves syllabically in generally ascending lines that end in G major.

Contrast this with Human Frailty, for whom Monteverdi composes music entrenched firmly in d

minor that follows a downward trajectory almost without fail:

69 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’antichità, e di propria

invention, trovate, e dichiarate da Cesare Ripa (Rome: Lepido Faeii, 1603), 173.

Example 3-5: Act I, Scene 1 – The Music of Euryclea

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Badoaro and Monteverdi seem to draw from a different tradition or, more specifically, from their

own dramatic concerns. The text from which Dolce derived Human Frailty’s sentenza originally

comes from the mouth of Ulysses himself. This provenance has caused some to draw a

connection between Ulysses and Human Frailty in Il ritorno:

But know, that in all above the earth The weakest and frailest thing is man He is able to show well in peace and war An unconquered destiny and an immortal soul Nonetheless, if Fate turns against him He will see many signs of grave harm. Thus once upon a time did I think I was happy, Now with time I find myself miserable, This is done by Fortune and the will Of the highest gods; but with truth The judgment of heaven is to be feared Against others’ malice and cruelty.70

It proves more difficult, however, to draw a connection with Ulysses from Il ritorno’s Prologue.

Rather than offer a confirmation that man (“huomo”) is “the weakest and frailest thing,” Badoaro

changes Human Frailty’s line to “umana.” No motivation for this change has come to light, but it

70 The excerpt may be found in Italian in Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 138.

Example 3-6: Prologue – The Weight of Mortality

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nonetheless suggests an attempt to avoid a specific association with the “man.” Additionally,

while Human Frailty acknowledges the superiority of Time and Fortune, Ulysses fails to follow

suit, leaving the audience to perceive the allegory as either genderless – difficult given the range

and clef decisions – or as signifying a female character.

The unprecedented appearance of Human Frailty on the operatic stage casts the absence

of Virtue into higher relief. Audiences of the time probably would have noted its absence, as

Virtue and Fortune had a well developed, if multifaceted, relationship in Venice by the time

public opera first appeared. As Robert Wittkower elaborates:

The stoic recommendation of virtue as a remedy against the caprices of chance was transmitted by Petrarch to the humanists of the Renaissance. […].71 Although it would be possible to quote other cases in which a reconciliation of Virtue and Fortune is depicted,72 the main trend of Renaissance thought conceives the relation of these two forces as an irreconcilable feud.73

In the Renaissance, the “feud” to which Wittkower refers was a rather one-sided battle in which

Virtue came out on top: “Cupid is generally punished either by Chastity, who attacks him with

arrows, or by a group of women whom he has disappointed, occasionally even by his mother

Venus.”74

The notion of Cupid, or Love, punished by Chastity is an interesting one, because

analyses of Il ritorno commonly clearly reflect a yearning for this more traditional outcome.75

71 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Petrarch was also a favored poet of 16th and 17th-century

madrigalists (although they also showed a strong preference for Tasso). 72 Here, Wittkower refers to the previous section of the chapter (p. 101), where he investigates the

popular notion that, “A reconciliation is possible as long as Fortune follows in the tracks of Virtue.” 73 Rudolph Wittkower, “Chance, Time, and Virtue” in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 101-103. 74 Ibid., 106. 75 I refer specifically to those scholars who tackle the interpretive issues this opera presents, which

means predominantly Carter and Rosand. Chafe also posits aesthetic claims. For a conflicting interpretation of Penelope, however, see Michael Ewans, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,” in Greek: Studies in the Poetics of Appropriation. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Although his musical analysis is somewhat cursory, he makes intriguing and unprecedented claims about the religious characteristics of Il ritorno (the opera’s “theodicy”). Prevailing scholarship tends to ignore this avenue of inquiry, since at the time of Il ritorno’s premiere the Jesuits had been evicted from the Republic. In its place, they argue, a Carnival-esque atmosphere pervaded society. While in practice this seems to be the case, one cannot

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Consider, for example, Carter’s earlier statement about Penelope’s use of Constancy as a shield

against the vicissitudes of Time, Fortune, and Love. However, as we examine the era in which Il

ritorno premiered, the situation is more complicated, inasmuch as Virtue does not always emerge

on top of its allegorical struggle with Love. Nowhere is this more evident that in Monteverdi’s

L’incoronazione di Poppea, where the Prologue portrays this same vitriolic relationship, but with

a new outcome: Love proclaims his superiority over both Virtue and Fortune, signaling the defeat

of morality in favor of love, lust, or some combination of the two. The morally ambiguous

qualities of Poppea have long perturbed scholars, but perhaps this outcome reacts against the

willfulness to find the antiquated triumph of Virtue in Il ritorno.

By deliberately withholding Virtue from his new Prologue – one recalls that Prudence

appeared in the original version of the Prologue – Monteverdi effectively eliminated it as a

primary theme. Therefore, we must question the motivation for instead inserting the rather

marked allegory of Human Frailty, which even by its name indicates a lack of resistance, a

consistently weak constitution. The list of possible characters is short: Ulysses, or Penelope.

Monteverdi seems to have purposefully avoided an association between the

Time/Fortune/Love (TFL) Prologue and Ulysses, as suggested in Chapter Two. The original

Prologue included a reference that connected directly with the Ithacan chorus Monteverdi

eliminated at the end of the opera, a reference that connects more directly with Ulysses:

To triumph, Fortitude arms itself in vain, To triumph, human Prudence is frail Strength, wisdom, valor carry little worth For if Fate dissents, it is all in vain.76 In tandem with the Ithacan chorus, in which a “wise and strong man arms himself with Virtue,”

this passage makes the case for an Ulysses-centered moral much stronger. But of course,

escape the fact that the uppermost tier of Venetian society maintained a rigid conservatism, particularly outside of Carnival season. The tension between official and religious conservatism and the realities of Venetian social life warrants further study, and therefore Ewans’s contribution on the theological side is most welcome. 76 Tim Carter has suggested that the insertion of the new Prologue had something to do with unease over the presence of Fate, a problematic theological concept in the Catholic Church.

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Monteverdi cut these passages. Thus, Rosand’s claim that “Badoaro’s Ulisse is indeed a frail

human being, at the mercy of Time and Fortune, tossed and turned, subject to the whims of the

gods,” fails to resonate with the realities of the dramatic situation created by Monteverdi’s cuts.

Instead, the Prologue seems to emphasize Penelope and a struggle with Love, although

the association with Penelope for audience members would not have occurred until after her

character actually appears onstage in Act I. Chafe says this of the relationship between the

allegories and Penelope:

In the prologue the allegories of Human Frailty and Love stand apart from those of Time and Fortune by their minor keys, d and a, as well as their ritornelli (the solos of Time and Fortune, we remember, are both set in G, without ritornelli.). Whether or not Monteverdi intended the tonal organization of Penelope’s solo and its focal points in the two refrains to carry over the associations of the d/a relationship of the prologue is uncertain [emphasis mine].77

Yet despite Chafe’s reservations, Monteverdi seems to intentionally signal the importance of his

key selections. Throughout the opera, the key of a minor figures most prominently in instances

where love as a concept or emotion appears in the text. Monteverdi confirms the association at

the end of the opera, when Penelope and Ulysses sing the closing love duet: it begins and ends in

a. Indeed, since Monteverdi retroactively designed the TFL Prologue to replace the FPF

Prologue, the argument for a modal connection between the Prologue and Penelope’s lament

becomes much stronger.78 Thus, the listener must keep the important association of “d” with

Human Frailty and “a” with Love, and perhaps secondarily the association of Time and Fortune

with G major in mind as the drama proceeds.

77 Ibid., 279. 78 See Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort? Penelope and the Interpretation of Il ritorno

d’Ulisse in patria.”

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Monteverdi further emphasizes the opening atmosphere of the opera, a tragedia en musica (di

lieto fine) by de-emphasizing the key of C in the Prologue. Chafe associates C major with (joy)

allegrezza in Il ritorno, saying, “[…] at several other points in the opera C represents the delights

and pleasures, the bliss of lovemaking rather than its more serious side.” 79

Although C Major appears prominently later in the opera, the Prologue itself does not

stress this key, specifically avoiding it at major cadences. This seems to signify the absence of

joy in the lives of the characters as the opera begins, and inevitably, the initial association is with

the character that appears immediately onstage after the Prologue: Penelope.

A final, crucial signification of the Il ritorno Prologue is that music, as differentiated

from recitative, has come into its own. Surely this results at least partially from the turbulent

aesthetic debates discussed in Chapter Two, which were not resolved until well past the mid-

century mark. In Il ritorno, more than in Monteverdi’s previous dramatic works, one finds an

unprecedented fusion of musical elements. As Rosand notes, in Il ritorno:

Speech is the underlying language of the score, recitative, the language that delivers information and conveys action; it is the language implied by the prevailing irregular poetry, the mixture of seven- and eleven-syllable lines known as versi sciolti. Musical utterances are lyrical passages, either extended formal songs or briefer effusions [emphasis mine], whose ‘musical’ setting enhances their emotional content or dramatic function. Speech becomes music under very particular conditions, conditions having to 79 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 270-1.

Table 3-1: The Keys of the Il ritorno Prologue

Key Association in Il ritorno

a Love

d Human Frailty/grief

G Time/Fate; War

C Joy

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do with outward as well as inward action – events in the plot as well as developments within the characters’ psyches.80

As has been suggested, at least part of this practice had to do with opera audiences, who desired

exciting, passionate music rather than moralizing recitative. Monteverdi also emphasized the role

of music in his score, suggesting an intimate connection between the presence of music and the

events portrayed onstage. In Il ritorno, he dispenses with the allegory Music in favor of actual

musical textures, usually in spite of rather than due to Badoaro’s efforts.81 These instances of

music, in most cases deliberately contrived by the composer, thus take on important semiotic

significance.

Within the Prologue, Monteverdi locates music within the voices of the three Prologue

allegories. The first to sing real “music” is Time, who flits between duple and triple time

effortlessly, including a florid passage on the word, “non:”82

80 Ellen Rosand, “Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Power of ‘Music’,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (Nov., 1995): 179.

81 As Rosand mentions in ibid., Monteverdi found very few obviously “musical” verse structures in Badoaro’s libretto. Only three obvious moments of music occur, as indicated by strophic verse structures and rhyme schemes: Melanto in Act I, Scene 2; Minerva in Act I, Scene 7; and Iro in Act II, Scene 2. In Monteverdi’s Last Operas (p. 218), she mentions “But on a number of occasions his [Badoaro’s] poetry seems disturbingly irregular, his choice of meter and rhyme almost random, requiring special intervention on the part of the composer to render it dramatically viable.”

82 Human Frailty does have vocal embellishments on penultimate syllables of phrases, most significantly in m. 132 of the Prologue. However, as they merely seem to function as a closing gesture, they impart little meaning to the dramatic texture of the opera.

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Against this, Human Frailty’s lack of music, Monteverdi’s insistence in maintaining the versi

sciolti settings, are marked with meaning. By restricting Human Frailty to the recitative style,

Monteverdi relegates the style to the past. The capacity to evoke rhetorical power has been

diminished in favor of overt musical statements, such as the madrigal-esque trio that closes out

the Prologue:83

83 Evidence suggests that the wealthier audience members (most of them) would have appreciated

hearing this texture in a public setting, recognizing it as an appropriation from the private sphere. See Edward Muir, “An Evening at the Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. by Jane Fulcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Muir describes the active musical culture in Venice circa 1637: “Not all music was public or religious. One of the significant innovations of the sixteenth century was the spread of private performances in the salons of patrician palaces where the secular madrigal [emphasis added] became the dominant form […] The madrigal sung in the privacy of the palace became an emotional solace for the members of the patrician class, who were obligated to live according to a rigid code of decorum.”

Example 3-7: Prologue – Time’s Lyricism

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Monteverdi establishes a clear hierarchy with the entry of the trio: Time, Fortune, and Love are

placed over Human Frailty. However, just as importantly, music, indicated by the vocal texture

as well as the dance-inspired triple meter supersedes “frail” monody.

All in all, the Prologue of Il ritorno carries few hidden meanings. In his choice of a

newer, more emotionally visceral Prologue, Monteverdi depicts Human Frailty belabored by

Time, Fortune, and Love. Human Frailty acknowledges the superiority of these three allegories.

There seems to be little room for Chastity, Prudence, or Virtue in this situation. To do so would

have been Aristotelian, antiquated, Renaissance. Caught up in the swirl of public opera, Il

Example 3-8: Prologue - The Madrigal of the Allegories

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ritorno’s new Prologue instead shares more with Poppea and its other public opera brethren.

Love, not Virtue, will triumph.

A Homeric Heroine

If Il ritorno’s Prologue suggests a frail character besieged throughout the opera, one must

ask whether or not such a character would differ from Penelope as she appears in the original

Odyssey, or rather as she appears in the abridged Italian translation by Lodovico Dolce that most

likely served as Badoaro’s source material. Intriguingly, one finds that the qualities of Homer’s

Penelope are those appropriated by modern scholarship when addressing her character – which

differ substantially from the characteristics signaled by the opera’s Prologue. By grafting

Homeric qualities onto the quite-Venetian Penelope of Il ritorno, we skew our understanding of

the opera’s social and aesthetic intent.

Homer’s description of Penelope in Book II of Homer’s Odyssey casts a revelatory light

on how ancient audiences received her qualities as a wife to Odysseus. Engaged in a verbal

altercation with Odysseus’s son Telemachus, one of Penelope’s suitors, Antinous, angrily erupts:

Send your mother away, and bid her marry the man of her own and of her father’s choice; for I do not know what will happen if she does on plaguing us much longer with the airs she gives herself on the score of the accomplishments Minerva has taught her, and because she is so clever. We never yet heard of such a woman; we all know about Tyro, Alcmena, Mycene, and the famous women of old, but they were nothing to your mother any one of them. It was not fair of her to treat us in that way, and as long as she continues in the mind with which heaven has now endowed her, so long shall we go on eating up your estate.84

Antinous equates Penelope, a mortal queen, with lofty female company. Tyro was the mother of

twin boys by Poseidon. She also murdered two other children to undercut a prophecy that they

would kill her father. Alcmena was the mother of Hercules, and described by Hesiod as tall,

84 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Samuel Butler and Andrew Lang (Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing, 2005), 126.

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beautiful, and unsurpassed in wisdom by any other person with two mortal parents. Finally,

Mycene was the namesake of the famously powerful city ruled by Agamemnon, the commander

of the Greek forces during the events of the Iliad.85

Antinous’s words immediately follow his description of Penelope’s famous weaving

trick, whereby she unwove her father’s burial shroud each night while telling the suitors she

would pick one of them to marry upon completion of the shroud.

This anecdote reveals one Penelope’s most important traits: her craft, or guile. Coupled

with her lauded qualities of chastity and loyalty, this wiliness enables Penelope throughout the

Odyssey to become a character possessing significant agency, which in turn makes her the ideal

match for her husband Odysseus. Michael Ewans describes exactly what makes her such a force

throughout the epic:

By the time when Penelope finally acknowledges Odysseus and falls into his arms in Book XXIII, Homer has shown her as far more than a broad stereotype of the ideal wife; she is the ideal and deserved wife for one man – Odysseus. She matches her husband in two qualities, which distinguish him from other Homeric heroes – intelligence and cunning. Her recurrent adjectives are circumspect and prudent.86

Unsurprisingly, Penelope’s prominent role has inevitably stirred up debate amongst scholars.

Marilyn Katz illustrates just one such instance: “Her appearance before the suitors and

solicitation of gifts from them has exposed her to the suspicion of lasciviousness”.”87 She

continues further: “The debate on these matters began in antiquity and was elaborated into a

subordinate tradition that competed with the ‘vulgate’ of a chaste and faithful Penelope.”88 Here,

85 Odysseus meets the spirits of Tyro and Alcmena in his journey to the underworld in Book XI of

the Odyssey. 86 Ewans, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse,” 13.

87 Marilyn Katz, Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 77. See also Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). One should remember that in the original manifestation of Il ritorno, Prudence (Prudenza) appeared as one of the allegories that foreshadowed the action. The use of one of Penelope’s primary adjectives seems to tacitly cast her in a positive light. 88 Katz undoubtedly refers to the account given by poet and translator Robert Graves, who reveals a pre-Hellenic tradition that suggests Penelope was the mother of Pan. See Robert Graves, The Greek

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analysts find a disjuncture between Penelope’s stated love for Ulysses and the way in which she

uses her physical attributes to her advantage while confronted with the predicament of the suitors.

Another divisive situation arises from Penelope’s actions once she meets with Ulysses,

disguised as a beggar. Penelope asks the beggar to interpret a dream she had. In the dream, an

eagle appeared and slaughtered twenty of Penelope’s geese while they eat. As she bemoaned the

loss of her animals, the eagle reappeared, and speaking with a human voice informed her that the

dream was an omen (it has been provided to her by Minerva). Ulysses, still disguised, interprets

the signs: the geese are the suitors, while the eagle represents “your own husband, who am come

back to you, and who will bring these suitors to a disgraceful end.”89

From this moment on in the plot, Elizabeth Vandiver, among others, notices peculiar

ambiguities related to Penelope. In her opinion, the bard deliberately leads the listener to

question whether or not Penelope is aware that the beggar is her husband. As a result, various

actions leading to the poem’s denouement become open to interpretation. If one views Penelope

as cognizant of her husband’s presence – an entirely viable point of view – she becomes a truly

powerful mover of the action, and an intrinsic component of the reestablishment of Ulysses as

head of his oikos, or family/kingdom/property.90 Her motivations are internally inspired, or

otherwise aided by Minerva, who at various times helps Penelope to sleep in order to calm her

grief, sends Penelope dreams (as we have seen), and changes Penelope’s appearance to make her

more alluring to the suitors. Indeed, one could argue that Penelope merits the favor of the gods in

much the same way that wily Ulysses does. Penelope’s shrewdness only contributes to further to

Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 374. Graves states: “Pan’s alleged birth from Penelope, after she slept promiscuously with all her suitors in Odysseus’s absence, records a pre-Hellenic tradition of sexual orgies; the Penelope duck, like the swan, was probably a totem pole of Sparta.” However no extant evidence suggests Badoaro, Monteverdi, or their contemporaries knew this aspect of Penelopean myth. Thus, it would seem manipulations of her character were driven by the intentional manipulation of the chaste, prudent Penelope rather than assimilating existing myths of a promiscuous queen.

89 Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIX. 90 See Elizabeth Vandiver, “The Odyssey of Homer,” lectures at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 1999, CD-ROM.

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her sophrosyne, a Greek word used for noblewomen that emphasizes chastity and self-restraint.91

Aided by the gods, Penelope becomes an active participant in the drama, embodying Sarah

Pomeroy words: “Although women suffered disabilities under the patriarchal codes, they were

not considered inferior or incompetent in the Homeric epic.”92

Nowhere does this relative equality appear more evident than after Ulysses triumphs over

the suitors. Here, Penelope engineers the emotional conclusion of the drama by cunningly

ordering Euryclea to set up Ulysses’ bed outside of the bedchamber itself. However, such an

event is impossible, because Ulysses built the bed from a live olive tree and melded it to the

surrounding room structure. The clever ruse solidifies Penelope’s intellectual equality with

Ulysses.93 Ulysses, who until now has remained composed throughout the emotional duress that

accompanied his homecoming, is tricked into giving himself away, saying:

Wife, I am much displeased at what you have just been saying. Who has been taking my bed from the place in which I left it? He must have found it a hard task, no matter how skilled a workman he was, unless some god came and helped him shift it. There is no man living, however strong and in his prime, who could move it from its place, for it is a marvelous curiosity which I made with my very own hands.94

91 Ewans, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse,” 16.

92 Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 28.

93 Any argument for social equality for Penelope does not resonate with the patriarchal society in which Homer composed the Odyssey. Vandiver makes the valid point that any possibility of marital transgression on the part of Penelope would doom her and signal the ruin of Ulysses’s kleos. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek armies during the Trojan War, appears in the Odyssey specifically for his use as a bardic device, or a cautionary tale that emphasizes Penelope’s suitability for Ulysses. His wife, Clytemnestra, took a new lover and assisted in her husband’s murder, causing the following blandishment against women: “You are indeed blessed in the possession of a wife endowed with such rare excellence of understanding, and so faithful to her wedded lord as Penelope the daughter of Icarius. The fame of her virtue shall never die, and the immortals shall compose a song that shall be welcome to all mankind in honour of the constancy of Penelope. How far otherwise was the wickedness of the daughter of Tyndareus [Clytemnestra] who killed her lawful husband; her song shall be hateful among men, for she has brought disgrace on all womankind, even on the good ones.”

94 Homer, The Odyssey, Book XXIII.

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Following this statement, Penelope finally relents, accepting her husband and going with him to

the bedroom, while Minerva delays the dawn to give the two lovers adequate time to make love

and report the events of the past twenty years.95

Although Penelope’s cunning has sometimes confounded modern interpretations, the

prominent characters of the Odyssey only approve of her actions. In fact, a statement by Minerva

directly refutes the claims of those scholars that Katz mentions: “Noble son of Laertes [Ulysses],

think how you can lay hands on these disreputable people who have been lording it in your house

these three years, courting your wife and making wedding presents to her, while she does nothing

but lament your absence, giving hope and sending encouraging messages to every one of them,

but meaning the very opposite of all she says.”96 Once again, the bard emphasizes Penelope’s

guile, thus emphasizing her suitability as the consort of Ulysses, who is first described to the

listener as “ingenious.” Homer, therefore, seems to dispel any notion of a “promiscuous”

Penelope. Ultimately, her circumspection and prudence do not detract from her desirability, but

rather add to it. It must be said that Penelope’s physical beauty, while transient, emerges as an

important part of her character.97

Having established some basic characteristics of Penelope as she appears in the Odyssey,

various discrepancies between poem and opera will be cast in high relief as we consider

Penelope’s opening lament. Each difference must be highlighted, for it further underscores

Monteverdi’s specific aesthetic intent regarding Penelope and Il ritorno.

95 These stories include every single marital transgression on the part of Ulysses. This fact, along

with the brutal murder of the slave women who slept with the suitors, serves to highlight the sexual double standard inherent in Homeric and – not to paint with too broad a brush – most human societies.

96 Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIII. 97 See Mary Lefkowitz, “Women’s Heroism,” in Heroines and Hysterics (London: Gerald Duckworth & Company, 1981), 1-11. Lefkowitz points out that every instance of Penelope demonstrating intelligence/agency is in the service of the patriarchy Ulysses represents.

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Chapter 4

Penelope’s Lament: Blistering Tirade?

“[I]t was not the doctors, but the poets, students of human emotions, who were better able to perceive that the causes of hysteria were psychological rather than physical; […] that sexual deprivation offered an unwelcome opportunity to reflect on the limitations of one’s existence and to worry about one’s deviation from established social norms.”98

- Mary Lefkowitz, Heroines and Hysterics

In 1518, Florentine poet Veronica Gambara lost her husband, motivating (allowing) her

to pen the following:

Torture me, cruel Fortune, with your power, Make me your plaything as you will, Relish my harsh, deceptive torment, And pile up miseries for me night and day! Make me exhausted, let me find No respite ever in my too enduring grief, But always give me war and never peace; Heap on me every evil you possess; No power that you wield, while you still live, Can move my steadfast heart from thoughts Which a thousand times a day both kill it and revive it! Nor do I fear your pitiless and savage strike, For the source of all my pain is such That any blow from you would just seem light.99

As Gambara’s poem suggests, the lament possessed a literary life that existed both outside of and

as part of its incorporation into the world of music.100 This particular poem also demonstrates

that for the Renaissance wife, widowhood was both a curse and a blessing: it simultaneously

98 Mary Lefkowitz, Heroines and Hysterics (London: Duckworth, 2005), 21. 99 Gambara, Veronica, Le rime, edited by Alan Bullock (Florence: Olschki, 1995), 88.

100This specific text shows a preexisting tradition of blaming Fate or Fortune for events outside of one’s control. Penelope’s lament evokes this same well-worn concept. Additionally, although most scholars point out the influence of Greek and Roman lament writers on musical laments, I would also like to point out the prevalence of lament texts in the Bible as well. Despite the libertine views of Badoaro and his contemporaries, Monteverdi had taken Holy Orders, and certainly would have read some of these lament texts – for example, the Book of Job and the Book of Lamentations - which in turn reflected on his own thinking on this genre.

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deprived her of a husband and enabled a modicum of self-expression through various avenues:

writing, publishing, and artistic patronage, among others.

Lament texts such as Gambara’s held great appeal to composers in 16th-century Italy; as

Rosand notes, laments “cried out most loudly for musical expression.”101 Throughout the 16th

century, composers continued to set lament texts in various polyphonic settings, including the

increasingly popular madrigal. However, the historical precedents of Monteverdi’s operatic

laments stretched further back than a mere century. Monteverdi and others drew also on the work

of Roman poet Ovid, whose Metamorphoses and Heroides established a tradition regarding

female characters from antiquity. As Lawrence Lipking puts it: “to be a heroine […] means

being abandoned.”102 Especially in the Heroides, in which Ovid imagines a series of letters from

women of antiquity to their absent lovers, one finds connections and a potential source for

Badoaro’s incorporation of an obvious lament text in the beginning of Il ritorno.103 Penelope’s

letter to Ulysses appears first in the collection:

Your Penelope sends you this, Ulysses, the so-long-delayed. Don’t reply to me however: come yourself. Troy lies in ruins, an enemy, indeed, to the girls of Greece - Priam, and all of Troy, were scarcely worth this! O I wish, at that time when he sought Sparta with his fleet, Paris, the adulterer, had been whelmed beneath angry seas! I would not have lain here, cold in an empty bed, nor be left behind, to complain, at suffering long days, nor my hand, bereft, exhaust me, working all night long to cause deception, with my doubtful web. When have I not feared dangers worse than all realities? Love is a thing full of anxious fears.104

101 Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 361. 102 Lipking, Lawrence, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, xv. The Silver Age of Latin

poetry contains some of the most notable attempts by Ovid to categorize Penelope entirely as a symbol of chastity, or the ideal wife.

103 Ovid seems the likely source for Badoaro, since there is no Homeric precedent for this type of lament. Certainly, Penelope frequently retreats to her chambers to weep, but the bard tends to mention these instances as short concluding passages to a section rather than as an emotional opening.

104 Naso, Publius Ovidius, “Penelope,” in Heroides, trans. by A.S. Kline (2001).

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Against this background Chafe, among others, has supported Penelope’s centricity to the plot,

arguing that the placement of her lament at the beginning of the opera makes her the primary

focus of the audience.105

Penelope certainly belongs at the center of the opera’s plot; she even suffers heroically as

the tragedy begins. However, I contend that her lament, while establishing her centrality to the

opera, also marks her as powerless, anachronistic, and problematic. Her lack of power stems

from her utter reliance on absent male authority; her anachronistic nature results from the

relationship of her lament to other portions of the drama; and the problem, clearly established, is

that she cannot make “music” in the form of lyrical utterances or singing. Isolated on stage and

in plot, Penelope moves the audience, but the characters in the opera ignore her plight (Euryclea

excepted).106 She affects the emotions, but at the expense of her dramatic effectiveness; her

lament exhausts her power and portends an inevitable capitulation to love, over which she has no

control.

The Lament in Scholarship

Before we discuss Penelope’s lament, let us first consider some of the scholarly writing

on laments. As much or more so than other genres, the perceived and real affective power of

laments has drawn and continues to draw scholars to it, and with good reason: of all musical

genres, Ruth Finnegan has labeled only three “universal”: lullabies, wedding songs, and laments.

With such a global scope, and by virtue of its intensely personal nature, the genre provides

analysts an abundance of narratives, drama, and emotional intensity. Within the last twenty-five

105 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 276. 106 See Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?” and Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre.

Carter has noted that Penelope’s ultimate fate is incidental to the other characters of the Odyssey, but that Monteverdi is the champion of her cause. While I agree with the first of these points, the second seems like the type of overly optimistic interpretation of her character that pervades the writing on Il ritorno.

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years, the lament has come under rigorous scrutiny by progenitors of the New Musicology, a shift

that led to the incorporation of cultural criticism and other interdisciplinary tasks within the

field.107 One can easily see the benefits of this change: it has facilitated attempts to place laments

within their proper social and cultural contexts. In the case of a dramma per musica, one can also

consider the benefits of placing a lament, or any other contained musical work, within the context

of the drama it helps create.

Still, inasmuch as the lament is a genre with a complex, multifaceted history, studies of

laments from the Renaissance and Baroque eras present certain issues to confront. Sometimes,

scholars politicize the evidence based on their own stated, and unstated, agendas. Since Rosand’s

efforts in 1979, when she labeled the descending tetrachord – a type of basso ostinato – an

“emblem of lament,” scholars have tacitly or overtly approached operatic laments as gendered

inasmuch as female characters utter them with a frequency far surpassing that of male

characters.108 Such studies, while valuable, run the risk of reducing the lament to a simple binary

opposition, to negotiations of power, particularly as they relate to gender. These actions could

107 Those whom one could group as “new musicologists,” despite the great variety of their respective research, include Lawrence Kramer, Rose Subotnik, Gary Tomlinson, Carolyn Abbate, Robert Walser, Richard Leppert, and Philip Brett. See Joseph Kerman, “American Musicology in the 1990s,” Journal of Musicology 9 (Spring 1991): 131-44. Kerman discusses the development of New Musicology, its contributions, and its implications for future musicological developments. 108 The incorporation of feminist theory into musicology has contributed to these associations. See Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” The Musical Quarterly 55 (1979): 346-59, and Suzanne Cusick, “There Was Not One Lady Who Failed to Shed a Tear: Arianna's Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,” Early Music 22 (Feb. 1994): 21-43. For the roots of gender theory applied to music, see especially Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). For a study of gender constructions in Monteverdi’s earlier music, see Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). While I gladly welcome the presence of feminist theory in music as a working apparatus, I struggle with McClary’s assertion that the work of previous feminists “makes it possible for us to proceed without having to define ex nihilo such basic concepts as gender, sexuality, and femininity. We are able to benefit from the debates that have enlivened feminist scholarship and to arrive at our tasks with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus already at hand.” (Feminine Endings, p. 7). Treating feminist theory as a boxed-set, ready for immediate application in musicology, fails to recognize the ability of that discipline to adapt and incorporate new ideas, much like musicology. Also, although she refuses to define gender and sexuality, she invariably interprets them along strictly masculine and feminine lines rather than treating gender identification as the complex issue it truly is in modern (and earlier) societies.

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potentially obscure other possible dramatic contexts and meanings of the work. Chrissochoidis

makes the point that “trapping the richness and complexity of historical phenomena within

computer mentality (on/off, masculine/feminine) erodes from past events and human beings the

right to exist independently from the mind and ideological formations of the historian.”109 This is

not to say that a gendered approach to lament forms does not carry significant benefits. It allows

scholars to understand the processes involved in imparting feminine rhetorical ability within

opera, as well at the ways the genre underscores masculine insecurities and/or fascination

regarding the feminine. However, rather than pursuing a feminist interpretation of operatic

character (or art music in general) as an end in and of itself, it will prove more useful to

understand how these ideologies contribute to a more holistic understanding of the ways in which

music signifies to listeners both in the past and currently.

In addressing Penelope’s lament in Act I of Il ritorno, one must consider these dramatic

issues. Scholars frequently have grouped her powerful utterance together with other

contemporary laments, independent of its dramatic signification. Susan McClary asserts that

“most of the lamenters celebrated in dramatic works after L’Orfeo […] are female: all women

who have been betrayed by absent, treacherous, or ineffectual male authority and who express

their righteous indignation in tirades as blistering as any present-day feminist critique.”110

McClary specifically includes Penelope in this category.

109 Ilia Chrissochoidis, “The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy: Background, Content, and Modern

Interpretations.” I would like to further point out that reducing music to masculine/feminine binaries, while “freeing” woman’s voices from their patriarchal surroundings, tends to obscure the viewpoints of those who may not identify with either classification. Even in Monteverdi’s time, castrati (among others) represent a group of individuals seen as occupying a different space on the hierarchical ladder of gender (where men occupy the uppermost rung and women the bottom). In Monteverdi’s time, conceptions of gender/sexuality (two separate constructions) operated primarily on a vertical, hierarchical axis. Subsequently, developments in the understanding of the body in the 18th century contributed to the formation of a horizontal axis as it relates to both gender and humans as a species differentiated from other anthropoids. For a more complete overview of 17th theories of sexuality and gender, see Roger Freitas, “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato,” The Journal of Musicology 20 (Spring 2003): 196-249.

110 McClary, Feminine Endings, 49.

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However, it may be more effective to understand Penelope’s lament as manifesting a

different sort of tradition. Its placement within the opera, the specific ways in which Monteverdi

sets Penelope’s music, and the results of the queen’s musical rhetoric suggest a Penelope far

removed from Homer’s prudent, crafty character. Rather than a monarch who utters a

“blistering” condemnation of masculine authority, we find a character who eschews agency in

favor of the existing patriarchal system.

Penelope’s Lament: Formal Structure

Monteverdi divides Penelope’s drawn-out plaint into three large sections: seventy-one

measures for the first section (mm.5-75) and forty-four measures for the latter two (mm. 83-126

and mm. 135-178). Between the sections, Penelope’s nurse Euryclea sings short, eight-measure

lines to demarcate shifts in Penelope’s emotional focus. Like previous lamenters, such as

Ariadne in Monteverdi’s famous Lamento d’Arianna (1608) and the nymph in Lamento della

Ninfa (1638), Penelope does not instigate her musico-dramatic shifts; she requires an outside

impetus.

The form described above was not, however, the original form of Penelope’s monologue.

Monteverdi’s substantial editing of this section demonstrates the importance he placed on how

Penelope first appeared to the audience. Initially for this section, he had received from Badoaro

“a sprawling text comprising 125 lines of versi sciolti.”111 The librettist had divided Penelope’s

text into four sections, with divisions still marked by Euryclea. The phrase “Tu sol del tuo tornar

perdesti il giorno” culminates the first two sections, while the line, “Torna, deh torna, Ulisse,”

111 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 254. According to the writings of Vincenzo Galilei and

other members of the Florentine Camerata, versi sciolti is the proper text setting for noble and/or highborn characters.

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closes the third section of text.112 These repeated lines, ostensibly written to provide coherency to

Penelope’s thoughts, are “rendered ineffectual from a formal point of view,”113 a result of the

comparatively vast size of each section. Additionally, Badoaro’s tendency to wander off on

pseudo-philosophical textual peregrinations prevented Monteverdi from expressing the emotions

of the character.114

To create a more concise, dramatically convincing monologue, Monteverdi cut fifty-one

lines from Badoaro’s text, which allowed him to divide the reduced text into the three sections

described above. Next, he switched the second and third sections of Badoaro’s original. Along

with this reconfiguration, Monteverdi reordered certain individual lines as well, presumably

motivated by “the distinctive features of the text: its unusually regular structure – many of the

lines form rhymed couplets – and its rhetorical emphasis, since nine different lines begin with the

same key word, ‘torna.’”115

112 This line of text appears twice more in Badoaro’s original text in sections three and four. This

may be the reason Rosand describes these textual refrains as “irregularly punctuated.” 113 Ibid. 114 See Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 255-7, for Badoaro’s elongated version of Penelope’s

lament. Rosand includes the entire text, with the lines Monteverdi cut in italics. Monteverdi cut all of the fourth section, which consists mostly of musings on time and death. Monteverdi’s distaste for this type of writing is documented both in his letters and the preface to Le Nozze. In the preface, Torcigliani notes that he deliberately left out “abstract thoughts and concepts” (“pensieri e concetti tolti di lontano”) in deference to Monteverdi’s inclinations. This only further drives home Monteverdi’s view of himself as primarily a craftsman of drama rather than a protector of musical taste.

115 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 261.

Table 4-1: The Formal Alterations to Penelope’s Lament

Badoaro’s Lament Monteverdi’s Lament

Part One: “Di misera regina,” 34 lines Part One: “Di misera regina,” 34 lines (unaltered)

Part Two: “Torna il tranquillo al mare,” 27 lines

Part Two: “Non è dunque per me varia la sorte?” 22 lines (16 lines cut)

Part Three: “Promettasi a la patria una vendetta,” 38 lines

Part Three: “Torna il tranquillo amare,” 20 lines

Part Four: “Torna, Ulisse, che ‘l tempo,” 26 lines

Eliminated (four lines moved to Monteverdi’s Part Three)

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The resulting three-part division establishes the importance of the repeating phrases

described above: “Tu sol del tuo tornar” and “Torna, deh torna, Ulisse.” In the phrase “Tu sol

del tuo tornar perdesti il giorno” Penelope (truthfully) accuses Ulysses of failing to return, unlike

so many other persons and natural occurrences. This phrase closes out the long first section of

the lament (mm. 68-75), and appears again towards the end of Monteverdi’s third section (mm.

159-65).

The second phrase, “Torna, deh, torna Ulisse,” becomes the climax of the lament in the

restructured form. It sums up Penelope’s emotions; she plainly beseeches Ulysses to come back

to Ithaca. In Badoaro’s original libretto, the phrase appears three times. While it does close out

the third section, the other two occurrences practically disappear through their seemingly random

placement in the midst of the third and fourth sections. Monteverdi’s rendition brings the phrase

to the fore: it closes the latter two sections (mm. 122-26, and 174-78), creating a dramatic balance

between or progression in the reiterated phrases, from, “Tu sol del tuo tornar” to, “Torna,

Ulisse!” Monteverdi further highlights both recurring phrases through text repetition, heightening

the emotion as Penelope drives forward to the cadences: “Tu sol del tuo tornar, del tuo tornar, tu

sol del tuo tornar, perdesti il giorno,” and, “Torna, torna, torna, deh torna, torna, Ulisse!”

Di misera regina non terminati mai dolenti affanni. L'aspettato non giunge e pur fuggono gli anni; la serie del penar è lunga, ahi, troppo, a chi vive in angosce il tempo è zoppo. Fallacissima speme, speranze non più verdi ma canute, all'invecchiato male non promette più pace o salute. Scorsero quattro lustri dal memorabil giorno in cui con sue rapine il superbo troiano chiamò l'altra sua patria alle ruine. A ragion arse Troia, poiché l'amore impuro,

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116 As noted in the table above, Monteverdi left the opening section of the lament unaltered.

ch'è un delitto di foco, si purga con le fiamme; ma ben contro ragione per l'altrui fallo condannata innocente dall'altrui colpe io sono l'afflitta penitente. Ulisse accorto e saggio, tu che punir gli adulteri ti vanti, aguzzi l'armi e susciti le fiamme per vendicar gli errori d'una profuga greca, e intanto lasci la tua casta consorte fra nemici rivali in dubbio dell'onore, in forse a morte. Ogni partenza attende desiato ritorno: tu sol del tuo tornar perdesti il giorno116.

Non è dunque per me varia la sorte? Cangiò forse fortuna la volubil ruota in stabil seggio? E la sua pronta vela ch'ogni uman caso porta fra l'incostanza a volo, sol per me non raccoglie un fiato solo. Cangian per altri pur aspetto in cielo le stelle erranti e fisse. Torna, deh torna Ulisse! Penelope t'aspetta, l'innocente sospira, piange l'offesa e contro il tenace offensor né pur s'adira. All'anima affannata porto le sue discolpe acciò non resti di crudeltà macchiato, ma fabbro de' miei danni incolpo il fato. Così per tua difesa col destino, col cielo fomento guerre e stabilisco risse.

Torna, deh, torna Ulisse!

Torna il tranquillo al mare, torna il zeffiro al prato, l'aurora mentre al sol fa dolce invito a un ritorno del dì che è pria partito. Tornan le brine in terra,

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In addition to the formal structure of the lament, the music itself connects Penelope with

Human Frailty. By using tonal centers to signify dramatic concerns, Monteverdi establishes the

real threat to Penelope in Il ritorno: not Time, not Fate – whom she rails against in the first and

second sections of the lament, respectively – but Love.

“Torna, deh torna, Ulisse”

As Act One begins, Monteverdi establishes a somber atmosphere through a simple, but

striking musical device: deliberate, melancholic minor chords:

tornano al centro i sassi, e con lubrici passi, torna all'oceano il rivo. L'uomo qua giù ch'è vivo lunge da' suoi principi porta un'alma celeste e un corpo frale; tosto more il mortale e torna l'alma in cielo e torna il corpo in polve dopo breve soggiorno; tu sol del tuo tornar perdesti il giorno. Torna, ché mentre porti empie dimore al mio fiero dolore, veggio del mio morir l'ore prefisse. Torna, deh torna Ulisse!

Figure 4-1: Formal Structure of Penelope’s Lament

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The suggestion of gloom stems from the motive’s relationship to the preceding music.

Monteverdi represents an emotional descent through the juxtaposition of this basic “sinfonia”

with the final, D major cadence of the Prologue that immediately precedes it. The descending

minor third traveled from F-sharp to E-flat successfully achieves the sharp change in affect

Monteverdi sought and preferred in music. The uplifting fanfare of the final Prologue sinfonia

clashes brightly against the plodding destitution that follows. Monteverdi creates further contrast

in the musical texture by shifting from the madrigal-like trio of Time, Fortune, and Love that

closed the Prologue (final sinfonia excepted) to simple basso continuo, preparing for Penelope’s

monodic entry. In effect, this transition musically conveys a descent from the spiritual plane

where the allegories dwell. There, lyricism rather than speech (recitative) inundates the

communication between characters. In Ulysses’s palace, by contrast, a different atmosphere

reigns.

Example 4-1: Act I, Scene 1 – Opening Sinfonia

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From Penelope’s first entrance, it becomes clear that she is mired in a deep depression.117

The listener experiences Penelope’s melancholic emotional state through her music. She opens

on the mediant of c minor. As the music progresses, Monteverdi evokes a Phrygian quality by

lowering the second scale degree in clear signification of the burden of Penelope’s sadness.118

However, Penelope’s c-minor beginning proves deceptive. In reality, d minor becomes the

musical manifestation of Penelope’s depression, as suggested by the frequent cadences in this

117 As Penelope began her lament, audiences would undoubtedly have compared her music to

another famous lamenter: Ariadne, the abandoned lover of Thesus. Although L’Arianna had originally premiered in 1608 as part of a wedding celebration at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua and Monteverdi’s former patron, it had also been revived in Venice as a public opera just one year before the premiere of Il ritorno.117 More than any other piece of music, the Lamento d’Arianna represents the model of the genre against which all other renditions of the lament scene were compared. See Lorenzo Bianconi, “Formal and Dramatic Convention: The Lament,” in Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 204-19; and Ellen Rosand, “Il lamento: The Fusion of Music and Drama,” in Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); and Wendy Heller, “Didone and the Voice of Chastity,” in Emblems of Eloquence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

118 See Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 276-88. I might also suggest that in an increasingly binary key system, the Phrygian d-flats also grounds Penelope’s lament in an antiquated era. Throughout the opera, Monteverdi plays off the tension between modality and tonality for a variety of expressive purposes.

Example 4-2: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope’s Opening Line

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key: seven times over the course of the lament.119 Most significantly, when she arrives at the root

of her dejection – the first iteration of “Tu sol del tuo tornar” – she cadences in D:

This line demonstrates the typical collapse of any attempt Penelope makes at anger. As Penelope

reiterates her lines, the music ascends chromatically, building intensity as Penelope admonishes

Ulysses: “tu sol.” On the final “tornar,” Penelope reaches d5, the highest note she sings in the

opera. However, almost immediately, she collapses down a sixth, slowly dragged back down to

d4 beneath the weight of her sadness. Subsequent utterances of Penelope throughout the opera

leave no doubt: depression, signified by d minor, defines her.

In tandem with d minor, a minor – the key associated with Love in the Prologue – forms

the tonal backbone of Penelope’s lament. Tonicizations of this key occur throughout her

monologue, most importantly at cadences and particularly at the aforementioned phrase, “Torna,

deh torna, Ulisse.”

119 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 277. One should note the propensity to raise the third of

the triad at important cadence points. This is not necessarily an indicator of key so much as a practice of the times. Prominent analyses of Monteverdi’s operas note the fluidity of the major/minor interpolation at cadence points.

Example 4-3: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope’s Trademark Key

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Monteverdi’s use of a minor for this formally emphasized phrase articulates the love Penelope

bears towards her absent husband. In this sense, any attempted criticism falls entirely flat.

As mentioned in the Prologue, a minor constitutes the key of Love. In the lament, this

association carries over, effectively representing Penelope’s true adversary in the opera.

However, one could suggest the dangers of Love escape Penelope’s notice: she fails to directly

address Amor. Instead, she dwells on the other allegories from the Prologue, unaware that Love

presents the real threat to her onestá (chastity).121 In the first section of the lament, she confronts

Time, miserably noting that her grief is “never-ending” (see Figure 4-2 above). In the second

section, she asks Fate, “Non è dunque per me varia la sorte? Cangiò forse Fortuna la volubile

ruota in stabil seggio?” (“Is there then no change to my fate? Did Fortune perhaps change her

turning wheel for a fixed seat?”)

The next logical step would take Penelope towards a contemplation of love and the

dangers it poses, particularly for a woman of her noble station and in her specific predicament. 120 Penelope repeats the same music and text in mm. 122-26 and 174-78 – the ends of the middle

and final sections of the lament, respectively. 121 Onestá seems to have specific connotations with morality and/or chastity as it relates

specifically to married women.

Example 4-4: Act I, Scene 1 – Penelope Longs for Ulysses120

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On a dramatic level, such thoughts also help foreshadow the appearance of the suitors, who

represent the greatest threat to Penelope’s virtue. Yet throughout the entire lament, Penelope fails

to mention them, instead focusing solely on her abandonment by Ulysses. Instead, Monteverdi

(as mentioned earlier, he repositioned Badoaro’s text) begins the third section with Penelope

discussing the variety of items in nature that return, juxtaposing that with Ulysses’s failure to

return.122 From there, she becomes more introspective, contemplating mankind’s frailty:

L’uomo quaggiù ch’è vivo Lungi da’ suoi principia, porta un’ alma celeste e un corpo frale. Tosto more il mortale, E torna l’alma in Cielo, E torna il corpo in polve dopo breve soggiorno. Man lives in a low place Far from his high beginning, [He] bears his heavenly spirit in a fragile body Soon death to mortals, And the soul returns to heaven, And the body returns to dust after the short journey.123

122 See Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance; Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious

Consort?”; and Rosand, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Power of Music,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (Nov., 1995): 179-84. The beginning of the third lament section is rife with the natural, showy Marinist poetry that Tomlinson argues characterizes this period in musical history. Tomlinson explains: “They tend to objectify poetic utterance through reference to things in the real world. The protagonists forsake the unmediated emotional expression of Orpheus and Ariadne and often seem unable to voice their feelings except by comparison to natural objects or objective concept […] Penelope’s longing for Ulysses’ homecoming inspires her not to ‘un giusto lamento’ (as Monteverdi had once described Ariadne’s plaint) but to a twenty-seven verse enumeration of the things in nature that unfailingly return –eleven verses of which Monteverdi eliminated from his setting.” This use of nature surely did not please Monteverdi, for it gets away from “changes of affection that please Signore Monteverdi very much because they allow him to display the marvels of his art.” This quality results in a somewhat ambiguous musical setting. Monteverdi actually composes music in C major in an almost aria-like style, which is completely unsuited to Penelope. However, both Rosand and Carter have waved this off. Carter says, “Penelope’s brief shift to an aria style at ‘Torna il tranquillo al mare’ (“Calm returns to the sea”) seems no more than a nostalgic hankering for the joys of the past, when she did indeed know how to sing,” while Rosand asserts, “[T]he lyricism is painfully short-lived. The ease with which she desists, with which song fades back into speech, underscores all the more her discomfort with music, her inability or unwillingness to let go. The temporary lapse was an illusion: a mere fantasy that music was possible” (180).

123 Curtis, Il ritorno, 20. The translation is my own, although Curtis provides a semantic translation in the score to match the musical rhythm.

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Even as Penelope dwells on her mortality, however, Monteverdi reconfigured Badoaro’s text so

that his musical setting creates an inevitable association with the Prologue and Penelope’s own

music. She ends on the “Torna” refrain in a minor; Monteverdi’s tonal setting suggests the

largest threat to Penelope and stresses her total reliance on Ulysses.

The Lament in 1640: Emblem, Convention

When Giulia Paoelli opened Act I of Il ritorno at the opera’s premiere, she undoubtedly

gripped contemporary audiences with her abilities: then and later, laments maintained a marked

level of popularity.124 As part of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals, the Lamento della

Ninfa had established, just two years before the premiere of Il ritorno, a new sort of lament that

Bianconi has termed the “lament aria”.125 Despite the popularity of the new, strophic lament –

which crystalized the use of the descending tetrachord as a signifier of the genre – lament scenes

continued to hold sway over operatic audiences as well.126 Discussing the lament scene, Bianconi

says it is “recognizable less on account of its musical physiognomy than by virtue of its literary

and dramatic characteristics.”127 He continues:

The lament scene is a scene of desperation, imprecation, and self-pity on the part of the heroine […]. One of its principal structural features […] is the violent, abrupt alternation

124 The authoritative text for a concise history of laments in the seventeenth century remains Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), 361-87. Also see Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), particularly the chapter entitled “Didone and the Voice of Chastity,” 82-135. For an in depth discussion of the physical appeal of women’s voices in the era, see Bonnie Gordon, “Vocal Anatomies: Mouths, Breath, and Voices in Early Modern Italy,” in Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism, eds. Jeffrey Kallberg, Anthony Newcomb, and Ruth Solie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10-46.

125 Bianconi, Lorenzo, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. by David Bryant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 216. The Lamento della Ninfa represents the “strophic lament” Rosand labels in Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 367-9.

126 Rosand, “Il lamento: The Fusion of Music and Drama,” in Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 361-87.

127 Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 216.

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of opposite states of mind, the over-representation of desperation by means of extreme states of consciousness and unconsciousness (“non amant sed insaniunt mulieres”).128

The paradigm of this definition, the Lamento d’Arianna appeared in Italy a full thirty

years before the Lament of the Nymph. Composed by Monteverdi as the climax of his opera

L’Arianna, which tells the story of Theseus and Ariadne, the lament met with instant and

enduring success.129 Observing the audience members during the lament, Federico Follino noted

that “there was not one lady who failed to shed a tear.”130 Universal approbation corroborated

Monteverdi’s high opinion of the thrice-published work; after being published again in 1623 in

Venice, it continued to be performed, admired, and emulated for several years.131 Following

Monteverdi’s template, laments traditionally functioned as vehicles for “emblems of eloquence,”

to use Heller’s term. Heller proceeds to offer her own definition of operatic laments:

As ancient writers had also recognized, they provided the perfect outlet for unrestrained female eloquence. Isolated, separated from society, the lamenting woman could express herself with a singular freedom: repenting a desperate passion, bemoaning a seemingly unalterable tragic destiny, and even pronouncing a fatal curse on the deserter – without disturbing the theatrical norms of speech and syntax. As we have seen with Arianna, opera frequently suppressed the power of its most threatening women by altering inherited myths almost beyond recognition, while at the same time providing composers with the ready opportunity to exploit the dramatic potential of these lamenting women. 132

Ariadne fulfills this definition in the fourth section of her lament; she utters a curse before quickly

recanting, doubting the power of her own freedom:

Ahi, che non pur risponde! Ahi che più d’aspe è sordo a’ miei lamenti!

O nembi, o turbi, o venti Sommergetelo voi dentr’a quell’onde! Correte, orche e baleen E de le membra immonde 128 Ibid. 129 The opera has since been lost. The lament, however, survives in both its madrigal and monodic

settings because Monteverdi had it published independently of the opera. 130 Quoted in Suzanne Cusick, “There Was Not One Lady Who Failed to Shed a Tear: Arianna’s

Lament and the Construction of Modern Womanhood,” Early Music 22 (Feb., 1994): 22. 131 Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1991), 363-4. Rosand describes in detail some of the specific ways composers emulated this form. 132 Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century

Venice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 48.

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Empiete le voragini profonde. Che parlo, Ahi che vaneggio?

Ah, he still does not answer! Ah, more deaf than a viper is he to my lament! O storms, o tempests, o winds, Drown him beneath your waves! Hasten, whales and sea monsters, And with his foul limbs Fill the deep abysses. Ah, what am I saying? Am I delirious?133

Monteverdi depicted the conflicting states of mind Ariadne goes through between the penultimate

and final line through the music: a shift from the G, a sharp hexachord, through a, to B-flat as

Ariadne backs away from her words. Simultaneously, he rhythmically decelerates Ariadne’s line

as she backs away from the intensity of her anger on the line “Empiete le voragini profonde”

(“Fill the deep abysses”):

133 Quoted in Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 360.

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Chafe notes that, with this line, “Monteverdi […] breaks into a style of rhythmic declamation

even more suggestive of the stile concitato than the devices of the preceding section.”134

134 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 180. The stile concitato represented Monteverdi’s discovery of how to set the “high” passions or affections of the soul. See Ardo, avvampo, mi struggo da Madrigali Guerrieri e Amorosi, Libro VIII: a 8 Voci (SSAATTBB), 2 Violoni e Basso Continuo, ed. Andrea Bornstein (Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2006). He described the style thoroughly in the preface to his Eight Book of Madrigals, aptly subtitled “Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi.” The piece that exemplifies the style is the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; see Claudio Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda: For Solo Voices (STB), String Quartet or String Orchestra, and Keyboard Continuo, ed. and trans. Denis

Example 4-5: Lamento d’Arianna, mm. 76-84

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With Ariadne’s lament in mind, Penelope’s persistent melancholy – her inability to

muster any significant level of vitriol – complicates the relationship between Penelope and

Ariadne that some writers advance. While both laments appear in operas, they serve wholly

different dramatic functions. 135 Rather than signaling a blistering tirade, perhaps through the use

of the stile concitato, Monteverdi’s determined use of a minor in Penelope’s lament suggests an

utter reliance on Ulysses. Monteverdi’s setting of Penelope’s lament and other lament texts in his

opera, then, show his knowledge of the emblematic qualities of the genre (unsurprising given that

two of his works defined the aesthetic boundaries of the genre). Precisely because he had so

convincingly established the characteristic qualities of the genre in previous works, in Il ritorno

Monteverdi manipulated the conventions of the genre for dramatic purposes and for the

enjoyment of the audience.136

Juxtaposed Laments: Penelope, Ulysses, and the Question of Agency

As noted above, Penelope is not the only lamenter in Il ritorno. An interpretation of

Penelope’s lament becomes more convincing when considered against another prominent lament

that appears later in the opera. Sung by Ulysses, it simultaneously emphasizes his own agency

while highlighting Penelope’s ineffectiveness.

Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Characteristics of the style include a faster tempo, rapidly iterated sixteenth notes, and the cantus durus (usually G). Monteverdi sets the stile concitato in G throughout his oeuvre, making it an easily recognizable occurrence. Although Ariadne’s lament obviously predates Monteverdi’s codification of the stile concitato, elements of the style pervade his earlier writing.

135 See Lorenzo Bianconi, “Formal and Dramatic Convention: The Lament,” in Music in the Seventeenth Century, 204-19. Bianconi makes and describes the distinction between lament scenes and lament arias. Also see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice for an explanation of the different forms written for musical laments; Rosand’s debt to Bianconi in the assignation of Ariadne’s lament and the Lament of the Nymph as paradigms is quite clear.

136 One can reference the noted audience reactions to Iro, seen below, which undoubtedly stemmed in part from his (properly placed) mock lament at the beginning of Act III.

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Il Lamento d’Ulisse

In Act I, Scene 6, the Phaeacians have just deposited Ulysses on the shores of Ithaca.137 Like

Penelope at the beginning of the opera, Ulysses awakes to find himself abandoned. His opening

lines, in c minor, signify confusion:

Dormo ancora, dormo ancora o son desto? Che contrade rimiro? Qual aria, ohimè, respiro? E che Terra calpesto Dormo ancora, dormo ancora, dormo ancora, o son desto? Chi fece in me, chi fece Il sempre dolce lusinghevol sonno, Minstro de’ tormenti? Chi cangiò il mio riposo in ria sventura? Qual deità de’ dormienti ha cura? Do I sleep, do I sleep, or am I awake? What country do I behold? What air, alas, do I breathe? What ground do I tread upon? Do I sleep, do I sleep, do I sleep, or am I awake? Who caused in me, who caused The always sweet, beguiling slumber, Harbinger of torments? What has transformed my rest into dread misfortune? What god watches over sleepers?138

Subsequently, he sings four additional sections. In the second section (mm. 23-43), he shifts to d

minor as he blames himself for succumbing to sleep. While he reaches a high E in m. 31, he

descends quickly in subsequent measures, getting stuck on F momentarily before eventually

137 Rosand refers to Ulysses’s appearance as occurring in Act I, Scene 7. The score by Curtis,

however, labels this Act I, Scene 6. It seems Rosand labels the scenes using the five-act division found in the librettos, while Curtis, creating a critical musical edition, works from the surviving musical manuscript.

138 As with other text repetitions in the opera, Monteverdi inserted the reiterations of “dormo ancora.” This creates rhetorical emphasis, which builds the drama and demonstrates wily Ulysses’s loquaciousness.

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collapsing to d, not coincidentally the key of Human Frailty and Penelope.

At this point in his lament, Ulysses demonstrates a remarkable similarity to Penelope. Both begin

their laments on the median in c minor. In mm. 18-26 of her lament, Penelope muses on time and

her weariness; In a related manner, Ulysses addresses sleep, the “brother of death” (“fratello della

Example 4-6: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses Blames Himself

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Morte”), and the dangers it poses to man, like Penelope stuck in the key of depression and

inaction: d.

There, however, the similarities end. In the following section of Ulysses’s lament, he discards

any semblance of frailty:

O Dei, sempre sdegnati, Numi, non mai placati, Contro Ulisse, che dorme, anche severi, Vostri divini imperi Contro l’human voler sian Fermi, e forti, Ma non tolghino ohimé, la pace ai morti. O ever wrathful Gods, Gods never placated, Harsh even to sleeping Ulysses Let your divine authority Upon the will of man be strong and resolute, But let it not deprive, alas, the dead of peace.139

As though he were angry with himself for having given credence to weak feelings, Ulysses leaps

an octave up to d5 before quickly moving to E, clashing with the “d” in the bass in the type of

unprepared dissonance that, at the beginning of the century, had perturbed Artusi so much in 139 Curtis, Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 52-3.

Example 4-7: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses Addresses Slumber

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Monteverdi’s madrigals. In the next section, he directs his attention to the Phaeacians, who he

thinks have abandoned him. Moved to anger, he utters an eerily prophetic curse on the

Phaeacians as he repeatedly stretches up to G, a signifier not just of Time and Fortune, but also

anger and war: “Sia delle vostre velle, falsissimi Feaci, sempre borea nemico, e sian, qual piume

al vento o scogli in mare, le vostre infide navi leggere agl’aquiloni, al l’aure gravi” (“To your

sails, most treacherous Phaeacians, may Boreas always be an enemy, and as feathers in the wind

or reefs in the sea, let your faithful ships be light to the north winds, and heavy to the breezes”).140

140 Curtis, Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 19. This statement relates to an interesting issue posed by Tim

Carter about Ariadne’s lament in L’Arianna (see below). Ulysses’s curse on the Phaeacians, uttered within his lament text, is dramatically redundant. In the previous scene, Neptune had already sought Jove’s permission to transform the Phaeacian ship, and Jove had allowed it, saying, “The gods will not despise a just vendetta” (“Non fien discare al Ciel le tue vendetta”). The reasons for redundancies between plot and lament highlight further the existence of laments outside of the narrative structure of operas. The fact that one cannot as easily remove Penelope’s lament from its dramatic context helps signify its difference from other laments.

Example 4-8: Act I, Scene 6 – Ulysses’s Curse of the Phaeacians

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Observing the end of Ariadne’s lament (see above), one finds Rosand’s label of Ulysses’s curse

as “Arianna-like” quite accurate, but with one important difference: Ariadne rapidly switches

affect as she tries to take back her anger, while Ulysses merely ends with his curse.141 This seems

to demonstrate his confidence and agency; he refuses to retract his harsh words, and Minerva’s

arrival in answer to his lament only confirms his heroic stature and justifies his stance.

In the beginning of this section, and elsewhere in Ulysses’s lament, Monteverdi writes

music for Ulysses in G, which further highlights the difference in agency between him and

Penelope. In fact, although Monteverdi turns Penelope towards G major more than once

throughout her lament, Chafe notes the following:

Penelope’s anger has a curiously ‘neutral’ tonal character that arises from the hexachordal background […] In contrast to the conspicuous introduction of the guerriero style in Ulysses’ G-Major music and the modern G-Major sound of his ‘O fortunato Ulisse,” Penelope’s G hardly ever exists as anything more than a cadence degree of the natural hexachord, which she never exceeds in this solo [in fact, in the opera].142

In comparison to Ulysses then, Penelope cannot rouse herself to anger over her situation.143

She vacillates between her main key, d minor, and a minor as she beseeches her husband to

return. Rendered emotionally numb and at her wit’s end, Penelope’s resolution to struggle

against Fate rings hollow. In an opera dominated by the cantus durus, Penelope’s persistent use

of the cantus mollis region strikes one as problematically marked. Her attempts to use the cantus

durus as effectively as her husband fail miserably.

To drive the point home, Monteverdi constructs Penelope’s lament in such a way that it

fails to cadence in her trademark key of d. Monteverdi leaves the audience and the tonal area

hanging. Furthermore, since Penelope began her lament in c minor, the ending in “a” suggests

her reliance upon the surrounding drama in order for her expression to mean anything. One can

141 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 283. 142 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 281. 143 Recall Gambara’s poem (p. 50), whose writings only reached publication after the death of her

husband. Not without reason are the most prominent female writers of seventeenth-century Venice either widows or in convents.

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compare this to Ulysses, who begins and ends in c minor. He, unlike Penelope, offers a tonally

closed lament that seems to emphasize his independence, strength, and agency. Penelope’s

lament establishes her frailty, while Ulysses proves his agency, his power over the events of the

opera. Not only does he ironically confirm the doom of the Phaeacians, he also causes Minerva

to appear in his need. Penelope’s suffering merits no assistance; she is merely a part of the scene

in which Ulysses and Minerva are players. In the original Odyssey, Minerva sends Penelope

dreams, comforts her sorrows with sleep. In Il ritorno, Penelope is faithless and isolated not only

from her absent husband, but also from the gods themselves.144

The dramatic placement of the monologue further highlights its ineffectiveness. Laments

were in many ways prototypical arias. Arias, moving forward in the history of Italian opera, exist

outside the dramatic framework of the operas. In other words, they could be appreciated on their

own merits. In Monteverdi, we find one of the progenitors of this practice. Tim Carter has

argued that Monteverdi actually intended Arianna’s lament to exist outside its dramatic context

because, dramaturgically speaking, her emotional outburst is redundant.145 The same is true of

144 The Phaeacians – who also sing in d minor – lack faith in heaven, just like Penelope. They

proclaim, “Tutto fa, tutto fa, tutto fa, ché’l Ciel del nostra oprar pensier non ha.” Their nonchalant disregard for the will of heaven secures their doom. Their punishment for their lack of faith is to have their ship turned into stone – a visually spectacular event that catered to the audience. Like Penelope, they set themselves outside the influence of heaven; heaven accepts the challenge to prove otherwise.

145 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 206-8. Carter shows that the chorus describes Ariadne’s abandonment and subsequent reaction. By the time her lament occurs at the end of the opera, it is not only dramatically redundant, but chronologically displaced. One gets the same sense of Penelope’s lament. See Norbert Dubowy, “Bermerkungen zu einigen Ulisse-Opern des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Claudio Monteverdi und die Folgen. Bericht über das Internationale Symposium Detmold 1993, eds. Silke Leopold and Joachim Steinheuer (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), 215-43. This may relate to or justify Dubowy’s speculation that one could see Penelope’s and Ulysses’s opening sequences as occurring simultaneously in different locations. Thus, just as Penelope reaches the apex of her sorrow, Ulysses returns. Whether the creators of the drama had this in mind is uncertain. Given the frequent discussions over scene divisions as they relate to the progression of time (as in Torcigliani’s forward to Le Nozze) , it seems uncertain that early opera aesthetics could actually accommodate chronological simultaneity. Truly, one could cut the first two scenes of the opera without interrupting the dramatic (or chronological) flow. Like scene one, scene three also begins with a c-minor sinfonia, and the Phaeacian ship appears on the horizon. Subsequently, Nettuno rises up from the sea and Jove appears in the heavens. In fact, the visual spectacle of such a beginning would have appealed to audiences at the time. The scene with the gods almost acts like a Prologue to Ulysses’s first scene, a more effective lament than Penelope’s. In its original conception, therefore, Penelope’s lament may have been placed there purely for aesthetic reasons; specifically, the affective capabilities of the prima

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Penelope’s lament; its placement at the beginning of the opera thwarts its emotional power in part

because it occurs so early in the plot. Coincidentally – or perhaps intentionally – Penelope’s

strongest iteration of agency and rhetorical ability occurs at the moment when she and Ulysses

are furthest apart in the opera.146 This placement differs from the typical location of an operatic

protagonist’s lament. Rosand states:

Operas usually contained several [laments], often for different characters, dispersed freely through the three acts, although one was invariably reserved for the protagonist, to be sung at the climactic moment just before the denouement. Like the lament of Arianna, most operatic laments were much more than individual numbers; they usually comprised entire scenes in which the protagonist confronted both the crux of the drama and the audience with all of her/his musical and dramatic powers [emphasis added].147

Ariadne’s lament serves as the emotional climax of L’Arianna. Monteverdi placed it near the

opera’s denouement; thus, even while it emphasizes Ariadne’s helplessness – she rapidly recants

her curse on Theseus – its dramatic placement stresses its importance. One can hardly say the

same of Penelope’s utterance; instead, Monteverdi improbably allots that place of significance to

Iro, a “parte riddicola” (see Chapter Six).148 Her lament tells the viewer very little about the

course of events in the opera.149 The audience at this point had seen only the action of the

Prologue, which introduces an opera focusing on conflicts between affects, or emotions, and on

the weakness of a particular character. Juxtaposed with Penelope bemoaning her condition and

donna Giulia Paoelli, of whom Curtis says, “must have been one of those creatures so rare today: a true contralto.” Audiences then (and now) would have been mesmerized by the unique vocal qualities of such a singer.

146 See Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 251-93. While this assertion is my own, Rosand provides an intricately detailed analysis of the original five-act structure of Il ritorno, demonstrating how each act highlights the decreasing distance between Ulysses and his goal (Penelope and his kingdom). Thus, the beginning of the opera – Penelope’s lament – represents the furthest distance between the two (physically, and possibly emotionally) in the entire opera.

147 Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 363. 148 While several scholars have scoffed at and/or dismissed Iro’s role in the opera (Tim Carter says

that, “The other candidate for presenting a message, Iro, remains – for all Rosand’s perceptive analysis – a ‘parte riddicola.’”), Rosand sees Iro as the moral crux of the entire show (she is determined to label the philosophical meaning of the show, even though Monteverdi really sought to eliminate abstract concepts from the libretto). See Ellen Rosand, “Iro and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,” The Journal of Musicology 7 (Spring 1989): 141-64. Rosand develops these ideas in Rosand, “The Philosopher and the Parasite,” in Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy.

149 For more on the “theodicy” of Il ritorno, see Ewans, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse,” 12-16. Note also that Ulysses fails to recant once Minerva informs him he is on Ithaca.

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her own susceptibility to the whims of Fortune and the ravages of Time, audiences could not help

but connect Penelope with frailty. 150

Some writers disagree with this idea. For example, Chafe states:

Penelope’s solo is a worthy successor to Ariadne’s lament, but one that is not detachable from the opera to the same degree. Owing to its early place in the drama Penelope’s solo cannot exhibit the resolution of conflict that Ariadne’s does. Instead, it portrays the heroine bearing up with difficulty against overwhelming pressures. It is, in fact, not a closed form, but one whose interpretation is dependent upon its surroundings. In some respects it is all the more moving for that.151

This statement, however, fails to highlight the main issue; namely, what little dramatic change

Penelope’s words effect. She makes only a token attempt at anger or indignation, quite unlike

her husband’s monologue later in the act. Instead, her music suggests Penelope’s climactic

emotion is one of supplication, confirmed by her persistent refrain in a minor: “Torna, de torna

Ulisse.” The rhetorical ability she displays falls flat.

In her work on laments across times and cultures, Nancy Lee has stated: “Lament is about

being acknowledged by God and affirmed – along broader lines, about God seeing the unjust

perpetrators.”152 In this sense, the lack of resolution at the culmination of Penelope’s lament

further underscores her ineffectiveness, her lack of power and agency. At the end of her lament,

Penelope has poured her soul out to the audience, but the gods of the opera care nothing for

predicament; nor, indeed, does any character except perhaps Euryclea. Tim Carter remarks that

later in Il ritorno, the other characters tend to ignore Penelope’s plight. Instead, only Monteverdi

appears to champion her cause.153 However, even as early as the lament, the audience sees how

150 Penelope’s relationship with time further drives home the affiliation of the opening lament with

Penelope’s letter in the Heroides. The final line of the poem focuses specifically on this concept: “You’ll find that I, in truth, a girl when you went away, though you soon return, have become an aged woman.”

151 Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, 276-7. 152 Nancy Lee, Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress

Press, 2010), 105. 153 Tim Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?,” 12.

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truly abandoned she is.154 In response to her lament, and evoking a spectacular change in affect,

Love appears to taunt the queen in the form of Melantho and Eurymachus. Neither comfort nor

portentous dreams come from the gods to inform her that Ulysses will return.155 Penelope can do

nothing to help her circumstances, a state Monteverdi stressed by eliminating Badoaro’s reference

to the weaving of Laertes’s shroud.156 Furthermore, while Badoaro twice inserted moments into

the libretto where Penelope displays a slight glimmer of hope, Monteverdi eliminated these

sections from his musical setting.157 Penelope placement at the beginning of the opera further

confirms a reliance on Ulysses. She encases herself in d minor-laden recitative while she waits

for him to come release her from her sorrow. In her lament, Penelope convincingly evokes the

“tragic destiny” of Heller’s statement on the lament above. She, like Human Frailty, seems fated

to misery brought on through the machinations of Love. As Il ritorno builds toward a joyful

154 That is not to say that Penelope’s lament did not move audiences. Contemporary reception of the work, although limited, stresses the affective abilities of Guilia Paoelli, the prima donna who premiered the role of Penelope. Evidence of admiration for Paoelli can be found in an intriguing letter written by Ferrante Pallavicino, the overtly misogynistic member of the Incogniti mentioned on p. 88. Note the fusion of torment and delight in the final sentence, which adequately captures the paradox of women on stage for voyeuristic observers (see Chapter Five:

And what affections […] would not be moved to pity in seeing the souls of those who hear you, already rapt by your harmony, now drawn out by a rapid fugue, now suspended in a sigh, now contained in a groppo of well-articulated runs, now assailed by the ordinance of musical voices; now finally tormented in various guises, while unexpectedly they stop, and impetuously push forward, gravely free themselves, and precipitously let go; they commit themselves, finally, to pursue one who with varied artifice has by rule to be always inconstant and restless? I would call these torments of Hell, if from your eyes, and in hearing your sweet accents, it were possible to feel anything but the delights of paradise. 155 By contrast, Minerva aids Penelope as well Ulysses in the Odyssey. She makes her appear

beautiful to elicit gifts from the suitors, she send Penelope restful sleep when grief overwhelms her, and she offers a dream of Ulysses’s return to Penelope (see Chapter Three). 156 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 254. The removal of any references to this action, the most celebrated and popularized of Penelope’s delaying tactics in the Odyssey, signifies to Rosand and Carter Monteverdi’s desire to emphasize Penelope’s innocence, and therefore her virginity. While I agree with this notion to a certain extent, I think it also strongly accents Penelope’s inability to alter her circumstances. While she suggests in her lament that she will fight Fate, her characterization as created by the edits to the libretto prevents her from actually possessing the tools to do so.

157 Ibid. Both scenes involve information regarding her husband. In the first instance, Eumete describes Penelope’s face brightening after he tells her news of Ulysses’s impending return. The second instance occurs after Telemachus also tells his mother that Ulysses will soon return home. Penelope initially rejects his claim, but immediately recants: “Voglia il Ciel, che mia vita anco sostenti debole fil di speme.”

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celebration of lyricism, it brands the “speech” of Penelope as unnatural and anachronistic – the

central problem of the opera.

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Chapter 5

The Accademia degli Incogniti and the Spirit of the Times

“Opera, unlike Athena, did not leap forth fully armed from the heads of church musicians but evolved out of the Bacchanalian culture of carnival.” 158

- Edward Muir, “An Evening at the Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice”

- In the previous chapter, we saw how Monteverdi textually and tonally equated Queen

Penelope with Human Frailty, and how he suggested Love will emerge as her primary adversary

over the course of the opera. In some ways, one can view the drastic alterations to the libretto as

reactions to subsequent scenes in which Penelope appears. These latter sections – subjected less

to Monteverdi’s editorial lacerations – dramatically and musically realize the issues Monteverdi

set up in the Prologue and opening of Act I. Inadvertently or not, he also highlighted inherent

cultural tensions embedded in Badoaro’s work that play out in the temptation of Penelope by

Love. As the opera progresses, Penelope’s interaction with the other characters reflects the

sexual politics of Venice at the time, in which men took advantage of a thriving sexual economy

– affairs and marriages beneath their class, pederasty, and a courtesan culture with an

international reputation – while patrician women often ended up as sexually frustrated nuns with

no outlet for their passions. In this chapter, we turn to an investigation of the cultural situation in

Venice at the time of Il ritorno’s premiere, which illuminates the predilections of the creators and

consumers of Il ritorno. Against this background, Badoaro will set the framework for the rest of

the opera, and we begin to see Penelope not so much as a paradigm but as an obstruction, an

image Monteverdi solidifies through his treatment of Penelope’s music.

158 Edward Muir, “An Evening at the Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” in The Oxford

Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane Fulcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 338.

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A Little German Pamphlet

In 1595, a short anonymous pamphlet – fifty-one paragraphs long – arrived off the

printing presses in Leipzig, Germany.159 Designed as a satire of the Anabaptists – a Christian sect

that denied Jesus’s divinity – the Latin text presented readers with a mishmash of ancient

philosophy, medieval logic, and Biblical authority in seeking to disprove the humanity of women.

It comes as no surprise that the Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas

homines non esse (“A new argument against women, in which it is demonstrated that they are not

human beings”) caused an instantaneous furor in literary and theological circles. Perturbed by the

bastardized logic and the selective misappropriation of scripture within the pamphlet, several

literati throughout Germany issued refutations of the Disputatio’s appalling arguments. The

excerpt below gives an example of the writing the Disputatio’s critics rejected:

21. Those points were fetched from afar; let me speak of things nearer at hand. The woman of Canaan approaching Christ begged him to free her daughter from a devil [Matt. 15.22]. Christ answered her not a word. What, I ask, does that signify? Was Christ too proud? Was he not merciful and mild, bidding all the afflicted come to him and promising them refreshment? [Rom. 15.32, etc.] Certainly. By this silence he therefore wanted to signify no more than that he had nothing to do with women, nor women with him. I shall demonstrate it more clearly: the disciples interceded on her behalf, but what did they receive in answer? “I am not sent” for her “but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” [Matt. 15.24]. Women, do you not hear that Christ was not sent for your sake? Do you men not understand that your wives have nothing to do with the kingdom of heaven? Some answer that Christ attacked the woman of Canaan with harsh words because she was a gentile - a ludicrous answer indeed. For did not God delight in the whole world and send his only begotten son as much for the gentiles as for the Israelites? 159 Manfred Fleischer, “Are Women Human?”- The Debate of 1595 between Valens Acidalius and

Simon Geddicus,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 12 (Summer 1981): 107-20. When the courts subpoenaed Heinrich Osthausen, the publisher, he admitted that Valens Acidalius had sent him the pamphlet manuscript. Acidalius a young, talented Latinist, literary critic, and historian, however, denied authorship; in an odd turn of events, he died later that year at the age of twenty-eight. Given that Acidalius himself was not known as a misogynist, and that his other works demonstrate quite a different writing style, scholarship tends to agree that he probably did not write the tract. Still, the pamphlet had circulated amongst Acidalius’s circle of intellectuals before he sent it to the publisher, so he must have found it amusing and worthwhile.

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Let them be ashamed of such crass absurdity. Let them then explain why Christ never spoke to a gentile man as he did to this silly little woman, given that innumerable gentile men came to him, asked for help, and received what they sought, not being severely chided but being treated most lovingly.

22. We have not yet finished with this passage. Listen further and be amazed. When the disciples first said, “Send her away” [Matt. 15.23], Christ answered: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” Jesus Christ, son of God, how great is your care in explaining things! Miserable women, do you not hear how our saviour addresses you: not as humans, but as dogs, not as children, but as whelps? Do you not hear that it is not meet for us to take from children the bread - that is to say, Christ, that bread of life who descends from heaven - and to give it to you, who are nothing more than those same filthy beasts? Why then do you work so hard for your salvation? Why do you put yourselves above the will of almighty God? Stay, I beseech you, in the station in which nature placed you, if in this world you desire to experience both happiness and the merciful God.160

Despite the outpouring of objections to the work, its popularity grew throughout the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, and its fame had nothing to do with the Anabaptists, a minor historical

sect. Often published in tandem with Simon Gediccus’s Defensio sexus mulieribus, an argument

against the claims of the Disputatio nova, the pamphlet finally reached Venice in (or at least no

later than) 1647.161

160 Clive Hart, trans. and ed., Disputatio Nova Contra Mulieres: A New Argument Against Women

– A Critical Translation from the Latin with Commentary together with the Original Latin Text of 1595 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press), 54-5. Throughout the treatise, the author makes numerous allusions to the Anabaptists and their arguments, mocking them as illogical and unfounded. In his conclusion (p. 70), he reveals his true purpose, and yet also states that he has proved his thesis on women:

I have proved, I believe, by means of fifty irrefutable witnesses from sacred scripture that woman is not human, nor is to be saved. Which if I have not achieved, I have nevertheless shown to all the world how the heretics of these times, especially the Anabaptists and the Papists, usually explain sacred scripture and what method they use for the establishment of their execrable dogmas. Enough to the wise.

161 It may have arrived in Italy at an earlier date, before the premiere of Il ritorno; see Manfred

Fleischer, “Are Women Human?”- The Debate of 1595,” 109-10. Fleischer mentions that the pamphlet arrived in Italy “around the same time” that the debate on the issue had “‘passed from the schools into the conversations of the best companies’ in Holland,” in 1639. One should note the name of the translator: Horatio Plata. Plata was most likely a member of the Incogniti. One would think he received encouragement from a circle of friends who found the arguments of the Disputatio amusing. Arcangela Tarabotti, a cloistered proto-feminist, published a scathing refutation of the Disputatio entitled Che le

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Badoaro and the Accademia degli Incogniti

While the Disputatio nova arrived in Venice only in the years after the premiere of Il

ritorno, the writing style and subject matter represent a paradigm of the literature discussed and

debated by the Accademia degli Incogniti (“The Academy of the Unknowns”) in the years prior

to, and after the premiere of Il ritorno.162 The Disputatio and similar works played a prominent

role in what Edward Muir has called “the culture wars of the Italian Renaissance.”163 A

“community of ambivalence” reigned in the intellectual circles of Europe, and nowhere did the

skepticism and doubt of the era find more fertile soil than in the notoriously tolerant Venetian

culture.164

The Incogniti were a group of wealthy, young intellectuals founded by Venetian

statesmen Giovanni Francesco Loredan whose ranks included Il ritorno librettist Giacomo

Badoaro.165 Touting the motto “Ex ignoto notus,” (“the known from the unknown”), the

Academy led the way in instigating and disseminating the debates on love, sex, marriage, and

women that inundated Venetian culture from their founding in 1630 until the group dissolved

around 1660. However, the Incogniti were not creatures of the ivory tower; young and energetic,

they espoused emphatic patriotism for La Serenissima. In addition to publishing and debating,

many Incogniti members actively engaged in the civic life of the Republic.

donne siano della specie degli uomini. One should note that Plata’s edition did not include the original critique of the Disputatio by Simon Geddicus. As a result, Tarabotti stepped up to fill the void.

162 It comes as no surprise that Acidalius studied at various Italian universities, including the University of Padua, before returning to the northern climate he preferred. Padua, the satellite university of Venice, served as residence for Cesare Cremonini, whose libertine philosophy and teachings influenced prominent members of the Incogniti.

163 Edward Muir, The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera, The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

164 William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1.

165 Born in 1607, Loredan would have been thirty-three years old at the premiere of Il ritorno, and only twenty-three when he founded the Academy a decade earlier. Although the common descriptions of the Incogniti call them Venetian patricians or noblemen, some of them actually fell into the class beneath known as the cittadini. Civil servants, lawyers, and other professional group comprised this class. For example, Busenello, the librettist for Poppea, worked as a lawyer.

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Encouraged by the teachings of Cesare Cremonini, the influential philosophy professor at

the University of Padua, the Incogniti produced writings that generally reflect a love of debate for

debate’s sake, erudition, hidden meanings, and abstract concepts.167 Their work often includes or

focuses on paradoxical arguments about women.168 Throughout their debates, they emphasized

adopting the other side of an argument, as well as considering situations from hitherto

166 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 65. The emblem bears the motto of the

Incogniti (“Ex ignoto notus”) and an image of the Nile River, whose (at the time) unknown source led to a well-known delta.

167 For example, at one Incogniti meeting, Marin Dall’Angelo presented a discourse entitled The Glories of Nothing. For more on the Incogniti and their tropes on nothingness, see Mauro Calcagno, “Signifying Nothing: On the Aesthetics of Pure Voice in Early Public Opera,” The Journal of Musicology 20 (Fall 2003): 461-97.

168 Wendy Heller, “Bizzarrie Femminile: Opera and the Accademia degli Incogniti,” in Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Heller offers excellent examples of the contrasting views based on the Myth of Venice espoused by the Incogniti. She terms these conflicting ideas, “ambivalent views towards women.”

Figure 5-1: The Emblem of the Accademia degli Incogniti166

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disregarded perspectives. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that a bifurcated debate such as the

Disputatio nova and Gediccus’s Defensio appealed to the group.

The Incogniti, Women, and Venice

One could say that, in practice, the Incogniti held rather progressive views concerning

women. As Muir notes:

The Venetians and their allies defended religious skepticism (even atheism), scientific experimentation, sexual liberty (even pederasty), women’s rights to an education and freedom from paternal tyranny, the presence of women on the stage, and the seductive power of the female voice.169

The group’s meetings provided a forum for the writings of Arcangela Tarrabotti, a cloistered

proto-feminist who wrote embittered tirades against the Venetian patriarchy and other social

injustices. It was Tarrabotti that published the Italian criticism of Disputatio nova, as noted

above.170 Giovanni Loredano, the founder of the Incogniti, maintained a friendship of sorts with

the nun, and in 1642, Busenello, the librettist for Poppea, traveled masked to her convent “to pay

[her] homage.”171

Paradoxically then – or perhaps unsurprisingly in the case of the Incogniti – in writing,

Incogniti authors routinely exposed this equality as a charade when it came to women. Over the

thirty years in which they actively met, the Incogniti advanced consistently misogynistic opinions

of women. They gleefully promoted the works of writers such as Federico Pallavicino, who

attacks women in his Il Corriero svaligiato: “As a rule, one does not find in your sex any rational

capacity other than the will, so submerged by the passions that it has become an irrefutable axiom

169 Muir, Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 3. One can contrast this statement with the

practices of the Jesuits, who continued to condemn comedic theatre in Venice and elsewhere while denying women a role in the theatre (they continued the practice of all-male casts).

170 The ability Tarabotti had to publish her views and engage in the debates of Incogniti members may have had something to do with the fact that her brother was an Incogniti member.

171 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 107.

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to say that woman is without judgment.”172 Works by the Incogniti themselves questioned the

nature or possibility of feminine chastity and the tempting bodily features of women. These

paradoxical writings led to a “dilemma” between the perceived weaknesses of women and the

real fact of the connection between women and physical pleasure.173

The overt patriotism of several Incogniti members further complicated the manifestations

of the feminine in their writing. Even while questioning and investigating the frailty and

desirability of women, they utilized feminine figures in Venetian iconography. The figure

Venetia manifested the conglomeration of opinions. A feminine symbol of the city’s grandeur,

Venetia was composed of four opposing entities: Venus, the Virgin Mary, Dea Romana, and

Justice. Under this system, virtues and vices intertwined to produce a menu of conceptions of

women to pick and choose from as needed.174 Thus, Venice could appear as both a maiden city –

unconquered as a result of its virtue – as well as a hedonistic city whose maidenhead was rather in

question; like Venus, the sea had given birth to La Serenissima. The vices and virtues of women

fascinated Incogniti members. As Heller states: “In the eyes of the Incogniti, women’s abilities to

attract and distract, to cause pleasure and pain, and to feel pleasure themselves were a source of

endless speculation.”175 With the advent of opera, the Incogniti found an ideal platform on which

to play out the inherent tensions, contradictions, myths, and realities of women in Venice.

172 Ferrante Pallavicino, Il Corriero svaligiato, ed. Armando Marchi (Parma, 1984), 10-15. The

English translation is given in the appendices of Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, ed. and trans. Letizia Panizza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159. To emphasize that the Incogniti generally consisted of younger members, one should note that Pallavicino was only twenty-five years old when Il ritorno premiered.

173 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 74. While Heller uses the term dilemma, I would question whether Incogniti members saw it as such. They seem to have delighted in encouraging a variety of readings in all their works. They rejoiced in double meanings, moral quandaries, and inconsistencies, a result of their skepticism that language could convey truth.

174 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 188-90.

175 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 52. One can almost take the term “endless” literally. The proliferation of writings by the Incogniti, by no means a small group, on women could fill several bookshelves.

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In the play La forza d’amore, Accademia degli Incogniti founder Giovanni Loredano

demonstrates the argument employed in many librettos and plays by group members; namely, that

women intrinsically require male authority and that women experience constant susceptibility to

love and seduction. Heller asserts that in the play “Loredano and his colleagues present us with a

world in which courtly love has gone awry, and in which women have little capacity to achieve

any sort of virtue.”176 Confronted by the virtues of exceptional women in literature, including

Penelope, Incogniti members transformed them into manifestations of their own conflicting views

and desires. Yet they did so with a consistently nonchalant manner; their aura of detachment in

all areas save politics – Loredano himself was a respected senator – encouraged them to revel in

the incongruity.

The generally lax enforcement of publishing laws only added to the Incogniti’s ability to

disseminate their works. Glixon and Glixon describe the official process:

According to Venetian law, before any book could be printed its publishers had to obtain a license that served to guarantee the moral and political suitability of the work. The procedure in effect in the first half of the century was lengthy and complex. Each book was examined first by the Inquisitori di Stato and the ducal secretary, who then, if it were deemed politically acceptable, issued a testamur, and forwarded it to the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova, where a scholar examined the text for ideological and religious acceptability, granting a license. The official imprimatur was then issued by the Capi of the Council of Ten.177

While this could suggest seeking a morally or politically beneficial aspect in publications,

reality did not reflect the seemingly rigorous process entailed above. Badoaro himself served as

one of the Capi of the Council of Ten. Given his membership in the Incogniti, one wonders how

many other members of this group that issued the imprimatur witnessed the supposed moral

decay in works they approved. Additionally, Padua – where a scholar provided ideological and

religious approval – served as an extension (or even progenitor) of the brand of Venetian

176 Ibid., 53. 177 Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, 123.

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intellectualism espoused by Incogniti members.178 The scholars examining the texts for

“ideological and religious acceptability” at Padua were notable for their epicurean outlook on life.

In the words of Cesare Cremonini, for example, “Intus ut libet, foris ut moris est” (“Inside as it

pleases, outside as it is the custom”).179

Carnival Culture in Venice

Cremonini’s hedonistic slogan aptly reflects in part the social atmosphere of Venice at

the time. By 1640, the date of Il ritorno’s premiere, the Society of Jesus (hereafter Jesuits) had

yet to return to the city after their eviction in 1607.180 Opera provided one of the largest

spectacles to audiences comprised of Venetian nobles, cittadini, courtesans, and foreign

dignitaries.181 In the midst of a long political decline, which most historians argue began around

the same time, Venice quickly built a reputation as a city of marvels, spectacle, and indeed,

178 See Muir, “The Skeptics: Galileo’s Telescope and Cremonini’s Headache,” in Culture Wars of

the Italian Renaissance, 13-60. Muir gives a succinct account of Padua as a central hub for skepticism and libertine thought. For more on the University of Padua, Venice, and the development of modern thought, see John Randall, Jr., The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1961); Paul Grendler, “The University of Padua 1405-1600: A Success Story,” History of Higher Education 10 (1990): 7-17, 36-7; and William Bouwsma, “Venice and the Political Education of Europe,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 266-91.

179 Quoted in Muir, The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 7. I have given the literal translation of the Latin, which Muir translates semantically as, “If it feels good, do it.”

180 The eviction of the Jesuits occurred after the pope placed an interdict on Venice to gain political advantage over the independent Venetian state. This action represents the final time the papacy used the interdict as a political tool: given that Venice carried out most of its trade with non-Christian countries, the interdict had little to no effect on the Venetian economy – at least initially. Instead, the interdict further ingrained a sense of intellectual and civic independence in the Venetian psyche.

181 Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, 338. For more on the social lives of Venetian citizens, see Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Patricia Fortini-Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). For more on specific social classes, see Donald Queller, Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986). These titles also represent a general trend in scholarship on Venetian society to focus on the Renaissance, with little space give to the 17th century, which more frequently falls into the “long decline” that ended with the fall of the Republic in 1797. Instead, 17th- and 18th-century studies, of which there are far less, emphasize Venetian political issues and other matters of state.

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debauchery. The Carnival season that preceded Lent provided the grandest forms of

entertainment, which included opera beginning in 1637.182 Carnival reversed conventional

notions of morality; masked citizens disguised their class and even their gender through their

choice of clothing, and illicit activities occurred in the famed opera boxes of the Venetian

theatre.183 Here we begin to see the relevance of a solely moral outcome to Il ritorno.

The potential for illicit activities only increased in light of the patrician marriage crisis

gripping Venice in this era, a period Muir calls “one of the most rigid marital regimes known to

the history of demography.”184 A ban on Venetian noblemen marrying outside their class in order

to prevent class pollution eventually led to egregious dowry and price inflation that resulted in

severe restrictions on patrician marriages. For the burgeoning number of patrician bachelors,

other outlets presented themselves, which in turn exacerbated the erotic side of Venice’s image.185

Patrician women, however, possessed few options beyond marriage. The situation inevitably led

patrician parents to the convent, whether or not their daughters had a vocation. As a result, the

monachization rate of patrician women around the time Il ritorno premiered hovered well above

fifty percent, and perhaps reached as high as eighty-two percent near mid-century.186 The

182 For more on Venetian conceptions of time and its role in civic and social life, see Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice, The Calendar of Venetian Opera (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

183 See Edward Muir, “An Evening at the Opera,” esp. 342-4. Muir includes an excellent and original discussion of the role of the mask for audience members and emphasizes the social experience a night at the opera entailed. Dissimulation seems to have been the norm not only for the Incogniti, but the patriciate in general: “A social event it may have been, but the social experience at the opera house was paradoxical. Attendees, who were almost all patricians and aristocratic tourists or diplomats, pretended not to know one another when they perfectly well did” (p. 339).

184 Ibid., 343. 185 Ibid. As Muir notes: “The officially unmarried brothers entered the sexual economy of Venice

on their own terms through liaisons with male lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, or courtesans, or they married lower-class women secretly.”

186 Jutta Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 28. Also see Carlo M. Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). One can only assume the plague that decimated Venice from 1630-1 further accelerated the issue. Although statistics of deaths by class are not available, Venice lost over a third of its population: about 46,000 people out of a population of approximately 140,000. Using Glixon and Glixon’s statistics (patricians and cittadini representing ten percent each of the total

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ultimate results of this broken system occurred in 1646, when the patriciate sold titles for 100,000

ducats. With the outbreak of the Cretan War, the government needed bodies to fill the political

offices necessary for the Republic’s continued function.

With unmarried patrician women either in convents or secluded in their chambers, the

audiences of opera houses consisted largely of these patrician bachelors and other proponents of

Venice’s courtesan culture.187 As Muir suggests, “traditional Christian culture provided little

guidance for those who lived through and suffered from the collapse of marriage structures but

did not have a religious vocation.”188 The opera house thus provided yet another venue for those

seeking a diversion from the social issues confronting the patriciate.

Until quite recently, there has been a dearth of statistical data on the composition of these

opera house audiences. Even the most recent interpretive studies of Il ritorno recognize the lack

of detail in this area. For example, while addressing the potential for polyvalent interpretations of

Il ritorno, Tim Carter states:

It [the argument for polyvalency] also raises as yet unasked questions about the predominant constitution of opera house audiences in this period, whether male or female, young or old, foreign or native. Each represented section of society would no doubt read these operas differently, according to their predilections.189

Fortunately, through the efforts of Glixon and Glixon, we now have meticulously gathered

archival data that allows us to more accurately suggest the predominant constitution of opera

population and popolani the remaining eighty percent) and assuming roughly equal casualties across classes, this would mean about 4,600 patricians died over the course of two years.

187 While more recent work in LGBTQ studies has questioned the emphasis in scholarship on the dominant male gaze at opera houses, they tend to focus on later musical eras. Based on the details provided by the Glixons in Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, it seems safe to assume that early modern Venetian audiences were predominantly wealthy, young, and male.

188 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance, 2. 189 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 239.

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audiences, which in allows for a more directed reading of Il ritorno.190 Compiling and analyzing

their evidence, Glixon and Glixon assert:

[O]ne could say that patrons viewed their palchi [opera boxes] not only as seats for the opera, but also as statements of their social standing (and perhaps of their character or personality). […]. A wide spectrum of the city’s patricians, including many of the wealthiest families, occupied most of the boxes, including both young men and distinguished members of the governing elite.191

In Chapter Two, I discussed the growing preference for lyricism amongst operatic audiences.

This inclination plays into a broader desire for spectacle, which an opera like Il ritorno provides

in abundance: a ship turned to stone, a live eagle, airborne gods, and thunder and lightning

effects. A tendency towards voyeurism developed alongside the preference for spectacle in male-

dominated audiences; the opera stage played out the social politics of the opera box. As the

audience members watched prima donnas singing onstage – itself a sensual, sexualized activity –

perhaps they imagined future liaisons with the women who attended the operas frequently: the

meretrice, or courtesans.192 Penelope’s lament did not result in “not one lady who failed to shed a

190 Jonathan Glixon, and Beth Glixon, “The Audience and the Question of Patronage,” Inventing

the Business of Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 295-322. While the work of the Glixon duo certainly sheds light on this situation, in many ways their evidence confirms what one might have already assumed. Opera was “for the public” as applied to the wealthiest segments of society and the cittadini, the Venetian civil servants, that had procured the funds necessary for opera patronage (many, but not all, were able to do so). In many ways, the opera box seating realizes the same types of socio-economic stratification that one finds at modern sporting events. 191 Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, 296. Additionally, on pp. 298-302, Glixon and Glixon provide statistical data for opera boxes at the Teatro S. Aponal, as well as a less detailed listing for the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo during an unspecified year. Of wealthier venues, including the SS. Giovanni e Paolo – owned by the Tron family, a well-established Venetian line – they say, “At the prestigious theaters, non-nobles rarely appeared in the first or second levels; instead, they could be found, predictably, in the pepian [floor seating, especially towards the rear of the house], as well as in the third or fourth orders.” One can only assume these “young men and distinguished members of the governing elite” included members and associates of the Incogniti. Other writers note the presence of foreign dignitaries (ambassadors, etc.). Some of these visitors undoubtedly identified with the Incogniti: a list of members found in the 1647 publication Le Glorie degli Incogniti lists more non-Venetian members than actual citizens. As noted earlier, Badoaro himself was on the Council of Ten, one of the most powerful governing bodies in the city.

192 See Ibid., 298; 301-2. They provide data that suggests opera houses often reserved seats for courtesans. The information they provide notes spaces reserved “per le donne.” Also see Edward Muir, “A Night at the Opera in Renaissance Venice,” 340-3. Muir discusses the possibility of illicit meetings occurring in opera boxes, as well as their role as a site for arranging future meetings. Both before their eviction from Venice and after their return, the Jesuits expressed indignation over such occurrences. For

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tear.” It led to a young, male-dominated audience waiting for a dramatic seduction to take

place.193 As Muir reminds us “as always sex sells.”194

Within the festive environment of Carnival culture, the Incogniti librettists’ “commitment

to playfulness and exotica” has, in Muir’s estimation, “limited their significance.”195 In his

reckoning, the spiritedly erudite efforts of the Incogniti make it impossible to decipher truth from

deceit, virtue from vice, etc. However, one cannot deny that the efforts of Badoaro and

Monteverdi helped to initiate a cultural phenomenon that has lasted for centuries. Such a result

bespeaks its own significance, whether or not the moral or message of a work becomes

obfuscated underneath the contradictory evidence available to us today. If anything, the

commitment to playfulness within a culture that embodied a multitude of incongruities and

contradictions merely warns against the desire to argue for single levels of meaning for characters

such as Penelope. As W.J.T. Mitchell said it, “All media are mixed media, and all representations

are heterogeneous.”196 In Il ritorno then, the task does not become fixing Penelope as chaste or

promiscuous, but explicating the ways in which she signified to Venetian audiences.

more on women’s voices on 17th-century stages, see Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Wendy Heller, “Chastity, Heroism, and Allure: Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice,” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1995).

193 One must emphasize what an importance occurrence this was. In other cities dominated by the Jesuits, all-male casts persisted in the early years of opera.

194 Muir, “An Evening at the Opera,” 342. 195 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 22. 196 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1994), 5.

Chapter 6

Tempted, Liberated, Conquered: The Multifaceted Queen

“The voice is a diffusion, an insinuation, it passes over the entire surface of the body, the skin; and being a passage, an abolition of imitations, classes, names […] it possesses a special hallucinatory power. Music […] can effect orgasm.”197

- Roland Barthes, S/Z

Returning to Il ritorno, one fully realizes the predicament of Queen Penelope implicated

by her opening lament. She embodies the sexual frustration pervading the Venetian marriage

system described in Chapter Five. Like the droves of patrician women unwillingly forced into

convents, her happiness and sexual urges can only wither and die; and like many unwilling nuns,

she seems to wish for different circumstances (“Torna, deh torna Ulisse!”). The masked revelers

– spectators of the plot – add a further dimension to the assault on Penelope’s chastity that

follows. These (male) observers did not come to the opera to watch Penelope act how she

“should.” Ulysses’s central role in the action has perhaps confused the scholarly situation, which

almost exclusively projects a sense of morality into the affair.198 Indeed, rather than worrying

about Ulysses – the title itself betrays the outcome – the audience focuses on Penelope’s plight.

The skeptic, libertine convictions and practices of the Venetian elite necessitate a reevaluation of

Penelope’s role in the remainder of the opera. In this chapter, I investigate the confusing

197 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 110. 198 This reading of the opera does not exclude analyses that highlight certain moralistic aspects of

the work. See Tim Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 249, where Carter states: “[I]mplicating a plurality of readings at different levels made (indeed, makes) sound cultural and financial success.” I agree inasmuch as elderly and/or more conservative members of the patrician class, by and large the perpetrators of the broken marriage system, also attended these operas. One should note that despite Carter’s words, he does posit his own reading of the work, seemingly discontent to accept the plurality of meaning as a deliberate construct of the show. To me, a reading of the opera that takes into account the desires of the vast majority of operatic audiences – a younger, libertine, male-dominated crowd – as well as the well-known views of the Incogniti on women clearly delineates perhaps a more dominant reading of the opera than viewing it as some type of morality play, but part of the opera’s beauty is its ability to manifest such ambiguity.

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amalgamation of the conservative and epicurean in Il ritorno. While retaining vestiges of

morality, the plot accelerates towards a denouement that charts Penelope’s passage from archaic

recitativo to modern lyricism – from abnormal chastity to natural pleasure.199 In her emotional

journey, one can observe the inherent tension between Venetian misogyny, responsible for the

systematic suppression of women, and fervent Republicanism, in which private (feminine)

morality connected directly to public virtue and state interest.

Penelope’s Chastity: A Sexual Death

As Penelope’s role (or lack thereof) in the drama unfolds, it becomes apparent that her

nonexistent lyricism constitutes an intrinsic quality of her character rather than a unique aspect of

her lament. In their interpretations of Il ritorno, both Tim Carter and Ellen Rosand struggle with

exactly what Penelope’s stile recitativo signals to audiences. Carter states, “Her refusal

(inability?) to sing rather than speak is one of the most striking features of Il ritorno.”200 Rosand

echoes Carter’s sentiment: “That intransigence, which persists until the final scene of the opera, is

both matched and intensified by her austere and speech-like mode of expression, which suggests

her reluctance (or inability) to release her voice in song.”201

199 I acknowledge that one must take the term “culture of the times” cum grana salis, given the

relative numerical disparity between patricians and cittadini on one hand and popolani on the other. See Glixon and Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera, 338, where they write, “At the top [of the social ladder], representing less than ten percent of the population, were the nobles, or patricians. A similar number were cittadini, or citizens, and the remainder were commoners, or popolani.” Also see Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, “Production, Consumption, and Political Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera,” Early Music History 4 (1984): 211-99. Bianconi and Walker (p. 227) argue that the price of opera tickets would have prevented practically any member of the popolani from attending. Therefore, all discussion of opera reflects the desires, tensions, and concerns of a vast minority of the population – less than twenty percent. The degree of civic pride, sexual norms, and socio-cultural practices of the vast majority of Venice’s population, including opinions on opera and the elite, remains a vastly underrepresented area of Venetian and operatic scholarship.

200 Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?” 8-9. 201 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 268. Here, Rosand builds upon claims she makes in

Rosand, “Il ritorno and the Power of Music.”

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In both cases, one finds a hesitation to cast Penelope’s immutability in terms that would

mark it as problematic. The terminology once again raises the issue of agency. The terms

“refusal” and “reluctance” suggest a choice for the affronted queen, while the word “inability”

complicates any interpretation of the opera that supports Penelope’s dramatic agency. The

struggle emerges because at the opera’s conclusion, Penelope gives herself, body and soul, over

to sensual lyricism. Such an ending suggests a sexual side to her character that does not resonate

with the identification of Penelope as entirely pure. Traditionally, purity would constitute the

most heroic aspect of Penelope’s character, a notion supported by Torquato Tasso in his Discorso

della virtu feminile, e donnesca, an oft-debated work in Incogniti circles. Tasso states:

As nature has produced man and woman of very different temperature and complexion, they are not likely to be suited to the same tasks […] So Aristotle concludes, arguing against Plato at the beginning of the Politics, that virtue is not the same in men and in women. Thus, bravery and liberality would be male virtues, and modesty [pudicitia] female […] It is the reputation for modesty which most befits a woman. More than any other virtue, this reputation cannot be held generally and still be based on modest behavior […] We will therefore conclude, that man is dishonoured by cowardice and woman by immodesty, since the one is the proper vice of the man, and the other of the woman. I do not deny, however, that bravery may well be a feminine virtue, but not absolute bravery, but bravery in obeying, as Aristotle says.202

Yet against these virtues of women, the issue Penelope presents following her lament offers a

view of her character more in sync with Incogniti thinking (see Chapter Five). As Carter admits,

“Indeed, Penelope’s need to recover herself becomes specifically a matter of reviving her

sexuality.”203 Similarly, Rosand acknowledges that “Penelope’s inability to ‘make music’ (an

analogue, surely, of making love) is emphasized in comparison to and, most strikingly, in

dialogue with other characters.”204

202 Torquato Tasso, Discorso della virtu feminile, e donnesca (Venice, 1562), fols 3v, 5r; quoted in

Rogers and Tinagli, eds., Women in Italy, 1350-1650, 26-7. For more on Tasso and other writings regarding exemplary women, virtues, and vices, see Heller, “The Emblematic Woman” in Emblems of Eloquence, 27-47; and Heller, “Bizzarrie Femminile: Opera and the Accademia degli Incogniti,” in Emblems of Eloquence, 48-81.

203 Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?,” 9. 204 Rosand, “Il ritorno and the Power of Music,” 190.

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Both writers are correct, and I would go a step further and suggest that an awakening of

Penelope’s sexuality is inevitable by Incogniti standards. I refer once again to Loredano’s play,

La forza d’amore, in which he suggests chastity brings only melancholy to a woman. In

Loredano’s estimation, virtue escapes women at every turn; they are susceptible to seduction

(love) by their very nature. The equivocal nature of chastity in the eyes of the Incogniti draws out

the central paradox of Penelope in Il ritorno, formulated by Heller: “Women are doubly damned:

if chaste, they fail to move because they are not beautiful; if beautiful, they fail because they

cannot possibly be chaste.”205 Penelope, identified with Human Frailty and thus deprived of

agency, enacts this Incogniti debate on chastity both dramatically and musically.

Penelope’s Problematic Companion

Penelope’s similarity to another one of Il ritorno’s antagonistic characters further

confirms her problematic status in Il ritorno. Shockingly, she finds an intriguing corollary in the

most unlikely of places: the parasite Iro, who depends on the suitors for food and loses a

humorous physical altercation with Ulysses.206 The utterance of a lament by Iro bears an uncanny

resemblance to Penelope’s opening monologue. As their characterizations reveal, both present

problems of the body. Iro, a glutton, loses his source of food. Penelope’s lament defines her

bodily problem – a loss of sensuality – that requires the aid of the wily, Minerva-aided Ulysses to

be overcome.

Iro’s entertaining bastardization of the lament genre to open Act III highlights the

association:

205 Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 55. 206 Somewhat surprisingly given Iro’s popularity with audiences, Monteverdi removed a portion of

the libretto in which Iro attempts to string Ulysses’s bow.

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He enters on a prolonged d, signifying a Penelope-esque depression. However, rather than railing

against Time and Fate, Iro bemoans the state of his belly, his constant hunger. Everything Iro

does, he does to excess; like Iro’s opening moan, the outcome of the lament is similarly

overblown: he kills himself, in his mind evading hunger, his greatest enemy.

While Ulysses’s lament seems designed to emphasize the differences between Ulysses

and Penelope – they start in the same place but end at totally different states – Iro’s lament evokes

interesting similarities with Penelope’s, more noticeable because in terms of dramatic placement

it replaces what might have been Penelope’s place of honor. At the end of her lament Penelope

encases herself in a rigid chastity – unnatural, and in terms of sexual desire, a “death.” Iro, on the

other hand, actually commits suicide, saying, “vada il mio corpo a disfamar la tomba” (“Let my

body feed the hungry tomb”). For the glutton, the loss of the body signifies his ultimate sacrifice;

for Penelope, her grief kills her chances at a normal (sexual) existence.207 In her provocative

musings on Iro, Rosand notes: “The one thing Iro is denied is song […] He is thus deprived of the

207 Tim Carter (Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?” and Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical

Theatre, and Ellen Rosand (Rosand, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Power of Music” and Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas) both acknowledge the sensuality of lyricism in the era of early public opera.

Figure 6-1: Act III, Scene 1 – Iro Begins His Lament

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possibility of fully expressing his feelings. Given the function of song in this opera, this is a real

deprivation, perhaps the biggest tragedy of all: Iro cannot live in the opera because he cannot

sing.”208 Such a statement weighs heavily on an interpretation of Penelope, who suffers similarly

from a lack of vocal prowess in terms of the newer operatic aesthetic (see Chapter Two). In an

opera inundated with singing characters – including the noble characters Ulysses and Telemachus

– the exclusion of music for Penelope and Iro link their two characters, marking them as

problems.209

Warrior and Lover

Immediately prior to Penelope’s reappearance in Act I, Scene 8, Monteverdi confirms

Ulysses’s knowledge of the central issue, cementing for audience members the dramatic crux of Il

ritorno. In the scene, Minerva reveals herself to Ulysses after he has lied to her about his

identity, informing Ulysses she will help him to recover his kingdom from the suitors. This

evokes joy from Ulysses, and as she reveals the plan, he utters the words “O fortunato Ulisse!”

Monteverdi casts Minerva’s preceding line and Ulysses’s response in G, a key related to Time

and Fortune from the Prologue. Additionally, in Il ritorno it represents violence and anger, as in

208 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 373.

209 We can surmise that audiences knew that manipulation was occurring, and that they appreciated it, even at this early stage in the life of Venetian opera. Torcigliani, in the opening of Le Nozze, mentions that Iro had become an audience favorite, and motivated him to create a similar character for Le Nozze, despite the lack of classical precedent: It only seems that I have altered Numano, called strong by Virgil, but also treated as a great braggart, whereby, in attaching myself to this quality of his, which does not usually

coincide with true bravery, I am using him as a comic character, not finding any more appropriate in Virgil, and knowing the mood of many spectators, who are more pleased by such jokes than by serious things, as we see my friend’s Iro to have delighted marvelously, which genre of character I truly would not have introduced in another [kind of] tragedy. (Quoted in Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 243).

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the stile concitato. The use of G major at this moment emphasizes the reversal of Ulysses’s

fortune while also foreshadowing the violent end of the suitors.

However, more joyous to Ulysses still is Minerva’s revelation that Penelope has until

now remained faithful to him. In response to this information, Ulysses repeats the phrase, “O

fortunato, o fortunato Ulisse!” However, Monteverdi raises his utterance a major second,

simultaneously representing his increased joy while also setting his consideration of his wife in a,

the key of Love.

Figure 6-2: Act I, Scene 7 – Ulysses Blesses His Good Fortune

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This line confirms the problem for Ulysses. The recovery of his kingdom from the suitors pales

in comparison to his need to recover Penelope. In order to achieve both objectives, he will need

to demonstrate his prowess both as warrior and lover, as fighter and seducer.

Penelope Tempted

Ulysses, however, is not the only character in Il ritorno with an interest in quickening

Penelope’s desire. The confrontations between Penelope and the other characters of the opera

fully realize Penelope’s antagonistic presence in the opera. In a time when sensuality had become

natural and Monteverdi worked to make lyricism a given as well, her refutation of both perturbs

almost every other character in the opera.210 Monteverdi supports this interpretation through his

systematic use of refrain structures, his creation of sung music in spite of Badoaro’s libretto. Tim

Carter affirms that Monteverdi sought “to render more cohesive the rather disparate styles

emerging in Venetian opera,” effectively synthesizing his own musical devices from previous

compositions – madrigalisms, the stile concitato, ciaccona patterns, and descending tetrachord

progressions – for dramatic purposes.211 With these devices in hand, Monteverdi exploited the

lyric potential for each character. This includes the characters for whom lyricism would be

expected – the gods, the lower-class lovers Melantho and Eurymachus, and the shepherd Eumete

– as well as noble characters such as Ulysses. Tim Carter argues that Ulysses, “as a noble

210 See Muir, “Introduction,” The Culture Wars of the Italian Renaissance, 1-11. Muir succinctly

describes the shift in social perceptions of morality, stating: Once reason was dethroned, the passions were given a higher value, so that the heart could be understood as a greater force than the mind in determining human conduct. When the body itself slipped out of its long-despised position, the sexual drives of the lower body were liberated and thinkers were [publically] allowed to consider sex, independent of its role in reproduction, a worthy manifestation of nature (p. 7). 211 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 246.

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character (but no famous mythical musician), probably should not ‘sing’ as much as he does.”212

However, such an argument follows the old rules of verisimilitude in opera. In 1651, Franceso

Sbarra crystalized the practice, writing:

I know that the ariette sung by Alexander and Aristotle will be judged contrary to the decorum of such great personages; but I also know that musical recitation is improper altogether, since it does not imitate natural discourse and since it removes the soul from dramatic compositions, which should be nothing but imitations of human actions. Yet this defect is not only tolerated by the current century but received with applause.213

One can easily shift Sbarra’s argument to 1640, although Monteverdi never saw the need to

articulate his thought process in print. Instead, he proclaimed the same operatic aesthetic through

his practice, trusting his innate sense of audience needs and his own taste to lead him to a

successful result.214

Penelope and Her Maid

The scene immediately following “O Fortunato Ulisse” (Act I, Scene 7) effectively

juxtaposes the opposed styles. Initially, Penelope easily thwarts Love. In the scene, Penelope’s

young maid Melantho, who “makes music at the drop of a hat,”215 cajoles the abandoned queen to

love once again rather than dwell unnaturally on a dead man’s ashes (Act I, Scene 8, m. 18-19:

212 Ibid., 248. 213 Quoted in Gary Tomlinson, “Pastoral and Musical Magic in the Birth of Opera,” in Opera and

the Enlightenment, eds. Thomas Bauman and Marita Petzoldt McClymonds (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. (7-20)

214 These arguments would seem to refute Mark Ringer’s suggestion that in Il ritorno “[t]he musical ‘art’ of the suitors is pitted against that of Penelope as well as her husband during the course of the opera. The hero and heroine, with their honest musical and verbal declamation, vanquish the suitors, with their exaggerated, overornamented styles.” The prevalence of lyricism belies a fusion between Monteverdi’s own aesthetic and the beliefs of the Incogniti, who distrusted the ability of language to convey meaning. See Mauro Calcagno, “Signifying Nothing,” 473. Calcagno suggests that “distrust of the meaning of language is compensated by trust in the power of the voice.”

215 Ellen Rosand, “Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Power of ‘Music’,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7 (Nov., 1995): 180.

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“cenere de’ morti”).216 Monteverdi sets Melantho’s music in a triple-meter C-major aria style,

evoking the blissful lovemaking we remember Monteverdi deemphasized in the Prologue (see

Chapter Three).

216 An edit Monteverdi made to the libretto actually removes the reason Melantho and Eurymachus

are attempting to sway Penelope to love. This omission explains why in Ewans, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse,” 20, Ewans suggests that Eurymachus’s suggestion to Melantho that she attempt to kindle love in Penelope as “abrupt and unmotivated.” In the twelve libretto manuscripts Melantho actually implies that Penelope has banned love for everyone on Ithaca until Penelope either takes another husband or regains Ulysses. The reasons for editing this seem obvious: the lines suggest the possibility that Penelope might choose another husband besides Ulysses. The removal of said line functions in multiple ways. As Rosand or Carter would see it, it enhances Penelope’s purity or innocence. Once again however, it removes the implication that Penelope has a choice in any of these matters. She is someone events happen to rather than a doer. Furthermore, it removes any personal motivation on the part of Melantho and Eurymachus; they seek merely to free the restrained Penelope because she is unnatural. As the two sing together: “ch’ad un focoso petto il rispetto e dispetto,” (“to an inflamed breast, all restraint is a vexation”).

Figure 6-3: Act I, Scene 8 – Melantho’s Aria

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In response to Melantho’s advice, Penelope emphatically rejects Love, negating Melantho’s

triple-time aria style with a grieved recitative in which she calls Love a “vain idol” (“Amor e un

idol vano”). Penelope eventually cadences in the expected d minor; she cannot extricate herself

her depression.217

This scene reveals one reason for some of the confusion over whether Penelope’s lack of music is

a choice or a deficiency: Melantho, the first to confront Penelope’s barriers, does not come close

to success. Penelope closes the scene with a suggestion that she controls the situation: “Non dee

di nuovo amar chi misera peno, torna stolta e penar chi prima erro” (“He dares not love again

who has suffered affliction. Having once erred, only a fool returns to suffering”).

217 See Act I, Scene 2, in which Melantho discusses Penelope with her lover Eurymachus.

Melantho says that she will attempt to “touch that heart that honor renders so adamant,” (“rittocchero quel core ch’indiamanta l’honore”). In Il ritorno, Eurymachus is not one of the suitors of Penelope as he is in the Odyssey. As Ulysses’s (false) claims of faithfulness in the final scene of Il ritorno attest, Venetian society did not officially condone multiple sexual relationships despite the reality of Venetian sexual practices. Or perhaps knowledgeable audiences would have derived humorous satisfaction from Ulysses’s lies, seeing it as enacting the realities of Venetian patrician marriages, in which the official prescription of chastity did not reflect real relationships. A definitive answer to such an issue may never emerge, as it depends on the predilections and preferences of each individual within the audience, but it nevertheless highlights yet another problematic hypocrisy embedded in the Il ritorno libretto.

Figure 6-4: Act I, Scene 8 – Penelope Confirms Her Grief

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Penelope and the Suitors

However, if Melantho failed in her initial foray, future scenes prompt audiences to recall

Penelope’s line. In her interaction with the suitors, she starts to become the “stolta” she scolded

in Act I, and any semblance of agency she maintained in her interaction with Melantho begins to

erode rapidly. The three suitors Pisander, Anfinomus, and Antinous first beseech Penelope in Act

II, Scene 5, like Melantho in an overtly madrigal-like passage, once again set in triple time.218

With the audience in mind, Il ritorno turns the tables of standard rhetorical seduction, the

stereotypical province of females in early modern Venice. In a similar manner to Eurymachus,

Monteverdi’s music transforms the suitors almost beyond recognition. They are no longer

threatening suitors who represent true physical danger to Ulysses, who may take his kingdom.

They are not overbearing brawlers, but courtly lovers; they have become lyrical mouthpieces of

Eros.219

In her conversation with Melantho, Penelope clung doggedly to d minor, refusing to

even consider loving another. As the suitors regale her with amorous overtures, however, the

audience sees her resolve begin to weaken, playing out Incogniti debates on women. To open the

act, Antinous evokes Incogniti debates the nature of love and beauty as he sings in a minor:

218 That three male characters serve as agents of seduction does not resonate with common

practices at the time. See Susan McClary, “Constructions of Gender,” in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 48. McClary observes, “In operas by Monteverdi and others after L’Orfeo […] both forms of rhetoric – seduction and lament – come to be practiced almost exclusively by female characters.” By manipulating the conventions of seduction (he also manipulates the lament convention in Iro’s monologue), Monteverdi highlights the importance of the seduction to the audience.

219 Ellen Rosand, “Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and the Power of Music,” 181. Rosand suggests that the efforts of the suitor’s music might have evoked the Giustiniana, a popular song style of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice in which three older men expressed lascivious desires. The words of Eurymachus in Act II, Scene 4 foreshadow the possibility of success, and demonstrate the detached self-awareness that pervades the published work of Incogniti members. Speaking to Melantho, Eurymachus says, “E pur udii sovente la poetica schiera cantar donna volubile e leggiera,” (“And yet I have often heard legions of poets sing that woman is fickle and flighty,”). The whole scene, in which Melantho confesses her failure to sway Penelope, confirms the obstacle Penelope proves to their love. In the end, the two lovers decide to love each other even though in Melantho’s words, “Penelope trionfa nella doglia e nel pianto,” (“Penelope triumphs amidst sorrow and weeping”).

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Following this introduction, the suitors break into a C-major passage with which they will belabor

Penelope several times over the course of the act. They urge her to love, singing “Ama dunque si,

si!” (“Therefore love me, yes, yes!”) repeatedly.

Penelope’s initial response to the suitors in mm. 25-35 already belies her wavering

defenses. After listening to the suitors’ initial pleas, Penelope states, “Non voglio amar, no, no”

(“I will not love, no, no”) and adheres to the stile recitativo; her words suggest resistance. But

there is a chink in her armor: rather than a cadence in d or a, Penelope descends to a cadence in C,

even as she speaks of her “woe” (“penerò”). As noted, in Il ritorno C major often highlights

passages related to joy or the blissful side of love. Already, Monteverdi signals to the audience

the emotional discord Penelope labels in Act II, Scene 12 (see below) through a disjuncture

between music and text.

Figure 6-5: Act II, Scene 5 – Antinous Sings of Love and Beauty

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Further musical developments confirm Penelope’s confliction. The suitors entreat

Penelope once more, and her response after their second attempt reveals her weakening resolve.

As Penelope sings the word “ardenti,” she rapidly traverses a melismatic passage of sixteenth and

thirty-second notes unlike anything she has sung in the opera thus far. Her music here seems to

contrast directly with Ellen Rosand’s assertion that in her interactions with the suitors, “by means

[…] of musical setting, the composer reinforces Penelope’s adherence to her moral creed.”220

As the phrase continues, however, Penelope recovers, and the phrase “non voglio amar”

dominates Penelope’s music once more; she retains her chastity. Even after listening to the

increasingly florid music and text of each suitor’s individual appeal, Penelope remains

adamant.221 Still, she admits her indecision with an evocative simile:

Non voglio amar, non voglio, 220 Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 272. 221 Monteverdi, Il ritorno, 126-8. Beginning with Antinous, each suitor makes metaphorical use of

the vine, the cedar, and the ivy, respectively in their attempts to persuade Penelope. The music for each suitor is rather light and flighty, even for the bass Antinous. It is interesting for the roles of male seducers, Monteverdi writes music that expresses the gaiety of the young lovers Melantho and Eurymachus

Figure 6-6: Act II, Scene 5 – The Beginning of Penelope’s Discord

Figure 6-7: Act II, Scene 5 – Penelope Feels Love’s Heat

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Come sta in dubbio un ferro, Se fra due calamite, Da due parti divise egli è chiamato, Così sta in forse il core, Nel tripartite Amore, Ma non può amar chi non sa, chi non può Chia pianger e penar. Mestitia e dolor Son crudeli nemici d’Amor. I will not love, I will not! As a wavering iron Between two magnets Is drawn in two different directions, So my heart is in doubt Between this triple love; But he cannot know love who can know nothing But tears and torment. Sadness and pain Are cruel enemies of Love. Yet even as her emotions cool, Penelope cadences in a minor: Love has truly confronted her in

full force.

Figure 6-8: Act II, Scene 5 – Penelope Maintains Her Vow (mm. 143-5 and 159-63)

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Act II, Scene 12

In general, past scholarship has covered the preceding scenes, although usually to

confirm Penelope’s chastity. In Penelope’s interaction with Melantho, her virtue hardly comes

into question. Even with the suitors, Penelope recovers herself despite her increasing desire to

emerge from her unnatural depression. Scholarship has used these scenes to bolster the

credibility of Penelope’s purity. However, in neglecting to consider Act II, Scene 12, they leave

out a crucial scene for determining how opera audiences perceived Penelope. In the challenge of

the bow found in this scene, one can see Penelope fulfill the susceptibility of Human Frailty to

Love detailed far back in the new Prologue, fulfilling the Incogniti argument that all women are

inherently susceptible to seduction.

In the scene, the suitors redouble their efforts to ensnare Penelope after Eumete informs

them of Ulysses’s imminent return and a portent from Giove derails their plans to murder

Telemachus.222 In a significant departure from their initial attempt, the suitors this time offer

their hearts and their pockets. Antinous once again serves as the mouthpiece for Incogniti

thought:

Dunque, prima che giunga Il filial soccorso, Per abbatter quel core Facciam ai doni almen grato ricorso, Perch’ha la punta d’or lo stral d’Amore. Therefore, before the arrival Of filial relief, Let us conquer the Queen’s heart And with gifts make an appeal to her kindness, For love’s arrow has a tip of gold.223

222 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, 239. 223 Monteverdi, Il ritorno, 168. Here, Anfinomo makes a curious claim: “Garments ornate and

precious, jewels and royal finery confess my proud devotion and praise your merits, peerless lady.”

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To modern audiences, Antinous’s words may sound preposterous, but, as shown in Chapter Five,

the Incogniti found no topic too ludicrous for their discussions. In fact, Antinous’s words outline

a debate of the Incogniti that would be finally be published several years after Il ritorno’s

premiere. The debate, published as “Perche si paghino le Donne de’ congressati morose” (“Why

Women Are Paid for Amorous Congresses”) in Loredano’s Bizzarriae Academiche, states: “A

woman does not love without self-interest. She does not give herself as booty to one who does

not give. Therefore, the purchase of feminine hearts is gained by the profusion of gold.”224

Penelope’s acquiescence to the suitors receives support in light of this debate. Turning

from her chastity, Penelope states: “Not unrewarded can such fine works remain” (“Non andran

senza premio opre cotanto eccelse”).225 Following this statement, she institutes the challenge of

the bow. Monteverdi writes the seduction into the score, and this time, Penelope does not restrain

herself; she trills in a scandalously excited fashion:

224 Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?” 225 Ibid. 170.

Figure 6-9: Act II, Scene 12 – Penelope Acquiesces

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Earlier in Act II (Scene 8), Minerva informs Ulysses that she will have Penelope suggest

a trial by bow that will enable him to win back his kingdom. Some might use Minerva’s words to

suggest Penelope’s seduction is a false one. However, in this case why did Badoaro not keep the

original trial from Homer (also present in Dolce’s translation)? In the Odyssey, Penelope

institutes the challenge of the bow after speaking at length with Odysseus in disguise, and not

after listening to the suitors’ honeyed speeches.226 As she announces the challenge, her speech

sounds bitter against the titillated fluttering of Monteverdi’s Penelope:

Listen to me you suitors, who persist in abusing the hospitality of this house because its owner has long been absent, and without any other pretext than that you want to marry me; this, then, being the prize that you are contending for, I will bring out the mighty bow of Ulysses, and whomsoever of you shall string it most easily and send his arrow through each one of twelve axes, him will I follow and quit this house of my lawful husband, so goodly, and so abounding in wealth. But even so I doubt not that I shall remember it in my dreams.227

In contrast, Badoaro presents a weak Penelope, admirable because she is not deceptive but also

pitiable, weak, and susceptible to love, like all women in the eyes of the Incogniti.

Monteverdi confirms the dramatic developments I suggest through his musical choices.

By now, one assumes Penelope will sing in C and a, and Monteverdi fulfills this expectation. As

she sets the terms of the challenge, Monteverdi underwrites her lines in C-major before moving at

the end of her line to a cadence in A.

226 Elizabeth Vandiver, “The Odyssey of Homer,” Disc 6. In fact, Homer’s choice has created a

massive rift in the interpretation of the Odyssey. Scholars debate whether or not the craft Penelope of the Odyssey is not aware that the beggar is indeed her husband. If she knows the beggar is Ulysses, instituting the challenge of the bow makes perfect sense after their conversation because it gives Ulysses the perfect opportunity to get his favorite weapon into his hands. If she does not know the beggar is Ulysses, it seems like she is giving in to the suitors. However, the language is ambiguous: Homer says, “Minerva now put it [the idea for the challenge] into Penelope’s mind.” It is unclear if Minerva is telling Penelope, “This is how Ulysses will triumph,” or if Penelope is merely giving in. Even so, one must note that she makes her disdain perfectly clear to the suitors – she has not been seduced. The ambiguity of the situation fails to make it into Il ritorno, however.

227 Homer, The Odyssey, Book XXI.

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Penelope’s continuous cadencing in A/a complicates any suggestion that she has not been drawn

in by Love. She suggests the seduction herself in her final line, stating: “e donna quando toglie,

se non è prima resa allor s’arrende” (“And when a lady succumbs, if she does not first give in,

will soon surrender”). Furthermore, the innuendo of the bow may suggest a more illicit

interaction with the suitors than has previously been thought: Penelope progresses from calling it

Ulysses’s bow to the “bow of Love” (“L’arco d’amor”); any worthy agent of Love – including

the suitors – may have her.

Consider Penelope’s words immediately after she gives into the suitors: “Mache, mache

promise bocca facile, ahi troppo discordante dal core?” (“But what, what did I promise with my

foolish mouth, so out of keeping with my heart?”). Penelope accuses her easy or loose mouth

(“bocca facile”) of committing the promise. Her mouth stands in conflict to her heart, and admits

to the audience her own lack of agency, blaming the gods (“Numi del Cielo”) for her loosened

bonds. As Bonnie Gordon has discussed, early modern discussions frequently assimilated vocal

mechanisms with reproductive parts, including the mouth to female sex organs.228 As Gordon

228 Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women, 77.

Figure 6-10: Act II, Scene 12 – Penelope Announces the Challenge of the Bow

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states: “Acting vocally could be tantamount to acting sexually.”229 Many members of the

audience might easily have understood the double entendre Badoaro uses in light of Incogniti

preferences for double (or many, or even no) meaning. Considering the Carnival atmosphere

pervading early opera, would not a Penelope seduced make sense?

Earlier, I suggested that “any worthy agent of Love” might win Penelope’s heart at this

stage. Fortunately for Ulysses, each of the suitors proves himself incapable of the task. Each

attempt by the suitors to string the bow fails, opening the door for Ulysses to triumph. In the end,

Ulysses reclaims his kingdom and demonstrates his prowess as a warrior by conquering the

suitors with a stirring Sinfonia da guerra in G major. Aided by Minerva and finally divested of

his elderly disguise, Monteverdi brings the G major keys of Time and Fortune full circle; Ulysses

proves himself the master of both.

Act III: An Imbalance of Power

If the end of Act II shows Ulysses’s triumph in the moment of Penelope’s failure, then

Act III focuses on salvaging Penelope. Having conquered Time and Fortune by reclaiming his

kingdom, Ulysses must now demonstrate his power as a lover, but also as a ruler, forgiving

Penelope for her failure by setting himself as master of her passions.

In the immediate aftermath of the suitor’s death, Penelope continues to suggest her

musical and dramatic excitement in Act II, Scene 12 were genuine. In a short interaction with

Melantho, she hearkens back to her Act I lament, although now she grieves over the loss of the

suitors. Melantho begins the scene in C major before eventually cadencing in G major as she

recalls the violent deaths of the suitors. Penelope’s answer demonstrates the shock she

experienced when Ulysses slaughtered the suitors:

229 Ibid., 31.

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Vedova amata Vedova regina Nouve lagrime appresto Insomma agl’infelici Ogni amor e funesto Beloved widow Widowed queen Ready yourself for new tears Unhappiest of all women Every love is baneful. Her opening two lines contrast with her opening line of the Act I lament: “di misera regina.”

Through the suitors, she had reached a point where she dared to feel love once more. Monteverdi

highlights the affect with the music, setting Penelope’s opening line in a minor before shifting to

A major on the word “amata.” Immediately, Penelope considers the death of the suitors and

realizes once again her abandonment, shifting from A major to d minor, readying her for a fall

back into the cantus mollis as she anticipates a return to grief. However, her most telling line

comes at the conclusion of her speech, as she notes that “every love” (“ogni amor”) ends in

sorrow. Once again, she moves to a cadence in d, suggesting the genuine – and, one should

remember, unnatural – anguish she experienced the beginning of the opera that caused her to

repudiate love in the first place.

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As Penelope closes out the scene, she links herself once again with Iro, whose lament parody

comes just one scene earlier.230 As he steels himself for death, Iro urges his heart to be

courageous, freely alternating between durus and mollis as though to emphasize his mental

instability through tonal uncertainty. As he ends his lament in a morbidly humorous manner: he

comes to rest on a G major chord, conquering hunger once and for all through the death of his

body.

Penelope, in stark contrast, fails to stir her heart to action, stating:

Dell’occhio la pietate Si risolve all’eccesso Ma concitar il core A sdegno et a dolore non m’e concesso. To see all this compassion Is cancelled by excess

230 Unlike Penelope’s Act I, Scene 1 lament, these Iro’s lament and Penelope’s and Melantho’s

scenes in Act III are adjacent to each other, increasing the likelihood that audiences might draw a connection between the fates of the two characters.

Figure 6-11: Act III, Scene 2 – Penelope Grieves over the Suitors

Figure 6-12: Act III, Scene 1 – Iro Ends His Life

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But I cannot bid my heart To nurture pain and disdain.231 Characteristically beginning and ending this sequence in d, Penelope confirms her inability to

affect change throughout the opera. Even the parasitic, laughable, bumbling Iro, who, like

Penelope, fails to sing lyrically through his own efforts, takes control of his body, even though he

must kill himself in order to do so.232 Penelope lost control of her body (and music) to the suitors

– in the opera’s final scene, Ulysses tellingly refers to the suitors as adulterers and thieves

(“adulteri e ladri”) – and can now only retreat back into her grief.

Scene 10: Penelope’s Final Capitulation

Despite Penelope’s willingness to give into (or inability to resist) the suitors, in the end,

Ulysses still desires her.233 Another way of thinking about the situation is that the suitors failed in

231 See Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 194. In the footnotes, Curtis reveals that the score omits a

scene found in the libretto for being too melancholy. In the scene, Mercury visits the Underworld and speaks with the shades of the suitors (“Ombre de’ proci”). It is uncertain who accused the scene of excessive melancholy, but nevertheless, it highlights the assertion that audiences at the time came to see happiness, comedy, and love rather than an Oedipal-type tragedy. It also further inscribes Monteverdi’s personal aesthetic. He cut several similar lines in Penelope’s opening monologue on the subject of death as well. See Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 341-2. Rosand provides the text of the Underworld scene, in which Mercury addresses the suitors and then the audience, warning them that life is transient and that eternal punishment awaits those who live an epicurean life. With the removal of this scene, the possibility of a didactic or moral element to Il ritorno becomes harder to find. As only the Vienna music manuscript survives, we have no evidence that Monteverdi ever set this scene to music. With its removal, however, the juxtaposition of Iro’s death and Penelope’s melancholy becomes possible, strengthening the dramatic connection between the two characters.

232 See Rosand, “The Philosopher and the Parasite,” in Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 329-77; and Rosand, “Iro and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.” Rosand sees Iro as one of the most important characters in Il ritorno and finds his death horrifying and significant. In Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?,” 12, Carter suggests that, “The other candidate for presenting a message [besides Penelope], Iro, remains – for all Rosand’s perceptive analysis – a ‘parte riddicola’.” I lean closer towards Rosand’s interpretation mainly because I disagree with Carter’s assumption that possessing humorous qualities necessarily erodes a character’s ability to convey important meanings. As Torcigliani suggests in his preface to Le Nozze, Iro rapidly became a crowd favorite, convincing him to fabricate a similar character in his own libretto. What better way to impart a message on an audience than by embedding it within a character one knows they will remember?

233 As this sentence demonstrates, sifting through Penelope’s motivations throughout Acts II and III of Il ritorno still proves an arduous task. Full of contradictory lines and shifting emotions, it becomes increasingly difficult to brand her as complicit or merely unfortunate in her interaction with the suitors. In

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their attempts to arouse Penelope from her unnatural state. A telling line by the shepherd Eumete

in Act II, Scene 11 gives the reason for Ulysses’s magnanimity: “Civile nobiltà non è crudele, Ne

puote anima grande sdegnar pietà” (“Noble civility does not embrace cruelty, nor can a fine

spirit despise compassion”).234 In forgiving Penelope, Ulysses acts as a just monarch.235

her dialogue with Melantho, she grieves over the death of the suitors, while in the final scene she tells Ulysses, “Quel valor che ti rese ad Ulisse simile, care mi fa le stragi degli amanti malvagi,” (“The courage that made you similar to Ulysses made me thankful for the massacre of the villainous suitors”). Such contradictions in her characterization, however, merely add support to the notion that she embodies a plenitude of conflicting notions of women prevalent in Venice at the time (see Chapter Five).

234 Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 160. Eumete’s line is just one example of many throughout the opera that consider the qualities of a just king and a functional government. In addition their discussions on morality and society, the Incogniti enjoyed political discussions as well, although the Venetian members at least generally possessed a great deal of patriotism. Although any references to Venice in Il ritorno are oblique, in the final line of her Act III, Scene 10 aria, Penelope proclaims, “già ch’è sorta felice dal cenero troian la mia fenice” (“Like a phoenix risen from the ashes of burning Troy returns my joy.”). This could be a potential reference to the Myth of Venice, laid out so explicitly on stage in Giulio Strozzi’s three librettos La finta pazza, La finta savia, and Il Romolo e Remo. Rosand, however, does not acknowledge this line, asserting: “To be sure, the political program for Ritorno, the first of the operas, is not explicit – we have no printed libretto or scenario that lays it out. Nor does the text itself contain any pointed references to Venice.” As Penelope’s line shows however, Badoaro’s libretto contains the seeds of the mythic imagery exploited more fully by Torcigliani Le Nozze. The reasons for this are unclear; it may be that Badoaro and Torcigliani felt different levels of patriotic fervor towards La Serenissima. However, Badoaro’s future works, including the prequel to Il ritorno from 1644 (Ulisse errante, with music by Francesco Sacrati), contain far more explicit references to Venice. I would suggest that the development of political imagery points to an evolutionary process of the trilogy, a realization of the potential of the genre to be used towards propagandistic ends. Rosand suggests in Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 15, that “[T]he full and explicit articulation of the Myth of Venice in Nozze legitimizes in retrospect the interpretation of Badoaro’s work as the first part of a Troy-Rome narrative.” (p. 16). I agree with this statement only to the extent that one can say Il ritorno was not originally conceived that way. Rather than imagined as a conceptual unit, the trilogy began life as a contained work; a grand “Myth of Venice” storyline had not yet been envisioned. This fact might explain the relative lack of explicit Venetian references in the libretto. However, the subsequent success of Il ritorno motivated Torcigliani to create Le Nozze, making more explicit in retrospect any potential political reading of Il ritorno. Torcigliani’s letter in Le Nozze would seem to support this, since he speaks of inspiration rather than collaboration. In other words, the conception of these operas as a political (or dramatic literary) unit started with Le Nozze rather than Il ritorno.

235 The irony in this statement is that he showed no mercy towards the suitors. Penelope ejaculates in Act II, Scene 10: “ché mostro è quell’amor che nuota in sangue!” (“How monstrous is that love which bathes in bloodshed!”). Paradoxically, however, the “chaste” love of Penelope and Ulysses only comes about as a result shedding the blood of the suitors, who through Monteverdi’s cuts come across as far less threatening than in the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, they violate one of Homeric society’s inviolable practices, xenia, which involves a rather specific guest-host relationship. In the Odyssey, each action of the suitors can be seen as violating the principles of xenia. In fact, their choice to willingly and knowingly violate xenia offers all the justification Ulysses needs to kill them. Violating xenia places them outside the realm of humanity with monsters like Polyphemus the Cyclopes, who also violates xenia in the Odyssey but from the host side of the arrangement. By making the focus of Il ritorno the awakening or rescuing of Penelope’s sexuality, the deaths of the suitors comes across as spectacularly unjust. With the removal of the Underworld scene, the justification for their deaths rather flimsy unless one suggests, as I do, that they

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Throughout the drama, he has displayed eloquence, craft, and guile, as well as a warrior’s

prowess.

As he approaches Penelope in the final act, she brands him an “enchanter or sorcerer”

(“incantor o mago”).236 Completely diverging from the sentiment she possessed in the scene with

Melantho (Act III, Scene 2), Penelope now repeatedly reminds Ulysses of her chastity, and he

reminds her of his as well.237 As she claims purity, Penelope makes an awkward statement that

she rejoiced at the deaths of the suitors, even though we have seen her speak to Melantho, a

champion of Love, about her sadness over the event (see note 235). If she is innocent, pure

Penelope, à la Carter and Rosand, she cannot have been lying about her feelings to Melantho. It

makes more sense that she experiences the same discord of feeling she references when she first

institutes the challenge of the bow. In this sense, her words to Ulysses come across as emotional

backpedaling. She seeks to convince both herself and her husband that the feelings towards the

suitors lacked the intensity suggested by Monteverdi’s music.

In suggesting that Badoaro may have implied a physical interaction between Penelope

and the suitors, it would seem that any claim to chastity is lost. However, an excerpt from

Dialogo della institution delle donne (“Discussion of the institution of women”) by Lodovico

Dolce – a hugely popular text in Incogniti circles – suggests a separation between physical and

actually violated Penelope. Then, it would seem, Ulysses’s anger has more support, or would seem more palatable to modern audiences at any rate. The slippage that occurs from Homer to Dolce to Badoaro (to Monteverdi) logically results in certain incongruences, in which the fate of the suitors is one of the most noticeable.

236 Monteverdi, Il ritorno d’Ulisse, 224. 237 One cannot calculate how many of the audience members would have known Ulysses is

actually lying to Penelope when he says, “In onor de’tuoi rai l’eternità sprezzai, volontario cangiando e stato, e sorte. Per serbarmi fedel son giunto a morte,” (“In honor of your beauty I scorned immortality, I voluntarily changed by state, and fate. In order to remain faithful I came close to death”). Ulysses refers to the nymph Calypso, who kept him as a lover for seven years on her isle. Thus, although he eventually chose Ithaca and Penelope over immortality, he took a while to do so. Additionally, he engaged in sexual relations with the enchantress Circe as well. For audience members in the know, Ulysses’s lying might have elicited a humorous response even while he stated faithfulness conformed to the prescribed norms for marriage in early modern Venice.

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spiritual chastity that could relate to how Penelope and Ulysses conceive of her interaction with

the suitors:

Because many things are necessary to men at the same time, that is to say prudence, eloquence, expertise at governing the Republic, talent, memory, art, and industry to rule life, justice, liberality, magnanimity, and so many other things that it would be too long to list them all […] But in the woman one does not look for profound eloquence, subtle talent, or the highest prudence, the art of living, or the administration of the Republic, justice, or anything else except for chastity […] Oh, said Lucrezia, what else is there to be saved when chastity is lost? And, yet, in the violated body there was a chaste soul [emphasis added].238

As he wrote Penelope and Ulysses interaction in the final scene, Badoaro may have had this or a

similar text in mind. Thus, Penelope remains truthful in a sense: she has retreated inside herself

after suffering Love’s blandishments once more.

In pursuit of the happy ending demanded by the conventions of the genre and his own

personal aesthetic, Monteverdi constructed the denouement with his new Prologue in mind, thus

solidifying Penelope’s connection with Human Frailty. She proves susceptible to Love once

more; she ends up with her husband, but plays no role in crafting her happiness. She can only

react, passively accepting the events that happen to her.

Penelope’s happiness stems from the machinations of Ulysses, who seeks a way to her

diamond-encased heart. After Penelope asserts her chastity, she cadences in D, once again

solidifying her position. Ulysses responds in kind, singing in d minor before shifting to A at the

end of his response, as though he reaches out to Penelope’s position and shows her the way to

awaken a natural Love.

238 Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della institution delle donne (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari,

1547), 23r-24v; quoted in Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 27.

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Penelope remains obstinate still, reversing Ulysses’s tonality over her next few phrases:

as he ends in a, she inevitably takes his lines and reverts them back to D. Finding little success,

Ulysses finally seduces his queen through a clever tactic: he mentions a coverlet for their bed that

bears a depiction of the virgin goddess Diana, whereupon Penelope finally recognizes her

husband.239 Instead of choosing a and d, Monteverdi sets these lines in a striking G major, which

could represent a multitude of meanings. Given its relationship to Time and Fortune from the

Prologue, G major could represent a change in Fortune for Ulysses, Penelope, or both. However,

Ulysses’s music in this passage bears an uncanny resemblance to his lines as he strings his bow in

Act II, Scene 12:

239 Once again, Badoaro departs significantly from Homer and Dolce with this event. In the

original Odyssey (see Chapter One), Penelope tricks Ulysses into divulging information regarding their wedding bed. In her deception, she proves herself the worthy consort of the wiliest of the Greeks.

Figure 6-13: Act III, Scene 10 – Ulysses Coaxes His Wife

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G major also represents Ulysses’s conquests, his accomplishments, and the defeat of his enemies.

In this sense, Fortune bends to his will. In convincing Penelope of his identity, he asserts his

primacy over Love as well, and Penelope’s emotional blockade crumbles. In an unprecedented

and stirring C major aria, she lets forth a string of melismatic passages, trilling along with nature

her recovered emotion. Even if she already tried to love earlier in the opera, here she finds true

release:

Figure 6-14: Act II, Scene 12 – Ulysses Strings His Bow

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It remains difficult to determine whether or not Penelope’s aria suggests a triumph of

conjugal love. Although Ulysses has vanquished the adulterous suitors, his actions regarding

Penelope result in the exaltation of C and a – the keys of joy and Love, respectively. The exact

nature of this Love will continue to be debated. However, immediately before breaking into

song, Penelope casts off decorum, making an apology to chastity: “Onestà mi perdoni, dono tutte

ad Amor” (“My apologies, chastity, I give everything to Love”). This line would seem to directly

refute Carter’s assertion (see Chapter Three) that “the ‘message’ of the opera – if message need –

is that Human Frailty, so belaboured in the prologue and through Penelope through Penelope in

the opera, has one invincible weapon against Time, Fortune, and Love – Constancy.”240

Furthermore, her lyrical display clashes with her earlier d minor music, and finally brings

her into the realm of lyricism celebrated by every other character in the opera, save Iro. Although

d minor certainly represents her depression throughout Il ritorno, it consistently bears

240 Carter, “In Love’s Harmonious Consort?,” 15.

Figure 6-15: Act III, Scene 10 – Penelope Rejoices

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associations with her chastity as well. By choosing C major for Penelope’s aria, as well as an a

minor duet with Ulysses to end the opera, Monteverdi seems to signals a triumph of the joyful

sensuality praised by various other characters in the opera, including the “adulterous” suitors.

Similarly, in her aria, Penelope tells the breezes to rejoice (“aure gioite, gioite, aure

gioite!”). Throughout the opera, breezes represent inconstancy and fickleness. Penelope’s praise

of inconstancy at the end raises questions as to the type of love Il ritorno celebrates. Has the

breeze and the rest of nature been tamed by the conjugal love of Ulysses and Penelope, or does

their reunion give the heated, inconstant love advanced by Melantho, Eurymachus, and the suitors

been given free reign? Their reunion does not end with a renewal of vows, but instead with a

duet whose most important word, “sì,” and key, a minor, echoes the heated young lovers

Melantho and Eurymachus (see the lovers’ Act I, Scene 2 duet).

Example 6-16: Act III, Scene 10 – The Final Duet

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Either way, the joyous, musical, and therefore sensual celebration of Penelope raises significant

questions about how audiences would have viewed her character, particularly in the libertine

society of 1640s Venice. Love can indeed claim victory over Penelope. The text notes the

conquering of her heart, while the music suggests the submission of her body as well.

In the preceding analysis, one can track a unifying characteristic: Penelope’s lack of

agency. She lacks the power to prevent the overtures of the suitors, and cannot bring herself to

emerge from her emotional stupor. Once the suitors finally overcome her barriers, they lack the

manliness of the durus-oriented Ulysses, who can also fluidly vary his musical lexicon to fit any

situation.241 Indeed, instead of Constancy in Carter’s argument, one could argue that Penelope’s

invincible weapon against Time, Fortune, and Love is Ulysses himself. As he proves himself

master of Time, Fortune, and Love over the course of the opera, he acquires the ability to punish

or save other characters by virtue of his good judgment. Thus, the suitors and Iro die by his

hands, and music-less Penelope is saved. For her, the removal of any control over her fate strikes

one as a devolution from her role in Homer’s tale. Her recognition of Ulysses’s demonstrates the

loss of her soul, while Ulysses answer demonstrate his control of her body:

Hor sì ti rinosco, hor sì ti credo, Antico possessore Del combattuto core Honesta mi perdoni Dono tutte ad Amor le sue ragioni. Now yes I recognize you, I believe you, Of old the master Of my contested heart; Forgive my rudeness: I give to Love all of the blame.

241 Antinous’s failed attempt to string the bow finds him uttering one of many humorous double

entendre in Act II, Scene 12. Upon his collapse, he says, “Il braccio non vi giunge, il polso non v’arriva. Ceda la vinta forza, col non poter anco’l desio s’ammorza” (“My arms cannot reach, my wrist is too short. Vanquished is my strength, and with it my desire”).

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In response, Ulysses exhorts Penelope to give into music with the command, “sciogli la lingua,

deh, sciogli” (“Unfetter your tongue, pray, unfetter it”).242 Monteverdi has crafted Penelope’s

malleability (beneath a diamond veil of chastity) so that the audience knows an inevitable

capitulation to her consort will result. Belabored over the course of the opera, Penelope could not

overcome her inherent frailty. Only through Ulysses can Penelope welcome music. In other

words, the embodiment of the patriarchy in Il ritorno governs her ability to participate in what

everyone in the opera defines as natural. By controlling her foray into lyricism, Badoaro and

Monteverdi restrain the evocative power of the female voice. Paradoxically freed and

simultaneously imprisoned, by the end of the opera Penelope becomes less Homer’s Odyssey and

more Ovid’s Metamorphoses, transforming from an emblem of eloquence to a trained

nightingale, an object of pure voice controlled by the virtue of masculine Venice.243

242 See Gordon, “Vocal Anatomies,” 10-46. The tongue participated in a system that assigned

sexual double meanings to the various parts of the female vocal mechanism. 243 See Mauro Calcagno, “Signifying Nothing,” 463.

Conclusion

This study has largely involved a process of recovery. One can find its origins in a

production of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria by Nikolaus Harnoncourt from 1979.244 Produced at

the Opernhaus Zürich, Harnoncourt’s efforts resulted in a video production that brought early

opera to a far wider audience. Despite the merits of the endeavor, the result is somewhat

inconsistent; it suffers from some questionable decisions regarding orchestration (Harnoncourt’s

decision), as well as the staging (the responsibility of director Jean-Pierre Ponelle).245

Nevertheless, as I watched the production, I observed Ponelle’s reading of the libretto and score

clearly manifested in his staging of the scenes involving Penelope and the suitors. As Penelope

attempts to maintain her chastity, the suitors beguile her flamboyantly and incessantly, running

their hands through the space just above her body. In Ponelle’s staging, the sensuality of

Monteverdi’s lyricism comes to life; Ponelle’s Penelope responds quite positively to the overtures

of the suitors. Glancing demurely at their excess, she seems to delight in their calls to dance and

revelry, clearly wanting to join in but not knowing how.

The overt objectification of Penelope – the suitors wanting to grasp and hold her as they

run their hands over her – seems supported by libretto and score, as shown in this study.

Harnoncourt and Ponelle merely recognize the sensual excess embedded throughout the opera

and foreground it in their production. Logically, this leads to a somewhat uneven result: if

Penelope responds so positively to the suitors, her subsequent reunion with Ulysses comes across

as slightly hollow unless one recognizes that the incongruences may have been the deliberate 244 Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Monteverdi: Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, dir. Jean Pierre-Ponelle, 153

min., Deutsche Grammophon, 2007, DVD. 245 These include a historically and aesthetically inaccurate orchestra. Harnoncourt includes far

more instruments than indicated in Monteverdi’s score, and Ponelle makes the decision to integrate the instrumentalists into the staged action. Patchy camerawork, involving unreasonable panning out and sometimes-unnecessary close-ups, also hinders the aesthetic effectiveness of the work.

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intention of Badoaro and Monteverdi. The disparity between this particular production and the

prevailing interpretations of the opera – most notably those of Carter and Rosand – evoked my

curiosity as to how Harnoncourt and Ponelle decided to solve the interpretive issues of the opera

in the manner they chose. Surely Penelope’s seduction did not result from artistic whimsy.

Ultimately, Harnoncourt and Ponelle seem to have stumbled onto some of the social

tension and incongruences built into the opera, which suggest Penelope fulfills roles both as a

chaste wife and seduced woman. In so doing, she enacts the debates of the Accademia degli

Incogniti on women, love, and morality, resulting in a slippage between chastity and purity. In

the end, her inability to gravitate towards either demonstrates a lack of dramatic agency. Rather

than ignore any facet of Penelope’s character – for example, focusing almost exclusively on her

opening lament and the final scene of the opera – I have focused on a more holistic interpretation

of the character, highlighting the friction between chastity and sensuality on the operatic stage as

audiences at the premiere may have done.

The plurality of meanings grafted onto Penelope’s characters comes from the opera’s

focus on Love – a focus emphasized by Monteverdi’s new Prologue, as well as his other editorial

contribution to the libretto. These interventions necessitate a more directed reading of the opera,

as he clearly responded to both audience demands and his own preferences, which not

coincidentally focused on audience responses. The original manifestation of the opera lacked

something Monteverdi found necessary: opportunities for him to move the audience. Badoaro, a

member of the erudition-loving Incogniti offered too few emotional moments to Monteverdi.

Through his textual and musical attempts to elicit emotion, Monteverdi drew out embedded

Incogniti and Venetian ideologies on women, driving home Penelope’s seduction for the viewer.

Il ritorno’s Penelope is not elevated as a paradigm of virtue, an example for audience members.

Instead, she embodies the apparent paradox at the core of the varied strands of writing and social

norms regarding women in seventeenth-century Venice. In Muir’s formulation, “The opera box

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became a model of the opera stage, where the relation between lust and love, sex and marriage,

personal fulfillment and stoic suffering were very much thrown into question.”246

Monteverdi, and to a lesser extent Badoaro, recognized that audience members did not

come to see an Aristotelian tragedy. They did not desire to listen to philosophical meanderings or

didactic preaching.247 Such occurrences were for Lent; opera was for Carnival, for revelry. If

anything, Il ritorno’s journey from stilted recitative to lyric aria encapsulates the spirit of the

times. Monteverdi’s proclamation of song over speech started a process that would have

profound effects on the operatic genre in future decades. It pointed to the inherent issue of

verisimilitude in opera and rejoiced in the tension. Rather than inspire a debate from Torcigliani

and Busenello (as Rosand would suggest), the success of Il ritorno encouraged these other

Incogniti members to explore more fully the implications of the sensual Love Badoaro haltingly

penned and Monteverdi fully realized through acute editorial incisions and evocative musical

decisions. In their pursuit of emotional acuity, however, Badoaro and Monteverdi stripped Queen

Penelope of any agency she once possessed. Like the famous caryatids of Athens, she is ossified,

trapped in the service of drama and only freed through the efforts of Ulysses, the prime example

of Venetian masculine virtue.

Thus, this study has built towards one (unprecedented) reading of Penelope’s character.

By drawing on the motivations of librettist, composer, and audience, as well as the crises and

norms of Venetian society at the time, I have sought to bring a unique scope to Il ritorno in an

attempt to understand the various meanings Queen Penelope could have. In the end, it is only one

reading. Carter’s musings on polyvalency hold significant meaning for Il ritorno, precisely

because it never intended to have merely one meaning. By carefully grounding an alternative 246 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance, 118. Muir, writing from a historical-cultural

perspective, unsurprisingly mentions Poppea as representative of the opera box-opera stage comparisons. However, following my preceding analysis of Il ritorno, one can see many of these same cultural links in the Odyssey story as adapted by Badoaro and Monteverdi.

247 The fact that Monteverdi deleted several passages by Badoaro with excessive abstract concepts or melancholy language only confirms this statement.

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understanding of Penelope from existing interpretations, I have shown that fixing a single

interpretation of her character is perhaps unrealistic, and not particularly useful either. She is

neither chaste Penelope nor corrupted Penelope, depressed Penelope nor joyous Penelope. She is

at once each of these, and that means she is Incogniti Penelope, Monteverdi Penelope, and

Venetian Penelope. Fractured into many layers of meaning, she is, and always will be, a paradox,

and therein lies the beauty of Monteverdi’s art.

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