Lost operas by Claudio Monteverdi

The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote prolifically for the stage. His theatrical works were written between 1604 and 1643 and included operas. Three of these operas have survived with their music and librettos intact. The music for the seven lost operas has been lost apart from a few fragments from L’Arianna and a trio from Proserpina.

About Lost operas by Claudio Monteverdi in brief

The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote prolifically for the stage. His theatrical works were written between 1604 and 1643 and included operas. Three of these operas have survived with their music and librettos intact. In the case of the other seven operas, the music has disappeared almost entirely. The loss of these works, written during a critical period of early opera history, has been much regretted by commentators and musicologists. For, the precise genre of Montever di’s works has proved particularly difficult to define. The first acknowledged opera is L’Orfeo, written in 1607 for the Mantuan court, which employed him, was a major success. He composed, in all, 24 works for the Stage, of which ten are usually classified as operas; the music for the seven lost operas has been lost apart from a few fragments from L’Arianna and a trio from Proserpina are known to have survived. The other three lost opera, Le nozze di Tetide, La finta pazza Licori and Armida abbandonata, were abandoned by MonteVerdi before completion; how much of their music was actually written is unknown. The composer’s creative life covered more than 50 years. Between 1590 and 1612 he served as a musician in the Gonzaga court in Mantua, followed by 30 years as maestro di capella at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. This timespan saw opera develop, from its beginnings as a limited form of court entertainment, to become part of the mainstream of public musical theatre.

In his later years he continued to write theatrical music in various genres, including operas and dances, and intermedi. Most of what is known about what is missing about the works comes from survivinglibrettos and other documentation, including his own correspondence. Tim Carter, a leading scholar, suggests that the high rate of loss of the works is due to the high number of them being written in the 1630s and 1640s. He also suggests that some of the music is not of much use after its initial performance, because stage music was rarely thought to have much utility after its creation. For example, for Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, the composer’s combattimento e Clorinda di Tancorinda has proved difficult to categorise. In addition to choruses and ensembles, the vocal parts included recitative, aria and arioso. This was a development from various older forms of musical theatre that had existed since the earliest years of the Italian Renaissance; such forms included the maschera, the ballo, and particularly the intermedio or intermezzo, a short dramatic musical episode inserted as a prologue or entr’acte between the acts of straight plays. Another format in the later renaissance period was the torneo, or “tournament”, a stylised dramatic spectacle in which the main singing was performed by a narrator.

Related posts:

L’incoronazione di Poppea Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Claudio Monteverdi Handel’s lost Hamburg operas