Monteverdi (and Henze) in Salzburg

Synopsis

The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by the Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” or “The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland,” as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.

The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score.” Monteverdi wrote down a bare 5-part accompaniment to the vocal lines of his opera, without indicating what specific instruments he meant to play those notes—and when. This means for any modern performance, someone needs to make those decisions.

For their 1985 summer season, the Salzburg Festival commissioned Henze to prepare a new orchestration of Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses” 245 years after its first performance in Venice back in 1640. As luck would have it, Henze’s version appeared around the same time as another modern attempt to reconstruct Monteverdi’s score by the noted Baroque specialist Nicholas Harnoncourt.

Even so, the music critics, in the main, were complimentary after the Henze’s version premiered in Sazlburg, noting that his scoring somehow managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.

Even though we’ll never know EXACTLY how the opera sounded when Monteverdi heard it back in 1640, thanks to modern technology, the audio and video of that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both CD and DVD versions.

Music Played in Today's Program

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) arr. Hans Werner Henze Ulysses' Homecoming soloists; Vienna Radio Symphony; Jeffrey Tate, cond. Orfeo 528 003

On This Day

Births

• 1750 - Italian opera composer Antonio Salieri, in Legnago (near Verona);

• 1849 - French composer Benjamin Godard, in Paris;

• 1893 - Canadian composer and conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, in Mimico, Ontario;

Deaths

• 1942 - Austrian composer Erwin Schulhoff, age 48, in a German concentration camp in Wülzburg;

Premieres

• 1820 - Schubert: opera "Die Zauberharfe" (The Magic Harp) in Vienna;

• 1912 - Schreker: opera "Der ferne Klang" (The Distant Sound), in Frankfurt at the Opernhaus;

• 1938 - Britten: Piano Concerto, with the composer as soloist, at a Proms Concert conducted by Sir Henry Wood;

• 1956 - Henry Brant: "On the Nature of Things," for spatially grouped instruments and strings, in Bennington, Vt.;

• 1966 - Ulysseys Kay: "Markings" (dedicated to the late Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld), at the Meadow Brook Music Festival in Rochester, Michigan;

Others

• 1906 - Gustav Mahler conducts the first of two performances of Mozart's opera "The Marriage of Figaro" in Salzburg, Austria, during a Mozart Festival that also included Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" conducted by Richard Strauss.