Monteverdi (and Henze) in Salzburg

Synopsis

The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by 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. 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.

The music critics, in the main, were complimentary after Henze’s version premiered in Salzburg, noting 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, that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both audio and video recordings.

Music Played in Today's Program

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) arr. Hans Werner Henze: Ulysses’ Homecoming; soloists; Vienna Radio Symphony; Jeffrey Tate, conductor; 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, 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, Vermont

• 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 Mozarts Cosi fan Tutte conducted by Richard Strauss.