L'Amfiparnaso is the classic Italian Renaissance music theatre piece. The music is written by celebrated fancier of lighter forms, Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), with a text attributed to Giulio Cesare Croce. It was probably written towards the end of 1593, first performed in Vecchi's home town of Modena in 1594 and published in Venice in 1597.

L'Amfiparnaso is a set of 14 scenes on a commedia dell'arte plot told through the medium of a five-voice vocal ensemble. Meet mean-spirited old Pantalone, the verbose and confused Dottore, the Spanish Captain, the servants (Zanni) and an array of effete lovers: the stuff of soap opera to Italian Renaissance audiences both high and low.

Its title can translate a number of ways, the most likely seeming to be 'The Twin Parnassuses', which Vecchi explains in his preface, saying that he has for the first time brought together the two peaks of 'commedia' and 'musica', seeming to imply the piece's juxtaposition of slapstick scenes with the serious music for the lovers. This happy balance partly explains why L'Amfiparnaso, of all works in this genre, has stood the test of time. It was a mix soon taken up by opera from Cavalli to Mozart and onwards.

By genre, the work is a 'commedia harmonica', or madrigal comedy, to give it Alfred Einstein's modern name, a type that flourished at the end of the 16th century. It took many forms but the best of them had some sort of plot and were based on the characters of the commedia dell'arte.

L'Amfiparnaso's plot is only lightly sketched. It's like a Christmas edition of a comedy show with each character delivering his catchphrase and leaving before his part in the plot is developed very far ' but here's an outline. Old Pantalone (himself enamoured of the courtesan Hortensia), offers his daughter in marriage to Doctor Graziano. A pair of lovers appears (an excuse for an exquisite madrigal). We then meet the beautiful Isabella, pursued in love by the unwelcome Spanish Captain. Lucio (Isabella's real lover), thinking himself betrayed, decides to kill himself (even more exquisite suicide madrigal). Isabella is distraught to hear of his death (even more exquisite' etc) but Lucio turns up alive and their friends offer them an unusual array of wedding gifts. Just before the end, Graziano reappears and, in serenading Pantalone's daughter, ruins a famous madrigal of the day by Da Rore, completely changing the meaning by getting the words slightly wrong. The whole is punctuated by the goings on of the cheeky servants, including a dubious (and by modern standards politically incorrect) visit to a Jewish pawnbroker.

Vecchi's music, especially in the love scenes, is as good as the very best of his contemporaries, bringing to mind Monteverdi and Gesualdo. Such sophistication was of course not for the town squares and street fairs where the real commedia dell'arte shows took place but for the pleasure of the indoor connoisseur. She or he knew the characters and would enjoy a reminder of their antics without the inconvenience of mixing with the lower classes in the street. But whereas some madrigal comedies were intended for staging, Vecchi actually warns against this in the prologue, saying that his comedy is for hearing and not watching. Yet that was for his audience, already familiar with the characters and understanding the dialect. We have lost touch with these everymen and women and also have to negotiate the language and culture barrier; how many Italians speak 16th century Venetian dialect today and understand all the in-jokes?

There have been several unsuccessful attempts to stage this piece in recent times. The main difficulty is that you cannot have characters on stage singing their words because each of them is portrayed by several voices at once - and the specific voices portraying any character often change every few seconds! The solution to this is to follow the advice of Vecchi's contemporary, Adriano Banchieri, who for similar works proposed hiding the vocal ensemble and using masked characters to mime the action in front of a simple Venetian backdrop. We have followed this and also commissioned spoken 'argomenti' (introductions) for each scene in the vernacular to recreate the wonderful, complex and often contemporary wordplay in the original text.

Robert Hollingworth, May 2004