Further thoughts from Robert Hollingworth

The Full Monteverdi is a dramatised account of (fairly unarguably) the greatest book of music for unaccompanied voices ever written, Monteverdi’s Il quarto libro de’madrigali (the fourth book of madrigals) published in 1603. These powerful almost operatic pieces (having little in common with most of their more gentle English cousins) demand passion, discipline and virtuosity from the singers and their expressive power is unmatched, as we have found when singing them in concert to a wide range of different audiences.

The Full Monteverdi began as a project in the mind of opera director John La Bouchardière. He had an idea for an innovative way of presenting the whole book, requiring it to be learnt by heart (with the cooperation of some unconventional venues). He approached Harry Christophers of The Sixteen who pushed him our way. I was initially sceptical because of the technical and acoustical demands of the production but changed my mind after experimenting with it in a space with some of I Fagiolini and John.

We can’t give away too much of what goes on except to say that’s it’s the most demanding project we have ever undertaken and central to it has been how to make the subject matter mean something to a contemporary listener. With an opera, you can sympathise with the characters. In a Schubert song-cycle you travel with the singer through very personal poetry. So with Monteverdi’s fourth book? Well, that would be telling. Suffice to say that, in an age when music such as this can too easily find itself an accompaniment to dinner, there is a certain need turn the tables.

Funded in part by Arts Council England.

More on the Fourth Book

The music of Monteverdi was one of the first things to interest me in early music. I had sung in performances of the 1610 Vespers as a boy and in my teens came across various Taverner Consort and Parley of Instrument recordings, the pure sound of which was so attractive. I developed a passion for his secular music, impressed by the larger-scale works with strings and the reams of virtuosic semiquavers portraying anger, one of his famous innovations.

Yet dramatic and immediately impressive though that repertoire is, for me it doesn’t compare with the intimacy and emotional power of his unaccompanied madrigals. Mmm – ‘madrigals’. The very term in England (non-UK and US readers please excuse me) has almost become perjorative because of its association with the lighter forms of the pastoral English madrigal. (Lord Blackadder sums this up: “Don’t say ‘tush’, Percy: it’s only a short step from ‘tush’ to ‘Hey nonny’ and then I shall have to call the police”.) Monteverdi’s madrigals are on a different plane; powerful and emotional miniatures, creating an atmosphere to knock you sideways in just a few bars.

He wrote six books of five-voice madrigals, a basic accompaniment being required for some of the last book. They spanned his entire creative life at the Gonzaga court in Mantua from the 1580s to his move to Venice in 1614 and they become increasingly demanding of the performer, requiring virtuosity of many different types. (He had at his disposal one of the new professional ensembles.)

More than all the other books, the fourth, published in 1603 after a gap of 11 years, breaks new ground. The dissonant writing upset one critic, yet other composers, Gesualdo notably, were to do stranger things to harmony. What makes Monteverdi stand out from his contemporaries (and after all the research of recent times into hitherto hidden composers he still stands alone) is the emotionally direct power of his writing.

Technically speaking (for anyone interested) the basic diatonic harmony behind his music is simple. What is exceptional is the way he writes dissonance against this to create and dissipate tension which so perfectly expresses the meaning behind the words. If this sounds unhelpfully clinical, its effect is not – one just has to listen to a few bars and be caught up in the emotion to appreciate the effect. You don’t need to be a lighting designer to enjoy a Hitchcock movie.

Exactly the same processes are involved in his first opera, L’Orfeo, first performed only four years after the fourth book was published and without doubt the first great opera. It’s that same expressive use of harmony underpinning the inherently dramatic vocal writing that gives L’Orfeo such emotional clout.

If you think of Monteverdi, what is it you bring to mind? A sort of proto-type Handel and Vivaldi? The grandeur of the Vespers? Italian passion in a safe early music sort of way?

By now it’ll be apparent that our approach to him is as a pioneering modernist - but the sweet sounds he writes are undeniable. His music has an awareness of sonority that makes the notes endlessly pleasurable to hear, a dangerous if attractive characteristic: Beecham warned of the danger of liking the noise music made rather than the music itself. Rather, this awareness of sonority is an extra layer, helping each chord and shape to speak in the most effective and sonorous way possible, heightening each effect.

The result? Music stripped away to ‘a nucleus of expressive intensity, leaving painful nerve-ends everywhere exposed to the force of emotion which revealed them - the new naturalism’ as James Weeks has called it. It’s fiercely modern, so trying to understand it by working backwards from Handel is unhelpful. Instead it’s the culmination of a current in Renaissance music which looked to colour every word.