Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria was first performed in Venice in 1640. It marked Monteverdi’s return to the stage after an absence of more than three decades, and its appearance coincided with a turning point in musical history. Venice had opened the world’s first public opera house three years previously: opera, hitherto the privilege of the Italian aristocracy, was now available to a paying audience. It was almost inevitable that the 73-year-old composer, maestro di capella at St Mark’s, should be drawn back to the genre he had made his own at the Mantuan court with Orfeo (1607) and Arianna (1608). Only fragments of the latter remain, though in his lifetime it was considered his masterpiece. It seems appropriate, perhaps, that to mark the 450th anniversary of his birth, the new Grange festival (occupying the site vacated by the relocated Grange Park Opera) should open with his first work for the public stage.
Monteverdi is the first great musical dramatist, a description that extends to his work way beyond the bounds of opera. Exploring the meaning of a text, whether secular or sacred, and realising its significance in sound, was integral to his methodology. His madrigals traverse vast emotional spaces in the briefest of spans, and his sacred works, most notably the Vespers of 1610, evoke the infinite nature of the divine through the drama of liturgy. His understanding of the human psyche, in all its contradictions, was acute, and his operas equate its workings with the often naked exposure of the human voice, controlled and subtle in inflection as it moves between recitative and arioso.
In Ulisse’s second act, we find a scene that encapsulates his understanding, at its finest, of human ambivalence. Ulisse’s son Telemaco describes in rapturous phrases the beauty of Helen of Troy to his mother, Penelope, who longs only for her husband’s return. When he gazed into Helen’s eyes, he says, he understood why the Trojan war was fought, and why so many lost their lives. Penelope upbraids him in severe recitative, arguing that the war was fought for an adulteress and that the resulting carnage was senseless. Morally, she is absolutely right, but we also notice, just for a second, that she lacks her son’s powers of imagination. It is a moment of extraordinary insight and compassion.
Such ambiguities are common in Monteverdi, but they can make his works difficult to stage, and the Grange’s production, directed by Tim Supple, and led from the pit by the festival’s artistic director, Michael Chance, doesn’t always serve him well. Supple on occasion rides roughshod over the complex metaphysical subtleties that inform narrative and action. His starting point is the Prologue in which Time (Paul Whelan), Fortune (Donna Bateman) and Love (Lorenza Paz Nieto) torment Robin Blaze’s Human Frailty. Each allegorical figure, however, is also allocated a “physicalisation”, as Supple puts it, in the form of an actor or acrobat, who is seen controlling the drama long after their vocal equivalents have left the stage.
In Supple’s scheme, they stand above the gods who interfere in human affairs, and whom Supple comes close to sending up. Giove (Gwilym Bowen) is a construction worker, Minerva (Emma Stannard) a bespectacled new-ager. Nettuno (Whelan again) sports a wetsuit and carries a harpoon. Paul Nilon’s Ulisse and Thomas Elwin’s Telemaco wear modern battle fatigues, carefully reminding us of the continuing relevance of the work’s examination of what it means to return home after conflict. Elsewhere, however, Sumant Jayakrishnan’s over-stylised designs frequently strike an awkwardly symbolic note: Anna Bonitatibus’s Penelope is cocooned from the world in swathes of white cloth that Nilon unwinds just before their final reunion. It’s all a bit fussy – I yearned for the simplicity of James Conway’s staging for English Touring Opera last autumn, in which little was allowed to intrude on the emotional interaction between protagonists.
The score remains a thing to marvel at. Chance has a fine understanding of Monteverdian ebb and flow, though there were occasional ensemble imprecisions in the Academy of Ancient Music’s playing. Bateman sounded oddly tremulous, and Nigel Robson, as the shepherd Eumete, was having an off night. Whelan, Stannard and Bowen are all superb, but it’s Elwin, Nilon and Bonitatibus who carry the evening. Elwin’s elegance makes the apostrophe to Helen very beautiful. Nilon wonderfully captures Ulisse’s noble anguish and the innate, humorous cunning that makes him a born survivor. Bonitatibus embodies Monteverdian singing at its finest, fusing text and line into a single expressive unit, emotions contained and vivid.
This production may be flawed, but it shows up Monteverdi’s greatness, and why we keep returning to him for the illumination he offers into our world.
- In rep at the Grange festival until 2 July. Box office: 01962 791020.
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