The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Claudio Monteverdi · a Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, printed in Venice in 1610 · thirteen numbers: the opening response, five psalms, four sacred concertos, a sonata, the hymn and the Magnificat · for one to ten voices, with cornetts, violins, violas and trombones over the organ · in Latin: the Vulgate psalms, the Song of Songs, Isaiah and John, the hymn and Luke’s canticle · about 90 minutes in performance
Mode
Vespers of the Virgin’s feasts in the concerted style: five psalms, the hymn and the Magnificat on their chants, with four few-voice concertos and a sonata between the psalms
Mythos
The Virgin as bride, dawn, star and mother; the many-voiced Church answered by a single soul; the one praised in the third person for an hour, who speaks last in the first
Phase
One evening Office from the opening versicle to the Magnificat; thirteen numbers in the print’s order; the concertos rising from one voice to six
Presentation
Concert music; one to ten voices with organ, cornetts, violins, violas and trombones; falsobordone, the polychoral psalm, monody with written ornament, echo and sonata
Register
From six voices declaiming on one chord under a theatre toccata, and one tenor murmuring the bride’s words, to ten voices intoning one chant and a litany laid eleven times over a dance
Scale
The Psalter’s king, city, builder and barren woman; the Trinity in three voices; about ninety minutes, and three centuries without a hearing
Governing Proposition
A court composer sets the whole evening Office of the Virgin’s feasts in the newest style of his age, with a theatre fanfare at the altar, a love-song from the Song of Songs between the psalms and an echo that answers from nowhere, and lays under nearly all of it the Church’s plainchant, so that the oldest song in the work is the bass of the newest. The wager of the work is that the Office has two voices, the Church’s and the soul’s, and that they can be heard taking turns on the same ground.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Office begins with a fanfare from the theatre. Six voices sing the versicle and response that open every Vespers, “Deus in adiutorium meum intende”
“O God, come to my aid”, on a single chord, declaiming the whole text in the manner of falsobordone, the chordal recitation of the old choirs. Under them the instruments, cornetts, violins, violas and trombones over the organ, play the toccata that had opened L’Orfeo at the Gonzaga court in Mantua in February 1607. The Alleluia at the end breaks into triple time. In its first two minutes the work has stated its manner: the Church’s words on the Church’s recitation, and the newest sound of the age built around them. A theatre stands at the altar, and the altar is not moved.
The music belongs to a single print, published in Venice by Ricciardo Amadino in 1610 and dedicated to Pope Paul V. Its title page announces a Mass for six voices for church choirs, and Vespers for several voices with some sacred concertos, fit for chapels or the chambers of princes. The Mass comes first: the Missa In illo tempore, a parody Mass in the old style on a motet of Nicolas Gombert, the kind of counterpoint Rome understood. The Vespers follows, and in the Bassus Generalis partbook it stands under its own heading, which calls it a Vespers of the Blessed Virgin in the concerted style, composed on plainchants. A letter from Mantua in July 1610 describes the Mass as a work of great study and labour, and the psalms as being in various and diverse manners of invention and harmony, all on the plainchant. That is the print’s own account of itself: the old way and the new, bound together and sent to Rome.
The Vespers is thirteen numbers in the print’s order. Eight of them are the Office of the Virgin’s feasts exactly: the opening response, the five psalms the rite assigns, Dixit Dominus, Laudate pueri, Laetatus sum, Nisi Dominus and Lauda Jerusalem, in the rite’s order, then the hymn Ave maris stella and the Magnificat. Between the psalms stand five numbers the rite does not ask for: four sacred concertos for one, two, three and then one voice with its echo rising to six, and a Sonata for eight instruments over a sung litany. Nine of the thirteen are built on a plainchant; the four concertos are the four that are not. Instruments beyond the organ play in five: the response, the first psalm, the Sonata, the hymn and the Magnificat. The psalms are scored for six, eight, six, ten and seven voices. The whole runs about ninety minutes, and after it the print gives a second Magnificat, for six voices and organ alone.
Movement II
Dixit Dominus is for six voices and six instruments. It alternates the chordal recitation of the psalm tone with florid passages that break out at the ends of verses, and with instrumental ritornellos, and it reaches “conquassabit capita in terra multorum”
“he shall shatter heads in the land of many”. Then the instruments fall silent and a single tenor sings over the organ. The words are the bride’s, from the Song of Songs: “Nigra sum sed formosa, filia Jerusalem; ideo dilexit me rex et introduxit me in cubiculum suum”
“I am black but comely, daughter of Jerusalem; therefore the king has loved me and brought me into his chamber.” “Surge, amica mea, et veni”
“Arise, my love, and come” rises out of the murmur; “iam hiems transiit, imber abiit et recessit”
“now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” It is a love-song, and it stands inside the evening Office; the title page offers the concertos for princes’ chambers in the bride’s own word for the king’s.
After Laudate pueri two sopranos sing Pulchra es: “Pulchra es, amica mea, suavis et decora filia Jerusalem”
“You are beautiful, my love, sweet and comely, daughter of Jerusalem”, and the sweetness turns to “terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata”
“terrible as an army in battle array”, and then to “Averte oculos tuos a me, quia ipsi me avolare fecerunt”
“Turn your eyes from me, for they have made me fly away.” After Laetatus sum come three tenors. Two begin: “Duo Seraphim clamabant alter ad alterum”
“Two seraphim cried one to the other.” A third enters at “Tres sunt qui testimonium dant in coelo”
“There are three who bear witness in heaven”, and at “et hi tres unum sunt”
“and these three are one” the three voices come together on one note. The ornaments, the trillo and the gruppo, are written out in these numbers; the singer’s art is composed.
After Nisi Dominus a tenor sings Audi coelum, and his last syllables are answered by a second tenor, unseen. “Gaudio” is answered by “audio”, joy by I hear; “benedicam” by “dicam”, that I may bless by I will say. He asks “quae est ista quae consurgens ut aurora rutilat”
“who is she who rises shining like the dawn”, and when he sings of the seas, “maria”, the echo answers “Maria”. Her name is drawn out of the last syllables of the prayer. At “Omnes hanc ergo sequamur”
“Let us all therefore follow her” six voices enter. One voice, two, three, then one with its echo opening into six: the ascent is the print’s order, not an editor’s. What these numbers are doing between the psalms is argued: substitutes for the antiphons repeated after each psalm, a place Italian practice let a motet or an instrumental piece fill; chamber pieces bound in for the princes’ rooms the title names; or a planned ascent. The print’s placing of them is the only instruction it gives.
Movement III
The psalms are the other voice. Laudate pueri is for eight voices on the psalm tone, and it carries the Psalter’s care for the low: “suscitans a terra inopem”
“raising the needy from the earth”, and “qui habitare facit sterilem in domo, matrem filiorum laetantem”
“who makes the barren woman dwell in a house, a joyful mother of children.” Laetatus sum, for six, is carried by a walking bass that returns through the psalm with the tone above it, a ground under a psalm: “in domum Domini ibimus”
“we shall go into the house of the Lord”; “Rogate quae ad pacem sunt Jerusalem”
“Pray for the things that make for the peace of Jerusalem.” The bride between the psalms sings of one chamber; the psalms sing of a house and a city.
Nisi Dominus is for ten voices in two choirs of five, the largest vocal scoring in the work. The two choirs sing the psalm tone almost without pause, the second following the first, so that for most of the psalm the chant is heard overlapping with itself. It is a wall of one chant. The words are the Psalter’s on labour, sleep and the family: “Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam”
“Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain who build it”; “qui manducatis panem doloris”
“you who eat the bread of sorrow”; “Ecce haereditas Domini filii”
“Behold, children are the heritage of the Lord.” Nothing in the number is free of the chant. Where the concertos are the new style with no old song under it, this is the old song with nothing else.
Lauda Jerusalem is for two choirs of three voices around a tenor who carries the tone throughout: “qui dat nivem sicut lanam”
“who gives snow like wool.” It and the Magnificat for seven voices are written in high clefs, and whether the convention of the time requires them to sound a fourth lower has been argued since Andrew Parrott made the case in 1984; many performances have followed him and others have not. The law of the work can now be stated. The Church’s texts are sung on the Church’s tones, in many voices, with the instruments framing them; the bride’s and the seraphim’s texts are sung free, in few voices, over the organ alone. Church and soul take turns. Neither is asked to sing in the other’s manner, and both stand on the same floor.
Movement IV
After the last psalm the instruments return. The Sonata is for eight of them over the organ, cornetts, violins, violas and trombones, in a sonata that changes metre as it goes, and across it a single soprano sings one petition of the Litany, “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis”
“Holy Mary, pray for us”, eleven times, to the same chant, in changing note-values and at changing distances. It is the one sung thing in the number. The instruments that opened the work have been silent since the first psalm, and here, at the centre of gravity of the second half, they carry a dance with a prayer laid across it. The people’s litany is the chant; the court’s instruments are the music; and the litany is not drowned.
Ave maris stella is the Vespers hymn, seven stanzas on the hymn melody, and the work sets it as variations. The first and last stanzas are for both choirs, eight voices; the second and third for one choir each; the fourth, fifth and sixth for a single voice, two sopranos and then a tenor; and instrumental ritornellos stand between the inner verses. The eight voices of the first stanza are calm grandeur. The hymn names her “maris stella”
“star of the sea”, and in its second stanza it sings the reversal on which the Marian myth turns, “mutans Hevae nomen”
“changing the name of Eve”, the greeting Ave read as Eva turned round. The sea the echo drew her name from is here her title.
The Magnificat is for seven voices and six instruments, in twelve sections, one for each verse of the canticle and the doxology, and in every one the Magnificat tone stands in long notes while a different texture is built around it. “Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles; esurientes implevit bonis”
“He has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble; the hungry he has filled with good things” is set with instruments in echo. In the Gloria Patri a florid tenor is echoed by a second tenor over the chant in the soprano, and the Sicut erat closes with everything. The Virgin, praised in the third person for an hour, speaks here in the first, with the oldest tone in the work at the centre of its newest music. Then the print gives a second Magnificat, for six voices and organ, on the same tone. Whether the two are two closes for one Vespers, with and without instruments, or evidence of two Vespers in one print, is not settled. The standard performing version takes the first.
Movement V
The dedication to Paul V is dated 1 September 1610, and Monteverdi went to Rome that autumn, carrying the print, seeking a place for his son Francesco at the Roman seminary and, it is usually supposed, a post for himself. Neither came. He had been in Gonzaga service since about 1590. Giovanni Maria Artusi had attacked his madrigals in print; the preface to the Fifth Book of 1605 and the Dichiaratione of 1607, signed by his brother Giulio Cesare, had defined the seconda pratica against those attacks. The print of 1610 was a double proof: that he could write the old way, in the Gombert Mass, and that the new way could carry the liturgy. In 1613 he was appointed maestro di cappella of St Mark’s in Venice; whether the print weighed in that appointment is inferred, not documented. No performance of the Vespers as a whole is documented in his lifetime, and no occasion for one is known. A Mantuan performance is a hypothesis.
Whether it is one work is the record’s first question, and the desk gives it as the record does. The five psalms, the hymn and the Magnificat are exactly the Vespers of the Virgin’s feasts, in the right order, each on its own chant; that much is a service. The four concertos and the Sonata are not Vespers texts. Stephen Bonta argued in 1967 that they stand where the antiphons would be repeated, so that the whole is one liturgical Vespers. Jeffrey Kurtzman has held, in essays from the 1970s and his monograph of 1999, that the print is a compendium from which a chapel master would choose, as the title page’s phrase about princes’ chambers suggests. Denis Stevens removed the concertos in 1961 and published a Vespers without them. Graham Dixon proposed in 1987 that the music was first conceived for Mantua’s patroness Saint Barbara, whose feast uses the same psalms; the proposal is unproven and unrefuted. The desk’s answer is the print: the feast’s psalms in the rite’s order under one heading, the concertos between them in an ascending scoring no anthology would happen on, and instruments framing the whole at the opening, the Sonata, the hymn and the close. Those are acts of design. What the print does not do is close the design, and that is charged where it falls.
Carl von Winterfeld transcribed excerpts in 1834. The complete modern edition is Malipiero’s, in the collected works of 1932, and the first modern performances belong to the 1930s and 1940s. Walter Goehr recorded the work in 1953; Stevens’s edition followed in 1961; on 5 March 1964 John Eliot Gardiner conducted it at King’s College, Cambridge, the first concert of the Monteverdi Choir, a choir founded to sing it; and Andrew Parrott’s liturgical reconstruction, with chant and transposition, was recorded in 1984. The manner itself had not waited. Monteverdi continued the concerted psalm at St Mark’s and in the Selva morale e spirituale of 1641, the Venetians after him carried it on, and Schütz, who had studied in Venice, published his Psalmen Davids in 1619. But the work was silent for about three hundred and twenty years, longer than any concert work on this desk, and when it was heard again it was heard as new. It had been new in 1610 in the same way, with the oldest song in it underneath: “Sicut erat in principio”
“As it was in the beginning.”
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not charged. Inside each number the subtractive test finds almost nothing to take: the Sonata’s eleven statements, the three voices meeting on one note in Duo Seraphim, the echo that must answer, the ten voices of Nisi Dominus on one chant. Across the whole it finds a design: the feast’s psalms in order, the concertos rising from one voice to six, the instruments returning at the end. But the give is the composer’s own. The print offers two Magnificats, ritornellos it does not require, and concertos fit for chapels or princes’ chambers; an editor removed them and a Vespers remained, performed and recorded. A work whose author supplies its alternatives has a necessity of the parts weaker than its necessity of the whole, and that holds the axis here. The chant beneath nine numbers is the one thing nothing could remove.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated in four parts. The old song is the bass of the new: nine of thirteen numbers stand on a chant older than any style in the work, and the newest music of 1610 is built around it. Praise of the sacred and desire of the body are one voice: the bride’s “introduxit me in cubiculum suum”
“brought me into his chamber” is a love-song inside the Office. Heaven answers with the ends of our own words, “maria” / “Maria”. And “et hi tres unum sunt”
“and these three are one” is made true by three voices arriving on one pitch. These hold without the faith. Held down because they are figures more than conditions: no person stands here as Peter stands in the Passion, and much of the praise is the Psalter’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height is at the ceiling and returns often. The first number is the most abrupt elevation in the sacred music of its century: a theatre fanfare, six voices on one chord and an Alleluia in triple time. “Surge, amica mea, et veni”
“Arise, my love, and come” rises out of a tenor’s murmur; the sopranos of Pulchra es turn from sweetness to an army in battle array. Duo Seraphim is three voices in written ornament collapsing to one note. Nisi Dominus is ten voices and one chant, a wall. The echo answers “Maria”. The Sonata is a dance with a prayer laid across it eleven times, and the Magnificat’s Gloria Patri and Sicut erat close everything. Off the top: the falsobordone recitations are declamation, splendid and level, and Nigra sum’s charm is charm.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The archetype is the Virgin as bride, dawn, star and mother, and the work builds it from received figures by its order. The psalms are David’s voice and the Church’s, many-voiced, on the Church’s tones. Between them the bride speaks, alone and then in twos and threes. The echo asks “quae est ista quae consurgens ut aurora rutilat”
“who is she who rises shining like the dawn” and draws her name out of the sea, “maria” / “Maria”. The hymn sings “mutans Hevae nomen”
“changing the name of Eve”, the Marian myth in one line. Last the Virgin speaks in her own words, the ancient tone in long notes at the centre of the newest music. That is load-bearing. Held below the Passion because the figures are the liturgy’s and no narrative particular keeps them sharp; the particular here is musical gesture.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the stile antico of the Mass that shares the print, the Venetian polychoral psalm, Viadana’s few-voice concerto over a continuo, falsobordone, and the echo and ornamented solo of chamber and theatre. The departures: the whole Office of a feast in the new style, at a scale no Vespers in print had reached; a theatre toccata opening a service; the Song of Songs as love-song brought into Vespers; the chant kept under it all, so that the swerve is made on old ground. The stake was real: a composer under printed attack, his place at court uncertain, sent Rome a double proof, the old way and the new, for a work with no occasion that waited three centuries for a hearing. Held below the top because every element was proven somewhere; the turn is the synthesis and its scale.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that two voices make the Office, the Church’s, many and bound to its tones, and the soul’s, few and free, and that they alternate. Set the concertos aside and the bride is silent; set the psalms aside and no one answers her; set the chant aside and the new music is a concert. The chant is not a container: in Nisi Dominus it is the whole texture, in the Sonata the one sung thing, in the Magnificat the fixed point every verse decorates differently. The ascent of the concertos is a shape the ear can follow. Held below the Passion and the Mass because the print leaves the form open: two Magnificats, ritornellos that may go, concertos offered for other rooms. A form the author lets be varied is less the instrument of knowledge than one he fixes.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and about ninety years of it, dense beyond any sacred work before Bach: Winterfeld’s excerpts (1834), Malipiero’s edition (1932), Schrade’s Monteverdi (1950); Stevens’s edition without the concertos (1961) and the argument it started; Bonta’s liturgical case (1967), Kurtzman’s essays and Oxford monograph (1999), Whenham’s handbook (1997); Parrott on transposition (1984), Dixon on Saint Barbara (1987). The work’s own questions stay open: whether it is one service; which Magnificat; what pitch; which instruments where the print is silent; whether antiphons belong; why a tenor sings the bride. Performance has run from the choral society to liturgical reconstruction with chant and to one voice a part. Held below the Bach works because the span of evidence is shorter and because the yield is more about what the work is than what it means.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The Vespers is the hinge of sacred music between the Renaissance and the Baroque: the first work to show that the whole Office could be given to the concerted style, with solo voice and obbligato instruments, and still stand on the chant. Every concerted psalm of the Italian seventeenth century is in its line of possibility. No performance in its own time is documented, how much of what followed is this print’s and how much Venice’s cannot be separated, and a delay of three centuries is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Monteverdi’s own Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Venetians after him; Schütz’s Psalmen Davids (1619) near it; and from the 1930s the work on which the early-music movement made its public case and tested its arguments about pitch, forces and liturgy.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, and of a particular kind. The work survived as print, in several copies, not as one autograph; it survived with no performance tradition at all, from 1610 to the 1930s, about three hundred and twenty years; and when it was recovered it entered the repertoire within a generation and has not left it. It is performed on every continent, in churches of its confession and others, in halls that belong to none, by choirs of two hundred and by ten singers. The surface fixed to its moment is small: Latin liturgy, chant, and an ornamental idiom that reads as style. It has outlived the Gonzaga court, the Marian devotion that framed it and the liturgy that might have held it. The cost is the silence, the longest of any concert work on this desk, and a performing form that must be made anew each time.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, and in 1610 the medium was every idiom at once. The chant runs as cantus firmus under every texture from one voice to ten, never abandoned. Falsobordone is made a form, recitation breaking into flourish at the verse-ends of Dixit Dominus. Nisi Dominus holds ten real voices with the chant overlapping itself, and Lauda Jerusalem seven around a fixed tenor. The ornaments of the solo numbers are written out, so the singer’s art is composed. The echo is structural in Audi coelum and the Magnificat’s Deposuit, and the instrumental writing, the toccata, the Sonata’s eight parts, the Quia respexit’s pairs over a chanting tenor, has no sacred precedent at this scale. The costs are specific: instrumentation partly left to the performer, two numbers in clefs whose pitch is still argued, and psalm verses that are declamation between inventions.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The two most distant elements are the Orfeo toccata under “Deus in adiutorium”
“O God, come to my aid”, and the ten voices of Nisi Dominus intoning one chant. One law governs them, in two clauses. First: the Church’s texts are sung on the Church’s tones, in many voices, with the instruments framing them; the bride’s and the seraphim’s texts are sung free, in few voices, over the organ alone. Second: whatever the manner, the chant is the measure of it. Under that law the toccata is a falsobordone with trumpets and the ten-voice psalm a chant with a crowd, across the widest range in the sacred music of its time. The strain is the one the record names: the four concertos stand outside the heading that promises plainchant, and the law accounts for them only by exempting them from its first clause.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The Psalter gives the work more orders than the Ordinary gives the Mass, and the setting holds them in one span: kingship, war and judgment, “Dixit Dominus Domino meo: Sede a dextris meis”
“The Lord said to my lord: sit at my right hand”; the poor and the childless, the barren woman made a joyful mother of children; the city and its peace; labour, sleep and the family, “qui manducatis panem doloris”
“you who eat the bread of sorrow”; the natural order, snow like wool and the winter past; the body and desire, in the Song of Songs; the Trinity; power and hunger, in the Deposuit. They are held by the Virgin as the thread and the chant as the ground, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: no particular human life, and the state only as the Psalter’s king.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5 and The Sublime at 9.4, then The Bottomless Well at 9.3 and The Swerve at 9.2. Command of every idiom of 1610 at once, over a chant never abandoned; elevation that returns from a theatre toccata at the altar to the Sicut erat; ninety years of editing, argument and performance still unsettled on what the work is; and a whole Office turned to a new style on old ground, at a real stake.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: the print supplies the work’s own alternatives, two Magnificats, ritornellos it does not require, concertos offered for other rooms, and a Vespers without them has been performed and recorded; the necessity of the parts is weaker than the necessity of the whole. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.7, the lowest gate: the disclosure is made in figures, the echo, the unison, the chant beneath, and not in a human condition.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clears it by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin as published in Monteverdi’s print of 1610, the thirteen numbers from the opening response to the Magnificat for seven voices in the print’s order, the standard performing text, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition, partbook or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across modern performance, not a measurement. The thirteen numbers are scored as one work; the Missa In illo tempore, which shares the print, and the second Magnificat for six voices are used only as evidence, and no single performance, with or without plainchant antiphons, is the object. The record has not settled whether the composer meant the thirteen numbers as one service, a service with options or a collection to choose from, and the page states that question as the record gives it. The words are Latin, the Vulgate psalms, the Song of Songs, Isaiah and the first Epistle of John, the hymn, the Litany, an anonymous echo text and Luke’s canticle, and are quoted only where they are sure, and sparingly; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The wording of the title page and of the Bassus Generalis heading is given in paraphrase. Figures that could not be verified, among them the number of partbooks, the parts of the hymn’s ritornello, the distance of the second choir’s entry in Nisi Dominus, the last echo of Audi coelum and the dates of the first modern performances, are not given. The sound of the work as heard, and the pitch at which two numbers should sound, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.