L'Orfeo, Favola in musica in un prologo e cinque atti (2009)

The Mantua Orfeo is the culmination of a long process that saw the gradual acceptance of pastoral fables, comedies, and tragedies in imitation of classical models, offering special musical elements to delight the listener. The novelty lay not only in the type of drama involved, but also in the manner of song, which favoured the accompanied monody. Solo voice singing, so extolled and theorized within the intense conceptual debates of Giovanni Bardi's Florentine academy, likely derives from a yearning for classicism, and for a recovery of Greek theatre - but is made contemporary through the principle of the comprehensibility of speech, which had many advocates. The "Tale of Orpheus" was written as a musical opera; the libretto by Alessandro Striggio assumes a knowledge of Rinuccini's tale. Whether openly or in more concealed fashion, Monteverdi makes use of topoi or practices in common use during his day: trumpet flourishes as signals, a narrative in dactylic rhythm, and dissonant intervals to emphasize struggle or grief. These are immediately recognizable even to a "common" public. At the same time though, he introduces complete innovations not only in the expository elements of profane song, but also in its other aspects: the exhaustive attention given to the collocation of words, the vibrant quality of the rhythmic pulse, bold dissonances, the harmonies chosen, and the wavelike melodic line.