The portego and Mocenigo Palace and family

In the preface to the 1638 publication of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Monteverdi writes that the composition was first performed during the 1624 carnival in the palace of ‘the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Signor Mozzenigo [Mocenigo]’.Footnote ¹⁷ To discuss the political and social implications of this immediate performance space, I will draw on Monika Schmitter’s important study on the quadro da portego in Venice, in which she unpacks how the salon of Venetian palaces, the paintings hanging on its walls and the other objects present in the salon interpenetrate and define each other.Footnote ¹⁸ Situated on the main floor, the salon, or portego, is the most imposing and public room in a Venetian house, used to exhibit family identity and social status. The inherent ideologies of this social space imbue the events that take place within; as counterpart, the objects of material culture that are exhibited, such as paintings, racks of arms and armour, but also the events that occur there – dining banquets, dances, musical and theatrical performances – buttress the principles embedded by the place.Footnote ¹⁹ As Schmitter reminds us, in the sixteenth century the portego becomes a ‘charged, even a contested, room, a spatialization of anxiety over social change’.Footnote ²⁰ The room that originally was the display space of racks of arms and armour ‘symbolically [representing] the health of the republic and in particular its virility … was in fact shifting from an emphasis on military masculinity, family heritage, and civic duty to the display of wealth and taste in sumptuous living and entertainment’.Footnote ²¹ It is likely that arms were still displayed in the portego in the sixteenth century, but akin to family portraits, they were purely emblematic of the family ancestors who battled for Venice,Footnote ²² and contributed to the perception of the portego, as suggested by Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, as ‘a space of genealogical memory’ in which ‘temporal discontinuity was surmounted through the coexistence of the present and the absent’.Footnote ²³

Among the objects on display in the salon, the so-called quadro da portego has a particular role in creating the social significance of the space. At the very least ‘displayed in the portego’, and most likely made specifically for it, the artefact was a painting whose horizontal format, with multiple figures and narrative subjects, could only be accommodated in the portego.Footnote ²⁴ The following were the most commonly represented themes: the Madonna, sometimes together with other saints, and Christ dead or on the cross; dining scenes, especially those involving Christ; the prodigal son, Christ and the Samaritan woman, the Adoration of the Magi; all topics that, in relating directly to the room’s entertainment functions, celebrate the themes of hospitality and charity. The dining banquets were reflected in the convivial scenes portrayed in the paintings, but the opulence and lasciviousness together with the effeminacy of the actual events were in contrast to the religious and moralising tone of the paintings, which therefore criticised the very same events hosted in the portego whilst simultaneously offering a justification and a religious elevation.Footnote ²⁵ There are also a number of subjects that expose and confirm ‘the more militaristic and civic-minded associations of the space … representations of military forces and battles, such as “a sea armada”, a “Turkish battle”, and “the story of Troy”’.Footnote ²⁶

We do not know which paintings were in the salon of Palazzo Mocenigo where Combattimento was first performed. However, the subjects discussed by Monika Schmitter were very common in the paintings hanging in the salons of Venetian palaces during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and offered a lens through which the aristocracy could identify itself. The same lens could encompass Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda as a counterpart in music to the genre of the quadro da portego, with which it shares a few themes. Combattimento ends with Clorinda’s baptism, a form of hospitality connected to the theme of Christ with the Samaritan woman at the well, to whom Christ offers the water of eternal life. Like the Gospel episode, the scene from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata ‘is a religious and moral tale about faith and redemption’ and ‘an image of a stranger requesting sustenance’.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, the role of water is important in the whole Combattimento episode, as it is for the whole city of Venice, connecting the fight scene with the combatants’ first encounter earlier in the poem. The murmuring stream to which Tancredi runs to fill his casque with water to baptise Clorinda is in fact reminiscent of the brook both soldiers had approached in search of some solace after a battle between the two armies, when Clorinda took off her helmet, causing Tancredi to fall immediately in love with her.Footnote ²⁸ But Combattimento is also a response to the more militaristic and civic-minded associations of the portego, as portrayed in paintings with military forces and battles. What is being dramatised in front of the audience is indeed a war and a murder scene that contradicts the tradition of having crime off stage, and at the same time suggests a repositioning of the gender boundaries and roles when Clorinda fully embodies her feminine self whilst embracing the Christian faith.

As a tool of genealogical memory, Combattimento reveals some reference to the Mocenigo family, one of the joint owners of the palace where the performance took place. Now one of the most famous and expensive hotels in Venice – the Hotel Danieli – Palazzo Mocenigo was first built in the late fourteenth century by the Dandolo family, which already counted four doges among their ancestors. The palace was renowned for its rich decoration and lavish social events, which continued throughout the seventeenth century, when it was split between the new owners, the Mocenigos and the Bernardos.Footnote ²⁹

Among the members of the Mocenigo family, two should be remembered here: Tommaso Mocenigo (doge from 1414 to 1423) and Alvise I Mocenigo (doge from 1570 to 1577).

The reign of Alvise I was dominated ‘by a new war against the Turks in which Nicosia and Famagusta were lost but in which the great naval victory of Lepanto [1571] was won’.Footnote ³¹

For Combattimento’s patronage, however, we look to Girolamo Mocenigo, whom Monteverdi himself mentions as his special patron in the preface to the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, the book that includes the score of Combattimento. A patron of the arts, Mocenigo climbed the ladder of civic engagements in Venice, became a member of the Senate in 1620 and adviser for inland affairs in 1624. He was also the dedicatee of a book of madrigals by the young composer Domenico Obizzi.Footnote ³² We do not know if Girolamo Mocenigo expressly commissioned Combattimento from Monteverdi; according to Denis Stevens, it is likely that ‘Monteverdi’s artistic contributions to his patron’s musical evenings at the time of Adriana Basile’s sojourn in Venice may well have given rise to the commission’.Footnote ³³ Whether this is the case or not, however, the relevance of the text for a member of an aristocratic family with several doges amongst its ancestors cannot be underestimated. As a performance in a space for genealogical memory, the involvement of Tommaso and Alvise I Mocenigo in battles against the Turks certainly resonates within Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. In particular, the sense of charity and hospitality that emerges from the text, and common to the subjects of the portego paintings, is the religious framework for interpreting the politics ratified by both Tommaso and Alvise I. In view of Girolamo’s political ascent, Combattimento may have been a tool to present himself as fully endorsing the civic and militaristic values, and also the sense of hospitality and charity so important to Venice’s identity and sanctioned by his ancestors.

As Monteverdi’s patron, one cannot avoid noticing that Girolamo Mocenigo seems to have been attracted to forms of ‘experimental’ music. In addition to Combattimento, he commissioned Monteverdi’s Proserpina Rapita, on a text by Giulio Strozzi, to be performed at the wedding of his daughter to Lorenzo Giustiniani in 1630, quite likely in the same salon as Combattimento. The event is now considered as the first full operatic staging in Venice, predating even the performance of Ermione of Pio Enea degli Obizzi in Padua in 1636, the event that traditionally has been considered as the one that contributed to create expectations towards the performance of the Andromeda in the Teatro San Cassiano in 1637.Footnote ³⁴ The text of Proserpina Rapita, which retells the story of Pluto and Proserpina, belongs to the genre of works dramatising one of those ‘mythical rapes associated with wedding entertainment destined to proclaim the power of love and to set proper bounds on female behaviour’, already popular with courtly intermedii.Footnote ³⁵ Even though the choice of this text was dependent on the particular occasion (the wedding of Girolamo’s daughter), it seems there is a direct link to Combattimento, which also aims to set proper bounds on female behaviour, revealing a possible predilection for these kinds of texts on Girolamo’s behalf.

An overview of Domenico Obizzi’s madrigals from his first volume of compositions, dedicated to Girolamo Mocenigo, discloses an interest of the composer first, and of the dedicatee conversely, for the latest fashion in madrigal texts with a Marinist imprinting, a passion for concepts and contrasting images that the then young Obizzi manipulated in such a way to create almost obsessive repetitions of the same images, with nearly every verse repeated at least twice.Footnote ³⁶ Among the authors of the texts in Obizzi’s madrigals, Cesare Rinaldi later became a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti.Footnote ³⁷ The presence of such a poet in the collection is a testimony that Girolamo was certainly not averse to the cultural climate that after the banishment of the Jesuits in 1606 from Venice ‘had created opportunities for two generations of seriously playful, mostly young intellectuals, some of whom had libertine inclination’ and who then later supported the development of Venetian opera through the Accademia degli Incogniti.Footnote ³⁸ The performance of Proserpina Rapita, and likewise the performance of Combattimento, are both a precedent for the contribution of the academy in the development of opera in Venice. It would be possible to argue that the success of Combattimento prompted Mocenigo to suggest something more fully staged.

Last, as a further element to reinforce the links between Combattimento and the venue of its first performance, one should remember that both Torquato and Bernardo Tasso knew members of the Mocenigo family. Bernardo in fact was a good friend of Alvise Mocenigo (not the doge), who had translated into Italian Aristotle’s Rhetoric and whom he mentions in the hundredth verse of his epic poem L’Amadigi: ‘Il Mocenigo, che coi chiari accenti / Tragge a sè i monti, e fa arrestare i venti’ (Mocenigo, who with clear accents / draws to himself the mountains and make the winds stop).Footnote ³⁹ Torquato himself mentions Alvise Mocenigo in a letter to Vincenzo Pinelli and was certainly emotionally involved in the offensive set by ecclesiastical authorities towards the use of vernacular in several genres of literature in Italy – such as chivalric poetry and short stories – and in philosophical and theological treatises. In this context, an important episode is constituted by the controversy of the Archbishop Filippo Mocenigo (more later), who in 1573, before leaving Venice for Rome, had written a treatise in the vernacular titled Vie et progressi spirituali.Footnote ⁴⁰

Venice and Islam (Turks and renegades)

Relations with the Ottoman world had always been crucial for Venice, especially for commercial reasons. Even in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto, with the defeat of the Muslim forces, and in the conviction that the war would continue (in fact, consultations were being held to form a Holy League between Spain, the Papacy and Venice against the Turks), Venice maintained an attitude of self-protection and negotiated directly with the Turks towards a peace treaty.Footnote ⁴¹ In this scenario, there is a process that needs to be considered and to which the text of Combattimento may allude: religious conversions to Christianity and to Islam. Contrary to how a current propagandist political view might try to portray the differences between these two cultural and religious worlds, their borders in the early modern Mediterranean area were more permeable, as Eric Dursteler has shown in retelling the story of women who crossed the political, social, geographical and cultural space between Venice and the Ottoman world.Footnote ⁴² Among the stories reported, that of Maria Gozzadini, born Christian, caused a diplomatic incident because of the status of Gozzadini’s husband, a high Ottoman official. She and her three daughters, raised as Muslims, left their home in Milos for Corfu (at the time part of the Venetian empire) and converted from Islam to Christianity to escape their emotionally and financially neglectful husband and father.Footnote ⁴³ As Dursteler reports, the Venetians argued

After lengthy discussions and debates between both parties, and between the Venetian officials in Corfu and the senate of Venice itself, the affair was settled financially, and Maria and her daughters were eventually free to settle down in Corfu and to become Christian.Footnote ⁴⁵

Conversion to Christianity also had some institutional representation. Since 1557 the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni – supported by Venetian ecclesiastical authorities, Jesuits, lay patricians and colonial administrators – existed to protect, tutor and baptise its members.Footnote ⁴⁶ Between 1590 and 1670 there were 1,300 catechumens; these ‘were subjected to monastic-style time discipline … Male and female catechumens were socialised into normative gender roles, with absolute segregation between the sexes. Female catechumens were restricted to the premises and employed in cooking, spinning, and washing laundry.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Most converts came from the Ottoman–Venetian frontier and from Mediterranean regions: some of them were soldiers in Venetian armies, but the ‘large majority of Muslim converts were domestic slaves in Venetian patrician and citizen households, where they might have served for years prior to their conversions’.Footnote ⁴⁸

As a text with a character, Clorinda – who was born Christian, raised as a Muslim soldier and baptised upon her impending death – Combattimento is about the permeability of borders in the Mediterranean area and normative gender roles, with the final revelation to Tancredi that his opponent is a woman. Once more, as a tool of genealogical memory in the portego, the text may also allude to some family ties. In fact, members of the Mocenigo family were actually involved in the investigation surrounding Gozzadini’s conversion.Footnote ⁴⁹ This happened in 1637, thirteen years after the performance of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, but still one year before its official publication in the Eighth Book of Madrigals. Additionally, the Mocenigo family may have been involved with the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni: in 1626 a bequest of 4,000 ducats was left to the Pia Casa by the patrician Tommaso, indicated as son of Andrea Mocenigo.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even if it is not confirmed whether Andrea had a son named Tommaso, significant in this record is the reference to the Mocenigo family for the support of this Venetian ecclesiastic institution dedicated to conversion.

La Gerusalemme liberata: Counter-Reformation and Carnival in Venice

Paolo Fabbri notes that, in comparison to other cities such as Rome, Ferrara and Modena, the presence of Tasso, especially La Gerusalemme liberata, in operas from seventeenth-century Venice is quite scarce and asks whether the ‘apparent ostracism of Jerusalem in a city like Venice, where the origin of opera is linked to the libertinism of the Accademia degli Incogniti, is maybe due to the strong connotation of the poem as post-Tridentine and Roman Catholic’.Footnote ⁵¹ Although Monteverdi’s Combattimento is dated before the flourishing of Venetian opera, the presence of such a text, entangled with politics and religion, requires an exploration that considers what strands of Venice’s early seventeenth-century political and religious situation the work might refer to and how those elements are reflected in the portego. This will reveal an interesting scenario in which the Mocenigo family plays a remarkable role.

In the early decades of the 1600s, what would be the middle of the booming years of Counter-Reformation arts in Italy, Venice was engaged in a series of ‘fights’ against the Pope and the Imperial forces. The relationship with the Pope reached a low point with the interdict in 1605–07, whereas the relations with the Imperial forces were put to test with the Spanish Conspiracy in 1618.

The relationship between Venice and the papacy had always been on the brink of fracture. The interdict in 1606 ‘was the last in the series of major interdicts by which the papacy had attempted, since the high Middle Ages, to impose its political leadership on the Christian Republic’.Footnote ⁵² The spirit of independence of Venice from Rome is a recurrent feature of the city’s politics; in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, young families (including the Mocenigo) present in a growing number of institutions were increasingly more hostile to Rome than the old families.Footnote ⁵³ Emitted by Pope Paul V, the interdict was caused by a series of measures that the Republic took during 1605 in order to exercise her control over the Catholic clergy; the most notable was the arrest of two clerics who bought some land without prior permission from the Venetian Senate.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1606 Leonardo Donà, an opponent to papal power, was elected doge. The Senate demanded loyalty from all the clergy in Venice and those who refused it, principally the Jesuits, were banned from the city. The situation threatened to evolve into a war. Spain tried first to mediate with the ambassador to Venice, Francesco de Castro, but the attempt failed, and it was thanks to the action of the French cardinal François de Joyeuse that in the end the interdict was lifted in 1607.Footnote ⁵⁵ The two clerics were freed but the Jesuits were still banned from Venice until 1656.

The conflicts around the interdict mark a change of attitude in the city towards a more pronounced sense of liberty. Venice was among the first Italian cities to adopt the Tridentine decrees in 1564, among which were those about the veneration of images. Moreover, the apostolic visit of the nuncio Lorenzo Campeggi and the Bishop of Verona Agostino Valier in 1581 must be read in the context of a process of post-Tridentine normalisation of Venice and attempts at disciplining the Venetian clergy.Footnote ⁵⁶ The reaction against the interdict then gave strength to the more liberal energies already circulating in the city. The absence of Jesuits, for example, is very important for the development of theatre and opera in the city, because they represented ‘the most vociferous anti-theatre lobby’, which had previously heavily influenced the Council of Ten in maintaining ‘vigilance over the performance of comedies, whether in private courtyards, palaces, or public theatre’.Footnote ⁵⁷ A climate of ‘relatively free-speech [and] open criticism of Counter-Reformation papal policy’ in the long term merged together with ‘libertines and religious sceptics … from all over Italy … wandering aristocrats, displaced priests, and speculative thinkers’ into the Accademia degli Incogniti.Footnote ⁵⁸

The years leading to the interdict saw three members of the Mocenigo family involved in a series of rather noteworthy events, which might bare critical aspects about the relationship between the Mocenigo family and the pope. The closest event and the most directly related to the interdict is the participation of Giovanni Mocenigo, uncle of Monteverdi’s patron, Girolamo, with the selected group of senators to honour Camillo Borghese immediately after his election as Pope Paul V, in the spring of 1605. As Benzoni reminds us, even though the pope demonstrated gratefulness, it was only one of a series of diplomatic but ‘ostentatious courtesies’, which kept hidden a growing animosity between Venice and Rome.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years earlier, in 1602, a different member of the family (also named Giovanni) denounced Giordano Bruno to the Holy Office, an action that led to the final accusation of Bruno’s heresy. Further back still, Giovanni’s uncle, the Archbishop Filippo Mocenigo, also cousin of the ruling doge Alvise I Mocenigo (1570–7),Footnote ⁶⁰ was subject to several trials for suspicion of heresy because of his reputation as defender of the value of philosophical knowledge and for having published a treatise on the main tenets of faith in vernacular.Footnote ⁶¹ Only in 1583 the ‘Pope declared that Mocenigo was neither a heretic nor suspected of heresy.’Footnote ⁶²

We can only suppose, of course, that the experience of Filippo Mocenigo, even the possibility that he may have been considered an heretic, remained imprinted in the memory of the family and that any action which followed – from Giovanni’s condemnation of Giordano Bruno to the money left to the Pia Casa dei Catechumeni – might be considered as an attempt to reaffirm the final absolution granted to Filippo and the general orthodoxy of the entire Mocenigo family. At the very least, the Mocenigos emerge as a young family, fully loyal to Venice’s civic conscience, but also fully aware of the responsibility towards Catholicism.Footnote ⁶³

Within the walls of the portego thus Combattimento may indeed be read as a heavily imprinted post-Tridentine text which reaffirms the Mocenigo family’s ‘loyalty’, at least at face value, to the papacy, exactly like a few years earlier, Giovanni took part to the diplomatic envoy to honour Popo Paul V. Beyond the border of the portego, Monteverdi’s composition acts in two ways. From the textual point of view, that of Tasso is a post-Tridentine, more conservative, pre-interdict text – though it ultimately highlights the contradictions of the Counter-Reformation scenario. From the musical point of view, however, it contains progressive potential. Together with the text of Proserpina Rapita in 1630 (whose author, Giovanni Strozzi, was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti), Combattimento provides the exploratory and carnivalesque territory of what later will become Venetian opera. Furthermore, the work marks what Muir describes as ‘[t]he shift from comic drama [popular in the years pre-Interdict] to serious drama with music’ and consequently ‘a shift in the taste of the theater-going public’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Once the Accademia degli Incogniti was established, the more traditional texts lost their appeal, leading the way to more progressive and Incogniti-inspired librettos and adaptations.

But to complete the scenario, one more incident should be considered: the supposed attempt of Spain, through the viceroy of Naples and the Spanish Ambassador to Venice, to take complete control of the Republic. The episode, known as the Spanish Conspiracy in 1618, is a convoluted series of events. It is in fact difficult to untangle the facts and the characters involved, and to get a clear idea of who did what and on behalf of whom through the numerous and contradicting sources.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Richard Mackenney ‘there is no single decisive piece of evidence to link [any of the characters supposedly involved] to what is known as the “Spanish” conspiracy, but there is evidence of a conspiracy against Venice, and of a conspiracy to ensure that the Spaniards were made to look responsible for’.Footnote ⁶⁶ However confusing, the episode does mark a significant development in the history of Venice’s self-fashioning, in which Venetian historian Paolo Sarpi played a major role.Footnote ⁶⁷ During and after the interdict, Venice’s image was that of a city defending the Republic’s independence and religious autonomy against Rome’s Counter-Reformation dogmatism. At the same time, in the rest of Europe a Machiavellian attitude towards power triumphed; simulation and dissimulation were ordinary politics everywhere. Reason of state, the possibility to act in every possible way to reinforce the dominion of the state, became part of monarchies’ lives throughout Europe.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this political scenario, the Spanish had always mistrusted the republic since Venice’s withdrawal from the Holy League against the Turks.Footnote ⁶⁹ It was by placing leverage on this mistrust that Sarpi manipulated the sources to be sure that the Spaniards (the Spanish Ambassador in Venice, the marquis of Bedmar, and the viceroy of Naples) would be considered the instigators of the conspiracy, even though, as Mackenney argues, there is no smoking gun to tell us without doubt that this is the truth. In order to defend the myth of Venice, the free republic, against the rest of Europe, Sarpi does not hesitate to behave in a manner appropriate to the idea of the reason of state.Footnote ⁷⁰ But this, for Mackenney, should be read against a ‘process of redefinition of the public and private spheres in the years around 1600’, leading us to reconsider the myth of the city itself. In Venice, in fact, there was never a clear, definite distinction between public and private which were unified by the strong presence of the sacred dimensionFootnote ⁷¹ – of which the Quadro da Portego and Combattimento are clear examples with their representation of sacred rituals in a space of secular entertainments. There were furthermore numerous institutions – confraternities, parishes, guilds – which functioned in the semi-public sphere and acted as intermediaries between the state and the private, allowing an identification with the state rather than a subjugation. This process of reinforcing the free republic against the pope and then Spain in the years leading to the interdict thus brought Venetian officials to ‘a sort of sacrifice of the private to the public’, reducing the space of the semi-public and asking for people to be subjected to the state. To preserve the identity of the republic, the private was totally absorbed into the myth of the free state. This in turn mirrored the same secretive ways common to absolutist monarchies in the rest of Europe, as exemplified by Sarpi, who did not hesitate to manipulate facts to suit the political agenda.Footnote ⁷²

The episode of Tancredi and Clorinda has no immediate connections with the Spanish Conspiracy (although the dedication in 1638 of the Eighth Book of Madrigals to the Habsburg emperor indicates the willingness to confirm strong ties with his political power);Footnote ⁷³ however, if considered in this context, the depicted fight in the work is the epitome of the dilemma between ‘dovere’ and ‘desiderio’, between reason of state and the sacrifice it requires of the private reason exemplified by Tancredi baptising Clorinda, between war and love (to echo Monteverdi’s title to his collection of madrigals). But the contamination with each other’s boundary leads to catastrophic consequences, which get staged in the middle of the carnival season.

Several scholars have investigated the centrality of carnival to the development of opera in Venice. For Eleanor Selfridge-Field carnival was ‘a state of mind … commonly portrayed as a period of wild and wanton abandon’ particularly during the last day of the period.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Wendy Heller’s words, ‘Carnival is the link between the theatricalization of Venice on the streets and the management of her mythology on the stage … In some respects, carnival made possible the dynamic tension between Venetian liberty and conservatism.’Footnote ⁷⁵ As a performance in the midst of carnival, precisely in the week of greatest frenzy,Footnote ⁷⁶ Combattimento is inevitably entangled with those aspects of carnival culture described by Victor Turner, for whom carnival is a liminoid activity ‘with a stamp of liminality … cultural debris of some forgotten liminal ritual’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Liminality is the main component of ‘tribal societies’, where it forms an integral and required performance of a specific activity (such as rites of passage), when the dissolution of order creates a more fluid and transformable situation, to the point it is hardly possible to distinguish the difference between work and play.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is through this moment of liminal suspension and uncertainty that an individual can forge a passage to a new status and solve their crisis. Liminoid is, on the contrary, a component of industrial societies where the rite of passage is no longer able to fulfil its original role to resolve a crisis, and where play and performances are completely separated from work, providing the platform for a series of liminoid genres that create a break in the continuous dynamic of society – such as literature, drama, sport and so on.Footnote ⁷⁹

Combattimento itself is a performance on the borders between the liminal and liminoid. As a liminal experience, it allows a ‘ludic’ re-construction of the constituent elements of Venetian culture.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, it distances itself from the liminal and liminality because it does not represent what Turner calls ‘anti-structure’ – that is, rites of passage that in their anti-structural function stand against the pre-existing structure.Footnote ⁸¹ Clorinda’s baptism, as a represented rite of passage, only suggests an anti-structure that is not brought to its conclusion with the disbanding of normative social structure.Footnote ⁸² As a liminoid experience, it is a play that, like opera, is generated ‘in times and places apart from work’, it is ‘experimental in character’, it is ‘more like a commodity’, it is ‘an individual product’, ‘a ludic offering placed for sale on the “free market”’,Footnote ⁸³ and as such ‘was seen and heard alongside fireworks, games, mock battles, street dances, and improvisatory theatre’, to which Combattimento does refer in several ways.Footnote ⁸⁴

As such, the episode of Combattimento is a plot that exists between the levels of signification expressed so far whilst reconstructing them in a ludic way in a dialogue with the social dimension of the portego: tension between private reason, ‘desiderio’ and liberty on the one hand (Tancredi’s unrequited love for Clorinda) and reason of state, ‘dovere’ and conservatism (Tancredi forced to fight whom he believes to be his enemy) on the other hand. So, Combattimento is not only connected to what was hanging on the walls of the portego, but also reflects and forecasts a series of elements outside Mocenigo’s palace, including the interdict, the Spanish Conspiracy, the early flourishing of Venetian opera and its connection to carnival.

The reconstruction of the elements constituent of Venice’s carnival culture starts already with Combattimento’s performance, all of a sudden, after a few madrigals without gestures and the music coming from other rooms.Footnote ⁸⁵ It recreates the effect of street performances in the salon: like someone walking among the alleys of Venice during carnival could turn a corner and find unexpectedly a street performance, Mocenigo’s guests would experience a sudden performance, the acting itself of the singers and musicians, from the other room. Therefore, not only does the Combattimento refer to the cantastorie, but it also does actually bring carnival inside Mocenigo’s palace. It is a private staging of carnival within carnival season.Footnote ⁸⁶

The reconstruction continues with the fight between Clorinda and Tancredi, which is a direct but at the same time highly problematised representation of what in the street is a more straightforward contest of Virtue vs Vice, characterised as Christian virtue and Heathen vice.Footnote ⁸⁷ But the rivalry between Tancredi and Clorinda refers also to those ‘popular entertainments, featuring ritualized rivalries between inhabitants of different districts of the city and of the Veneto, which were public, and noble ones which were private’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Tasso’s description of the two combatants who were getting closer and closer to each other ‘a passi tardi e lenti, come duo tori gelosi e d’ira ardenti’ (‘with slow steps / like two rival bulls inflamed with fury’), might even evoke a visual assonance with the tradition of the decapitation of three bulls in the courtyard of the ducal palace. Last, the two protagonists’ fight evokes the tradition of the ‘war of fists’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Not to mention that Clorinda in disguise as a man reminds us of the fact that during carnival ‘Noblewomen sometimes disguised themselves as men (sometimes in fact as priests) and gained access to otherwise forbidden venues.’Footnote ⁹⁰

In the end, however, the liminoid aspects of Combattimento seem to return to liminality because the performance does ‘elicit loyalty and is bound up with one’s membership or desired membership in some highly corporate group’, which is one of the main features of liminality.Footnote ⁹¹ That is, it creates a sense of community for the aristocratic families attending the event in Mocenigo’s palace; on a pair with the quadri da portego, it lets transpire aspects of the relationship of the Mocenigo to Venice, and by reflection, to Rome. Ultimately, Monteverdi’s dedication of the Eighth Book of Madrigals to Ferdinand III indicates allegiance to the highest ‘corporate’ group of the time.

‘Amico hai vinto’

The question at this point is what story does Combattimento tell within this social, cultural, political and geographical web? Published in 1581, Tasso’s text, even in its celebration of the first crusade (1096–9), does not show those propagandist traits of texts and performances put in place in the years after the victory at Lepanto (1571) when, for example, during the processions through Venice, Turkish people were portrayed in the shape of slaves, prisoners in chains, or in allegorical figuration where ‘two young men representing Hope and Charity were then followed by the figure of Faith trampling on the Turkish serpent’.Footnote ⁹² As Paolo Preto reminds us, quite likely Tasso was aware of the ambiguous relation between Venice and the Turks, with Venice always interested in defusing possible contrasts. In his poem ‘he uses a terminology – “empi, gran tiranno, iniqua setta” – that he had derived almost verbatim from medieval and modern Christian literature … that incited a crusade against the infedeli’.Footnote ⁹³ The Muslim ‘other’ in the poem, and particularly in Combattimento, is not ridiculed.Footnote ⁹⁴ Sometimes the Muslim forces are depicted with accents of ‘negative heroism that still assign to them some grandiose quality’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Clorinda is the object of Tancredi’s fascination, and Monteverdi’s music invites the audience to respond in a very emotional way to her death. The tears at the end of the performance, which Monteverdi mentioned in the preface, are in their empathic impact an amplification of Venice’s own sense of charity and hospitality.Footnote ⁹⁶

The episode becomes in the end an exposure of the Crusade’s contradictions in the contrast between the ‘tremendum fascinosum, the history of winners with its ideological weight and its opposite, the tremendum horrendum which testifies the tragic fate of victims (Christians and Muslims) of the violence of history, of war and of love’.Footnote ⁹⁷ To place Clorinda and Tancredi as victim and winner does not consider Tancredi’s own reaction (speechless, incapable of forgiving himself for what he has done); it would perpetuate through violence a conflicting relationship. If, instead, we regard both of them as victims of history, we need to examine the discourses through which they can be understood as such. In doing so, the performance of the Combattimento becomes the site ‘which probe[s] a community’s weaknesses, call[s] its leaders to account, desacralize[s] its most cherished values and beliefs, portray[s] its characteristic conflicts and suggest[s] remedies for them, and generally take[s] stock of its current situation in the known “world”’.Footnote ⁹⁸

As a performance on the threshold between liminality and liminoid, in which Tasso and Monteverdi were able to present the structural values of their societies thorough a carnivalesque eye, Combattimento becomes the site of a critical history in which, citing Ricœur’s discussion of Nietzsche, the ‘present is not the last instance of a complete history. On the contrary it is the performance, whose energy inaugurates a history that still needs to be done,’Footnote ⁹⁹ a history that interrogates not only Monteverdi’s contemporaries but also the current Western civilisation whose cultural values are grounded in artistic enterprises such as Monteverdi’s composition.

The section that grants us access to the site of critical history is Clorinda’s third intervention, ‘Amico hai vinto’, the pivotal moment of the entire composition from both the narrative and the musical points of view, and also the tangible surface that reveals the reversibilities between Clorinda, Tancredi, the Testo and the audience, all performing their roles in the portego. Fatally wounded, Clorinda asks Tancredi, still unaware of her identity, to baptise her.

Clorinda’s main concern for her soul and not for her body realises a split between body and soul and reflects the history of winners at work in what Judith Butler would describe as a ‘normative heterosexuality which shapes a bodily contour that oscillates between materiality and the imaginary’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clorinda’s body, which showed the coherence of a centred and whole body as a soldier and a Muslim, is now a body in pieces and parts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The past of the Muslim male body cannot be reached and sustained any longer; thus a sense of the whole can only be projected into the imaginary future as the Christian soul that leaves behind the materiality of the body, symbolically castrated. In its exclusion from the body, the phallus becomes the external ‘privileged signifier’, the ‘site of control’ from which Clorinda’s body, though in the background, can now be constituted in its alterity.Footnote ¹⁰² It is the soul that, while shaping the body, works as the image in the mirror. It allows her to move from the imaginary and ideal identification of the past to the symbolic phase, where eventually her feminine and Christian self, purified of all masculinity and Muslim aspects, is brought into existence and then into a painful death ‘through a set of violations’, the mortal wounds inflected by Tancredi, that in the description of the text could also be understood as the wounds of a rape, obliterating completely the female body.Footnote ¹⁰³ Clorinda’s body (and with this, her being the other in cultural and religious terms) is domesticated within the normative heterosexuality and faith that claim to be self-sufficient: a soul that can do without a body, a Christianity that cancels or appropriates the other.

From the musical point of view, the section ‘Amico hai vinto’ is harmonically fluid (see Ex. 1).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In modal terms, I suggest it is in G Hypodorian/plagal (i.e. D Hypodorian transposed from the durus to the mollis system, with a B flat). It occupies the D scale, with the final G placing the mode-defining diapente in the upper part from D down to G, and the diatessaron, G to D, in the lower part.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For Pontio the principal cadences would then take place on D and G; an almost principal cadence would take place on B flat, whereas inimical cadences would be placed on E and A.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Following Zarlino, the proper cadences would be on the final G, its upper fifth D and on their mediating third, B flat, whereas any other cadence can be done on any other pitch and would be an irregular cadence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is around these pitches (D, G) that Monteverdi composes the music for the section ‘Amico hai vinto’, and exploits to a great effect the ambiguity they can create, raising the question as to whether the main cadences lead to G or D.

Ex. 1

Monteverdi, Combattimento, ‘Amico hai vinto’, bb. 365–83 (Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, Libro ottavo. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638).

The section starts with the G minor triad, setting a pattern that starts again in bar 377 approached through its ‘dominant’ D (bar 375), but which does not move through G major (as in b. 368) and stops on an A major ‘dominant’ triad (on the word ‘lave’) suggesting a possible final cadence on D, which would repeat the cadence in D from bar 375. All the cadential moments, however, are highly undermined by rests breaking cadential formulas. When the Testo resumes his narration, he does so with a C minor harmony, in stark contrast with the previous A major colour. But indeed the contrast C minor/A major was already exploited in the middle of the section, and a final cadence in D major is reached in bar 394 in the Testo section.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This final cadence in D is reached within the durus system, with a shift to a Dorian environment within the D tonal type. The brief moment with Hypodorian was thus never fully confirmed though it provided the soundscape for the moment of crisis in Clorinda’s life, fully explored in the vocal part, where it is possible to single out two patterns. One is moving upward from d² through e² flat to e² natural (Ex. 1, bb. 365, 370, 373); the other moves downward and circles around g¹, with its upper and lower-neighbour notes a¹ and f¹ sharp (bb. 366–7, 373, 375). These two registers establish a split that reflects the polarity in the text between body and soul, Clorinda and Tancredi, Muslim and Christian. When she addresses Tancredi – ‘Amico hai vinto’ – Clorinda drops into the lower register. She then moves up to the higher register to express her forgiveness – ‘Io ti perdon’ – but when she asks for his forgiveness, she returns to the lower register. She then makes a sudden leap into the higher register on the word ‘corpo’ (b. 373), but it is almost as if she does not allow herself to hit that register with her body, and she retreats immediately to the lower register, to descend even deeper to e¹ and f¹ sharp, without resolving directly to g¹ and masking the cadence on G in bar 377 (by moving thorough a¹ to b¹ flat), which marks the return of the opening pattern rather than its ending. The exploration of the lower part of the modal scale requires then ‘an increase of energy and the reconquest of the upper region’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The voice climbs from the lower register – while referring to her soul, for which Tancredi has to pray (with the lower register again expressing Tancredi’s action) – to shoot into the high register on the top e² flat – ‘e dona batesmo a me’ – which stretches the upper border of the modal scale before finishing in the middle–low register on the words ‘ch’ogni mia colpa lave’ (which cleanses all my sins), without continuing onto the D and G harmonies, as in bars 375–7.

The high register thus represents the new Clorinda, the one asking to be baptised and who worries about her soul and not about her body; however, it cannot be associated with her femininity, since at this stage it has not yet been revealed. There is a modal centre that disappears as soon as Clorinda’s own body and identity get closer. All is left suspended at the end, when the music stops on A major; the quick change of system, from mollis to durus, with C minor in the Testo, emphasises this even further, as Clorinda’s fate and identity have not yet been resolved.

To contextualise Monteverdi’s music, it is useful to consider the other two settings of sections of Combattimento by Sigismondo d’India and Antonio Il Verso, both of which Monteverdi may have been familiar with, particularly d’India’s version as the paths of the two composers crossed several times: first in Mantua, around 1608, during d’India’s travelling in north Italy, then in Venice when he was made Knight of St Mark’s in 1621, exactly the year of the publication of his fourth book of compositions for one and two voices, which included his version of Combattimento.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As for Antonio Il Verso’s version, it was published with his Fifteenth Book of Madrigals for five voices in 1619 in Palermo, where he had returned several years earlier after a brief sojourn in north Italy.Footnote ¹¹¹

According to Carter, Monteverdi’s and d’India’s settings bear some similarities, particularly in the narrator’s realisation of Tancredi’s shock at discovering the identity of Clorinda and in her ‘final words, where the tonic in the voice grinds against the dominant harmony in the continuo’.Footnote ¹¹² Carter then continues and says that ‘No less revealing, however, are d’India’s and Monteverdi’s settings of Clorinda’s speech, which are in the same tonal-type, and where Monteverdi adapts and at times changes the sequence of d’India’s affective gestures, even if there are significant differences’.Footnote ¹¹³ Indeed, the similarities are there (the ‘ahi conoscenza’ section ending with a cadence on A, the same tonal-type, some melodic gestures in Clorinda’s speech) but to me they seem rather circumstantial and in crucial moments the differences are marked quite strongly.

Sigismondo d’India’s setting starts in medias res, directly with the section ‘Amico hai vinto’ (see Ex. 2). The main feature of d’India’s setting is the alternation of moments of chromaticism resolving in moments of sparse and clearer sounds.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Intensely illuminating is the descending seventh, d² to e¹, on the words ‘hai vint’io’, clashing with the d in the bass.Footnote ¹¹⁵ By avoiding the fight scene, d’India creates a strong dissonant opening to suggest Clorinda’s wounding. We should also notice the upward perfect fifth followed by the downward diminished fifth on the words ‘deh per lei prega’ (pray for her, which reveals almost a sense of discomfort in Clorinda’s request) is initiating the pattern leading to the final cadence in G.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Ex. 2

Sigismondo d’India, ‘Amico hai vint’io ti perdon, perdona’, bb. 1–18 (Le musiche a 1 e 2 voci, Libro quarto. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1621).

What mostly differentiates Monteverdi’s setting from d’India’s is the definition of the tonal focus. Whereas Monteverdi keeps it ambiguous, d’India sets up clear trajectories that lead to well defined cadences: on D at the words ‘io ti perdono’, on F major/minor at the words ‘al Alma si’ and on G at the end of the section, ‘ogni mia colpa lave’. This clearly exploits the boundaries of the Hypodorian mode with an irregular cadence on F. Furthermore, even though d’India’s setting did not realise such a clear distinction between the two registers, he still explores the lower register for the reference to the body (notice the descent to d¹ in bb. 7–8).

In Il Verso’s polyphonic setting too, there is a clear modal trajectory, with two cadences taking place in Clorinda’s dying speech: on D at the words ‘che nulla pave’, and on G at the words ‘ch’ogni mia colpa lave’ (see Ex. 3), with the latter cadence reconfirmed at the end of the first stanza (ending ‘gli invoglia e sforza’) and again at the end of each madrigal of the cycle, till the last one on Clorinda’s final words ‘S’apre il cielo, io vado in pace’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As in d’India, the distinction of the two registers is not explored to the same extent as in Monteverdi: the D cadence, in the lower/plagal register, refers to the body, whereas the cadence on G refers to the baptism, but beyond this it does not seem to suggest any further dualism.Footnote

Ex. 3

Antonio Il Verso, ‘Amico hai vint’io ti perdon, perdona’, bb. 4 and 10 (Madrigali a cinque voci, Libro XV. Palermo, Giovan Battista Maringo, 1619).¹¹⁸

Returning now to Monteverdi’s setting, it is Clorinda’s last intervention that ultimately unravels the story and her identity. Tancredi has now discovered that his enemy is Clorinda, and Monteverdi limits her vocal range to the higher register, the register of the soul, of the baptism and of the Christian faith, and now the register of her femininity. She is dying, and the narrator states that she seems to say ‘S’apre il cielo; io vado in pace’, that is, she does not actually say anything, and the words are a male interpretation of her dying body language.

It is, however, in the act of performance that Clorinda is kept alive, when Monteverdi assigns the words to the singer. If the text makes clear that those words are about the poet’s gaze, a male’s gaze appropriated by the audience who cannot refrain from shedding tears,Footnote ¹¹⁹ Clorinda’s actual singing offers a resistance against that gaze and against Tancredi, who is completely silent and later verges on madness, alive but performatively dead in a reversal of Clorinda’s situation.Footnote ¹²⁰ Disavowed and violated, the remnant of Clorinda’s body is the performative matter brought back to us onto the stage. It is through those final words of a dead but still alive, performatively speaking, Clorinda that the normative heterosexuality projects onto Tancredi what is revealed as a false reflection and a false guarantee of this self-sufficiency. His madness and incapacity to forgive himself for what he has done are consequences of the materialisation and exclusion of Clorinda’s body. In the end, the liminoid representation, as theatre, of a liminal moment, the baptism of Clorinda, reveals Tancredi as a victim of the same heterosexual matrix and power discourse of self-sufficiency of which he was the main agent just beforehand.

As in the section ‘Amico hai vinto’, here too the cadence is the interpretative key (see Ex. 4). For Cusick,

Ex. 4

Monteverdi, Combattimento, ‘S’apre il ciel’, bb. 439–45 (Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, Libro ottavo. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638).

However, the scenario is not as straightforward as Cusick suggests, and there is no complete satisfaction for the tonal desire. To start with, though a series of V–I relationships is exploited, there is not a single unidirectional circle: E–A, G–C, B flat, G, A–D. The cadence in D (bb. 444–5), then, completely avoids or undermines at the very least the leading note (which would normally be altered in the final cadence), in what would be the cantizans formula.Footnote ¹²²

The lack of C sharp requires some attention. The 1638 printed edition of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals has a sharp above the A in the bass, which is then included in Carter’s reproduction of the example and in the latest Cremona edition. The Malipiero edition does not include the sharp sign in the basso continuo, and nor does Suzanne Cusick include it in her article.Footnote ¹²³ Help to solve the issue whether there should be a C sharp or not might come from the fact that, as Tim Carter says, ‘Monteverdi may also be quoting himself; Clorinda’s cadence appears (in the same key and in much the same local context) in the fifth stanza of “Possente spirto e formidabil nume” in Act III of Orfeo, on – perhaps significantly – the word “vita”’ (see Ex. 5).Footnote ¹²⁴ However, although the melodic similarities of the cadences are unequivocal, there are few noteworthy differences. In Orfeo the cadence in question, D major, is on a pitch in a flow of cadential moments from a B flat triad through G, D major, to end on G.

Ex. 5

Monteverdi, ‘Possente spirto’, bb. 169–78 (Orfeo. Venice, Ricciardo Amadino, 1609).

Though on a very important word, ‘vita’, it is not the arrival point of the section. In Combattimento (see Ex. 4), even if a B flat triad is used to approach the dominant of D, the entire trajectory of the final section shows cadential-like approaches to A and C (contradicted by the word setting, in fact there are no textual conclusions, furthermore the G to C passage is broken by a rest and C is clearly played to approach B flat) leading to D, the arrival point of the entire composition.Footnote ¹²⁵ The two cadences have therefore completely different values. Indeed, they are performed in different ways: the cadence in Orfeo could be sung quite quickly, because the conclusive melodic and textual elements arrive a few bars later, whereas the cadence in Combattimento supports in slow singing motion the expressive weight of the whole piece.Footnote ¹²⁶ From the melodic point of view there is then a subtle but very relevant difference. In Orfeo the voice returns to d² together with the cadential D chord, whereas in Combattimento the voice anticipates the resolution to the tonic against dominant chord in the strings and the basso continuo. Monteverdi then does not include the sharp symbol in the basso continuo both in this specific cadence and in any cadence in the entire ‘Possente Spirto’, yet he does include it in Combattimento. The practice of writing basso continuo figuration in the seventeenth century was not consistent, but the question arises, why did Monteverdi include the sharp symbol in Clorinda’s final cadence, whilst in another extremely poignant composition, such as ‘Possente Spirto’, he did not feel it necessary to do so?

Another obvious difference is the absence of set instruments in Orfeo, which would provide a clear harmonisation as in Combattimento, where the strings above the basso continuo do exactly this, by omitting C sharp. But what do performers do when they realise the basso continuo? A very illuminating example comes from Rinaldo Alessandrini. In his edition of Orfeo, he does realise the basso continuo with the C sharp, which can also be heard very clearly in his own recording of the opera, because of the limited instrumentation in that particular passage. In his recording of Combattimento, however, there is no C sharp, or if it is played only by the basso continuo instruments (harpsichord and/or theorbo), it hardly can be heard against the sustained strings and the typical sense of closure provided by the leading note’s resolution is heavily undermined.Footnote ¹²⁷

One last point in this regard is made by Anna Maria Vacchelli. In her introduction to the Cremona edition, she states that ‘The accidental [in general in the basso continuo] can refer to the third, the fifth, or both notes and, exceptionally, to the sixth.’Footnote ¹²⁸ The case of the sharp placed above the A in the bass line in the Combattimento is considered to be one of those exceptions, indicating F sharp, which is indeed sung by Clorinda, and not the leading note, C sharp. So, Vacchelli states, ‘in the present edition, the chord [in the basso continuo] has been realised and modelled on the notes of the strings, to maintain the magical effect of a suspension determined by the part of Clorinda, who resolves on the tonic whilst the other instruments hesitate on the dominant chord’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Vacchelli, therefore, draws attention to the significance of the sharp sign indicated in Monteverdi’s score, whereas Carter and Cusick do not problematise it at all; the former including it in his example, assuming that it refers to C sharp and without considering other options, the latter omitting it probably as a mistake.

A comparison between this final cadence and the beginning of the composition will show very clearly the extent of the changes that have occurred, from the initial cadences to the end.

Example 6 presents a cadence on d descending through a fifth (bars 1–9), a cadence on a through a descending fourth from d¹ (bars 10–16), and a further cadence on d also through a descending fifth from a (bars 16–18). All these cadences have at least two modal cadential formulas in the written parts: stepwise descending motion to the root of the triad, enriched by the bass line that ascends by a fourth or descends by a fifth, whereas the cantizans formula with the leading note – whether it is clearly indicated as in bars 15 and 18 or not as in bar 8 – does not create any clash with the vocal part.

Ex. 6

Monteverdi, ‘Tancredi, che Clorinda un homo stima’, bb. 1–18 (Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, Libro ottavo. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1638).

In dividing the opening four verses into three units, the cadences shape Tancredi and Clorinda in their materiality and desires for fighting in a battle that draws them dangerously and erotically close to each other. All these plain and direct elements are missing at the end, as the cadence is achieved at the expense of a strong musical exclusion (the lack or undermining of the leading note), certainly with the aim of representing Clorinda’s transformation and assumption into Heaven. This transformation had already started in the section ‘Amico, hai vinto’, when Clorinda stopped short of a D cadence. Looking back at Example 1, it is clear that ‘Amico, hai vinto’ had the role to start detaching the leading note from the cadence in D for Clorinda, who can now conclude on D, at the very end, without the leading note, in the high register. A cadence almost deprived of its own body but at the same time with the body of Clorinda resurfacing in the actual performance.

The last cadence in Sigismondo d’India’s setting provides a fascinating comparison. First of all, the cadence is on G (not D as in Monteverdi’s); second, it does not play with the avoidance of the leading note and its trajectory of desire to the same extent as Monteverdi does.Footnote ¹³⁰ In fact, the entire last phrase presents very clearly the dominant D major (see Ex. 7), as the bass line resolves f sharp to g already before the final cadence on the words ‘S’apre il cielo’, whereas Monteverdi provides the cadence only on the words ‘in pace’. D’India also places a sharp above the d in the bass line; considering that we have already heard the f sharp–g pattern, and that there is an f sharp at the beginning of the penultimate bar in the bass line, it seems obvious to say that here the sharp indicates f sharp, but Clorinda still does not provide any modal cadential formula, setting a contrast between the basso continuo and herself.

Ex. 7

Sigismondo d’India, ‘S’apre il cielo’ (Le musiche a 1 e 2 voci, Libro quarto. Venice, Alessandro Vincenti, 1621).

The approach to the final cadence in Il Verso’s version (see Ex. 8) is characterised by straightforward ascending scalic patterns: the canto starts on d¹ (b. 22) and continues up to the high d² on the words ‘dir parea: S’apre il Ciel’ (b. 24) before dropping on the words ‘io vado in pace’ and approaching the leading note f¹ sharp, which resolves on g¹ (in contrast, like d’India’s, to Monteverdi’s final cadence in D). At the opposite spectrum (b. 24), the bass starts an ascending line on G up an octave, on the words ‘parea: S’apre il ciel, io vado in’ before jumping to d, and supporting the cadence with the final dropping fifth, with the quinto providing the other cadential formula.

Ex. 8

Antonio Il Verso, ‘S’apre il cielo’, bb. 21–6 (Madrigali a cinque voci, Libro XV. Palermo, Giovan Battista Maringo 1619).¹³¹

Harmonically the cadence does not show anything out of the ordinary; texturally, we should notice though that after a section with very little polyphonic treatment at the phrase ‘Colei di gioia trasmutossi e rise, e in atto di morir lieto e vivace’ (the text is treated homophonically between Canto, Alto, Tenore and Basso, only the Quinto providesFootnote polyphonic contrast), at the start of ‘Dir parea: S’apre il cielo, io vado in pace’ (which is Clorinda’s words in the poet’s imagination), the voices break into a markedly polyphonic texture. This may be a choice to counter the possible narrative assignment of the words to one single character (possibly indicated by homophonic treatment), suggesting instead an ecstatic and multiple reverberation of the subject in this particular experience. The contrast between homophonic and polyphonic treatment goes back to Il Verso’s first madrigal when Clorinda’s speech – ‘Amico hai vinto, io ti perdon; perdona tu ancora, al corpo no’ – is set homophonically before the voices break into polyphonic texture at the words ‘che nulla pave’ to continue until the end of her words. In Il Verso’s composition, Clorinda’s complex identity is thus realised by the contrast homophony/polyphony, where polyphony is used to indicate the soul and the final ascension to heaven. It is evident therefore that the composers fully embrace the complexity of Clorinda’s character yet depict it in different ways.

The role of the instruments

The magical effect of which Anna Maria Vacchelli writes about, when discussing the realisation of the sharp sign, should also lead us to talk of the role of the instruments in both the sections ‘Amico hai vinto’ and ‘S’apre il ciel’ of Monteverdi’s Combattimento. However, a few narratological preliminaries are necessary as they relate to the instrumental setting. The section ‘Amico hai vinto’ marks the passage from the narrator’s to Clorinda’s point of view. Up to this point everything has been seen through the eyes of the narrator, who, while describing the fight, lets the combatants talk for themselves through a few carefully selected very short shots; he is the one who has opened a window just to close it almost instantly. With ‘Amico hai vinto’, Clorinda takes full possession of the point of view and all of a sudden the implicit gazes of the previous sections, which were all overshadowed by the narrator, come to the fore: the narrator is quiet and the viewers in the portego are asked to suspend for a moment what they know, listen to Clorinda, and identify both with her request and with Tancredi’s silence. In cinematic terms, we would have an interpellation towards Tancredi and the audience: Clorinda is gazing directly at the camera and seduces the spectator.Footnote ¹³²

It is the instruments that have the power now to establish these distinctive points of view, with a rather different role from the rest of Combattimento. Whereas for most of the composition the instruments have a mimetic role, describing the fight and realising indeed the genere concitato, in the two sections in question they are completely entangled with Clorinda’s voice. For Cusick, she is taking ownership and control of what the instruments can do. Fully in ‘control of the music’s affect, unmediated by any narrating voice, Clorinda’s dying voice commands’.Footnote ¹³³

In ‘Sapre il cielo’, the scene is initially observed through the eyes of the narrator as he remarks that ‘she seems to say’, but Monteverdi’s instrumentation and decision to assign the last words to the singer impersonating Clorinda create an intriguing situation: all of a sudden the narrator’s gaze is appropriated by Clorinda’s own gaze, not as the interpellation of ‘Amico hai Vinto’, instead more along the lines of the cinematic subjective point of view. It is not a close-up; Clorinda takes over the camera and everybody around her sees through her eyes. If ‘Amico hai vinto,’ in its interpellation, had the role to seduce with the oscillating modal soundscape, now that seduction is complete and the listeners identify completely with Clorinda, who establishes her presence over the lack of the leading note.Footnote ¹³⁴

Contemporary art may offer here a historically informed analogy in what is called ‘glaucous light’, the ‘light of dawn that saves and hits many protagonists [of Caravaggio’s paintings] in the crucial moments of their existence’: Matthew, Saul, Mary Magdalene, the Young Sick Bacchus and many more.Footnote ¹³⁵ With its pale green and blue-grey shades the ‘glaucous light’ represents the moment of death and transfiguration; theatrically manufactured it seems to hit directly the skin of the protagonist, but at the same time seems to emerge from within the characters themselves. It is a light that illuminates and creates darkness all around: it is not night any more but it is not daylight yet.

Tasso’s text has indeed a crucial stanza where the reference to the night and to the daylight is of primary importance; ‘Notte, che nel profondo oscuro seno’ (Night, in the deep dark bosom) in fact refers both to the night and to its darkness as a container of deeds that are worthy of daylight, and it is certainly the task of the narrator/Tasso to bring these deeds from darkness to light. Already in that octave, Monteverdi’s music and use of instruments are different from the fight scenes. They anticipate the suspension in Clorinda’s last two speeches; the light that it is not darkness anymore but not full daylight yet is embodied by the oscillation of modal direction in ‘Amico hai vinto’ and in the ambiguity around the final cadence. The instruments are both the intervention of the composer, in the same way as the light in Caravaggio’s painting is a dramatic and artificial light built in the studio by the painter – but at the same time the instruments come from within the character of Clorinda, like the light in Caravaggio’s painting comes from within the characters’ skin. The instruments thus are no longer only a reflection of the character’s inner feelings maintaining an external perspective, they are now both external and internal, on the edge between darkness and light, where Clorinda’s final words and performance can assert her resistance.