Listen to This. Alex Ross

tune.

      The buoyant rhythm neatly captures Rinuccini’s springtime imagery. The voices imitate one another and tease against the beat, like dancers weaving around a maypole. In the final lines, the sonnet takes a surprising turn: the protagonist of the poem reveals himself to be a disconsolate loner, singing and weeping over the absence of two fair eyes. And the bouncing beat gives way to a heaving lament. As in Lorca’s flamenco, sobs and kisses, pleasure and anguish, coincide.

      Zefiro torna was a certifiable hit of the 1630s, grabbing the attention of many rival composers. Monteverdi deployed ostinato basses in several other pieces, most memorably in Lamento della ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph, which he published in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, of 1638. In an introduction to the volume, Monteverdi declared that he wished to give a complete musical picture of what he called the three passions—“anger, temperance, and humility or supplication.” Anger, he said, had never been properly depicted in music before, and he proudly underlined the groundbreaking achievement of his “madrigals of war.” But the Lamento is no less inventive in the way it goes about illustrating the third passion, that of the humbled soul. A solo female voice, representing a distraught nymph, sings a plaint—

       Let my love return to me

       as he was before

       or take me then and kill me

       so I rack myself no more.

      —while three male voices paraphrase her woe (“unhappy one, ah, no more, she cannot suffer so much ice”). The bass line follows the classic lamenting shape. The notes A-G-F-E are heard thirty-four times in succession, never yielding.

      The ostinato in Zefiro torna exudes a giddy, carefree air. The one in Lamento della ninfa is different. First, obsessive repetition focuses and magnifies the melancholy affect of the stepwise descent. Indeed, as the musicologist Ellen Rosand maintains, this work made the association almost official; the falling motif became an “emblem of lament,” one that composers employed consciously, with reference to Monteverdi’s model. Second, the ostinato has a symbolic function, carrying a tinge of psychological compulsion. The voice keeps tugging against the bass line, pushing upward, stretching its phrases beyond the two-bar unit, giving rise to dissonant clashes, breaking down into chromatic steps. The implacability of the bass suggests that these attempts at escape are in vain. Instead, the piece ends in a mood of shattered acquiescence, as the voice subsides to the note from which it began. Even so, there is no denying the seduction of repetition, the psychic pull of the circling motion. The ceremony of lament interrupts the ordinary passage of time, and therefore, paradoxically, holds mortality at bay.

      In the early seventeenth century, opera spread across Italy, becoming more of a commercial entertainment in the process. In 1637, one year before Monteverdi published Lamento della ninfa, a touring troupe brought opera to the republic of Venice. The season took place during Carnival, the time of dissolution and self-reinvention. Opera was reborn as a many-layered, stylistically ravenous form, combining lyric tragedy with lewd comedy—the musical counterpart of the high-low drama of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Mythological subjects took on a modern edge; castrato singers flamboyantly restyled classical heroes; star divas enacted scenes of madness and lament; and a diverse public showed lusty approval. For the remainder of the century, up to five theaters were operating in Venice at one time, drawing an audience that included not only the upper crust but also courtesans, tourists, well-born students, and a smattering of ordinary people. In Ellen Rosand’s words, “opera as we know it assumed its definitive identity.”

      Monteverdi was nearly seventy when opera came to Venice, but the phenomenon allowed him to experience a second youth. His two surviving late operas, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea, revel in extreme emotions, oscillating between suicidal angst and orgiastic joy. The two extant scores of Poppea—a drama of lust and greed in the high Roman Empire—both end with a disarmingly blissful duet between Nero and his lover Poppea, “Pur ti miro” (“I gaze upon you”), over a caressing major-key ground bass. Although scholars now believe that this duet was added by another composer, it communicates the heady allure of opera in its early days.

      When Monteverdi died, in 1643, Francesco Cavalli, a gifted protégé, took his place. No less than his mentor had, Cavalli shaped the opera genre as we know it today, perfecting the transition from speechlike recitative to fully lyrical arioso singing. He had a particular gift for arias of lament, embedding them in velvety harmonic progressions. An early example appears in the 1640 opera Gli amori d’Apollo edi Dafne, which tells of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree. Toward the end, the god Apollo realizes that his beloved nymph has slipped from his grasp, and he declares himself miserable. Cavalli promptly unfurls the A-G-F-E bass line from Lamento della ninfa, making it the motor of a truncated arioso passage that bears the title Lamento:

      As in Monteverdi, the repetition in the bass mimics the obsessive, circular thinking of the unhappy lover—the painful recollection of happy moments, the sick-hearted imagining of alternate outcomes. It follows the psychological rhythm of depression: the spirit sinking step by step, straining to recover, then sinking again.

      The Venetian public evidently enjoyed Apollo’s monologue of misery, for Didone, Cavalli’s opera for the following season, features laments galore. In the first act, survivors of the fall of Troy—Hecuba, King Priam’s widow; her daughters Cassandra and Creusa; and the hero Aeneas, Creusa’s husband—bewail the end of their world even as more mayhem descends on them. Cassandra has hardly finished mourning for her beloved Coroebus when Creusa is abruptly slain. Hecuba enters, seeking to voice a feeling “beyond the tears,” and she finds release in an incantation that seems to portray not only the recent fall of Troy but also the future demise of Greece:

       Porticos, temples are

       Shaking and trembling,

       Burning and tumbling.

       Purple and empire,

       Turn into dust,

       Make clothes of ashes!

      At this point Cavalli had a stroke of genius, one that reverberated through the centuries. He prolonged Monteverdi’s ostinato bass, so that it moved down by chromatic steps (G–F-sharp–F-natural–E–E-flat–D). There’s something claustrophobic about those close-set intervals: they give the feeling of a dismal shuffle, the gait of a lost soul.

      The laments of Didone come mainly from the throats of women: Cassandra and Hecuba in the first act, Dido at the end. Almost from the start, male opera composers depended on the figure of the abandoned, vengeful, and/or maddened female. The musicologist Susan McClary, in her pioneering study Feminine Endings, identifies Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa as a harbinger of operatic mad scenes, describing the piece as “a display designed by men, chiefly for the consumption of other men.” McClary compares the music to a grille on an old asylum window through which passersby could watch mad people. Other scholars, though, have detected a certain defiant self-assertion in the female portraits set forth by Cavalli and other early operatic composers. Wendy Heller, in a discussion of Didone, describes the title character as a tragically constrained woman, but celebrates Hecuba as an intriguingly dangerous force of nature, her music charged with “a sense of the supernatural and the other-worldliness of [her] strength.”

      The singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), one of the few publicly recognized female composers of the Baroque period, reversed the standard equation in her cantata L’Eraclito amoroso (“The Amorous Heraclitus”). The text for this piece shows the Greek philosopher Heraclitus in a perpetual fit of despondency:

       My only pleasure