(The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland)
Venice 1640

Libretto by Giacomo Badoardo

Performing version by Martin Pearlman

Cast in order of appearance:
L'Umana fragilità (Human frailty)
Il Tempo (Time)
La Fortuna (Fortune)
Amore (Love)

*

Penelope, wife of Ulysses
Ericlea, her nurse
Melanto, her maid
Eurimaco, Melanto's lover
Nettuno (Neptune)
Giove (Jove)
Three Phaeacian sailors
Ulisse (Ulysses)
Minerva
Eumete, Ulysses' loyal swineherd
Iro, the glutton
Telemaco, son of Ulysses
Antinoo, suitor of Penelope
Pisandro, suitor
Anfinomo, suitor
Giunone (Juno)

Program Notes by Martin Pearlman

Only three operas by Claudio Monteverdi have come down to us.  L'Orfeo (1607), his very first, is generally acknowledged to be the first great opera in the genre.  Then, after a gap of more than thirty years, during which Monteverdi wrote numerous operas that tragically have been lost, we have two masterpieces from near the end of his life: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642). 

Il ritorno d'Ulisse is based on the story told in books 13-23 of Homer's Odyssey, in which Ulysses returns home from the Trojan War after an absence of twenty years and slays his wife's suitors, who have taken over his palace.  Giacomo Badoardo's libretto set to music by the 73-year-old Monteverdi was premiered to great acclaim in 1640 during the carnival season in Venice, and because of its success, it was revived in the following season, an unusual distinction for an opera of the time.  The performances took place at one of Venice's newly opened public opera houses, where not only were budgets severely limited, but where productions aimed to please popular tastes.  In this case, the story was a familiar one to the audience, with plenty of blood and gore, a far cry from the nymphs and shepherds of earlier court productions. 

The opera then dropped from view until the late nineteenth century, when an unattributed manuscript was found in Vienna, perhaps from a later production that may have taken place there.  But it was not till the mid-twentieth century, when further documents were discovered, that the music was proven to be a genuine "lost" opera of Monteverdi.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse is certainly the least well known and least performed of the three surviving Monteverdi operas, a fact that may have something to do with its relatively recent discovery and authentication.  But another reason perhaps lies in the libretto itself, which some have suggested makes the work more difficult to put across than the composer's other late opera.  Whereas Poppea is filled with interesting dialogue between complex historical characters, Ulisse is of necessity somewhat more formal in its portrayal of gods and heroes.  The final act, which is largely devoted to the convincing of a reluctant Penelope that it is truly her husband who has returned home, has been called anticlimactic by some critics.  There are also detours in the story, such as the scene in Act II (often cut) where Telemachus tells his mother about the beauty of Helen, whom he has seen in his travels.  But Monteverdi's music transcends any such problems, and Il ritorno d'Ulisse is unquestionably one of the three pillars that place Monteverdi among the greatest of opera composers.

The manuscript and performing versions

Perhaps the greatest reason that Ulisse is not heard more often has to do with the difficulties presented by the surviving material.  The music survives in only one manuscript, although a number of manuscript copies of the libretto have been found.  We have nothing of this opera in the composer's own hand, only the one score hastily and sometimes carelessly written out by a copyist, probably after the composer's death.  It lacks many details (some of which may have been explained to the performers in rehearsals), it is incomplete in places, and it has a number of small errors.  It is clearly a working copy designed for a particular production.  Several scenes in the libretto are missing in the score, having either been lost, cut from that production, or perhaps never set to music in the first place.  A performance therefore requires many decisions to fill in the holes in what the score tells us. 

Checking the manuscript for Boston Baroque's production, we have made countless small adjustments plus a few major ones to the existing modern editions.  In many places the manuscript is incomplete or unclear, and a variety of interpretive decisions must be made.  In Scene 4 of Act I, for example, there is a written instruction that the instruments play a brief sinfonia, while the sleeping Ulysses is carried in.  We are instructed that, "so as not to wake him," the sinfonia should be played quietly and be limited to only one chord (i. e. one unchanging harmony).  However, no music is provided, only a bass "C" to tell us what the unchanging harmony should be.  We must therefore create a brief introduction, or sinfonia, on a C major chord to lead into the following scene.  Its static harmony, which seems appropriate for the sleeping Ulysses, is reminiscent of the noisier opening sinfonia of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, another piece on a single unchanging chord.

In other places, only a bass line is given for an instrumental piece, and one must devise upper parts.  An unusual example of this occurs at the end of Act II, Scene 5.  That scene concludes with a celebratory trio for the three suitors ("All'allegrezze"), after which the score has just seven quick bass notes and the word "ritornello."  In our edition, we take these notes as a phrase to be repeated several times with upper instrumental parts added, so that it becomes a brief dance to conclude the scene.

One important revelation in the manuscript occurs at the point where Ulysses slays the suitors.  Just as the instruments begin to build momentum for that climactic moment, most editions and performances interrupt the rhythmically driving music to insert a line of recitative as a prayer to Minerva.  It seems strangely weak to stop the dramatic forward motion, insert the one line of prayer, and then resume the rhythmic music.  Looking at the manuscript, one sees that the inserted line of music (for which the words are not in the libretto) appears to have been added later as a footnote at the bottom of the page, suggesting that it is probably not original.  We therefore have omitted the insertion, so that the rhythmic momentum continues to build to the end of the scene.

Instrumentation

The manuscript score does not specify the instruments that should be used, although the five-part ritornelli, or interludes, would almost certainly be for strings, with perhaps some other instruments added occasionally for color.  For most of the opera, though, the score gives only two staves of music: a vocal line plus an instrumental bass.  It is left to the performers to decide how to harmonize the bass line and to decide which instruments should play it.  Using a variety of continuo instruments allows the palette of instrumental colors to be varied according to the dramatic situation. 

Probably the greatest difference among performing versions of Ulisse is in the matter of orchestral accompaniments.  In the original score, the orchestra plays very little, mostly extremely short instrumental interludes (some as brief as 10 seconds).  Beyond that, it accompanies singers in only three places: in the brief fight between Irus and Ulysses (middle of Scene 12, Act II), at the moment when Ulysses slays the suitors (end of Scene 12, Act II), and in Penelope's song of joy in the final scene of the opera (although in this last, the orchestra plays only in interludes).  Altogether, these accompaniments and the ritornelli come to less than 15 minutes of playing out of a full-length opera.  The rest of the score is for singers accompanied only by a continuo bass line.

The question then is whether the manuscript score is complete or whether instruments were meant to accompany singers in places where there is no music specified for them.  Every production must address this issue.  Some composers (e. g. Dallapiccola and Henze) have orchestrated the work throughout, giving it something closer to a nineteenth-century operatic sound.  Not only does this change the basic character of Monteverdi's work, but it also makes it impossible for the singers to be rhythmically free in declaiming their text -- and it restricts the ability of the continuo players to improvise and react to the singers as they are meant to do in this music.  At the other extreme are performances that limit themselves strictly to the notes in the score, so that the full ensemble plays very little and almost never accompanies singers.  This last choice seems unnecessarily austere, of questionable authenticity, and perhaps even somewhat timid.  Even with a varied continuo section, having the larger ensemble sit silent for over 90% of the opera would seem as artistically and financially wasteful for the seventeenth century as it would be for the twenty-first.  There are, of course, other performances that fall somewhere between these two extremes.

My version for Boston Baroque is in this middle ground.  I have composed orchestral parts to accompany singers at certain key moments of heightened drama, when a character breaks out of recitative into song.  For the most part, these are simple accompaniments designed not to interfere with the singers, although occasionally the instruments interact contrapuntally with the voice.  There are plenty of hints to support this approach.  Some other operas of the time offer models in the form of written-out parts for instruments to accompany singers.  There are even some operas that give instructions for an aria to be played "with violins" or "with all the instruments," even though no instrumental parts are shown in the score.  In the manuscript of Ulisse, there are places where a few interpolated notes appear to be cues for instruments that are meant to be playing, even though there is no music written for them.  In one such place, Melanto's little song "Ama dunque" in Act I, Scene 10, a few melodic notes written between her phrases imply that there is instrumental accompaniment throughout the song.  I have accordingly supplied music for four solo string instruments here, their parts incorporating the inserted notes in those bars where they appear in the score. 

Orchestral accompaniments like these can heighten moments of true song, but the core of this music is still in the freer speech patterns of recitative accompanied by improvised continuo.  For the human characters, these speech patterns tend to be relatively simple and straightforward.  On the other hand, the speech of the gods is often full of florid ornamentation, an unnatural speech that creates an aura of the superhuman.

The libretto vs. the musical score

There are many places in the opera where a libretto differs from the surviving musical score.  Most notably, the book divides the drama into five acts, while the score has three.  They also have entirely different prologues.  Sometimes individual words differ between libretto and score, and sometimes an an entire scene in the libretto is missing in the musical manuscript.  One must decide whether to follow the libretto as a guide to what the score was meant to be, or whether to follow the score as we have it.  For the "missing" scenes, have we lost music, or did Monteverdi never set them to music in the first place?

Wherever possible, I have followed the musical score rather than the libretto, since librettos of the time did not always reflect the finished product.  Librettists often treated their works as independent poems, sometimes retaining their original material, even after a composer may have altered or omitted parts of it according to his musical needs.  A libretto can sometimes help clarify details, but following the score means that we are using the one source that was actually designed to be used in performance. 

Monteverdi's letters show that he was quite demanding of his librettists and often required changes.  His primary interest, he said, was to portray the full range of human emotions.  The "missing" mythological scenes in this opera may well never have been set to music, because he wished to keep the opera focused on the human drama.  Similarly, this libretto's choruses of nereids and sirens or of underworld shades were, in all likelihood, never set to music.  Not only would they have shifted the focus of the opera away from the emotions of the human and divine characters, but choruses were also not a common feature in the cash-strapped public opera houses of Venice at the time. 

Synopsis

Prologue

In the allegorical prologue, Human Frailty is shown as subject to the whims of Time, Fortune, and Love.

Act I

Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, laments the absence of her husband, who left for the Trojan War twenty years earlier.  She expresses her sorrow to her nurse Euryclea. Penelope's young maid Melanto and her lover Eurymachus sing of their love.  They are in league with the suitors and plot to convince Penelope to take a lover. Phaeacian sailors bring the sleeping Ulysses onto the shore of Ithaca, his homeland.  The angry Neptune has kept him from his home for ten years, but now Jove is able to convince him to end his persecution.  Neptune is satisfied by turning the the Phaeacians and their ship to stone but leaves Ulysses alone. 

Ulysses awakes abandoned and confused, but the goddess Minerva reveals to him that he has landed in his homeland and gives him instructions.  He is to turn into an old beggar and go to his palace, where he will see Penelope and her suitors.  Meanwhile, Melantho is trying unsuccessfully to convince Penelope to give up her mourning and marry one of the suitors.

Ulysses meets his old, faithful swineherd Eumaeus.  Eumaeus is annoyed by the boorish glutton Irus, who is a follower of the suitors, but he is overjoyed, when Ulysses, in the form of an old beggar, informs him that his master will soon return. 

With the guidance of Minerva, Ulysses' son Telemachus returns from a sea voyage in search of his father.  Eumaeus informs him that his father will soon return, and he leaves for the palace.  Left alone with Telemachus, the old beggar reveals that he is really his father Ulysses, who has finally returned after twenty years. 

Act II

The suitors ask Penelope to love again but are terrified when Eumaeus enters and announces that Ulysses will soon return.  They decide to intensify their wooing and to murder Telemachus.  On his way to the palace, Ulysses sees Minerva again, and she promises her aid in the coming battle with the suitors. 

The suitors are annoyed that Eumaeus has brought the old beggar into the palace, but they  now offer Penelope presents and profess their love.  Ulysses, as the old beggar, defeats the obnoxious Irus in a wrestling match.  Under the invisible influence of Minerva, Penelope proposes a contest in which whoever can most easily string Ulysses' bow will win both her hand and the kingdom.  The brash Anfinomous, Pisandrus and Antinous all attempt to string the bow but cannot bend it.  Then the old beggar comes forward and asks to try.  He easily strings the bow and shoots the suitors dead.

Act III

Following the massacre, Irus mourns the suitors and wonders who will feed and humor him now.  He is ready to die.  Penelope is skeptical about what has happened and feels that, for her, all love ends in tragedy.  Neither Eumaeus nor Telemachus can convince her that Ulysses has finally returned and that it was he who killed the suitors.  The goddesses Minerva and Juno ask Jove to allow Ulysses to live in peace.  Jove then convinces Neptune to abandon his hatred. 

Ulysses appears before Penelope restored to his true form, but she still refuses to believe he has returned.  The gods could be playing tricks on her, and magic could make this man look like Ulysses.  Then Euryclea reveals that she has seen on him the scar that Ulysses bore from an old wound.  Finally, Ulysses describes for Penelope the decorations on her bed, something which only Ulysses would know.  She is now convinced, and the joyous lovers are reunited. 

Performance Edition by Martin Pearlman

Below are preview photos from the edition. You can download or view a PDF of the full edition here.

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