The idea for this project emerged after playing a nurse role (Murmilla in Telemann’s Richard Löwenhertz) at the Magdeburg Opera House, Germany, in 2018. When I was first asked to play the role, I thought it was slightly odd for a lyric tenor voice to interpret a nurse: maybe this is my “macho” Italian heritage talking! However, performing Murmilla was a great chance and a true revelation for me. I was impressed to note that a role classified as comic by the codes of Baroque opera had, in fact, a high number of theatrical, human and emotional facets. It was more multifaceted than many “serious” characters; thus it encouraged me to discover this new world opening itself up in front of me. To my surprise, I found a wealth of repertoire in seventeenth-century Italy and especially in Venice with Francesco Cavalli, for a total of 114 nurse roles, which provided me clearly with enough material to make an album! I also realized that the nurse’s role has something more than all other operatic roles in that era; it is able to create a cathartic intimateness with the audience; we will find something similar only in the nineteenth-century operatic heroines. I find myself entirely at ease in such a relationship; possibly, it is the main reason why I chose to sing, in my life.
Note by Marco Angioloni
One thing one may safely affirm about seventeenth-century Venice is that it must have been a wonderful place to live. The city was harvesting the fruits of the lavish architectural creativity of the preceding centuries (and particularly of the Cinquecento), while still enjoying a flourishing cultural life, an opulent artistic scene and that unique combination of savoir vivre, of irony, of pleasure and of magnificence which always characterized the Serenissima, the Republic of San Marco.
Indeed, while Venice was never exactly a pious city, it was by no means indifferent to religion; only, it was exceptionally able to maintain a precarious, albeit intriguing, balance between a genuine interest in the sacredness of life and a healthy enjoyment of the worldly pleasures. These two aspects, in Venice, rarely conflicted with each other; in fact, the religious rites and buildings were as magnificent as the civic liturgies of the Republic and its secular spaces.
The same applied to music: whereas other Italian cities were trying and applying the recent deliberations of the Council of Trent on music, and attempting to find a “sober” musical rendition of the sacred texts, Venice was happily experimenting with new languages, which did not even endeavour to conceal their blatant disregard for the Council’s dictates. And while both the sacred spaces and the music which filled them were expressing with forceful evidence the splendour of the early Baroque era, and conveying through art a (sincerely religious) feeling of awe, amazement and grandiosity of the things divine, the first public theatres were developing a particular aesthetics of their own, which was in turn indebted to the “extraordinary” which characterized the Baroque experience.
In the early seventeenth century, opera as a genre was still very young; as is well known, the first examples of what is today identified as “opera” had been created, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, by a group of Florentine noblemen who gathered around the famous Count de’ Bardi. However, if Florence saw the birth and childhood of opera, the first masterpieces in this genre are certainly due to the pen of Claudio Monteverdi, who spent a considerable part of his life in Venice. Indeed, Monteverdi himself embodied the “sacredness of the secular” and the “secularity of the sacred” typical of Venice: his sacred music is as spectacular as his operas, while his operas have a supernatural dimension (even when they are not mythological) which verges on the religious experience.
It is not by chance, therefore, that Francesco Cavalli could find in Venice his ideal homeland, and that his activity embodied perfectly that same delicate balance and reciprocal contamination between sacred and secular. Cavalli was born in Crema in 1602 (so his birth was practically contemporaneous with that of opera); his family name was Caletti (or Caletto), though his father (and therefore the entire family) was also known as Bruno or Bruni; the name of Cavalli was later adopted by Francesco as a homage to his aristocratic patron. Cavalli’s father was a musician himself, who discovered the precocious musical gifts of his son and educated him, until, at fourteen, the boy was heard by Federico de Cavalli who brought him to Venice. From then on, young Francesco enjoyed a steady and prestigious career, mainly in the Basilica of San Marco, but also in some of the most important churches of the city. At San Marco, Cavalli was a singer (a soprano at first, and later a tenor), an organist (with a gradual ascending progression, embodied by his promotion from second to first organist), a composer and, eventually, the Chapel Master (1668). For these roles, obviously, Cavalli had both to compose and to perform many works of sacred music: he fulfilled his duty with general satisfaction, also acquiring an international fame.
However, his religious duties must have left Cavalli with considerable free time and a vast amount of creative energies, which he prolifically employed in the field of opera; here, the fruits of his art consist not only of his actual works (many of which, unfortunately, have not been preserved), but also of the influence he played on the further development of the genre. In particular, thanks to the particular dynamics of the artistic and social scene of the Serenissima, operas were not intended only for the patrician ears of the aristocracy; here, the rules of the market and the dynamics of patronage, sponsorship and entrepreneurship encouraged the creation of operas with a more pronounced humanity, and a higher affective content. If, on the surface, the subjects of the first operas were rather uniformly taken from the ancient myths or Classical historical figures, the treatment such subjects received in Venice was markedly different from that found in other cities; here, the affections were less stereotyped, the style more varied, the characters closer to those of the real human beings, and there was room for an ample variety of situations. And even though the protagonists normally maintained their august aura, a comical, or at least ironic element was frequently found in the Venetian operas; in particular, many such moments were entrusted to a particular character and voice, i.e. that of the Nurse. In the words of the artist performing in this CD:
When Venice invented public opera, in 1637, this new genre had existed for not yet forty years. A great variety of characters is found; and among kings, queens, servants and eunuchs, the nurse is an important – though too frequently forgotten – character. It is the symbol for that union of the registers which Venetian opera was seeking. This CD proposes a hour-long exploration of this character, which had been abandoned for too long in the libraries worldwide, resulting in a programme of mostly premiere recordings.
Within a universe ruled by the gods, the mythological characters or the rulers, the nurse leads the audience to a more material, to a more realistic reality; she embodies the two components – the tragical and the comical – pertaining to the union of registers, thus becoming a perfect symbol for the Venetian opera. She mainly performs the role of the one who teaches ethics, who gives common-sense advice, frequently about the passing of time and the unforeseeable traits of love.
She is generally old in age, and her part is sung en travesti; thus, she enjoys a privileged relationship with the audience, who, of course, knows about her dressing-up. Contrary to the feminine characters who dress as men for strategic purposes or love affairs, the nurse sings en travesti for a performing convention: her character deceives nobody, but it embodies an unrestrained freedom of expression which begs the modern question about gender, in a city, such as Venice, which was the symbol of freedom itself.
Thus, the character of the nurse is found in a substantial portion of the Venetian repertoire, between 1638 and 1670; we thus find a cohort of more than a hundred “old women”, before the disappearance of this figure. Indeed, Venetian opera opened itself up to reform in that era; it expunged from its stages the anti-heroes such as the depraved Roman emperors; and it put back on their pedestal the virtuous rulers, which mirrored on stage the royal ruler who attended the performances.
The subtle fascination of this forgotten character, therefore, has led the artists to create an itinerary dominated by the works by Cavalli, but with meaningful presences of examples from the works of several of his contemporaries (some of whom were also his pupils, colleagues or protegées, as in the cases of Sartorio and Cesti; the works by Alessandro Ciccolini result from the modern reconstruction of a partially lost opera by young Domenico Scarlatti). Nurses inhabit a liminal zone between the empathy of motherhood and the wisdom of old age; they may be slightly more detached than mothers in their view of their charges, and thus possibly provide a more reasoned advice; they do not belong in the aristocracy but nourish its children, thus also providing a bridge between the classes by means of their very body. And just as Juliet’s Nurse is much more influential, in her life, than Lady Capulet, possibly also in the works recorded here the Nurse will act as a temporal bridge, allowing us to get a glimpse of a lost world, a lost society, a lost era which, however, still lives in its music.
Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio