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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ulysses is genius of faithfulness in one's fate, 20 Dec 2006
This opera by Monteverdi is, after Orfeo, a great step towards modern opera in many ways but it is a lot more than just a great step. We are at once surprised that old harmonics and ways of playing or singing have disappeared. No gregorian heritage any more in this music. We are entering the new style entirely and leaving the old one behind. But it is still a lot more. Orfeo was dealing with a primitive story in many ways : going down into hell to recuperate his love and yet losing her completely out of pure foolishness. That was primitive of Orfeo in many ways not to understand the great privilege he had, primitive and irresponsible. With Ulysses we are entering a completely different world. Love it is for sure, love of Ulysses for his wife Penelope that makes him come back finally, or rather beg and get the permission to go back from the gods, the ruthless and vengeful gods that want to punish humanity for their triteness after having punished Troy for Paris' vanity. That is a weak argument indeed. These gods are in no way logical. They should be willing to accept the fact that these humans who carried out the gods' vengeance should be protected and rewarded by these very same and satisfied gods. But gods are never satisfied and always ask for more sacrifices and sacrificial victims. This discourse is not only on ancient pagan gods but it is about the christian God too. God has invented, created some say, a world of justice, peace and love, and yet it is nothing but a constant strifing struggling survival adventure that means victims, death, sacrifices, more victims, etc, to satiate, maybe, God's thirst for blood, vengeance, violence, as if God could not exist without this constant anger and killing. And yet it goes even farther than that. The love of Ulysses for Penelope and of Penelope for Ulysses is so powerful that no one, not even the gods, can make them change their minds, make them step out of their self-appointed straight path. No one and nothing can disturb their resolution and distort their targeted objective and the path leading to its fulfillment. The whole opera is about this fight of the gods, but also of time, fate and love, that is to say human nature, by definition frail, that is easily tricked and changed by these three evanescent but always present end everlasting temptations or circumstances. This background reinforces the resolution and determination of both Ulysses and Penelope to reach and attain their goal, which is to be reunited in their mutual love. This shows in a way that man, and woman, is more powerful than God if he, or she, wants to be. This is typically Renaissance in a way. And yet Monteverdi is still from his tradtional time. Ulysses will manage to come home. But Penelope will not believe it, believe him. And yet to come to that final possibility, three goddesse will have intervened. Minerva of course, and first of all, but then Juno who is called in to help Minerva, and finally Diana, as the goddess of pure love and purity for women, who is invoked at the very end of the opera, Diana, the triple goddess, this goddess that can represent Hecate, the goddess of death and hell, Semele, the goddess of the moon anbd the night, and Diana herself, the goddess of life, purity, nature, young animals and so many other things, in one word fertility and life. And these three goddesses will have to help bring the gods down from their obstinate blindness or their blind obstinacy : they want to get some kind of vengeance and do not know when and where to stop. That will have to come from Jupiter who will have to convince Neptune. What a long road to salvation ! This divine structure set to work by Monteverdi goes beyond modernity into heritage and beyond heritage into questioning the present and maybe inventing the future. The music and the singing are absolutely remarkable because we no longer have some kind of beautiful musical accompaniment, though it may still be there from time to time. We no longer have a music that is purely the musical embodiment of the drama, though it may still be there from time to time. We reach the level of music becoming the perfect carving of human feelings in the pure marble of the instruments and the voices, the notes and the intervals. The voices are chosen to express these feelings and Penelope for instance will remain, nearly all along, the wailing and lamenting voice of deprived faithfulness. In the same way every voice expresses the feelings of the characters in their very textures and in the music that guides them onto the road of singing. There are so many moments of perfection in that dimension of this opera that we could not even start quoting them all. Music is no longer the voice of God or the song of angels. Music is the exhilarating exploration of the human mind and the human heart. We are opening the door to the most advanced modernity of all times. And I shiver when saying of all times, because at times I feel that Hildegarde von Bingen had maybe reached the same intensity of psychological and spiritual vision.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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