Le lacrime di Eros
Performance information
Voorstellings-informatie
In short
On the origins of music, the birth of opera, books of love and the work of Scott Gibbons.
In short
The birth of opera
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a work often considered to be the first ever opera, premiered on 24 February 1607. The conductor Raphaël Pichon has long been intrigued by how this masterpiece and this art form could emerge. Opera did not appear out of nowhere: artists, poets and thinkers in sixteenth-century Florence had been searching for a kind of theatre in which poetry and music were equally significant. In both form and content, they drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Important precursors of the opera were the musical interludes (called intermedi) that were inserted between the acts of stage plays with their spoken texts. Over time, these intermedi grew and evolved into fully-fledged independent works of musical theatre: the first operas.
Both festive and political
The music that has been selected for Le lacrime di Eros was originally performed in a context that was both festive and political. The experimental musical and theatrical performances took place during festivities to mark political events such as dynastic weddings. The works were often performed in palatial gardens or halls, and they were intended to demonstrate the power of the princes who organised the performances. Such exciting, impressive and innovative art served to enhance the prestige of the Medici family, who ruled Florence.
The books of love
Renaissance writers were accustomed to dividing their poetry into ‘books’ (libri) of poems, each dealing with a specific theme. The composer Monteverdi published his madrigals along the same principle. Inspired by this structure, Raphaël Pichon and Romeo Castellucci have similarly divided their production into various ‘books’ that collectively form a thematic series. Romeo Castellucci’s approach is to treat the stage like a canvas on which he creates memorable images, using the performers’ bodies, objects and impressive special effects. Le lacrime di Eros consists of a sequence of symbolic images, each showing a different negative aspect of love, as lamented in Renaissance songs: love as torture, love that sets your heart on fire, love that transcends death, and love that condemns you to loneliness.
Then and now
In addition to the old music from the birth of opera, Le lacrime di Eros also includes new compositions by Scott Gibbons that enter into a dialogue with the original material from the Renaissance. The microphone is his instrument, and the noises made by the performers’ bodies, the objects on the stage and the instruments in the orchestra pit are the sounds he uses in his compositions. Furthermore, innovative electronic acoustic techniques will be used to manipulate the acoustics of the Dutch National Opera & Ballet Main Auditorium so that the music can sound ‘as it was then’ and at the same time convey the alienation of being ‘something new’.
Index and Musical overview
Le lacrime di Eros is a pasticcio performance constructed from Renaissance music that originated the art form opera. The musical structure also includes electro-acoustic interventions and compositions by Scott Gibbons, using sounds from singers, musicians, objects and machines.
Index and Musical overview
Index
LIBRO I – Amor Machina
Love machine
LIBRO II – Amor
Love
LIBRO III – Aqua Amoris
Water of love
INTERMEDIO – Pulizia del Sangue
Cleaning of the blood
LIBRO IV – Locus Solus
Place of loneliness
LIBRO V – Venum in Parola
Poison in the word
LIBRO VI – Contra Mondo
Counterworld
Musical overview
Le lacrime di Eros is a pasticcio performance constructed from Renaissance music that originated the art form opera. The musical structure also includes electro-acoustic interventions and compositions by Scott Gibbons, using sounds from singers, musicians, objects and machines.
Anoniem – Udite, selve, mie dolce parole (Fabula di Orfeo, 1480)
Cristoforo Malvezzi – Dal vago e bel sereno (La Pellegrina, 1589)
LIBRO I – Amor Machina
Scott Gibbons – Castello di Cristallo (2024)
Girolamo Fantini – Toccata (La Renuccini, 1638)
Cristoforo Malvezzi – O fortunato giorno (La Pellegrina, 1589)
Giulio Caccini – Al fonte, al prato (Le nuove musiche, 1614)
Jacopo Peri – Al canto, al ballo (L’Euridice, 1600)
Giulio Caccini – Dalla porta d’Oriente (Le nuove musiche, 1614)
Giulio Caccini – Mentre che dolce mia vita (Le nuove musiche, 1614)
Giulio Caccini – Mentre che tra pace e guerra (Le nuove musiche, 1614)
Giulio Caccini – Non ha ’l ciel cotanti lumi (Le nuove musiche, 1614)
Claudio Monteverdi – Balliamo che l’onde (Il settimo libro de madrigali, 1616)
Joan Ambrosio Dalza – Piva (1508)
Francesco Corteccia – Bacco, Bacco, E U O È! (Ballo di Satiri e Baccanti, 1539)
LIBRO Il – Amor
Jacopo Peri – Lassa! che di spavento e di pietate (L’Euridice, 1600)
Domenico Belli – Languirò d’amato zelo (Orfeo dolente, 1616)
Lorenzo Allegri – Sinfonia a 6 Spirto del ciel (Primo Ballo della notte d’amore, 1608)
Sigismondo d’India – Ma che, squallido e oscuro anco mi piaci (Le musiche a una e due voci, 1609)
Scott Gibbons – Core (2024)
Marco da Gagliano – Piangete, ninfe, e con voi pianga Amore (La Dafne, 1608)
Claudio Monteverdi – Che se tu se’ il cor mio (Il quarto libro de madrigali, 1603)
Domenico Belli – Ardo, ma non ardisco il chiuso ardore (Primo libro dell’arie, 1616)
Luca Marenzio – Qui di carne si sfama (La Pellegrina, 1589)
LIBRO IIl – Aqua Amoris
Alessandro Orologio – Intrada XXIV (1597)
Jacopo Peri – Funeste piagge, ombrosi orridi campi (L’Euridice, 1600)
Anoniem – Torna, torna al freddo cor (ca. 1450)
Giulio Caccini – Ineffabile ardore (Il rapimento di Cefalo, 1600)
LIBRO IV – Locus Solus
Scott Gibbons – Un luogo di solitudine (2024)
Cristoforo Malvezzi – Sinfonia a 6 (La Pellegrina, 1589, intermedio IV)
LIBRO V – Venum in Parola
Claudio Monteverdi – Ritornello (Il Ballo delle Ingrate SV167, 1608)
Claudio Monteverdi – Apprendete pietà (Il Ballo delle Ingrate SV167, 1608)
Claudio Monteverdi – Se i languidi miei sguardi (Lettera amorosa a voce sola SV141, Il settimo libro de madrigali, 1619)
LIBRO VI – Contra Mondo
Anoniem – Stravaganza d’amore (arrangement by Miguel Henry)
Scott Gibbons – Vagabondaggio d’Amore (2024)
Claudio Monteverdi – Zefiro torna, e di soavi accenti SV 251 (Scherzi musicali, 1632)
Emilio de’ Cavalieri – O che nuovo miracolo (La Pellegrina, 1589)
Scott Gibbons – Contra Mondo (2024)
In conversation with chief conductor Raphaël Pichon
When Raphaël Pichon first heard Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) as a teenager, he was immediately captivated. Driven by curiosity, he wanted to know everything about it. How could this masterpiece, which already seemed so mature in its form, possibly have appeared as if from nowhere? What was the context that gave birth to the first opera in history?
In conversation with chief conductor Raphaël Pichon
When Raphaël Pichon first heard Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) as a teenager, he was immediately captivated. Driven by curiosity, he wanted to know everything about it. How could this masterpiece, which already seemed so mature in its form, possibly have appeared as if from nowhere? What was the context that gave birth to the first opera in history?
These questions led Pichon to Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was astounded by the immense experimental freedom he discovered in this repertoire. “I was overwhelmed by the quality, honesty and radical nature of the music.”
Portraying the music
The journey that culminated in Le lacrime di Eros started some ten years ago when Raphaël Pichon, together with his Pygmalion choir and orchestra, spent three years researching material from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Florence, hunting through libraries and studying and arranging scores. The research resulted in their first project, Stravaganza d’Amore! Pichon and Pygmalion performed the works in concerts and recorded a much-acclaimed CD. Pichon knew even then that he wanted to take this a step further. “It was my dream from the start to portray this music on a stage with my own choir and orchestra. Pygmalion is my family, my inspiration, what drives me. It feels only logical to bring the story that we started on together so many years ago to this climactic conclusion.”
Raphaël Pichon
“It was my dream from the start to portray this music on a stage”
Pichon says this music is asking to be performed in a theatrical interpretation. “The music we play is music for the stage. It is not opera in the strict sense of the word, but it is a theatrical form of music. This music was often performed in a grand gala setting, but the essence of these works was a desire to convey human passions on stage using the language of music, dance and images.” The penny dropped for Raphaël Pichon when he was collaborating with Romeo Castellucci on their staging of Mozart’s Requiem for the Aix-en-Provence festival. “As a director, Romeo Castellucci has an unparalleled ability to open doors to new dimensions, without necessarily focusing on a particular story or character. Together, we developed the idea of selecting the music for Le lacrime di Eros and organising it around the theme of love, a subject that is pervasive and ubiquitous in Renaissance music. In each selection, we show a different aspect of love. Inspired by Monteverdi’s books of madrigals, we named those different aspects ‘books’ that combine to form a series, as it were.”
A production without a story
There is no story in Le lacrime di Eros. Instead, it offers a kaleidoscopic immersion in the experimental opera scene of Florence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a diverse collection of composers adopting different styles and musical idioms.
The love that is sung about in this repertoire is no sickly sweet, sentimental matter; it is all about suffering, struggling, torture, grief and loneliness. “The figure of Orpheus played a major role in the birth of opera. As a mere demi-god, he was someone audiences could identify with, someone who could not only fall in love but also fail and suffer. The love between Orpheus and Eurydice is a recurring theme in the repertoire we have selected and it therefore functions as an — albeit very subtle — shadow narrative underlying the score of Le lacrime di Eros.”
Age-old sounds and innovation
Le lacrime di Eros presents a soundscape that is not often heard in an opera house. The instruments that are played are even older and more rarely heard than the baroque instruments usually associated with old music. “Rather than calling it an orchestra, with this music it would be more accurate to speak of various groups, families of instruments that are played together. For example, we have violins with special bows and violas da gamba. In the wind and brass sections, we have various Renaissance instruments such as different kinds of flutes, cornets and pivas (a type of bagpipe). We also have instruments that evolved into what we see in the modern symphony orchestra today, including the shawm (the precursor of the oboe), the dulcian (the predecessor of the bassoon) and the sackbut (an early version of the trombone). We also have the lira da braccio, an instrument similar to a viol on which you can play chords; poets used it for the accompaniment during recitations of their verse. It is also the instrument Orpheus is frequently depicted as playing in the art of the period.”
Pichon uses these old instruments to bring several very different musical worlds to life. “The more cheerful songs in the selection often take their melodies from the secular and popular music of the time. The music speaks to listeners directly and straightforwardly. But there are also pieces in the selection that are incredibly bold and experimental in terms of both their melody and their harmony. I suspect that audiences may well be surprised by the modernity of the music and the creative freedom you can hear in it.”
A cosmos of sound
Spatial considerations were also important in the compositions. “Physical space played a significant role in these works. This was before the time of theatres and opera houses as we know them today. The music was performed in gardens, or in large halls in palaces with very open acoustics and a lot of reverberation. Multiple choruses and groups of instrumentalists were deployed to fill the entire space with music. The audience found themselves at the centre of a sonic cosmos, with the sound moving around the listener.”
To incorporate this spatial aspect of the experimental drive of the Renaissance in Dutch National Opera & Ballet’s Main Auditorium, they engaged the sound artist and composer Scott Gibbons. Together with sound designer Rémy Brean, he developed an innovative electro-acoustic setup for the Main Auditorium that makes it possible to manipulate the sound experience in the room. Using the system, an approximation of the acoustics of the Renaissance can be achieved, but it can also be used to create innovative alienating effects.
However, that was not the only reason for bringing Scott Gibbons on board: “The music of Le lacrime di Eros dates from a time — the sixteenth century — when theatre consisted exclusively of spoken texts and music was only permitted as interludes between acts [what were called intermedi]. You could say the music produced by these composers was very progressive: by combining music with drama and other stage disciplines, they were genuinely looking ahead to the future. In our production, we wanted to make a similar move by inviting the future to embrace this old music. Scott Gibbons has been collaborating with Romeo Castellucci for some twenty years now, so it felt right to invite him to disrupt the repertoire and interfere in the production. This Renaissance music is so virginal that it needs that little bit extra for performance in an opera house.”
With such interventions, the artistic team are essentially continuing with the experimentation seen in the Renaissance, creating a stage production that is hard to categorise: “Le lacrime di Eros is not a ‘show’ and it’s not an opera. I hope it will feel like a cross between a meditation and an artwork, a work of performance art and a sound installation at the same time. In short, it’s an experiment.”
Dutch text: Jasmijn van Wijnen
A conversation with Romeo Castellucci
A performance without a story, but with a wealth of stage images showing love from its dark side. Dramaturg Piersandra Di Matteo sat down with director Romeo Castellucci during the rehearsal period to discuss the theme, music and dramaturgy of Le lacrime di Eros.
A lover’s discourse: fragments
A performance without a story, but with a wealth of stage images showing love from its dark side. Dramaturg Piersandra Di Matteo sat down with director Romeo Castellucci during the rehearsal period to discuss the theme, music and dramaturgy of Le lacrime di Eros.
Where does the title Le Lacrime di Eros come from?
“The contradiction in the title — ‘the tears of Eros’ — is inspired by Georges Bataille’s last book, in which the French philosopher analyses the amphibious nature of love and Eros in their relationship with pain and death. While it reflects an anthropology far removed from the serene, metaphorical tones of Renaissance love that we evoke in our production, the discomfort and profound loneliness caused by the absence of the beloved hold a similar significance in these songs. Moreover, the concept of pain in love is an absolute trope in Western literature, exemplified by the couple Orpheus and Eurydice, whose story is the quintessential tale of loss.”
The performance delves into the Renaissance musical universe, highlighting the unique bond between poetry and music at the Medici Court, through a selection of songs that explore the enigma of love. What vision of love emerges?
“It is a moment in the history of music, and in the history of art in general, marked by great ferment and innovation. We enter that world through the assembly of songs selected and rearranged by Raphaël Pichon, who for years has carried out a deep philological exploration of that repertoire. The texts evoke images of pain associated with love stories, outlining the figures of deprivation, separation and distance, in a progression that ranges from sensual languor to melancholy, culminating in inner torment.
Loneliness, abandonment, and loss in love point to the all-embracing theme of desire, which is always related to the missing object. These two words — love and desire — are inseparable. In one of his fragments on love, Roland Barthes clearly expresses this tension when he states that “the amorous subject, according to one contingency or another, feels swept away by the fear of a danger, an injury, an abandonment, a revulsion — a sentiment he expresses under the name of anxiety.””
The work is not centred on a narrative trajectory, at least not explicitly. Could we define it as a composition of images that reveal themselves in the intra-action with the music and words?
“Le Lacrime di Eros unfolds as a sequence of scenes conceived as ‘Books’, a reference to Monteverdi’s madrigal production. It is a carousel of objects for contemplation. Each scene appears to reveal an aspect of love through a Via Negativa (the negative way). This is exemplified in the ‘Introito’, which showcases a marvellous machine of bodily love. It is meant to allude to pure joy, to a kind of paradise where sensual love triumphs; yet, in reality, it reveals itself for what it is: a cold, celibate apparatus. The machine gradually strips away the bodies that comprise it, like emptied shells or discarded plastic pieces left on the ground as inert remains. Nevertheless, the devotion of individuals to this cold totem of moving gears and pistons remains intact. It is the act of love viewed from the outside, the romantic experience mirrored in the coldness of technique — an image of alienation that unveils something about our dysfunctional conception of love in an era built on the rejection of the body.”
“Another Book presents a rosary of torture machines, the most stereotypical ones. This is not intended to evoke the world of BDSM. These tortures represent the spiritual ones that a lover inflicts upon themselves due to the loss of the beloved’s embrace. They are icons of love’s anguish, objective correlatives of inner suffering. No one here feigns experiencing pain. Remaining alone and abandoned — this seems to be the true torture rack that these Renaissance songs are expressing.”
“The embrace, as a synecdoche of the loving encounter, also involves a small scene featuring a contortionist. The idea came to me while reading The Pale King, the unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, in which a child tries to kiss himself, attempting to gain a millimetre more of his body each day, in the hope that he will eventually cover his entire skin surface. It represents complete solitude, a desperate need for contact — an embrace, in fact — that transforms into a wrenching solipsism. It is the desire for love that turns back on itself. The other is no longer present, or not yet. The meeting between two human beings never occurs in these scenes, or perhaps only at the very end.”
Blood emerges as a recurring leitmotif, saturating the stage, which comes alive as a breathing, weeping and groaning organism...
“The first action we encounter on stage is a blood donation. A female figure offers herself. It is a symbolic gift, teetering on the edge of exsanguination, understood as a kenosis, a self-emptying, a way of giving the vital part of oneself to the other — while singing the anguish of the love of the shepherd Aristaeus for the nymph Eurydice.
In a song from Book IV of Monteverdi’s Madrigals, a line literally states: “Those tears of yours are my blood.” Blood coincides with weeping, an image of suffering in its most intense appearance. Moreover, blood forges an essential connection with the voice, representing an act of self-giving that is offered in song, poised for dissipation.”
The North American composer Scott Gibbons was also involved in the overall sound score of Le Lacrime di Eros. You have been collaborating with him for over twenty-five years in your theatrical works and installations. What inspired this intervention?
“Scott Gibbons develops electro-acoustic techniques, distinguished by the capture of real sounds that are not generated synthetically. The microphone serves as his instrument, whereby he reveals the world for what it is, contemplating the entire spectrum of the audible up to the threshold of the inaudible. In his inquiry, the root of every sound is closely tied to the material. This is what fascinates us: a sound that manifests, penetrates, caresses, enters, and is always honest.
It was Pichon who proposed the collaboration with Gibbons, a choice that testifies to a deep understanding of theatre and a rare inclination towards research. Rather than taking a historicist approach, we engage in experimentation with the material of the songs, voices and Renaissance instruments. The aim of Gibbons’ intervention is to illuminate the shadow side of the moon, the dark side of the realm of desire, without any rhetorical filters: the inner materiality of the singers’ bodies, the sounds of the mouth, salivation, the breaths taken while singing, the articulation of bones, blood circulation, and the resonances of the wooden instruments... We propose a potentially new way of listening to the Renaissance musical and poetic universe, while remaining faithful to the experimental spirit that inspired its emergence.”
How does this sound research interact with the Renaissance repertoire?
“Scott Gibbons creates distinct patterns, rhythms and frequencies, or isolated fragments — punctuations that interfere with, intertwine, and amplify the musical structures of composers like Peri, Caccini, and Monteverdi, constantly engaging in dialogue with the stage and its materiality.
These scores serve as premonitions or echoes, or they may operate in contradiction to what we see or what is expressed by the words, revealing the true nature of love that lies hidden behind the rhetorical universe. The sound crafted by Gibbons has the power to unveil the essence of pain without the filter of poetry. The revelation of pain remains a persistent concern in Western art. And the most beautiful thing — as we learned from the Ancient Greeks — is that it evokes tears.”
Text: Piersandra Di Matteo
The birth of opera
Romeo Castellucci’s initial encounter on stage with the world of early music presented in Le Lacrime di Eros occurred in 2000 with Il Combattimento, his first production that tackled a musical-literary work before staging Parsifal in 2011. Five vocal pieces by Claudio Monteverdi were interspersed, like those in Le Lacrime, with electronic music by Scott Gibbons.
The birth of opera
Romeo Castellucci’s initial encounter on stage with the world of early music presented in Le Lacrime di Eros occurred in 2000 with Il Combattimento, his first production that tackled a musical-literary work before staging Parsifal in 2011. Five vocal pieces by Claudio Monteverdi were interspersed, like those in Le Lacrime, with electronic music by Scott Gibbons.
Discussing Il Combattimento, Castellucci argued that the birth of opera is not only a crucial moment in history of music but also, and perhaps most of all, of theatre—it is the birth, or the rebirth, of Western theatre. This claim echoes the sentiments of the artists and intellectuals whose innovations and experiments, more than four centuries ago, culminated in the first operas staged in Florence, Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600), both featuring poet Ottavio Rinuccini and composer Iacopo Peri. A contemporary witness of Monteverdi’s Orfeo—the opera that, a few years later in Mantua, followed the experimental path of the Florentine pioneers—was astounded that, in the newly invented genre of theatrical music, “all the interlocutors speak musically.”
New ways
In a groundbreaking essay, influential art historian Aby Warburg discussed the theatrical dimension of the 1589 Florentine intermedi by highlighting the connections among the poetic, musical, visual, and kinetic domains. Warburg showed continuities and discontinuities between, on the one hand, the six lavish vocal compositions (with their iconographic references to antiquity echoing earlier Renaissance trends) and, on the other, the first operas then produced a few years later in the same cultural environment (Dafne incorporating the battle between Apollo and the serpent featured in the third intermedio). The operas were characterized by “new ways” of combining words and sounds (believed to be reminiscent of Greek tragedy) by exploring “the psychological means of dramatic art” more effectively than contemporaneous pastoral dramas. For Warburg, opera emerged as an intermediate form between “real life” and “dramatic art,” exemplifying the multi-sensory, kinetic spectacles that characterized early modern European feste. These festivals, often occasioned by dynastic weddings, were held in outdoor environments or noble palaces, proclaiming and promoting the power and influence of princely rulers. The theatrical dimensions of the new music expressed the cultural elite's humanistic aspirations through multimedia entertainments in line with the courts’ customary lavish spectacles (tournaments, jousts, naval battles, etc.).
Representation as purpose
However, in contrast with happy endings and allusions to celestial harmonies, tensions and contradictions abounded in both intermedi and early operas, and they reverberate today. The integration of music and words on stage to present an entire dramatic action was considered a radical and controversial departure from the naturalistic objectives of art; this perception has certainly changed after 400 years of operatic staging when we now take it for granted. But the term rappresentativo, which frequently appears in titles, letters, and publication prefaces of the opera pioneers, revealed deep and lasting anxieties about what music and staged representation could do. The word rappresentativo was used to refer to a style invented by Vincenzo Galilei, who imitated Greek songs when setting Dante's poetry; Giulio Caccini then used the term to characterize his opera Euridice and Monteverdi his Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. However, rappresentativo was also used in conjunction with the new musical style imitating speech (recitativo) and words like genere and musica, to refer to non-staged solo songs such as those found in Caccini's Nuove Musiche and Monteverdi's Lettera amorosa in Book VII of his madrigals. The goals of representation, both theatrical and non-theatrical, remained as elusive as the multifaceted relationships between text and music in Caccini's strophic songs. The subsequent history of opera has demonstrated no assurance of one-to-one resemblances between poetry, music, and visual elements. Singers' bodies and voices undermine any semblance of verisimilitude (nobody dies while singing, it is often said).
Gravity and sweetness
Revealing such anxieties, the prologue of Euridice features the character La Tragedia undergoing a live transformation, seemingly shedding her previous persona associated with bloodshed and mournful spectacles. In a paradoxical journey, Tragedy undoes and purges herself using double negation (non), akin to a contortionist searching for a new identity:
No longer of blood (non sangue) shed by innocent veins / nor of eyes (non ciglia) put out by the insane tyrant / unhappy spectacle to human sight, / do I sing now on a gloomy and tear-filled stage (meste e lagrimose scene). // Away, away from this royal house, / maudlin images, shades of sorrow! / Behold, I change my gloomy buskins and dark robes / to awaken in the heart sweeter emotions (i più dolci affetti).”
Renaissance writers emphasized the emotional and surprisingly gratifying aspect of human reactions to painful experiences: “tragedy-—wrote playwright Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio—has a pleasure of its own, and in that weeping (pianto) one discovers a hidden pleasure, which makes it pleasing to the listener, attracts the attention of the soul, and fills it with marvel. The “sweeter emotions” that Tragedy paradoxically evokes in announcing her “new path” (novo cammin) reflect Giraldi’s idea of “tragic pleasure” as a symbol of modern self-awareness. The psychological model of emotions expressed in early operas aligned with the aesthetic of the melancholic pleasure derived from weeping and tears (pianto and lacrime), especially when juxtaposed with the moral perspective of Aristotelian catharsis.
Sounds of the sighs
The “sweeter emotions” conveyed by the new genre of opera thus reflected the enduring tradition of Renaissance love philosophy, which portrayed love as a paradox and the origin of inexplicably pleasant suffering. As Raphaël Pichon notes, from the 16th to the early 17th century, composers and artists in North Italian courts investigated how human passions could be translated to the stage, setting poetry from Angelo Poliziano’s Orpheus (1480) to Giambattista Marino’s The Lyre (1614). Monteverdi, for example, set excerpts from Giambattista Guarini’s 1590 pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherd. In Guarini, the formal and emotional poetic qualities of the gravity (gravità) typical of tragedies were tempered and balanced by the sweetness (piacevolezza) of dolci affetti. Gravity and sweetness represented the polarities characterizing Petrarch’s love poems, reflecting the lover’s split subjectivity between sufferance and pleasure. And yet, thanks to music, audiences of early operas, madrigals, and solo songs experienced (and still experience today) a vast and extreme range of emotions: love can be as burning as fire and its pains as devastating as physical torture. On stage, the “sounds of the sighs” of the suffering lover in the first poem of Petrarch’s Songbook (Canzoniere)could be as audible and unbearable as those of noisy theatrical machines.
Libri
Imitating contemporaneous poetry collections, composers and publishers modeled Renaissance music books on the archetypical Petrarchan libro, the 366 poems of the Canzoniere. Similarly to Petrarch’s approach, assembling poetry in a book did not create coherent narratives but gathered "scattered rhymes" (rime sparse) often connected by loose thematic and formal cross-references. Petrarch's fragmented lyrical voice initially found expression, as if diffracted, in polyphonic compositions like madrigals (compiled into libri) and later in monodic experiments. The Florentine intermedi and early operas incorporated both styles while highly prioritizing the latter for theatrical purposes. However, the publication of books during the era of censorship was fraught with tensions and contradictions. Opera librettos and scores faced censoring pressures evident in their anxiously defensive prefaces, such as those in the publications of the first Florentine and Mantuan operas. In his treatise On Honest Dissimulation (1641), the Marinist poet Torquato Accetto offered an interpretative key, revealing that his book was left "almost bloodless" (quasi esangue) due to self-inflicted wounds. Accetto suggested that a short book often conceals a longer book that could not be written. He urged readers to recognize the “scars” (cicatrici) present in books by using “good judgment,” similarly to Eurycleia when she discovers Ulysses’s scars in the Odyssey.
Books-as-bodies
Early modern texts are injured bodies, raising additional questions when set to music. The scars of the books-as-bodies are echoed through the physical voices of mythological-Arcadian characters wounded by Love. Shepherds (Aristaeus, Thyrsis), nymphs (Daphne, Eurydice, Chloris), gods and demigods (Apollo, Orpheus, Ariadne) lament the death, departure, or rejection of their beloveds. Their voices emerge from the openings of wounds, reminiscent of Accetto’s scars. Late Renaissance and early Baroque chamber and theatrical musical works feature lamenti as their quintessential moments, evoking audience tears.
Seeing with the ears and hearing with the eyes
In his Combattimento of 2000, Castellucci combines vocal pieces by Monteverdi into a staged “madrigal book” of his own, incorporating electronic music by Scott Gibbons. The ongoing collaboration between Castellucci and Gibbons entails capturing real-world sounds with a microphone, reflecting their shared poetic vision that underscores the tangible materiality of sound in bodies, animals, nature, and machines. However, Castellucci’s theater goes beyond mere sonic exploration. It also stages sensorial exchanges, in which the audience engages in a unique interplay of seeing with their ears and hearing with their eyes. Distinguishing where a sound begins and an image originates would be futile. Castellucci's stagings transcend the simple illustration of texts and music. As with the experimentalists and innovators in Florence ca. 1600, forging a “new path” means radically questioning the nature of sound and theatrical representation.
Text: Mauro Calcagno
Musicologist and cultural theorist Mauro Calcagno is specialising in opera studies, early modern music performance studies, critical theory and digital humanities. He received his PhD from Yale University and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania.
We talk to composer Scott Gibbons
In Le lacrime di Eros, the composer Scott Gibbons brings Renaissance music in a dialogue with new electro-acoustic compositions based on sounds he takes from the people and objects on stage and in the orchestra pit.
The materiality of sound and the sound of materials
In Le lacrime di Eros, the composer Scott Gibbons brings Renaissance music in a dialogue with new electro-acoustic compositions based on sounds he takes from the people and objects on stage and in the orchestra pit.
What is your relationship with Renaissance music and how did the context in which this music came into being inspire you?
“I was really surprised when Raphaël told me that there was a lot of exploration into acoustics and sound dispersion too during the Renaissance. Of course, this is also a very topical area of interest four hundred years later in contemporary music, one that Romeo Castellucci and I have explored quite a bit over the years. So naturally this was a primary line of inquiry for Lacrime di Eros.”
“It brought me back to my first encounter with music. My father was a pastor, and I remember how waiting for him in the church was extraordinarily boring for me. One day, he sat me at the pipe organ and told me to amuse myself for a while so he could work. Experiencing those low pedal notes that you can feel more than hear, and the high frequencies that seemed to caress my skin... The fact that I was triggering the sounds from a keyboard while the church's acoustics made the sound emanate from the whole building was magical. Different tones seemed to come from different origins, as though the organ was a whole orchestra rather than one instrument. That encounter with the pure physicality of sound was transformative, and since then I have been very interested in studying acoustics and the physics of sound.”
What role do your compositions play in Le lacrime di Eros?
“My work involves a subversion, distortion and deconstruction of the music that Raphaël has selected. There will be moments in the performance where I perform deconstructions of the music, tying into some of the themes of the programme or providing movement from one scene to the next. My compositions create a framework for the themes, objects, and machines on stage, which establishes them as necessarily existing. The music and sounds that I bring also function as a sort of analytical tool, through which elements can be highlighted and either defined or left ambiguous. Using technology beyond the voices and instrumentation, it's possible to create a tangible presence of sound. And in fact, the brutal physicality of sound can lead to the dematerialising of the figure, of actual objects.”
How did you approach this assignment?
“The real core of this performance is the body of work that Raphaël has curated, so that's the starting point. Of course, they were selected and organised to present specific themes, so my point of departure is how do I interface with them, interfere against them, move around them, how can I provide landscapes for them to exist within.”
“Romeo has designed some robotics and mechanical devices and selected some industrial machines for use on stage. These non-musical elements have to be folded into the greater scope of the performance, to be integrated into the orchestra with their own musicality. As much as possible, I try not to impose music on the objects so much as carve it out.”
Can you describe the sound experience of Le lacrime di Eros?
“It will be its own world. That’s one of my goals anyway, to feel like these are existences parallel to our own, which are familiar and strange at the same time. We are witnessing a secret world that existed before the curtains opened, and will continue to exist after they close. The sound diffusion is part of the key. We’re very lucky to be working with sound consultant Rémy Bréan, who has designed a sound mapping for the DNO auditorium in order to place the music in three-dimensional space. Which brings us back to the experiments in sound diffusion that were being done in the sixteenth century, during the creative explosion of experimentation that would ultimately result in the creation of Opera itself as an art form.”
Dutch text: Jasmijn van Wijnen
Libretto
Libretto Le lacrime di Eros
Main sponsor Dutch National Opera & Ballet
Partner
