Monteverdi Wrapped Up
" THE superb details of workmanship in the compositions of 1610 have been fined down to a more schematic ` blanc-et-noir ' style of buoyant tutti—and concertante ' solo '—episodes " ; writes Dr. Redlich. This is literary barbarism, nothing less ; and so to abase one art in older to celebrate the splendours of another is a poor service to Art itself. if music, as some say, will not " go into words," still less will it go into jargon of this sort. And yet it would be a mistake to blame Dr. Redlich's faithful translator, Kathleen Dale, or to imagine that this study of Monteverdi is no more than a collec- tion of technical discussions of abstruse points. As a bdbk it is not readable, at least by English standards (I fancy German-speaking countries have different standards for works of scholarship), and, like most German hooks, needed re-writing—umschreiben, as they them- selves say—rather than translating, into English. Instead of this Dr. Redlich asks his readers to accept as untranslatable, and therefore as justified accretions to the English language, such monstrosities as musicaler Klangmaterialismus (to denote nothing more complicated than an unintelligent literalism in performance of old music) and Zufallsorchester for " fortuitous instrumentation."
Nevertheless, those who can surmount these initial difficulties of presentation will find a great deal of interesting material in Dr. Redlich's study of the " first of the moderns." The chapters devoted to his life are well documented, though sometimes over- charged with irrelevant detail which further obscures the already shadowy figure of the composer. Both he and his music are set against the historical background, and his relationship with his predecessors discussed at length. In his discussion of the music Dr. Redlich illustrates his points tellingly by musical examples, a most important factor in the presentation of music a so minute portion of which is familiar to his readers. He does not attempt a solution of the mystery of what Monteverdi himself called prima and seconda prat tica ; but he emphasises, again with well chosen examples, the large element of sheer musical invention in Monteverdi's music and the indebtedness of later composers—not only in the operatic field—to this masked or even forgotten innovator. How many of the musical " painters of the emotions " in the eighteenth century, for instance, realised that they were doing little more than revive and possibly extend Monteverdi's conscious elaboration of music as a language of the emotions ?
Possibly the most interesting chapter is that devoted to Monteverdi as a composer for the Church, since this is the province in which his achievement is most completely forgotten. As a composer of madrigals and opera we occasionally meet him, even though too often represented by the same pieces; but outside the Vespers his Church music is virtually never performed in the concert-hall. The masses and motets are worth performing both for themselves and for the correcting of the one-sided picture which we get of the composer by Concentrating our attention on his dramatic innovations, by regarding him, in fact, primarily as a figure of historical rather than
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