Luogo e data di registrazione		Beethoven-Saal, Hannover (Germany) - 25/30 Luglio 1955
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Produzione		Dr. Fred Hamel
	Recording Engineer		Harald Baudis
	Prima Edizione LP		Archiv | 14057/58 APM | 2 LPs - durata 46' 57" - 50' 55" | (p) 1955 | Mono
	Edizione CD		Archiv Produktion "Codex" | 453 176-2 | 2 CDs - durata 47' 32" - 56' 44" | (p) 1997 | ADD | Mono
	Cover Art		-
	Note		Sommerlichen Musktage Hitzacker 1955

On the 24nd Febraury 1607 a group of brilliant and erudite people assembled at Mantua to witness the first performance of the "Favola in Musica", by the court musical director of the noble house of Gonzaga, Claudio Monteverdi, who was then forty years of age and was already one of the most eminent musicians of northern Italy. The audience were justified in expecting something noteworthly, and they were not disappointed. "Orpheus" proved itself to be neither a pompous spectacle with music like those customary at courtly entertainments, nor a musically rather arid melodrama in the style evolved a few years previously in Florence, but a hitherto unique mixture of the two. True, it was a drama set word for word to music, like its Florentine predecessors, but there was none of the slavish subortination of music to text which had weakened the earlier operas. Monteverdi employed all the means available to him: the old polyphonic style used side by side with the new single voice technique, and all the wealth of instrumental effects known at that time. These various elements were not brought into play haphazardly or for their own sake, as in the old festive works, but solely for the purposes of the drama. "Orpheus" is therefore a music drama, the first in musical history, although from a textual point of view it is merely a more lyrical than dramatic Pastoral in a style common at that time. Orpheus and Eurydice appear in the first act among the carefree shepherds and nymphs as among their own kind, and in the second act a nymph brings Orpheus the news of Eurydice's death. The two following acts, set in the Underworld, contain virtually all the dramatic action: the winning over of Charon, the reunion of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the final tragedy of Eurydice's second death. The lyrical fifth act, Orpheus' "Lamento", returns to the pastoral scene of the first and second acts, with as little action. This division of the work into two clearly defined sections exercised a strong influence on Monteverdi in his choice of instrumental colours. He paints the idyllic scenes on earth, with their nymphs and shepherds, by means of the gentle tones of flutes, strings, harpsichord and organ: the Underworld is depicted by the awe-inspiring tones of trumpets and trombones, with a portative organ as continuo. The hero Orpheus, with his characteristic music, appears in both parts of the work. The brightness of the scenes on earth is characterized by a species of lyrical recitative, alternated by short strophic songs, madrigalesque choric dances, and lively, rhythmic orchestral interludes. These varied elements combine to create the idyllic atmosphere of the pastoral scenes. The happy mood is destroyed at a blow with the news of Eurydice's death. At the entrance of the nymph bringing the tragic message in the middle of the second act it is as though the door to another world were opened. The gently flowing lyrical declamation hitherto employed is now no longer able to bear the emotional burden of the situation. A more dramatic mode of expression is called upon, the vocal line becoming more forceful, the harmony taking on a new tenseness, with astonishingly sharp dissonances. In short, all formal considerations are treated as being of secondary importance to the music's primary purpose of creating in the spectators the most potent emotional feeling possible. A psychological masterpiece and a highspot of the opera is the short dialogue of questions and answers between the Messenger and Orpheus, the message of Eurydice's death itself, and the despalring cry "Ohimè" with which Orpheus reacts to the news. This impassioned dramatic declamation (especially impressive in the narration of Eurydice's death, in the lament of Orpheus which follows it, to the expression of his anxiety on behalf of his regained and then irrevocabily lost Eurydice, and in his final "Lamento" in the fifth act) is alternated, in the scenes in Hades, with pathetic choruses and solemn, ominous instrumental interludes. a born musical dramatist, Monteverdi knew that a continuous state of emotional tension would tire the soectators. He therefore introduced not only straightforward declamatory passages into the recitative, but also on out and out comic part, that of the ferryman Charon in the third act. Even Orpheus' great vocal solo "Possente spirto, e formidabil nume", in which he employs all his wonderful art as a singer, does not disturb the rough Charon from his stupid self-satisfaction. Monteverdi's "Orpheus" ist the earliest real music drama, that is to say the first work in which the music is entirely one with the dramatic idea, but both the music and the idea itself are far removed from anything to which modern audiences are accustomed, and it is necessary to make an effort to see the work from the viewpoint of the period at which iy was written if the full measure of its greatness is to be appreciated. All that later generations have achieved with powerful musical-dramatic situations, novel instrumental effects and huge orchestral forces, had its origins in the achievement of the operatic genius Claudio Monteverdi, who used all that he found serviceable of the resources available to him, with the enthusiastic approval of his more enlightened contemporaries. We only need to understand how to listen to his music - then it is a revelation! Anna Amalie Abert