The Ricercar Consort

The Virgin’s Teares

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

From the 5th century onward, Marian worship held a significant place in Christian art; it experienced considerable growth during the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly in the realm of music, which saw the emergence of numerous hymns, antiphons, and canticles celebrating the Virgin. The Council of Trent's recommendation for greater textual clarity was soon complemented by the seconda prattica, a theory developed by Florentine intellectuals. This seconda prattica, or "new music," advocated for a return to monody, modeled on ancient traditions, which emphasized human emotions. Then, at the turn of the 17th century, the Baroque movement was born—an artistic movement rooted in contrasts and contradictions, but above all in the expression of passions, a revolutionary concept in the musical context of the time. This program, which centers on Mary in both her spiritual and secular aspects, perfectly illustrates this shift.

The interplay between the sacred and the secular is evident in the two works by Claudio Monteverdi featured in this program: Maria quid ploras and O stellae coruscantes are adaptations of secular madrigals to which the rhetorician Aquilino Coppini applied sacred texts in order to expand the repertoire of religious music. This practice was common; Monteverdi himself employed it in his Pianto della Madonna, transforming the famous Lamento d’Arianna into a Lamento della Vergine (Lament of the Virgin mourning her son.) The admiration of religious figures of the time for Monteverdi's music was so profound that they regarded it as divinely inspired and did not see a problem in this transformation from the secular to the sacred, as it was not a problem building a Christian church on the ancient site of a pagan temple.

The seconda prattica also paved the way for the development of entirely new instrumental music. At the dawn of the Baroque era, the sonata emerged, with the violin playing a prominent role thanks to the remarkable advancements in Italian lutherie. These early sonatas were still far from the classical models of Mozart or Beethoven that we are more familiar with today; they were short works featuring contrasting sections. The influence of Venice and its tradition of cori spezzati (separated choirs of voices or instruments responding to one another) is evident in these sonatas, which showcase the two violins in a true dialogue, as in the sonatas of Cima, Rossi, or Vivaldi's La Follia. La Susanna passegiata by Bartolomeo Selma y Salaverde, a Spanish composer based in Venice, highlights the tradition of virtuosic improvisation on the most famous songs or madrigals of the time. Here, the song Susanne ung jour by Roland de Lassus serves as the basis for improvisation, with the final section of the song repeated in a haunting ostinato.

La Canzonetta spirituale sopra alla nanna by Tarquinio Merula is both the most surprising piece in this program and the one that best reveals the human side of the Virgin. It is a mother's lullaby to soothe her child, built on an ostinato of just two notes (evoking mothers rocking the baby). The Virgin transitions from the tenderness she feels for her baby to the horrifying visions of Christ's tragic passion.

After receiving his musical education in Padua and Venice, Giovanni Felice Sances settled in Vienna, where Italian chapel masters held most of the prominent positions. His Stabat Mater, in its form, is a true cantata that alternates recited passages with arias based on the tetrachord formula, a typical ostinato of Italian laments.

The influence of Monteverdi is strikingly evident in Henry Purcell's The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation, a scene that seems to emerge directly from a sacred opera. Purcell sets to music a passage from the Gospel of Luke recounting the disappearance of the twelve-year-old Christ, who remained in Jerusalem to debate with the scholars. The Virgin expresses her doubts, anxieties, and joys in a lengthy recitative interspersed with short arias that sometimes bring her to the brink of hysteria. The words of the poet Nahum Tate are heightened by Purcell's music, which, in his time, "was especially admir’d for the Vocal, having a peculiar Genius to express the energy of English Words, whereby he mov’d the Passions of all his Auditors."

In 1706, the young Handel abruptly decided to leave Hamburg, where he had already begun a promising career, to travel to Italy. This Italian speriod, lasting until 1710, was an important and formative period for the composer's creative genius. In Italy, Handel cultivated relationships with patrons and benefactors, and in 1707, he was commissioned by Cardinal Colonna to compose the antiphon Salve Regina for the Basilica of Santa Maria in Montesanto. The work is divided into three parts: the first, in minor, emphasizes the supplicant nature of the text; the second, more lively, includes a solo organ passage evoking the supplicant's hope; and the third, concluding the piece, is striking for its meditative and contemplative quality, in keeping with the spirit of the Carmelite order, which was then in charge of the Montesanto church.

Philippe Pierlot