“Tu sei Morta” from L’Orfeo

Individual Expression within Stylistic Control: Does It Work?

By Elizabeth Van’t Voort | February 4, 2021

There is often a question of who or what, in musical performance, controls the meaning of the music. Is it the lyrics and their meaning, or do the melody and harmony shape the way we perceive the lyrics? The person performing the music also chooses their own style of phrasing or emphasis of what is focused on. The push and pull of these elements can be debated through all different styles/genres of music, but I would like to look at it in consideration of Baroque music and add the element of historically informed performance. That is, the performer trying to recreate the style of performing that would have happened at the time the piece or song was written. In particular, I want to consider a performance of “Tu sei morta” from the opera L’Orfeo (1609) by Claudio Monteverdi, performed by Nigel Rogers, the London Baroque, and the London Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble. It showcases specific stylistic elements from early Baroque performance, such as the use of phrasing regarding harmony (for example, emphasis on dissonances and resolutions), the use of vibrato, the focus on Affect (a general emotion or feeling that the piece conveys), the pitch standard that they tune to, and—what I’ve found to be most interesting and contradictory—the use of ornamentation.

This piece and the ways it and Baroque music portrays meanings, suggests a sort of hierarchy in which the different elements relate to each other. But first I must start by giving some background on one of the terms mentioned earlier: affect. The Doctrine of Affections was a philosophy about human emotion in the Baroque era (particularly developed in René Descartes’s Traité des passions (1649)). It was based on Greek theories of balancing various fluids in your body. (Fascinating, right?) In essence, this theory claimed that there are six basic emotions or “passions”: admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sorrow. All others. are combinations of those basic emotions. In terms of how this applied to music, a single piece of music was generally focused on creating a single affect, so that the entire audience would be experiencing the same emotion. Composers developed almost mathematical processes to produce those emotions, and that’s where different treatment of harmonies (dissonances vs. resolutions, etc.) comes in. In this piece, “Tu sei morta”, the Affect generally produced could be described as something of sorrow mixed with love to create longing, as the character Orpheus is mourning his loved one’s passing and wishing to be with her. This reveals what could be the first layer of the hierarchy, the text. The content of the text in this piece (and in much Baroque music) directly defines the Affect of the piece.

There is still one more element influencing the meaning of the song that has not been touched on yet! The Affect and text together dictate or inspire the melody and harmony (although a case could be made that it is the other way around), but with so much already determined, what is there left for the performer to do? This question is an interesting and complex one, and one of the most fascinating things I found about this particular performance. With the other elements already so seemingly calculated and controlled, as a performer, there were also expectations of how to sing and play this music in order to bring out the harmonies and melodies in a way that supports the Affect. It would seem, then, that there is very little room left for individual creativity. But the Baroque era saw the rise of the virtuoso performer, and one of the things that was not only expected of soloists, but what also set them apart and showcased their virtuosity, was ornamentation. In the line “Meco trarrotti a riveder le stelle”, the melody on the word stelle (stars) reaches up the highest it has yet for the soloist, but he adds an ornament that goes even higher, and accentuates the meaning of the lyrics even further than the melody alone supported them (1:33 of the recording). This he does by his own choosing and in his own way; Baroque music was typically written with sparce to no ornaments and the soloists were expected to add them themselves. This ornament in particular is a perfect example of what I believe to be creative individualism within the limits of stylistic guidelines.

The ornaments at the end of the piece, particularly stood out to me because they are so different to the trills or mordents that we are typically more familiar with. In the second last bar the soloist, Nigel Rogers, uses a Baroque ornament known as passaggi with disposizione di voce (disposition of the voice), described in Grove Music Online as “glottal articulation, which allows for precise definition of rapid streams of notes.” This stunningly rapid scale he executes with each note separately articulated is enough to convince you of the soloist's skill, but then on the penultimate note of the piece he adds on three or so additional types of ornaments. Confession time: I am not a vocalist and really didn’t know much about ornaments specific to voice, but in this last bar I was blown away by what sounded to me like a vocal version of a Baroque violin ornamentation known as “bow vibrato”, where the violinist bounces the bow lightly and quickly on one repeated note. Rogers here creates the same effect but with his voice! I have now learned that it is, in fact, called a trillo and was specifically used right before cadences. Now this is where there is conflict in my mind. When the ornamentation of a piece is the one time a performer has creative freedom to bring in their own individual taste, do they still have that freedom when each ornament itself is so structured within a style; or are they pulled back into the hierarchy of text to Affect, to harmony and melody, to phrasing and expression of the performer, and lastly to the performer’s ornamentation choices, serving both the meaning of the text and the stylistic expectations of the period?

When focusing on individual elements, it can seem that they have primary control over the musician and the meaning or portrayal of the message, rather than a more traditional approach of individual taste. But I think that even within these sets of stylistic “rules” performers still may show creative and expressive freedom. There is also the consideration that, as a modern performer, the ability to understand and execute such specific stylistic interpretations could highlight your own personal style, maybe even more!