Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (SV 325, The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland) is an opera consisting of a prologue and five acts (later revised to three), set by Claudio Monteverdi to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. The opera was first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1639–1640 carnival season. The story, taken from the second half of Homer's Odyssey, tells how constancy and virtue are ultimately rewarded, treachery and deception overcome. After his long journey home from the Trojan Wars Ulisse, king of Ithaca, finally returns to his kingdom where he finds that a trio of villainous suitors are importuning his faithful queen, Penelope. With the assistance of the gods, his son Telemaco and a staunch friend Eumete, Ulisse vanquishes the suitors and recovers his kingdom.
Il ritorno is the first of three full-length works which Monteverdi wrote for the burgeoning Venetian opera industry during the last five years of his life. After its initial successful run in Venice the opera was performed in Bologna before returning to Venice for the 1640–41 season. Thereafter, except for a possible performance at the Imperial court in Vienna late in the 17th century, there were no further revivals until the 20th century. The music became known in modern times through the 19th-century discovery of an incomplete manuscript score which in many respects is inconsistent with the surviving versions of the libretto. After its publication in 1922 the score's authenticity was widely questioned, and performances of the opera remained rare during the next 30 years. By the 1950s the work was generally accepted as Monteverdi's, and after revivals in Vienna and Glyndebourne in the early 1970s it became increasingly popular. It has since been performed in opera houses all over the world, and has been recorded many times.
Together with Monteverdi's other Venetian stage works, Il ritorno is classified as one of the first modern operas. Its music, while showing the influence of earlier works, also demonstrates Monteverdi's development as a composer of opera, through his use of fashionable forms such as arioso, duet and ensemble alongside the older-style recitative. By using a variety of musical styles, Monteverdi is able to express the feelings and emotions of a great range of characters, divine and human, through their music. Il ritorno has been described as an "ugly duckling", and conversely as the most tender and moving of Monteverdi's surviving operas, one which although it might disappoint initially, will on subsequent hearings reveal a vocal style of extraordinary eloquence.
Historical context
Monteverdi was an established court composer in the service of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua when he wrote his first operas, L'Orfeo and L'Arianna, in the years 1606–08. After falling out with Vincenzo's successor, Duke Francesco Gonzaga, Monteverdi moved to Venice in 1613 and became director of music at St Mark's Basilica, a position he held for the rest of his life. Alongside his steady output of madrigals and church music, Monteverdi continued to compose works for the stage, though not actual operas. He wrote several ballets and, for the Venice carnival of 1624–25, Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda ("The Battle of Tancred and Clorinda"), a hybrid work with some characteristics of ballet, opera and oratorio.
In 1637 fully-fledged opera came to Venice with the opening of the Teatro San Cassiano. Sponsored by the wealthy Tron family, this theatre was the first in the world specifically devoted to opera. The theatre's inaugural performance, on 6 March 1637, was L'Andromeda by Francesco Manelli and Benedetto Ferrari. This work was received with great enthusiasm, as was the same pair's La Maga fulminata the following year. In rapid succession three more opera houses opened in the city, as the ruling families of the Republic sought to express their wealth and status by investing in the new musical fashion. At first, Monteverdi remained aloof from these activities, perhaps on account of his age (he was over 70), or perhaps through the dignity of his office as maestro di capella at St. Mark's. Nevertheless, an unidentified contemporary, commenting on Monteverdi's silence, opined that the maestro might yet produce an opera for Venice: "God willing, one of these nights he too will step onto the stage." This remark proved prescient; Monteverdi's first public contribution to Venetian opera came in the 1639–40 carnival season, a revival of his L'Arianna at the Teatro San Moisè.
L'Arianna was followed in rapid succession by three brand new Monteverdi operas, of which Il ritorno was the first. The second, Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia ("The Marriage of Aeneas to Lavinia"), was performed during the 1640–41 carnival; Monteverdi's music is lost, but a copy of the libretto, of unknown authorship, survives. The last of the three, written for the 1642–43 carnival, was L'incoronazione di Poppea ("The Coronation of Poppea"), performed shortly before the composer's death in 1643.
Creation
Libretto
Giacomo Badoaro (1602–1654) was a prolific poet in the Venetian dialect who was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, a group of free-thinking intellectuals interested in promoting musical theatre in Venice—Badoaro himself held a financial interest in the Teatro Novissimo. Il ritorno was his first libretto; he would later, in 1644, write another Ulysses-based libretto for Francesco Sacrati. The text of Il ritorno, originally written in five acts but later reorganised as three, is a generally faithful adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, Books 13–23, with some characterisations altered or expanded. Badoaro may have been influenced in his treatment of the story by the 1591 play Penelope by Giambattista della Porta. The libretto was written with the express purpose of tempting Monteverdi to enter the world of Venetian opera, and it evidently captured the elderly composer's imagination. Badoaro and Monteverdi used a classical story to illustrate the human condition of their own times.
The Monteverdi scholar Ellen Rosand has identified 12 versions of the published libretto that have been discovered in the years since the first performance. Most of these appear to be 18th-century copies, possibly from a single source; some are literary versions, unrelated to any theatrical performances. All but one of the 12 identify Badoaro as the author, while the other gives no name. Only two refer to Monteverdi as the composer, though this is not significant—composers' names were rarely given on printed librettos. The texts are all generally the same in each case, and all differ from the one surviving copy of Monteverdi's musical score, which has three acts instead of five, a different prologue, a different ending, and many scenes and passages either omitted or rearranged. Some of the libretto copies locate the opera's first performance at Teatro San Cassiano, although Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo is now generally accepted as the opening venue.
Composition It is not known when Monteverdi received the libretto from Badoaro, but this was presumably during or before 1639 since the work was being prepared for performance in the 1639–40 carnival. In keeping with the general character of Venetian opera, the work was written for a small band—around five string players and various continuo instruments. This reflected the financial motives of the merchant princes who were sponsoring the opera houses—they demanded commercial as well as artistic success, and wanted to minimise costs. As was common at the time, precise instrumentation is not indicated in the score, which exists in a single handwritten manuscript discovered in the Vienna National Library in the 19th century.
A study of the score reveals many characteristic Monteverdi features, derived from his long experience as a composer for the stage and of other works for the human voice. Rosand believes that rather than casting doubts on Monteverdi's authorship, the significant differences between the score and the libretto might lend support to it, since Monteverdi was well known for his adaptations of the texts presented to him. Ringer reinforces this, writing that "Monteverdi boldly reshaped Badoaro's writing into a coherent and supremely effective foundation for a music drama", adding that Badoaro claimed that he could no longer recognise the work as his own. Contemporaries of the composer and the librettist saw an identification between Ulysses and Monteverdi; both are returning home—"home" in Monteverdi's case being the medium of opera which he had mastered and then left, 30 years earlier.
Authenticity Before and after the publication of the score in 1922, scholars questioned the work's authenticity, and its attribution to Monteverdi continued to be in some doubt until the 1950s. The Italian musicologist Giacomo Benvenuti maintained, on the basis of a 1942 performance in Milan, that the work was simply not good enough to be by Monteverdi. Apart from the stylistic differences between Il ritorno and Monteverdi's other surviving late opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, the main issue which raised doubts was the series of discrepancies between the score and the libretto. However, much of the uncertainty concerning the attribution was resolved through the discovery of contemporary documents, all confirming Monteverdi's role as the composer. These documents include a letter from the unknown librettist of Le nozze d'Enea in Lavinia, which discusses Monteverdi's setting of Il ritorno. There is also Badoaro's preface to the Il ritorno libretto, addressed to the composer, which includes the wording "I can firmly state that my Ulysses is more indebted to you than ever was the real Ulysses to the ever-gracious Minerva". A 1644 letter from Badoaro to Michelangelo Torcigliani contains the statement "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria was embellished with the music of Claudio Monteverdi, a man of great fame and enduring name". Finally, a 1640 booklet entitled Le Glorie della Musica indicates the Badoaro-Monteverdi pairing as the creators of the opera. In the view of conductor and instrumentalist Sergio Vartolo, these findings establish Monteverdi as the principal composer "beyond a shadow of a doubt". Although parts of the music may be by other hands, there is no doubt that the work is substantially Monteverdi's and remains close to his original conception.
Roles The work features a large number of characters—more than thirty, including small choruses of heavenly beings, sirens and Phaecians—but these parts can be organised among thirteen singers (four sopranos, two altos, five tenors and two basses) by appropriate doubling of roles.Schneider, Magnus Tessing, "Heavenly Masquerades: On Doubling in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria", in Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation, edited by Ellen Rosand and Stefano La Via (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 194–211. This approximates to the normal forces employed in Venetian opera. In the score, the role of Eumete changes midway through Act II from tenor to soprano castrato, suggesting that the surviving manuscript may have been created from more than one source. In modern performances the latter part of Eumete's role is usually transposed to a lower range, to accommodate the tenor voice throughout.