The new Urtext edition of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin is suitable for performing the complete work or excerpts.
The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 today is doubtless the most popular seventeenth-century sacred work. It is widely performed and often recorded. Many of the problems it poses have been thoroughly researched and debated. And yet, producing a modern edition remains a challenge, especially in terms of interpreting the source in its context. Issues become relevant such as the question whether the Vespers is a unified work or a collection of independent movements, the seeming impossibility to establish a specific historic event or a specific liturgy for which it was composed, or how to solve certain discrepancies between extant sources. All these questions are connected, and they therefore all have to be resolved in order to establish a definitive score.
A group at the University of North Texas has taken up the challenge of editing the Vespers. Under my guidance as General Editor, ten students took on the task of critically editing at least one movement each, and to comment on each other’s work. Exploring the historical context of the Vespers, we developed an individual reading of the source; this led to an editorial approach that is somewhat unique for this work. Rather than taking the Vespers as a work composed to be performed in its entirety for a clearly defined occasion, we hold that it is a collection of movements to be used in various contexts as needed and appropriate.
Monteverdi assembled the 1610 print for three main purposes: to publish a collection of sacred music to be used to the glory of God for the Service of the Hours on various occasions; to demonstrate his skills as a composer of sacred polyphonic music, especially in light of his controversy with Artusi; and to create a portfolio for application to various positions as maestro di cappella at major churches in Italy. We thus regard the Vespers specifically as a collection of movements that may not have been intended for a single liturgical function, but that provided appropriate movements for a great number of occasions, both for liturgy and perhaps also for relatively private devotional music.
While it seems unlikely that in Monteverdi’s days the Vespers was ever performed fully on a single occasion, the work nevertheless represents an artistic unity in that its composer painstakingly assembled it to represent his most outstanding compositorial efforts in a wide variety of styles: old-fashioned polyphony, polychoral settings, concertato style, and modern, continuo-based dialogues and monody.
It was exciting to see how these ideas had very practical implications that shaped the edition of the work in unforeseen ways, from the interpretation of melodic variants between different part books to the understanding of how certain accidentals should be added to the music as presented in the source (compare our edition of Lauda Jerusalem with other interpretations of this difficult movement). As a result, our edition provides a fresh image of Monteverdi’s 400-year-old work, for modern performers and scholars.
A performance of the Vespers in its entirety is always a marvelous event. However, we would also like to encourage performers to consider performing individual movements from it, in different contexts and settings, since that is most likely the way this music was performed (and intended to be performed) in Monteverdi’s time. A movement such as the Magnificat sex vocibus might thus again gain its rightful place: regrettably, it is usually left out of modern performances since it sets the same text as the Magnificat septem vocibus, which uses similar compositional ideas, yet it is a highly individual movement full of charm and beauty.
Hendrik Schulze
(from [ta]kte 1/2013)