Monteverdi, Pari and de Rore in the face of love and loss
Monteverdi, Pari and de Rore in the face of love and loss
This programme takes us into the profound world of grief, despair and longing, in which composers Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Pari and Cipriano de Rore set the human experience of love, suffering and loss to music in a moving way.
At the centre is Claudio Monteverdi’s «La Sestina» – ‘Lagrime d’Amante al Sepolcro dell’Amata’ , a masterpiece that powerfully expresses the despair and inexorable decline of vitality in the face of the death of a loved one (his wife, who died three years earlier, and as well his 18 years old deceased student Caterina Martinelli, who was intended for the title role in the opera ‘Il Lamento d’Arianna’) through the artful use of the ‘sestina’ form, so emotionally introduced to us by Francesco Petrarca.
Claudio Paris’ ‘Il Lamento d’Arianna’ takes up the theme of the abandoned lover and depicts Arianna’s lament after she was left behind by Theseus on Naxos. Paris’ setting, which draws on Monteverdi’s famous ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ Madrigal, captures the intensity of Arianna’s pain and despair with expressive melodies and rhetorical figures that immediately draw the listener into her emotional turmoil.
This programme is sublimated by a selection of 5 of the 11 Cipriano de Rores «Le Vergine» stanzas, in which Francesco Petrarca expresses his love for ‘Donna Laura’ and his grief over her death in 1348 as religious veneration of Mary.
Together, these works reveal music’s ability to reflect the most complex and profound human experiences. They invite us to empathise with the nature of love, the transience of life and its comforting powers.
@smihca2025
from heart to heart 