L’Orfeo (1607), by Claudio Monteverdi
In this musical commented audition, we will try to approach L’Orfeo by Monteverdi not only from a musical and historical point of view, but also through a principle: to conceive it as an absolutely religious and spiritual work. Claudio Monteverdi himself wrote in a letter in 1616 how this work took him “ad una giusta preghiera”. Thus, according to the musicologist Josep Mª Gregori, “the symbolic richness that permeates his sonorous discourse makes L’Orfeo a kind of religious opera, written and thought about religiously, almost as a liturgical act”. Now, how can we, women and men in 21st century, approach a work like this without falling into an easy reductionism based only on a biased conception limited to the interpretation and hermeneutics that the humanistic sciences provide?
Oriol Pérez Treviño