L’organizzazione dello spazio sonoro nell’Orfeo di Claudio Monteverdi: modelli e strutture.

Abstract

The essay investigates some aspects of Orfeo’s musical language under the perspective of the authors’ researches in the field of tonal organisation of Renaissance polyphony. Point of departure of those researches is the idea that Renaissance composers, when they were to compose any music, should have had some criteria in their minds with which to organise the tonal space. These criteria were perhaps not totally coincident with theorists’ concept of ‘mode’, but should have been somehow close to it. After a summary of Eric Chafe’s 1992 ‘tonal’ analysis of Orfeo, the paper examines two important organising factors of the opera: the tonal type beq -A and the use of sequences. The examination reveals how differently the same tonal type beq -A organises the tonal space, in relationship to each dramatic situation, and how the use of sequences, especially in Bass parts, provides music with a ‘deep’ arioso character, different from the ‘superficial’ one of the canzonette in Chiabrera’s style.