Albrecht Dürer, The Death of Orpheus, 1494. Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
On 23 February 1607 Carlo Magni, a gentleman of the court of Mantua, writes to his brother in Rome that the following evening the prince will have a singular fable performed, because “all the interlocutors will speak musically”. The next day, in a hall of the Ducal Palace, before the members of the Invaghiti academy and in the thick of Carnival, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, to verses by Alessandro Striggio, is staged. On 1 March it is repeated. Of those two evenings two printed books remain, two years apart, and the two books do not end the same way.
The first is the libretto, issued in Mantua for the occasion. The second is the score, which Ricciardo Amadino prints in Venice in 1609 with a dedication by Monteverdi to Prince Francesco Gonzaga dated 22 August. In the libretto, after losing Euridice for the second time, Orfeo swears he will love no other woman; he hears a hostile band approaching and withdraws. The Bacchantes enter, sing hymns to Bacchus and urge one another to vengeance against the man who has offended their sex. The rest the audience of 1607 knew from Ovid: the singer torn to pieces, the head carried down the river still calling out. In the score, in place of the Bacchantes, Apollo descends from the sky. He rebukes his son for the excess of his grief, promises that he will see Euridice’s likeness in the sun and the stars, and takes him away with him. The two ascend singing “Saliam cantando al cielo” (“let us rise, singing, to heaven”), the chorus closes, a moresca dismisses the hall.
From this arises a legend that circulates readily, and that this magazine even had on its schedule: Monteverdi the widower, sending Orfeo down to the underworld to look for his own wife. The dates do not hold. Claudia Cattaneo, a court singer, married to Claudio in 1599, falls ill in the summer of 1607, is taken to Cremona to the house of her father-in-law, a physician, and dies on 10 September, six and a half months after the premiere. When Orfeo descends into Hades before the Gonzagas, she is alive. The mourning comes afterwards and falls, if anything, on the printing: it is as a widower that in 1609 Monteverdi signs the book in which a father consoles an inconsolable man. But no document says he chose that ending for reasons of his own, and the soundest explanation does not pass through biography.
It was proposed by Nino Pirrotta: the Mantuan hall was too narrow for a machine capable of lowering a god from the ceiling, and the Apollo ending, perhaps planned from the start, could not be mounted that evening. Others think the opposite. The lutenist and conductor Stephen Stubbs is convinced that in 1607 the audience really did see the Bacchantes, and that the sky was added for the book. The musicologist Silke Leopold has pointed to a curious clue: the final moresca, a wild dance ill suited to follow an apotheosis, may be the residue of the old ending, the dance during which the Bacchantes tore Orfeo apart.
In either case the 1609 score does not photograph a performance, it rewrites it for those who were not there. It is a commemorative print, full of indications about which instruments played at which point, designed for readers scattered throughout Italy, and a distant reader needs a written conclusion more than a myth to be completed from memory. So the first opera to remain steadily in the repertoire has two endings: one for the hall in Mantua, one for the libraries of Europe. And the second has won for a simple reason.
In 1615 Amadino reprinted the score, and the ending was still Apollo’s. Of the music that accompanied the Bacchantes, if it was ever written, not a single note has reached us.