Orfeo's enterprise

Orfeo and Caronte

[Image source: https://petrareinhardt.com/stage_cinema/lorfeo/ . From a production by Opéra de Lausanne, October 2016.]




CORO di SPIRITI INFERNALI:

Nulla impresa per huom si tenta invano,
Né contro a lui più sà Natura armarse:
Ei de l'instabil piano
Arò gl'ondosi campi e'l seme sparse
Di sue fatiche, ond'aurea messe accolse.
Quinci, perché memoria
Vivesse di sua gloria,
La Fama a dir di lui sua lingua sciolse,
Ch'ei pose freno al mar con fragil legno,
Che sprezzò d'Austr' e d'Aquilon lo sdegno.

CHORUS of INFERNAL SPIRITS:

No enterprise by man is undertaken in vain,
nor can Nature further defend herself against him.
He has ploughed the waving fields
of the uneven plain and scattered the seed
of his labour, whence he has reaped golden harvests.
Wherefore, so that the memory
of his glory shall live,
Fame has loosened her tongue to speak of him
who tamed the sea with fragile barque
and mocked the fury of the winds of the north and south.

End of Act III of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607). Its hero has just succeeded in entering the infernal regions, after using his lyre to charm the watchful Caronte (Charon) to sleep. From the libretto by Alessandro Striggio.  [Translation source: https://www.opera-arias.com/monteverdi/l'-orfeo/libretto/english/ ]


*

And he held and went; air
whistled along the passageway;
Hold and go, hold and go.
his wood labour, that would have made
a battalion, his cornetto.

You lay both hands along the bow
as on a bannister, after a knee replacement,
and you think what is undertaken has
its scattered footprint, it can't fail.

Even on the unstable plain, which is built
over archaic landfill. If nature might
wear armour other than her own!

We and memory's noise of voices
have closed and opened, closed and opened
in the unjudging tide,
have fashioned such landmarks
that, to total and account for,
to look back, frightened by our own rumour,
to catch her fading on the sight....
-- Where does it leave us?



(MP)


*

The wordless autumn wind
puts people's grief
into words. They themselves cannot
do it, for it is existence
that grieves, a nothingness
inside us all that compels us
to torment, and be tormented,
and thus exist so
intensely that being
drowns out the grief. . .

(Gösta Ågren, from "The Return of Orpheus", in Hid (Coming Here), 1992, translation by David McDuff.)

*

Sinfonia: Nulla impresa per huom (John Eliot Gardiner / Monteverdi Choir / English Baroque Soloists)




[Post inspired by the I Fagiolini production of L'Orfeo at this year's York Early Music Festival (5th July 2019).]