Orpheus ascending: Monteverdi triumphs in Brooklyn.(three operas)

Portraits of Claudio Monteverdi show a pale, stern man with vaguely haunted eyes. He could be mistaken for a Renaissance prelate of intellectual bent, one who tried to keep the world and its pleasures at a distance. This ascetic-looking character was, in fact, the godfather of opera in all its Dionysian delirium. Last month, the Brooklyn Academy of Music mounted a festival of the three great Monteverdi operas: "Orfeo," in a production from the Chicago Opera Theatre; "The Coronation of Poppea," from the Dutch National Opera; and, best of all, "The Return of Ulysses," from the Aix-en-Provence Festival, with William Christie and the musicians of Les Arts Florissants. At each performance I attended -- there were thirteen performances in all -- a full house responded with raucous cheers. Not a bad New York run for a four-hundred-and-thirty-four-year-old composer.

Did Monteverdi invent opera? Technically, no; practically, yes. Opera had existed for only a decade when the composer produced "Orfeo," in 1607, and he was the first to draw perfection from the form. By 1600, the theory of music drama had fallen into place; for decades, progressive scholars, among them Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo, had been urging composers to abandon the arcana of counterpoint in favor of a more expressive, single-voiced style. The pioneers of Florentine opera fashioned a method of recitative singing which allowed for the exposition of plot between arias. But the earliest operas lacked narrative drive; after a while, the recitatives tended to exhaust the ears. Monteverdi, who was already writing quasi-operatic scenes in madrigal form, electrified the genre with the force of his personality. Conversational melodic lines, commanding interval leaps, sharp rhythmic contrasts, abrupt chord changes, biting dissonances, ominous roving basses -- all spell out the violence of Orpheus' emotions as he descends into the underworld.

Having begun at the summit, Monteverdi followed opera as it evolved from an aristocratic to a popular art. "Orfeo" was written for the elder son of the Duke of Mantua, and it appealed directly to the taste of a refined young nobleman; Orpheus' sensuously spiralling lamentations mirrored the fad for melancholy in the Renaissance. "Ulysses" and "Poppea" were composed decades later, in Venice, for a much different audience. By the sixteen-thirties, opera had grown so popular that a public opera house had opened in the heart of Venice, and, under new commercial pressures, composers began to incorporate the conventions of bawdy farce. Women played boys, young men played old women, servants cackled at emperors. Monteverdi, by this time the music director of St. Mark's, held himself aloof from the public opera at first, as was probably expected of a great man in his seventies. But he soon returned to the fray, and at the time of his death, in 1643, he was writing prolifically for the annual carnival season.

The earthy magnificence of "Ulysses" and "Poppea" points up a central fact of Monteverdi's work: every device, no matter how innovative, has a specific theatrical weight. Those Stravinskyan dissonances echo the wildness of a rural band, in which players go their separate ways over a common ground. The surprise modulations, pivoting rapidly on a fixed tone, mimic the waywardness of an actor in the throes of passion. The famous lamenting basses -- still a fixture of pop music -- are X-rays of a shattered heart. (Sade's recent hit "By Your Side," with its four-note descending bass, is very Monteverdi-like.) The composer embraces everything -- the low comic and the high tragic, street theatre and psychodrama. What is great in Monteverdi cannot be separated from what is popular. This is the ultimate legacy of opera's founding master.

Les Arts Florissants' vibrant performance of "The Return of Ulysses" gave a sense of what it must have been like to witness a Monteverdi masterpiece amid the chaos of a Venice carnival. The freedom of the playing was thrilling: Les Arts seemed to be making up the score as it went along. William Christie, who founded this now legendary early-music institution in 1979, did almost nothing in the way of traditional conducting, keeping busy with the harpsichord, organ, and regals. In a recent interview with the online magazine Andante, ...