at the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and Georgetown University, presents Tasso, Monteverdi, and the Arts.
Lecturers Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University) and Peter Lukehart (National Gallery of Art CASVA) will present Torquato Tasso’s poem Jerusalem Delivered and the works of art it inspired.
The National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble with soprano and artistic director Rosa Lamoreaux, and the National Gallery of Art Chamber Players will perform the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Claudio Monteverdi.
Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University):Worthy of a Full Theater’: Reality and Illusion in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.
Peter Lukehart (National Gallery of Art CASVA): Resisting Love and Embracing War in Representations of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, performed by the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble with soprano Rosa Lamoreaux, artistic director, and the National Gallery of Art Chamber Players.
ABOUT THE IMAGE: Bernardo Castello, draftsman; Agostino Carracci, engraver. Clorinda Dying in the Arms of Tancred (from La Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso), Genoa 1590. The Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
RSVP
Lectures at 6:00 pm, Concert at 7:00 pm.Admittance free and open to the public. First-come, first-seated. Seating begins at 5:30 pm.
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No admittance after 7:00 pm
LOCATION
National Gallery of Art
West Building, West Garden Court
Sixth Street and Constitution Ave. NW
Washington, DC
MORE INFO
Laura Benedetti – Biography
Laura Benedetti is the Chair of the Italian Department at Georgetown University. She graduated summa cum laude from the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and holds a Masters from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining Georgetown as the first Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professor of Contemporary Italian Culture she taught for eight years at Harvard, where she became the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities.
Laura Benedetti is the author of over sixty articles, encyclopedia entries and reviews which span seven hundred years, from Boccaccio to Elena Ferrante. From 2000 to 2010 she wrote the annual entry on Italian literature for the Encyclopedia Britannica Year in Review, highlighting Italy’s most recent narrative and poetic production. She has also published the edition of Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s 1554 Discorso dei romanzi (with Enrico Musacchio and Giuseppe Monorchio), a monograph on Torquato Tasso (La sconfitta di Diana. Un percorso per la Gerusalemme Liberata), the proceedings of two conferences (Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, with Julia Hairston and Silvia Ross) and The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in 20th-Century Italy, which won the 2008 Flaiano International Prize. Her translation of Lucrezia Marinella’s Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please, complete with an introduction and over four hundred notes, was published in 2012 as part of the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe,” making this important volume available to the public for the first time after its original edition in 1645.
Laura Benedetti – Abstract
Worthy of a Full Theater’: Reality and Illusion in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.
Complex yet coherent, haunting and artistically accomplished, the duel of Tancredi and Clorinda constitutes the core of Jerusalem Delivered as well as one of the most celebrated episodes in the history of Western literature. Tancredi, a valiant knight of the Christian army, does not recognize his beloved Clorinda under the guise of a mysterious warrior, and unwittingly slays her. While no reader can remain indifferent to Tasso’s artistry, the deepest reason for the long-lasting appeal of the story lies in the implications of Tancredi’s fatal mistake, which centuries later would not escape Sigmund Freud’s keen attention. Tancredi fails to accept Clorinda’s unique history and complexity, but in doing so he condemns himself to lifelong unhappiness. The real theme of the episode is therefore the inability to embrace Otherness–a theme that resonates throughout the centuries and for all of us. No wonder Tancredi and Clorinda would continue to strike each other as warriors and miss each other as lovers in the works of poets, painters, and composers, mesmerized by the tragic beauty of Tasso’s story.
by Laura Benedetti, Chair of the Italian Department at Georgetown University
Peter Lukehart – Biography
Peter M. Lukehart is Associate Dean at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (2001-present), where he has special responsibility for the fellowship program. He was educated at Eckerd College B.A. (1977), majoring in French literature. He received an M.A, in art history, in 1980 from Temple University, and a Ph. D., also in art history, from The Johns Hopkins University in 1988. He taught at George Mason University from 1988-1990, and then served as Mellon assistant curator of Southern Baroque Painting at the National Gallery of Art from 1990-1992. From 1992 until 2001, he held a joint appointment at Dickinson College where he was director of the college’s museum, The Trout Gallery, and also assistant (1992-2000) and then associate (2000-2001) professor of art history. In 2000, Lukehart organized the exhibition and related website Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, which won the Dibner Award in the History of Science. He has a longstanding interest in the education and incorporation of artists in the early modern period. His publications on this subject include contributions to the exhibition catalogue Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro: Artist-Brothers in Renaissance Rome (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007) and to The Artist’s Workshop, published under his editorship in the Studies in the History of Art series at the National Gallery of Art (1993). He also served as editor of the Accademia Seminars (2009), for which he wrote the introduction and an essay “Visions and Divisions in the Early History of the Accademia di San Luca.” He is project director for an online research database entitled “The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590-1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma” (www.nga.gov/casva/accademia). His most recent article, “Ut icona poesis: Gabriello Chiabrera, Bernardo Castello, and the Sacro Volto of Genoa,” was published in Gifts in Return (2012), a festscrhift for Charles Dempsey.
Peter Lukehart – Abstract
Resisting Love and Embracing War in Representations of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata
The publication of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata in 1581 occasioned a host of responses from literati, musicians, and artists that lasted well into the eighteenth century. This talk focuses on the copious trove of drawings, paintings, and prints created during the first decades after the epic became part of the shared culture of Italy. From lavishly illustrated editions of Tasso’s poem to handsomely decorated interiors, the text provided a rich source of narrative material for painters, draftsmen, and printmakers. Yet, in these early years there was no consensus on which scenes from each canto embodied the most climactic or poignant moment in the lives of its protagonists, such as the brave warriors Rinaldo and Tancred. Their exploits on and off the battlefield illuminated a range of moral and emotional dilemmas that spoke to artists and audiences alike. One moment succumbing to the pleasure of amorous dalliances, the next taking up arms against the enemy, Tasso’s characters are described in nuanced portraits, each facet of which would later be represented in art. These diverse, and sometimes contradictory, artistic responses offer a window into the contemporary reception and understanding of Gerusalemme Liberata before a much smaller subset of scenes became canonical.
by Peter M. Lukehart, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona, near Milan, in 1567. Before moving to Mantua, at the Gonzaga court, as maestro di cappella, he studied in Cremona, where he was also active as a singer and a composer. In 1613 he moved to Venice to work at the Basilica di San Marco, and in 1632, after the death of his wife, he entered priesthood and died in Venice in 1643.
His groundbreaking production includes madrigals, sacred music (Selva morale e spirituale, Vespri della Beata Vergine), and operas (Orfeo, Arianna, Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, Incoronazione di Poppea).
Monteverdi’s music is almost exclusively devoted to singing, and the fact that he wrote the musical scores to texts by Italian poets both of his time and of the past, greatly contributed to spread their fame internationally and to ensure that they were not forgotten in the centuries to come.
He wrote in a style that he called the seconda prattica, to distinguish himself from the more conservative tradition of Palestrina and his contemporaries. For Monteverdi the starting point was always the text. The music simply reflected whatever mood the words might suggest, or whatever meaning a single word needed to convey. This technique allowed Monteverdi to reach astonishing levels of dramatic depth both in his sacred and profane music, setting a new standard for western music.
Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
Tancredi loves Clorinda. They meet, but as she is in armour, he does not recognize her. They challenge one another and begin to fight in the darkness. Three times, Clorinda manages to avert the knight’s embrace, since it is that of an enemy, not of a lover. As dawn breaks, Tancredi sees that his enemy is more seriously wounded than he is. He asks her name, but Clorinda refuses to give it; and the fight is resumed with more savagery than before. During the ensuing combat, Clorinda is mortally wounded and only then does Tancredi recognize his adversary.
Due in part to its innovative format, Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, composed in 1624, is an early baroque vocal work that is difficult to classify. It was first presented to the public in 1638, when it appeared with several other pieces in Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. Usually described as an operatic scena, the one-act musical drama is intended for performance by three solo singers and a small instrumental ensemble. The libretto, based on Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581), is a Romance set against the backdrop of the First Crusade.
In this work, Monteverdi juxtaposes the orchestra and the voices as two separate entities. His division of the strings into four independent parts instead of the usual five was innovative for its time and was not generally adopted by European composers until the eighteenth century. The score contains one of the earliest known uses of pizzicato in baroque music. It also contains one of the earliest uses of the string tremolo—reiterating a particular note rapidly as a means of generating excitement. This latter device was so revolutionary that Monteverdi had considerable difficulty getting the players of his day to perform it correctly.
National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble
Now in its ninth season as a chamber choir under the leadership of artistic director Rosa Lamoreaux, the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble has presented special programs in connection with Gallery exhibitions, including seventeenth-century Dutch music in honor of Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (2008) and Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age (2009), as well as music by Vivaldi and other Italian composers to celebrate the opening of Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals (2011). In 2010 members of the Vocal Ensemble joined forces with the early music ensemble ARTEK to perform Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (1610) on the occasion of its 400th anniversary year, and in 2012 and 2013 the group sang the Gallery’s traditional Viennese New Year concert.
Acclaimed by the Washington Post for her “scrupulous musicianship…gorgeous sound, and stylistic acuity,” soprano Rosa Lamoreaux maintains an international career of broad scope, including solo recitals, chamber music, opera, and orchestral performances at Carnegie Hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Kennedy Center, Royal Albert Hall, Strathmore Hall, and the Washington National Cathedral, among other major concert venues. Her concert tours abroad have included performances in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom as well as Brazil, Japan, and Peru. Now in her ninth season as artistic director of the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble, she also works with ArcoVoce, Chatham Baroque, the Folger Consort, Four Nations Ensemble, Hesperus, Musica Aperta, and Opera Lafayette. Lamoreaux maintains a website at www.rosasings.com.
Hailed as “electrifying” by the Washington Post and noted by the Philadelphia Inquirer for his “eloquent, emotional singing,” baritone David Newman is in particular demand as a baroque specialist. He has performed Messiah with the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, and Tafelmusik as well as with Masterwork Chorus in Carnegie Hall; Bach’s Saint John Passion with the American Bach Soloists, Carmel Bach Festival, Chorale Delaware, and the Bach Chamber Orchestra of Honolulu; and the Saint Matthew Passion with the Bach Society of Saint Louis, Baroque Choral Guild, San Francisco Bach Choir, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. He was also a featured soloist in the Sorbonne’s 2003 Festival Berlioz in Paris with the University of California Davis Symphony Orchestra. Featured at Lincoln Center and Merkin Hall by the Four Nations Ensemble, Newman has recorded Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with The Bach Sinfonia. He teaches voice at James Madison University.
A recipient of the Carmel Bach Festival’s Adams Fellowship for performance and study of the music of Bach, tenor Matthew Loyal Smith has performed with ensembles in Canada and the United States, including Artek, the Niagara Symphony Orchestra, the Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra, and the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia as well as Washington, DC’s Cathedral Choral Society, National Philharmonic, Washington Bach Consort, Washington Chorus, and Washington Concert Opera. His oratorio credits include all of Bach’s oratorios and many of his cantatas as well as Handel’s Messiah and Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. His operetta and operatic roles include Frederic in Pirates of Penzance, Baron Zsupàn in Countess Maritza, the Prologue in The Turn of the Screw, and Kaspar in Amahl and the Night Visitors. A student of Beverley Rinaldi and Christine Anderson, Smith earned a bachelor of music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a master of music in opera from Temple University.
National Gallery of Art Chamber Players
A resident ensemble of the Gallery since 2004, the National Gallery of Art Chamber Players has provided appropriate chamber music in honor of a number of recent Gallery exhibitions, including Spanish Renaissance music in honor of The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain (2009) and Renaissance Italian music in honor of Arcimboldo, 1526–1593: Nature and Fantasy (2010).
Members of the National Gallery of Art Chamber Players participating in tonight’s concert are:
Leah Nelson, Violin I
Nina Falk, Violin II
Leslie Nero, viola
Lori Barnet, cello
Richard Stone, theorbo and director
Steven Silverman, harpsichord
MUSICAL PROGRAM
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643)
Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (The Combat of Tancred and Clorinda) (1624)
Cast, in order of appearance:
David Newman, baritone (Testo)
Rosa Lamoreaux, soprano (Clorinda)
Matthew Smith, tenor (Tancredi)
PROGRAM NOTES
The publication of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) in 1581 occasioned a host of responses from literati, musicians, and artists that lasted well into the eighteenth century. One moment succumbing to the pleasure of amorous dalliances, the next taking up arms against the enemy, Tasso’s characters are described in nuanced portraits, each facet of which would later be represented in art. The interaction between two of the characters in the canto, Tancred and Clorinda, forms the basis of the libretto of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, composed in 1624. It was first presented to the public in 1638, when it appeared with several other pieces in Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. Difficult to classify, it is usually described as an operatic scena, intended for performance by three solo singers and a small instrumental ensemble.
In this work, Monteverdi juxtaposes the orchestra and the voices as two separate entities. His division of the strings into four independent parts instead of the usual five was innovative for its time and was not generally adopted by European composers until the eighteenth century. The score contains one of the earliest known uses of pizzicato in baroque music and one of the earliest known uses of the string tremolo—reiterating a note rapidly as a means of generating excitement. This latter device was so revolutionary that Monteverdi had considerable difficulty getting the players of his day to perform it correctly.
In a classic case of mistaken identity, Tancred, a Norman general in the first Crusade, takes on Clorinda in hand-to-hand combat, deceived by her heavy armor into thinking that she is one of the male leaders of the Muslim tribe that has attacked and set fire to one of his seige towers outside walls of Jerusalem. Not until the end of the battle, described in fierce detail by Tasso’s libretto, does he realize that he has fought against and killed a woman—one with whom, indeed, he had earlier fallen in love.
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