Il Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda
The composer
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was universally accepted as the greatest European composer of his time. He began as a composer of courtly madrigals for private performance but soon gained fame for large scale dramatic works (operas, in effect, though the term hadn’t yet been coined) and splendid and spectacular instrumental-choral church music.
The latter led to his appointment as music-director of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the most prestigious (and best-paid) job a 17th century musician could aspire to. His comparatively easy professional situation permitted him to accept commissions from patrons who competed for services, leading to a series of musico-dramatic works (including the Combattimento) which were published simply as “madrigals,” but which stretched and finally burst the formal templates of his time. Already over 70, he was persuaded to write for the nascent commercial opera houses of his time. In the 20th century, his last stage work, The Coronation of Poppea, has come to be recognized as one of the half-dozen greatest music dramas of all time.
The librettist
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) was the greatest lyric poet of the the Italian renaissance. He wrote his epic poem Jerusalem Deliver’d (La Gerusalemme liberata, published 1580) to celebrate the piety and feats of arms of the Christian armies of the First Crusade, but from the beginning readers gravitated to the highly romantic (and totally fictional) episodes of love, jealousy, and suffering between the Christian and Muslim characters, primarily the knights Tancred and Clorinda and the witch Armida and the paladin Rinaldo. Dozens of later opera librettists based their texts for composers like Handel, Gluck, and Lully on Tasso’s tales.
To modern readers his mixture of suave sensuality and neurotic obsession with wounds, blood, and pain can seem disturbing, but it suited the robust tastes of his own time to perfection. Tasso himself, celebrated as a poet, suffered from severe mental disturbances, what we would call today paranoid schizophrenic episodes, leading to confinement for his own protection in his last years.
The text
- Tancredi and Clorinda, she disguised,
- meet ’neath the walls of Jerusalem at night
- He deemed she was some man of mickle might,
- And on her person would he worship win,
- Over the hills the nymph her journey dight,
- Towards another gate, there to get in.
- With hideous noise fast after spurr’d the knight.
- She heard and stay’d, and thus her words begin:
- What haste hast thou? ride softly; take thy breath;
- What bringest thou? He answer’d, War and death.
- And war and death (quoth she) here mayst thou get,
- If thou for battle come…
- Oh, night, consent that I their acts display,
- And make their deeds to future ages known,
- And in records of long enduring story,
- Enrol their praise, their fame, their worth, and glory.
- Their swords together clash with dreadful sound,
- Their feet stand fast, and neither stir nor start;
- They move their hands, steadfast their feet remain,
- Nor blow nor foin they struck or thrust in vain…
- Thrice his strong arms he folds about her waist,
- And thrice was forc’d to let the virgin go,
- For she disdainèd to be so embrac’d,
- No lover would have strain’d his mistress so.
- When daybreak rising from the western flood
- Put out the thousand eyes of blindfold night,
- Tancred beheld his foe’s outstreaming blood
- And gaping wounds, and wax’d proud at the sight!
- Why joy’st thou, wretch? O what shall be thy gain?
- What trophy for this conquest is ’t thou rears?
- Thine eyes shall shed (in case thou be not slain)
- For every drop of blood a sea of tears.
Excerpted from Book 12, verses 52–59 from the translation of 1600 by Edward Fairfax.