L’Orfeo: Toccata and Ritornello

based on an arrangement for modern orchestra by Gerhard Samuel

Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which was first performed in Mantua in 1607, was the first work of genius in the then short history of opera. A favola in musica (play in music) as the composer called it – the term “opera” was not in use at the time – it is based on the same story as the first surviving work of its kind, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, which was first performed in Florence seven years earlier and which was both a challenge and an inspiration to Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio.

Both Peri’s Euridice and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo feature a prologue before the action begins. Monteverdi, however, introduces his with an instrumental Toccata, which an English composer of the time would probably have described as a tucket or fanfare. Brilliantly written for such instruments of the day as recorders, cornetti, trombones, and strings with a large continuo group, it lends itself well to a modern orchestra, as we hear in the present arrangement. The three, progressively more colourful presentations of the Toccata    are interspersed here with two similarly updated versions of the instrumental Ritornello which, in the opera, recurs throughout the prologue.