Musica Secreta and Celestial Sirens
with Mark Dobell, Don Grieg and the BREMF Consort of Voices
Music by Giaches de Wert, Emilio de’ Cavalieri and Claudio Monteverdi
You’re invited to a wedding!! Or more precisely, four weddings and a funeral. Join us as we lead you through merriment and mourning, jubilation and lamentation: love, life and death in the great north Italian city-states.
Love and death are part of life, and all that matters to us in life can be shown by what goes on at weddings and funerals. Weddings bring the hope of stability for a new generation, and even more fundamentally, the hope of a new generation. Funerals give mourners a chance to reflect on the life of the deceased, and on how best to approach their own mortality.
The great families of the north Italian Renaissance – the Gonzagas, the Este and the Medici – relied upon each other to retain power in a political landscape that was continually being buffetted by those from even further afield. They knew the bonds of kinship would keep their families strong and lots of babies meant a plentiful supply of potential male heirs, in an age when premature and unexpected death played havoc with the rules of succession.
Their weddings, then, were occasions of great rejoicing and political significance, a brief oasis of relief when the negotiations were finished, and before the agonising wait for the first baby began. Their funerals were moments of sovereign spectacle, as much a display of the determination to continue in power as public demonstrations of grief.
In the midst of all the extravagance, though, there were personal stories of disempowerment, of sacrifice and of obedience – primarily the stories of the women who were bartered and who were expected to breed in order to keep their families in the ascendancy, and indeed the women who were part of the pageantry that cemented the courts’ civic and foreign countenance. Whether princess or performer, they all had critical – but almost invisible – roles in the power play.
And then there were the surplus women, the ones who could not breed or for whom husbands could not be found. They had very little options beyond entering a convent, where they were all married to Christ, both the least and most demanding bridegroom possible. They, too, had a wedding day, often with elaborate ceremonies, but unlike their sisters destined to be duchesses and princesses, their future was far from uncertain. They were encouraged to sublimate their need for physical love into a mystical union with God, with a sensuality and desire that might surprise our modern sensibilities.
Like the movie, Musica Secreta’s version of Four Weddings and a Funeral features some of the great tunes of the day – the soundtrack to the nuptial festivities of the noble families of northern Italy; and despite the distance of four centuries, we are sure to relate to the hopes and humanity of their celebrations. In these works, spirituality and sexuality, love, life and death are woven into a brilliant tapestry of sound. Come to the party and make merry with us!
