A beacon of the interpretation of baroque music, which we feel could tell us many things in other repertoires, the Argentinian Leonardo García Alarcón is the headliner of the Festival de Lanaudière, where he is currently focusing on the music of Monteverdi. We wanted to discuss with this great thinker how he distinguishes and defines this composer.
“Claudio Monteverdi caused the greatest revolution in Western music. He said: “I invented anger in music and this anger I call style concitato” he says straight away.
Leonardo García Alarcón takes us to the sources of eloquence: “Monteverdi said so in 1638, in the preface to his Eighth Book of Madrigals : “If I do not respect the laws of counterpoint, that is to say if I do not prepare the dissonances [car il faut toujours les préparer et les résoudre dans le contrepoint classique], the character is affected emotionally.” »
The reign of affect
The impact is major: “This means that for the opera and the madrigal, we can express a strong and direct emotion”. In contrast, the 16th century madrigale century had invented chromaticism. “Chromatism, it comes from chromos, it is the color of each of the black and white notes which follow one another, specifies the Argentinian. Chromatism is pain: the one that goes up is suffering, the one that goes down is the nostalgia of suffering. Monteverdi invents dissonance attacked without preparation. To this great invention, he adds that of the acceleration and deceleration of the tactus, which he writes inside the coins. »
“As soon as the madrigal arrives, this tactus (pulsation) changes in relation to affect. It is something very new. At the same time, music in France remains tied to dance and a fixed tempo, while Italy lets itself be driven by affect. Monteverdi is the great painter of affect,” says Leonardo García Alarcón.
For these expressive needs, the Italian musician will graft another revolution: “Speed and anger in music are expressed by the speed of the bow of the violins. It is the violin that can express anger and can speak of war. It’s a great revolution, because Monteverdi says in a way: “Goodbye, viola da gamba; you are not the theatrical instrument.” »
For García Alarcón, by causing a revolution in articulation and speed, Monteverdi also “created an instrumental setting”. “With concertant madrigals, you hardly need sets in a theater anymore. The orchestra becomes the setting for the voice in The fight between Tancred and Clorinda, where we see the swords and the moment they clash. Monteverdi invents the decor in music. »
Infernal Instrument
This, for the Argentinian chef, Monteverdi had already foreseen in The Orfeo (1609), which anticipates geniuses of orchestration such as Rameau or Berlioz. “Monteverdi writes absolutely everything about the importance of timbre. A treat [petit orgue portable] accompanies Charon [Caronte] because he is a monster, and this nasal and nuanceless instrument conveys no emotion. When Orpheus sings, the harp accompanies him. Previously, the Orphic instruments were the lyre and then the “lira da braccio” (or arm lyre). In later centuries, it will be the harpsichord (in Bach’s time) then the piano (4e Concerto of Beethoven).
“There is, for example, the idea of instruments that are made with fire: thus sackbuts [ancêtre du trombone], which express an infernal emotion. This is why the music of the underworld is accompanied by sackbuts. There is a clear relationship between the stamps and the text. »
If Leonardo García Alarcón is inexhaustible on this subject, as on so many others, it is because he thinks that the responsibility of the artist is to “know all the treatises and documents that surround an era”. “A musician, an artist in general, is curious to know everything that surrounds a piece. This does not mean that then he does not have freedom or the choice of an interpretation, because it would be the death of the interpretation”, he nuances immediately.
This consideration is the letter “s”, for “style”, of a neologism describing the responsibilities of the interpreter: what he calls the “tradilscovarte”, for tempo, rhythm, articulation, dynamics, intonation, line, style, charisma, ornamentation, virtuosity, attitude, rhetoric, timbre and space. “If you manage to make subdivisions in each of the parameters, you enter directly into the art of interpretation. That is to say, you have to be able to dissect each of the parameters and not go and work on all of this at the same time, otherwise you will not be able to obtain an appropriate result. », believes the Argentinian chef.
Leonardo García Alarcón places the intonation at the very top, dictated by the chords according to this or that temperament. He also distinguishes tempo, a “holistic” notion over a long time, from rhythm which, within the tempo and the line, is an “essential pulsation to build the backbone of a work”.
Intervals and emotions
It’s the dynamic question that sheds fascinating light on listening to Monteverdi, says the specialist in baroque music. “We associate dynamics with intervals. Intervals in music have evoked human emotions which in Western music can become almost rational and classified. For example, a sixth is always soft, even the Neapolitan sixth. There is a single strong sixth, where the dissonance is in the bass. A diminished seventh is an interval or very piano or very strong; an augmented fourth is the devil in music, the absolute force; a minor seventh is soft. This means that dynamics and intervals are associated. Since composers know the dynamics of intervals, they can associate this notion with a text. In practice, it is very difficult to find a text that speaks of anger on a minor seventh or on a sixth. We note that the awareness of the relations between intervals and dynamics is precisely at the origin of the style concitatoby Monteverdi. »
And the leader to dig an eloquent example. ” Take it Piano della Madonna and the Ariadne’s Lament. He wrote the Lament in 1609, then, in 1642, Il Piano. They are the same notes. But as the Virgin cannot speak like Ariadne, because one respects her dignity and her elegance even in suffering, Monteverdi has organized the intervals so that the Virgin does not attack any dissonance, whereas Ariadne does it all the time. So you can imagine how important, for such a composer, the relationship of the intervals was. »
Monteverdi, inventor of concitato, that is to say of an articulation and a rhythm associated with the text, will have an influence on its time beyond the music. “Poets like Le Tasse [Torquato Tasso] created a “sensitive poetry”, as we said at the time. For the first time, a poet writes so that it can be put to music. It is not poetry that is music in itself, as with Petrarch, but a text clearly intended to be set to music. We see the affects, the gradation of the articulation between the consonants, first soft then harder. If one is not aware of that, awareness of the articulation, one cannot produce a discourse, even an instrumental one. »
Musicological science in no way paralyzes the inspiration of Leonardo García Alarcón. “Monteverdi is reborn in us. But in the same way that I admire my grandfather, I don’t want to be my grandfather. The strength of great composers is that they cross the ages and speak to all generations with the same force but not in the same way, because each generation feels things differently. On the other hand, if I talk about style and rhetoric, we all share the same thing: the fear of death, the love for our children and for someone, the desire, the fear of abandonment and suffering, as well as the humor to survive it all. We’ve been sharing this since man of Neanderthal. It continues with Monteverdi, but the distance between us and Monteverdi is nothing when you think of the distance between Dante and Virgil, which is 1200 years. »
“What is interesting is to see the way Monteverdi is reborn in us and provokes things, since we share the same emotions as him. This is how, faced with a work from the past, in the eyes of the conductor, it is not just a question of “playing it with the best instruments, not just reading all the treatises; it must be able to live again with us today and regain current strength. For me, that’s the interpretation.