Some considerations on King Arthur’s music today

The reading and the play of King Arthur engenders today two most important areas of thinking: the first one comes from the genre of the work – experimental as a semi-opera – a hybrid combination of acting, singing, dancing, instrumental moments and stage machinery; the second is related to the tradition of the musical text, the score or parts thereof, and later modifications often contaminated if compared to the Urfassung, the first version of it.
Unfortunately, the original manuscript score has not survived, but much of it remained in the possession of the Dorset Garden Theatre, where King Arthur was premièred, and it was used for the revivals in the following decades, up to be copied, integrated and partly published in the early years of the eighteenth century.
Sezione Aurea’s aim is to provide the new dramaturgy made by Motus a historically careful musical setting. The main sources were identified in the second printing (1702) and in the second edition (1712) of King Arthur, in addition to the two different scores preserved in Salisbury and in the British Museum.
It is also necessary to analyze the later performance tradition, without prejudice, declining the philological principle of “recentiores not deteriores”: for which the latest versions are worst of the previous ones. Stratified history of King Arthur’s renditions until the mid-nineteenth century is compelling, which is an unequivocal sign of composer’s enduring luck and his ability in imposing a British music paradigm. The semi-opera is an experimental genre, always possible to actualize. Salient point of this tradition, which embraces the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it’s definitely the version by Thomas Augustine Arne, conceived in 1770 for the famous actor David Garrick. Arne modified the structural system and the original music settings inserting new numbers, with the aim of overcoming some inconsistencies between text and music (following Garrick’s indications) and bringing the opera much more close to the audience and to the taste of the audience of those years.
In the history of the latest productions of King Arthur – starting from 1784 appears more frequently with the title of Arthur and Emmeline – we see continuous experimentations in the organization of the ‘numbers’, according to the different acting companies, with always different balances between spoken and sung parts (such as in the reworked versions by Henry Bishop at Covent Garden in 1819 or by William Hawes for the Lyceum in 1857).
The result therefore is a general impression of a continuous text’s actualization, progressively reshaped according to the tradition’s evolution. The new audience and the always much modern performance spaces dictate new needs that require always different solutions in the choice of tones for each instrumental voice.
For our execution, we tried to develop an original instrumental balance, which takes into account the new dramaturgical reading of the work, confronting its results with the more recent musical readings by Pinnock, Gardiner, Christie and Niquet.
The search for a more “aerial” sound, able to generate more nuances in the pentagram’s snowfield, with the use of acute voices only, reflects itself in our instrumental ensemble, that is composed in the mid-high register, of two violins, two oboes (from eighteenth century tradition), in addition to the harmonic and contrapuntal complement offered by the viola da braccio. The basso continuo is taken by a bass viola da gamba, a twelve feet violone, a theorbo and a harpsichord, as if to suggest, in the absence of the cello and the bass-viol, a French taste in colour, less pushed in the low register.
This composition of the instruments appears to be effective in supporting the Motus new reading of work, who wants to underline the pervasive presence of the “feeling of dance”, evident in almost every song. The dances here are not only seen as an expression of an Italian or French musical fashion, but as the commendation of a declared and autonomous English taste. It is not so rare indeed to still find in the opera exquisitely Shakespearean accents: this trend was definitely strengthened after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the ascent to the throne of Mary II Stuart, along with her cousin William III Orange.
Sezione Aurea wants to offer to the dramaturgical reading some of the many nuances of Purcellian’s musical dictation. In the famous Chorus and Dance of Cold People which vibrates through the strong figure of the tremble the initial theme built on the repletion of musical cells in monotone sequence, not only exerts an immediate boost to rhetorical evocation of the ice, but suggests a deeper intention of the voice, gesture and stage action and has its roots in the French tradition. That happens in Lully’s Isis, especially in the Choeur des Trembleurs which will provoke infinite suggestions even after Purcell, for example in the Winter of Vivaldi’s Four seasons, where the frost is almost pictorially made by eighth notes repeated without apparent rhythm or melody.
Sezione Aurea

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