Il ballo delle ingrate

The birth of opera around the beginning of the 17th century was not quite the watershed we might imagine. Arresting though the new idea of “speaking in music” was, it was an avant-garde development that took time to take root. Fully-fledged operas were much less common than smaller entertainments which reassuringly mixed old and new—part madrigal, part opera, part ballet. Claudio Monteverdi wrote Il ballo delle ingrate (Dance of the Ungrateful Ladies) for the wedding of Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, in 1608. It’s a cautionary tale of the fate awaiting the cold-hearted in love—of which there were, it seems, a number among the ladies in the audience. The hints of irony and satire in the libretto were distinctly novel features in court entertainments which were more usually concerned with higher virtues and lower flattery. Cupid and Venus meet Pluto at the gates of Hell and ask him to briefly release some of the “ingrates”, who perform a sad and grave dance for them. Monteverdi’s ballet music was all scored for a slightly old-fashioned, but sonorous, five-part string ensemble. Pluto addresses the ladies in the audience in a warning aria full of bombastic runs and wide leaps, but before the women return to his “infernal kingdom”, they beg a final dance, and one sings a heart-rending farewell to the “pure and serene air”.