Reviews

The Guardian

John Eliot Gardiner: (3 Sep 2010)

My relationship with Monteverdi goes back to when I was eight. The great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, with whom I later studied in Paris, came to teach at the Bryanston summer school, just down the road from our family home in Dorset. This was in the early 1950s, and William Glock, who ran the school, brought Britten, Tippett, Hindemith, Stravinsky and Imogen Holst there. Glock had just got hold of the Malipiero edition of the Monteverdi madrigals, and Boulanger conducted them. So there I was, singing these great pieces of music as a child with one of the great teachers of the 20th century.

That's how Monteverdi's music first impinged on me. But his Vespers made an even bigger impression. I heard a broadcast of the piece in the late 50s, conducted by Walter Goehr in York Minster with the London Symphony Orchestra, and I was blown away. We made a lot of music at home, but nothing prepared me for hearing music like this. It was so glamorous, it had such allure, such a powerful sense of drama, and I loved it. I suppose that's where the idea took form in my mind – that one day I would love to grapple with it and direct it myself.

The chance came when I went to Cambridge. I still wasn't sure at that stage about which direction my life would take. I was reading history and I had a strong connection with the Middle East. Fortunately, I had a sympathetic tutor in Edmund Leach, the social anthropologist, and he allowed me to take a year off to find out once and for all if I was going to be a musician. So I decided, as a test, to mount and conduct a performance of the Vespers in King's College Chapel.

Denis Arnold said to treat it as a single work, perform the sequence of individual psalms, motets, hymn, sonata and canticle that make up the Vespers in exactly the order that Amadino published them in 1610; Professor Thurston Dart – the Sherlock Holmes of musicology at the time – told me to make my own edition. I set about forming a choir, supplementing the local female singers from the London colleges, while the men all came from Cambridge. I had the temerity to audition the choral scholars, because apart from singing the odd madrigal on a punt with Raymond Leppard, they didn't know a note of Monteverdi. It was totally foreign to their way of singing. Instead of a polite Cambridge-style euphony and mellifluousness, I was striving for vibrant colours, drama, vigour and passion: the elements I thought were the hallmarks of Monteverdi's musical style.

I was lucky to find solo singers such as Robert Tear and John Shirley-Quirk, and musicians such as Simon Preston, Andrew Davis and David Munrow. The performance on 5 March 1964 caused a bit of a stir, even though it was very rough and ready. For me, it was an epiphany: it made me resolve to train as a conductor.

I've now conducted the Vespers 18 times in different venues, and four times at the Proms. Audiences have increased vastly. But this will be the first year since 1968 that I've performed it in the Royal Albert Hall. That's one of the big controversies about the piece: where was it written for? Why did Monteverdi write it? We'll never know for sure, but I feel there's an aesthetic link – and there could have been a liturgical one – between his Vespers and St Mark's in Venice, where he later became Maestro di Capella. When I performed and recorded it there in 1986, it fitted the Basilica like a glove. All those problems about where you place the musicians and how you realise Monteverdi's spatial conception of the music resolve themselves in St Mark's, where you can use the galleries and pulpits. Of course, I'm not saying St Mark's is the only place the Vespers could or should be heard, just that it's my preference, and I think it sounds best there. It's a feast for the eyes and the ears.

There will always be a lot of argument about how to perform the Vespers. But if the definition of a masterpiece is that it can withstand and inspire many interpretations, then the Vespers qualifies. All the musicological work on the music's liturgical and biographical contexts is fascinating, but it only gets you so far. The fact is that we are left with this unusual but brilliantly effective sequence of music just as Monteverdi published it, so what are we going to do about it? Some say you should add music by other composers, you should shuffle the order of the movements, put in more Gregorian chant, you must transpose two movements down by a fourth; my feeling is that it's remarkably good as it stands. And it works in concert – after 18 performances, I am convinced that its impact is greatest when played in the order it was originally published, with nothing added or subtracted.

The Vespers crystallises everything that I believe Monteverdi stands for. There's a fantastic synergy between text and music, it's a wonderful compendium of the most ancient and most modern music known at the time, and it's on a scale that surpasses anything his contemporaries were doing in terms of opulence, virtuosity and compositional skill. The work demonstrates Monteverdi's cardinal belief that music is capable of expressing the gamut of human emotions. He is the first codifier of the passions in music, whether it's love or anger, whether it's suffering, pathos, languor, religious fervour or erotic desire. They are all there in the Vespers.

It's also prophetic music. Some of the things I cherish in Verdi and Berlioz – their outrageous use of space, for example – have their origins in the Vespers. The dramatisation of church music that comes to another peak in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis also has its seeds in Monteverdi.

I have a plan for how I'm going to do it in the preposterously large space of the Royal Albert Hall, but you'll have to wait for the concert to find out. What I can say is that the performance, just like every one I've ever given of the Vespers, will be a contemporary experience. I'm not trying to revive something in an antiquarian way. I'm saying: this is a vision of a composer who, though he could never have heard this music quite as we're doing it (and if he ever heard it in his lifetime at all, it wasn't in a mammoth mausoleum like the Albert Hall), had the fantasy and inventiveness to come up with this unique, dazzling, bejewelled sequence of music. And it should thrill one every bit as much as a Mahler symphony.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner was speaking to Tom Service.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/sep/02/john-eliot-gardiner-vespers