The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, or The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland, as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.
The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score.” Monteverdi wrote down a bare 5-part accompaniment to the vocal lines of his opera, without indicating what specific instruments he meant to play those notes. This means for any modern performance someone needs to make those decisions.
For their 1985 summer season, the Salzburg Festival commissioned Henze to prepare a new orchestration of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses 245 years after its first performance in Venice back in 1640.
The music critics, in the main, were complimentary after Henze’s version premiered in Salzburg, noting his scoring somehow managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.
Even though we’ll never know exactly how the opera sounded when Monteverdi heard it back in 1640, thanks to modern technology, that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both audio and video recordings.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) arr. Hans Werner Henze: Ulysses’ Homecoming; soloists; Vienna Radio Symphony; Jeffrey Tate, conductor; Orfeo 528 003