Paul Monk reading 'Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty'
Music for the companion recordings of Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty
By Paul Monk
The recordings start with the Toccata and Prologue from Monteverdi's L’Orfeo and end with a small piece from Act 5 of the same opera. Monteverdi's L’Orfeo is generally regarded as the first work of genius in the history of opera. It presents a rich blend of Greek myth with 16th-century dramatic conventions and of varied instrumental and vocal groupings.
The legend of Orpheus is one of the loss of a beloved woman and how he sang beautiful songs to the gods of the underworld in the hope that they would release her, Eurydice, from Hades and allow him to live with her again in the Sun. Famously, the gods were so charmed by his songs that they assented on one condition - that Eurydice would follow him out of the Underworld but that he must not look back to see if he was there until both of them were again in the Sun. At the last moment he forgot himself, looked back and lost her forever. The great twentieth century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Sonnets to Orpheus, that ‘it's always Orpheus when it sings’, so the singing of Orpheus is chosen to place my own sonnets in a setting at once classical, musical and modernist.
Each sonnet starts with a small selection from the ‘Meditation’ of the opera Thais, composed in the 1890s by French composer Jules Massenet and based on the novel Thais by Anatole France. Massenet’s music was chosen because the story in the Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty is a tale in some ways akin to that related in Massenet's beautiful opera. In the opera, Athanael, a Christian monk in the Egyptian desert, goes to Alexandria with the avowed, almost ferocious intention of converting and ‘saving’ the famous and beautiful courtesan Thais. He does so but in the process, as she had warned him would happen, he is himself converted to the ‘cult of Venus’, falling passionately in love with Thais and finally begging her to turn back from what he declares is the illusion of an afterlife and love him here on Earth. He begs in vain. She dies in a convent, declaring that angels are coming down to carry her to Heaven.
The selections from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo are from a 1995 Harmonia Mundi recording.
The selections from Massenet’s Thais are from a 2000 Decca recording.
Permission to use these extracts has been sought.