Il Pianto di Maria

The cantata Il Pianto di Maria had long been attributed to Handel, though suspicions about its authenticity were abundant. Recent research has proven the cantata to be the work of a less prominent and younger Italian composer, Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (1710-91). Ferrandini began his musical training in the stimulating arena of Vivaldi’s Venice, though he spent the majority of his career at the court in Munich. It was in Munich, for instance, that Ferrandini’s most successful opera, Catone in Utica, was selected in 1753 to be the initial performance at the city’s new opera house. He returned to Italy a few years thereafter, ostensibly for health reasons, and it was in Padua that the ailing Ferrandini met young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during one of the “Wunderkind’s” Italian tours.
By that time the man’s best years were behind him, and apart from a few successes in the realm of opera, tonight’s cantata represents the whole of his contribution to the modern repertoire. It is certainly a misfortune, in one sense, that Il Pianto di Maria was known for so long under another composer’s name. The cantata, written around 1735, is a formidable and at times compelling work, but one wonders if it would have survived into the 21st century without the luster of Handel’s name attached to it, albeit mistakenly.
The author of the poem, a rather free paraphrase of the Stabat mater adorned with scenes from the Crucifixion and beyond, remains unknown. Ferrandini’s setting features several aria-recitative alternations. There are eight movements in all, including a cavatina structure that places lyrical, aria-like material on either side of a central accompanied recitative (think of it as a very large da capo aria with recitative as the middle section). Il Pianto di Maria opens with a conventional, even formulaic recitative straight out of the operatic world. From the start it dramatizes the discomfort felt by some 18th-century listeners, who balked that a quasi-sacred text could be set to the kind of music often accompanying the moral degradations depicted in opera. After all, this is the love and suffering of a mother for her son—indeed, the Mother for the Son—and to hear it portrayed in the same way Handel, for instance, might portray the love of a Roman emperor must have been unsettling. Still, immediacy of expression is what matters, and Ferrandini captures it in the opening recitative, from the climactic vocal irruption on “Ah cieli!” to the deflating, flatward harmonic turn that underscores the word “immense.”
In the following Cavatina and both later Arias, Ferrandini shows his early training in the Italian string style of Corelli and the late 16th century, a style that favors close imitation, tight chains of dissonances, and gradually rising melodic arches that come to resolution in understated cadences. Where Ferrandini gets slightly bogged down is at the joins of phrases. For instance, during the Cavatina he often comes to a complete stop—silence—then continues on as if nothing happened. While this can be used on occasion for rhetorical effect, the frequency of the idea here without suitable justification in the words causes the “pleading” affect of the Mother to halt just when it ought to build to a greater highpoint.
Ferrandini seems to have had a fondness for accompanied recitatives, of which there are three in this cantata. His decision makes good sense given the dramatic, pictorial possibilities of the crucifixion scenes in this composite poem. Whereas unaccompanied recitative draws attention to the solo voice and the quick changes of emotion, accompanied recitative can invoke the full expressive resources of the string orchestra to offer striking aural images of the visions described. The technique was developed to perfection by Monteverdi in the early 1600s. Ferrandini looks to it in order to animate the long list of Christ’s torments in movement 3, where he composes incisive string gestures to depict Jesus “lashed by scourges, pierced by thorns, wounded by nails…” And as one might expect, the tumultuous earthquake in movement 6 comes in for a flurry of agitato string passages, meant literally to shake the audience from its comfort zone (a kind of Baroque sound effect).
Perhaps more unsettling is the short, too short accompanied recitative that closes the entire cantata. Rather than a broad summation, we find only a brief moralizing sentiment minimally stretched out with a few cadential progressions, and then … nothing. Handel does the same thing, curiously enough, in a few of his works; this aspect thus was one of the main reasons for the misattribution of Il Pianto di Maria. The goal, it seems, was precisely to leave the listener in shock, to leave the audience in a state of confusion, reflection bordering on penitence
Now that the work may be known under the name of its rightful author, we can assess its significance: a skillful collection of early 18th-century operatic devices, nuanced at times but awkward at others; the finest piece written by a young man tutored in the Corellian sound-world but seeking fame in the great opera centers of Europe; a welcome contribution to the cantata repertoire from a lesser master fated to be born among giants.

(c) Jason Stell