Sacred madrigals

A connoisseur of Monteverdi's madrigals, whose complete works he has conducted in concert and on disc, Paul Agnew invites us to rediscover this repertoire in an unusual light: that of the "contrafacta". These "forgeries", devised by Aquilino Coppini, are nothing less than adaptations of Monteverdi's madrigals to sacred texts. The music remains unchanged, but the poetic treatment is of the utmost interest: Coppini, in an astonishing exercise of rhetoric, has shaped the sacred texts to bend them to the accents, rhythms and sonorities of the original secular texts, whose resolutely erotic content finds, under his pen, a striking translation of religious ecstasy. This passage from the profane to the sacred invites us to admire the extraordinary plasticity of Monteverdi's writing, which allows two very different readings of the same music.