Adventures and fateful journeys often begin with a voyage across the sea. It’s a familiar trope from ancient and medieval times that has persisted well into modern times. This musical journey takes us across the breadth of the Mediterranean — long a backdrop for incredible stories, not to mention an object of inspiration for innumerable compositions. Take Odysseus, for instance: after the fall of Troy he spent ten years adrift at sea, waylaid on his journey home by the sorceress Circe, the one-eyed Cyclopes and the beguiling Sirens — adventures that fired the imaginations of Baroque composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Giovanni Ghizzolo.
According to legend, the ancient Greek singer and poet Arion was rescued by friendly dolphins. He had won a singing contest in Sicily, but the prize money very nearly proved his undoing on the voyage home. In one of his songs, the Salamanca- born Renaissance composer Diego Pisador paid tribute to the dolphins who rushed to Arion’s aid. In 1099, crusaders from the West crossed the Mediterranean to take Jerusalem. Monteverdi’s stormy madrigal tells of the tragic,
fatal duel between two lovers — the crusader Tancredi and
the Saracen maiden Clorinda — who meet on the battlefield
without realizing each other’s identity.