Four Centuries of Combat

On Saturday, 20 December 2025, the national project 1624–2024: 4 Centuries of Combat – and Beyond comes to a close with the event “Four Centuries of Combat. Claudio Monteverdi’s Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda”, at the Museum of Music in Bologna, starting at 5:00 pm.

The evening is organized into three main moments.
The round table will feature two leading figures from the national academic world: Professor Emeritus Paolo Fabbri, author of the definitive monograph on the Cremonese composer, and Professor Paola Besutti, a member of the Monteverdi Foundation of Cremona.
This will be followed by a performance of the madrigal, made possible through the collaboration of singer Alida Oliva, who will take on all three roles of Testo, Clorinda, and Tancredi (a customary practice in the Italian historical musical tradition), accompanied by the ensemble Il Migliarino, a specialized early music group.
Finally, there will be a segment dedicated to dance: the historical dance group Licita Scientia, led by choreographer Maria Cristina Esposito and accompanied by a specially formed consort of recorders from Il Migliarino, will perform a series of period dances in historical costumes.

The program focuses on the study, enhancement, and reception from the 19th to the 21st centuries of Claudio Monteverdi’s famous madrigal, the “Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda”. This work is not merely the musical transposition of an equally celebrated text by Tasso, taken from Canto XII of the “Jerusalem Delivered”, which enjoyed great success at the time. It is instead a true “time machine”, allowing us to grasp, across more than four centuries, some of the most significant aspects of its influence on Western society.