Scarlatti: Il trionfo della Grazia

Ensemble Céladon revives Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il Trionfo della Grazia (also known as La Maddalena penitente), a 1685 oratorio for three voices that scored a resounding success at its Roman premiere — six cardinals in attendance, the cream of Roman musical life performing — and went on to tour productions across Italy and Vienna into the early 18th century. Written to a libretto by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili (later Handel’s librettist for Il Trionfo del Tempo), the work stages Mary Magdalene’s conversion as a Counter-Reformation morality drama: Maddalena, torn between the pleasures urged by Gioventù (Youth) and the admonitions of Penitenza (Penitence), moves through a carefully structured emotional arc from worldly pleasure to spiritual transformation.

Composed early in Scarlatti’s career, while his style still leaned toward the arioso aesthetic of Cavalli and Stradella, the oratorio is built from brief, tightly wrought arias and recitatives with continuo-dominated accompaniment that keeps the focus on the characters’ rhetorical arguments — pathos against logos, culminating in the jewel-like aria Risolvo di più non vedervi. Soprano Marie-Frédérique Girod (Maddalena), soprano Lise Viricel (Gioventù), and countertenor Paulin Bündgen (Penitenza, also directing) bring this rarely heard drama to life with a small period-instrument ensemble, recorded at the Chapelle du Lycée Saint-Louis-Saint-Bruno in Lyon.

Ensemble Céladon
Paulin Bündgen – director