The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by the Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” or “The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland,” as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.

The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score.” Monteverdi wrote down a bare 5-part accompaniment to the vocal lines of his opera, without indicating what specific instruments he meant to play those notes—and when. This means for any modern performance, someone needs to make those decisions.

For their 1985 summer season, the Salzburg Festival commissioned Henze to prepare a new orchestration of Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses” 245 years after its first performance in Venice back in 1640. As luck would have it, Henze’s version appeared around the same time as another modern attempt to reconstruct Monteverdi’s score by the noted Baroque specialist Nicholas Harnoncourt.

Even so, the music critics, in the main, were complimentary after the Henze’s version premiered in Sazlburg, noting that his scoring somehow managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.

Even though we’ll never know EXACTLY how the opera sounded when Monteverdi heard it back in 1640, thanks to modern technology, the audio and video of that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both CD and DVD versions.