Claudio Monteverdi

Born in Cremona, where he undertook his first musical studies and compositions, Monteverdi developed his career first at the court of Mantua (c. 1590–1613) and then until his death in the Republic of Venice where he was maestro di cappella at the basilica of San Marco.

His opera L'Orfeo (1607) is the earliest of the genre still widely performed; towards the end of his life he wrote works for Venice, including Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea.

While he worked extensively in the tradition of earlier Renaissance polyphony, as evidenced in his madrigals, he undertook great developments in form and melody, and began to employ the basso continuo technique, distinctive of the Baroque.

Artusi cited extracts from Monteverdi's works not yet published (they later formed parts of his fourth and fifth books of madrigals of 1603 and 1605), condemning their use of harmony and their innovations in use of musical modes, compared to orthodox polyphonic practice of the sixteenth century.

[25] On the other hand, letters to Giovanni Battista Doni of 1632 show that Monteverdi was still preparing a defence of the seconda pratica, in a treatise entitled Melodia; he may still have been working on this at the time of his death ten years later.

After publishing his Vespers in 1610, which were dedicated to Pope Paul V, he visited Rome, ostensibly hoping to place his son Francesco at a seminary, but apparently also seeking alternative employment.

[32] When Monteverdi arrived to take up his post, his principal responsibility was to recruit, train, discipline and manage the musicians of San Marco (the capella), who amounted to about 30 singers and six instrumentalists; the numbers could be increased for major events.

[31][36][39] A subsequent major commission, the opera La finta pazza Licori, to a libretto by Giulio Strozzi, was completed for Fernando's successor Vincenzo II, who succeeded to the dukedom in 1626.

[41] Among Monteverdi's private Venetian patrons was the nobleman Girolamo Mocenigo, at whose home was premiered in 1624 the dramatic entertainment Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda based on an episode from Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata.

He wrote to complain about one of his singers to the Procurators, on 9 June 1637: "I, Claudio Monteverdi ... come humbly ... to set forth to you how Domenicato Aldegati ... a bass, yesterday morning ... at the time of the greatest concourse of people ... spoke these exact words ...'The Director of Music comes from a brood of cut-throat bastards, a thieving, fucking, he-goat ... and I shit on him and whoever protects him ...'".

[54] The introduction to the printed scenario of Le nozze d'Enea, by an unknown author, acknowledges that Monteverdi is to be credited for the rebirth of theatrical music and that "he will be sighed for in later ages, for his compositions will surely outlive the ravages of time.

Mark Ringer writes that "these teenaged efforts reveal palpable ambition matched with a convincing mastery of contemporary style", but at this stage they display their creator's competence rather than any striking originality.

[67] The second book (1590) begins with a setting modelled on Marenzio of a modern verse, Torquato Tasso's "Non si levav' ancor", and concludes with a text from 50 years earlier: Pietro Bembo's "Cantai un tempo".

[70] How much he composed in this period is a matter of conjecture; his many duties in the Mantuan court may have limited his opportunities,[71] but several of the madrigals that he published in the fourth and fifth books were written and performed during the 1590s, some figuring prominently in the Artusi controversy.

[72] Of the Guarini settings, Chew writes: "The epigrammatic style ... closely matches a poetic and musical ideal of the period ... [and] often depends on strong, final cadential progressions, with or without the intensification provided by chains of suspended dissonances".

[72] Tasso and Guarini were both regular visitors to the Mantuan court; Monteverdi's association with them and his absorption of their ideas may have helped lay the foundations of his own approach to the musical dramas that he would create a decade later.

Claude V. Palisca quotes the madrigal Ohimè, se tanto amate, published in the fourth book but written before 1600 – it is among the works attacked by Artusi – as a typical example of the composer's developing powers of invention.

Besides Tasso and Guarini, Monteverdi set to music verses by Rinuccini, Maurizio Moro (Sì ch'io vorrei morire) and Ridolfo Arlotti (Luci serene e chiare).

[78] The fifth book looks more to the future; for example, Monteverdi employs the concertato style with basso continuo (a device that was to become a typical feature in the emergent Baroque era), and includes a sinfonia (instrumental interlude) in the final piece.

In writing to a friend in 1609 Coppini commented that Monteverdi's pieces "require, during their performance, more flexible rests and bars that are not strictly regular, now pressing forward or abandoning themselves to slowing down [...] In them there is a truly wondrous capacity for moving the affections".

[89] Ringer suggests that the lament defines Monteverdi's innovative creativity in a manner similar to that in which the Prelude and the Liebestod in Tristan und Isolde announced Wagner's discovery of new expressive frontiers.

In some versions of Monteverdi's Vespers (for example, those of Denis Stevens) the concertos are replaced with antiphons associated with the Virgin, although John Whenham in his analysis of the work argues that the collection as a whole should be regarded as a single liturgical and artistic entity.

This concertato style challenges the traditional cantus firmus,[93] and is most evident in the "Sonata sopra Sancta Maria", written for eight string and wind instruments plus basso continuo, and a single soprano voice.

[98] The central theme of the collection is loss; the best-known work is the five-voice version of the Lamento d'Arianna, which, says Massimo Ossi, gives "an object lesson in the close relationship between monodic recitative and counterpoint".

For unknown reasons, the composer's name does not appear on the inscription, the dedication being signed by the Venetian printer Bartolomeo Magni; Carter surmises that the recently ordained Monteverdi may have wished to keep his distance from this secular collection.

[97] Main articles: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria; L'incoronazione di Poppea; Selva morale e spirituale The last years of Monteverdi's life were much occupied with opera for the Venetian stage.

[117] However, David Johnson in the North American Review warns audiences not to expect immediate affinity with Mozart, Verdi or Puccini: "You have to submit yourself to a much slower pace, to a much more chaste conception of melody, to a vocal style that is at first merely like dry declamation and only on repeated hearings begins to assume an extraordinary eloquence.

[123] The Messa et salmi volume includes a stile antico Mass for four voices, a polyphonic setting of the psalm Laetatus Sum, and a version of the Litany of Lareto that Monteverdi had originally published in 1620.

His operatic works were revived in several cities in the decade following his death;[129] according to Severo Bonini, writing in 1651, every musical household in Italy possessed a copy of the Lamento d'Arianna.

[130] The German composer Heinrich Schütz, who had studied in Venice under Giovanni Gabrieli shortly before Monteverdi's arrival there, possessed a copy of Il combattimento and himself took up elements of the stile concitato.