Claudio Monteverdi

• 1. Introduction

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  Claudio Monteverdi was baptised on the 15th of May 1567 in Cremona, and by the time he died in Venice on the 29th of November 1643, he had spent more than half a century reshaping what music could do. He stood at the hinge between two great eras: the Renaissance, with its intricate polyphony and pure mathematical relationships, and the Baroque, where music became a vehicle for human feeling, subordinated to text, tied to drama, built to move an audience. One man living across both worlds produced nine books of madrigals, three complete surviving operas, monumental sacred music, and a body of surviving letters that reads like a window into the daily friction of professional artistic life. Yet for more than two centuries after his death, almost no one knew his name. How does a composer who effectively invented the opera as we know it vanish so completely, only to be rediscovered by the very future he helped create? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. Cremona and Mantua

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  Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, maestro di cappella at Cremona Cathedral, gave the young Monteverdi what the musicologist Tim Carter called "a solid grounding in counterpoint and composition." The training bore visible fruit fast: Monteverdi's first published work, a set of motets titled Sacrae cantiunculae, appeared in Venice in 1582 when he was only fifteen years old.

  By 1590 or 1591 he had moved to the court of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga in Mantua, entering service as a string player. His own words, written in the dedication of his third book of madrigals, explain how he got there: "the most noble exercise of the vivuola opened to me the fortunate way into your service." The Mantuan court was competitive and musically ambitious. The Flemish maestro di capella Giaches de Wert held the senior post, alongside the composer and violinist Salomone Rossi and his sister, the singer known as Madama Europa.

  Monteverdi married the court singer Claudia de Cattaneis in 1599. They had two sons, Francesco born in 1601 and Massimiliano born in 1604, and a daughter who died shortly after birth in 1603. He accompanied Duke Vincenzo on military campaigns in Hungary in 1595 and on a visit to Flanders in 1599, where his brother Giulio Cesare reported that Monteverdi encountered the canto alla francese, a French-influenced vocal style he later drew on in his Scherzi musicali.

  When the maestro post fell vacant after Pallavicino's death in 1601, Monteverdi was confirmed in the role. He was at the top of the Mantuan musical hierarchy, but his treatment there would eventually drive him out. His wife died in September 1607. The plague took the young singer Caterina Martinelli, who had been intended for the title role in his opera L'Arianna, in March 1608. By November of that year he was writing bitter letters seeking an "honourable dismissal," a request the Gonzagas refused while offering a modest salary increase instead.

• 3. The Artusi Controversy

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  Giovanni Maria Artusi, an influential Bolognese theorist, attacked Monteverdi's music in a 1600 treatise called L'Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica, followed by a sequel in 1603. Artusi quoted from works not yet published, condemning their harmonic innovations and departures from accepted modal practice. He did not name Monteverdi directly.

  Monteverdi refused to answer him personally. A pseudonymous defender called "L'Ottuso Academico" took up the argument on his behalf. When Monteverdi finally responded, in the preface to his fifth book of madrigals, he cited court duties as the reason for his delayed reply and promised an explanatory treatise, Seconda Pratica, overo Perfettione della Moderna Musica. That treatise never appeared.

  His brother Giulio Cesare later clarified in print what Monteverdi's position actually was: the seconda pratica was not a radical break with the past, but an evolution from the prima pratica, complementary to it rather than opposed. Monteverdi did not see himself as an iconoclast. He saw himself as a pragmatist, adding tools rather than discarding them.

  The debate had an unexpected benefit. Reprints of Monteverdi's earlier madrigal books followed. Some of his madrigals were published in Copenhagen in 1605 and 1606. The poet Tommaso Stigliani published a eulogy of him in his 1605 poem "O sirene de' fiumi." Adriano Banchieri, writing in 1609, described the composer's "expressive qualities" as "truly deserving of the highest commendation." By Monteverdi's own reckoning, Artusi had become fully reconciled to modern trends by 1608, rendering a formal response unnecessary. Yet letters to Giovanni Battista Doni as late as 1632 show Monteverdi still drafting a treatise called Melodia in defence of the seconda pratica. He may still have been working on it at the time of his death.

• 4. L'Orfeo and the Birth of Opera

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  In 1606, Vincenzo's heir Francesco commissioned an opera from Monteverdi for the Carnival season of 1607. The libretto, by Alessandro Striggio, told the story of Orpheus. L'Orfeo received two performances, in February and March 1607. The tenor Francesco Rasi, who had also sung at the premiere of Jacopo Peri's Euridice in 1600, took the title role.

  The opera opens with a brief trumpet toccata, followed by a prologue in which a figure representing music herself announces the subject with a string ritornello that returns throughout the work, one of the earliest examples of an operatic leitmotif. Act 3 centres on Orfeo's aria "Possente spirto e formidabil nume," in which he attempts to persuade Caronte to let him pass into the underworld. Tim Carter described the vocal embellishments and virtuoso accompaniment of that aria as "one of the most compelling visual and aural representations" in early opera.

  The opera that followed, L'Arianna of 1608, is almost entirely lost. Only the Lamento d'Arianna survived, published in the sixth book of madrigals in 1614 as a five-voice work and again in a monodic version in 1623. The musicologist Suzanne Cusick argued that in this lament Monteverdi effectively created "the lament as a recognizable genre of vocal chamber music and as a standard scene in opera." The opening words "Lasciatemi morire" are accompanied by a dominant seventh chord that the scholar Mark Ringer described as "an unforgettable chromatic stab of pain."

  By 1651, the writer Severo Bonini reported that every musical household in Italy possessed a copy of the Lamento d'Arianna. Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, borrowed from the Italian historian Nino Pirrotta the phrase "Opera from Monteverdi to Monteverdi" to describe the arc from private court entertainment in 1607 to commercial public theatre by the time of L'incoronazione di Poppea in 1643.

• 5. Venice and San Marco

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  In 1613, following the death of the ailing Giulio Cesare Martinengo, Monteverdi auditioned for the post of maestro at the basilica of San Marco in Venice by submitting a Mass. He was appointed in August of that year and given 50 ducats for his travel expenses. He was robbed of that money, along with his other belongings, by highwaymen at Sanguinetto on his way back to Cremona.

  Martintengo had left the music of San Marco in poor condition. Monteverdi inherited a neglected choir and a disorganised administration. His first task was to rebuild: recruiting, training, and managing around 30 singers and six instrumentalists, with numbers rising for major festivals. Among his early recruits was Francesco Cavalli, who joined the choir in 1616 at the age of 14 and remained closely associated with Monteverdi for the rest of his career.

  The Republic of Venice suited Monteverdi in ways that Mantua never had. His letter of the 13th of March 1620 to Alessandro Striggio is a frank comparison: he praised his Venetian position and finances while pointedly noting that Mantua still owed him a pension. The Procurators of San Marco raised his annual salary from 300 ducats to 400 in 1616, a concrete sign of their satisfaction.

  His personal life in Venice was not free from difficulty. His son Francesco, studying law at Padua in 1619, was, in Monteverdi's view, spending too much time with music. The composer moved him to the University of Bologna, but the strategy failed; Francesco eventually joined the choir of San Marco in 1623. His other son, Massimiliano, who had qualified in medicine, was arrested by the Inquisition in Mantua in 1627 for reading forbidden literature. Monteverdi sold the pearl necklace he had received from Duchess Caterina to fund his son's defence. He wrote to Striggio for help, fearing that Massimiliano might be tortured; Striggio's intervention appears to have been effective.

  The plague that devastated Venice from 1630 killed more than 45,000 people over 16 months, leaving the city's population at just above 100,000 by 1633, the lowest level in around 150 years. Among the dead was Monteverdi's assistant at San Marco, the composer Alessandro Grandi. Monteverdi's younger brother Giulio Cesare also died at this time, probably from the same disease. Monteverdi was ordained as a priest in 1632.

• 6. The Madrigal Books

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  Monteverdi's nine books of madrigals trace the full arc of his musical development across more than five decades. The first book, published in 1587, was dedicated to Count Marco Verita of Verona. The second book of 1590 was dedicated to the President of the Senate of Milan, Giacomo Ricardi, for whom Monteverdi had played the viola da braccio in 1587. These early volumes show the strong influence of Luca Marenzio, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, and especially Giaches de Wert, from whom Monteverdi learned the art of expressing passion in music.

  The eighth book, subtitled Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi, published in 1638, is the fullest statement of his mature ambitions. Structured in two symmetrical halves, one devoted to "war" and one to "love," it opens each half with a six-voice setting, followed by a Petrarch setting, then a series of duets, and ends with a theatrical number and a ballet. The Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, the centrepiece of the "war" section, had already been performed in Venice in 1624 at the home of the nobleman Girolamo Mocenigo. On its publication in the eighth book, Monteverdi explicitly connected it to his concept of the stile concitato, the "aroused style" meant to "fittingly imitate the utterance and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare." It was the first published work to include instructions for pizzicato string chords.

  The critic Andrew Clements described the eighth book as "a statement of artistic principles and compositional authority," in which Monteverdi shaped and expanded the madrigal form to accommodate what he wanted to do. A posthumous ninth book appeared in 1651, a miscellany reaching back to the early 1630s. It includes the trio "Come dolce oggi l'auretta" for three sopranos, the only surviving music from the lost 1630 opera Proserpina rapita.

• 7. Rediscovery and Legacy

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  After the 1650s, Monteverdi's name effectively disappeared from musical life for more than two centuries. The Lamento d'Arianna lingered as a prototype of a durable genre, but the broader body of work was forgotten. Wider scholarly interest returned in 1881, when Robert Eitner published a shortened version of the Orfeo score. The manuscript of L'incoronazione di Poppea was discovered in 1888 and that of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria in 1904.

  Vincent d'Indy drove the early staged revivals: L'Orfeo in May 1911, L'incoronazione in February 1913, and Il ritorno in May 1925. The Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio had already declared Monteverdi "il divino Claudio" in his 1900 novel Il fuoco, and musicians associated with the regime of Benito Mussolini, including Gian Francesco Malipiero and Luigi Dallapiccola, contrasted Monteverdi's work with what they saw as the decadence of Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky.

  The 1610 Vespers were not published in a modern edition until 1932. Denis Arnold wrote that they achieved fame and popularity only after their twentieth-century rediscovery, having not been particularly regarded in Monteverdi's own time. The general early-music revival of the 1970s accelerated their wider performance. The magazine Gramophone counted more than 30 recordings of the Vespers between 1976 and 2011, and 27 recordings of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda between 1971 and 2013.

  In 1985, Manfred H. Stattkus published a catalogue of Monteverdi's works, the Stattkus-Verzeichnis, revised in 2006, assigning each composition an "SV" number. The website Operabase recorded 555 performances of his operas in 149 productions worldwide across the 2011-2016 seasons, ranking him 30th among all composers and 8th among Italian opera composers. In his last surviving letter, written on the 20th of August 1643, still ill, Monteverdi was asking the Doge of Venice to intervene over the long-disputed pension that Mantua had still not paid him.