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About
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, string player and choirmaster. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque periods of music history.
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 surviving letters give insight into the life of a professional musician in Italy of the period, including problems of income, patronage and politics.
Much of Monteverdi's output, including many stage works, has been lost. His surviving music includes nine books of madrigals, large-scale sacred works such as his Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers) of 1610, and three complete operas. His opera L'Orfeo (1607) is the earliest of the genre still widely performed; towards the end of his life he wrote works for the commercial theatre in Venice, including Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea.
While he worked extensively in the tradition of earlier Renaissance polyphony, such as in his madrigals, he undertook great developments in form and melody, and began to employ the basso continuo technique, distinctive of the Baroque. No stranger to controversy, he defended his sometimes novel techniques as elements of a seconda pratica, contrasting with the more orthodox earlier style which he termed the prima pratica. Largely forgotten during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, his works enjoyed a rediscovery around the beginning of the twentieth century. He is now established both as a significant influence in European musical history and as a composer whose works are regularly performed and recorded.
Music
Background: Renaissance to Baroque
There is a consensus among music historians that a period extending from the mid-15th century to around 1625, characterised in Lewis Lockwood's phrase by "substantial unity of outlook and language", should be identified as the period of "Renaissance music". Musical literature has also defined the succeeding period (covering music from approximately 1580 to 1750) as the era of "Baroque music". It is in the late-16th to early-17th-century overlap of these periods that much of Monteverdi's creativity flourished; he stands as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque.
In the Renaissance era, music had developed as a formal discipline, a "pure science of relationships" in the words of Lockwood. In the Baroque era it became a form of aesthetic expression, increasingly used to adorn religious, social and festive celebrations in which, in accordance with Plato's ideal, the music was subordinated to the text. Solo singing with instrumental accompaniment, or monody, acquired greater significance towards the end of the 16th century, replacing polyphony as the principal means of dramatic music expression. This was the changing world in which Monteverdi was active. Percy Scholes in his Oxford Companion to Music describes the "new music" thus: Composers discarded the choral polyphony of the madrigal style as barbaric, and set dialogue or soliloquy for single voices, imitating more or less the inflexions of speech and accompanying the voice by playing mere supporting chords. Short choruses were interspersed, but they too were homophonic rather than polyphonic."
Novice years: Madrigal books 1 and 2
Ingegneri, Monteverdi's first tutor, was a master of the musica reservata vocal style, which involved the use of chromatic progressions and word-painting; Monteverdi's early compositions were grounded in this style. Ingegneri was a traditional Renaissance composer, "something of an anachronism" according to Arnold, but Monteverdi also studied the work of more "modern" composers such as Luca Marenzio, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, and a little later, Giaches de Wert, from whom he would learn the art of expressing passion. He was a precocious and productive student, as indicated by his youthful publications of 1582–83. Paul 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. Geoffrey Chew classifies them as "not in the most modern vein for the period", acceptable but out-of-date. Chew rates the Canzonette collection of 1584 much more highly than the earlier juvenilia: "These brief three-voice pieces draw on the airy, modern style of the villanellas of Marenzio, a substantial vocabulary of text-related madrigalisms".
The canzonetta form was much used by composers of the day as a technical exercise, and is a prominent element in Monteverdi's first book of madrigals published in 1587. In this book, the playful, pastoral settings again reflect the style of Marenzio, while Luzzaschi's influence is evident in Monteverdi's use of dissonance. 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". Monteverdi set the latter to music in an archaic style reminiscent of the long-dead Cipriano de Rore. Between them is "Ecco mormorar l'onde", strongly influenced by de Wert and hailed by Chew as the great masterpiece of the second book.
A thread common throughout these early works is Monteverdi's use of the technique of imitatio, a general practice among composers of the period whereby material from earlier or contemporary composers was used as models for their own work. Monteverdi continued to use this procedure well beyond his apprentice years, a factor that in some critics' eyes has compromised his reputation for originality.
Madrigals 1590–1605: books 3, 4, 5
Monteverdi's first fifteen years of service in Mantua are bracketed by his publications of the third book of Madrigals in 1592 and the fourth and fifth books in 1603 and 1605. Between 1592 and 1603 he made minor contributions to other anthologies. How much he composed in this period is a matter of conjecture; his many duties in the Mantuan court may have limited his opportunities, 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.
The third book shows strongly the increased influence of Wert, by that time Monteverdi's direct superior as maestro de capella at Mantua. Two poets dominate the collection: Tasso, whose lyrical poetry had figured prominently in the second book but is here represented through the more epic, heroic verses from Gerusalemme liberata, and Giovanni Battista Guarini, whose verses had appeared sporadically in Monteverdi's earlier publications, but form around half of the contents of the third book. Wert's influence is reflected in Monteverdi's forthrightly modern approach, and his expressive and chromatic settings of Tasso's verses. 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". Chew cites the setting of "Stracciami pur il core" as "a prime example of Monteverdi's irregular dissonance practice". 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.
As the 1590s progressed, Monteverdi moved closer towards the form that he would identify in due course as the seconda pratica. 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. In this madrigal Monteverdi again departs from the established practice in the use of dissonance, by means of a vocal ornament Palisca describes as échappé. Monteverdi's daring use of this device is, says Palisca, "like a forbidden pleasure". In this and in other settings the poet's images were supreme, even at the expense of musical consistency.
The fourth book includes madrigals to which Artusi objected on the grounds of their "modernism". However, Ossi describes it as "an anthology of disparate works firmly rooted in the 16th century", closer in nature to the third book than to the fifth. There is evidence of the composer's familiarity with the works of Carlo Gesualdo, and with composers of the school of Ferrara such as Luzzaschi; the book was dedicated to a Ferrarese musical society, the Accademici Intrepidi.
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. He presents his music through complex counterpoint and daring harmonies, although at times combining the expressive possibilities of the new music with traditional polyphony.
Opera and sacred music, 1607–1612
In Monteverdi's final five years' service in Mantua he completed the operas L'Orfeo (1607) and L'Arianna (1608), and wrote quantities of sacred music, including the Messa in illo tempore (1610) and also the collection known as Vespro della Beata Vergine which is often referred to as "Monteverdi's Vespers" (1610). He also published Scherzi musicale a tre voci (1607), settings of verses composed since 1599 and dedicated to the Gonzaga heir, Francesco. The vocal trio in the Scherzi comprises two sopranos and a bass, accompanied by simple instrumental ritornellos. According to Bowers the music "reflected the modesty of the prince's resources; it was, nevertheless, the earliest publication to associate voices and instruments in this particular way".
L'Orfeo
The opera opens with a brief trumpet toccata. The prologue of La musica (a figure representing music) is introduced with a ritornello by the strings, repeated often to represent the "power of music" – one of the earliest examples of an operatic leitmotif. Act 1 presents a pastoral idyll, the buoyant mood of which continues into Act 2. The confusion and grief which follow the news of Euridice's death are musically reflected by harsh dissonances and the juxtaposition of keys. The music remains in this vein until the act ends with the consoling sounds of the ritornello.
Act 3 is dominated by Orfeo's aria "Possente spirto e formidabil nume" by which he attempts to persuade Caronte to allow him to enter Hades. Monteverdi's vocal embellishments and virtuoso accompaniment provide what Tim Carter has described as "one of the most compelling visual and aural representations" in early opera. In Act 4 the warmth of Proserpina's singing on behalf of Orfeo is retained until Orfeo fatally "looks back". The brief final act, which sees Orfeo's rescue and metamorphosis, is framed by the final appearance of the ritornello and by a lively moresca that brings the audience back to their everyday world.
Throughout the opera Monteverdi makes innovative use of polyphony, extending the rules beyond the conventions which composers normally observed in fidelity to Palestrina. He combines elements of the traditional 16th-century madrigal with the new monodic style where the text dominates the music and sinfonias and instrumental ritornellos illustrate the action.
L'Arianna
The music for this opera is lost except for the Lamento d'Arianna, which was published in the sixth book in 1614 as a five-voice madrigal; a separate monodic version was published in 1623. In its operatic context the lament depicts Arianna's various emotional reactions to her abandonment: sorrow, anger, fear, self-pity, desolation and a sense of futility. Throughout, indignation and anger are punctuated by tenderness, until a descending line brings the piece to a quiet conclusion.
The musicologist Suzanne Cusick writes that Monteverdi "created the lament as a recognizable genre of vocal chamber music and as a standard scene in opera ... that would become crucial, almost genre-defining, to the full-scale public operas of 17th-century Venice". Cusick observes how Monteverdi is able to match in music the "rhetorical and syntactical gestures" in the text of Ottavio Rinuccini. The opening repeated words "Lasciatemi morire" (Let me die) are accompanied by a dominant seventh chord which Ringer describes as "an unforgettable chromatic stab of pain". 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.
Rinuccini's full libretto, which has survived, was set in modern times by Alexander Goehr (Arianna, 1995), including a version of Monteverdi's Lament.
Vespers
The Vespro della Beata Vergine, Monteverdi's first published sacred music since the Madrigali spirituali of 1583, consists of 14 components: an introductory versicle and response, five psalms interspersed with five "sacred concertos" (Monteverdi's term),a hymn, and two Magnificat settings. Collectively these pieces fulfil the requirements for a Vespers service on any feast day of the Virgin. Monteverdi employs many musical styles; the more traditional features, such as cantus firmus, falsobordone and Venetian canzone, are mixed with the latest madrigal style, including echo effects and chains of dissonances. Some of the musical features used are reminiscent of L'Orfeo, written slightly earlier for similar instrumental and vocal forces.
In this work the "sacred concertos" fulfil the role of the antiphons which divide the psalms in regular Vespers services. Their non-liturgical character has led writers to question whether they should be within the service, or indeed whether this was Monteverdi's intention. 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.
All the psalms, and the Magnificat, are based on melodically limited and repetitious Gregorian chant psalm tones, around which Monteverdi builds a range of innovative textures. This concertato style challenges the traditional cantus firmus, 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. Monteverdi uses modern rhythms, frequent metre changes and constantly varying textures; yet, according to John Eliot Gardiner, "for all the virtuosity of its instrumental writing and the evident care which has gone into the combinations of timbre", Monteverdi's chief concern was resolving the proper combination of words and music.
The actual musical ingredients of the Vespers were not novel to Mantua – concertato had been used by Lodovico Grossi da Viadana, a former choirmaster at the cathedral of Mantua, while the Sonata sopra had been anticipated by Archangelo Crotti in his Sancta Maria published in 1608. It is, writes Denis Arnold, Monteverdi's mixture of the various elements that makes the music unique. Arnold adds that the Vespers achieved fame and popularity only after their 20th-century rediscovery; they were not particularly regarded in Monteverdi's time.
Madrigals 1614–1638: books 6, 7 and 8
Sixth book
During his years in Venice Monteverdi published his sixth (1614), seventh (1619) and eighth (1638) books of madrigals. The sixth book consists of works written before the composer's departure from Mantua. Hans Redlich sees it as a transitional work, containing Monteverdi's last madrigal compositions in the manner of the prima pratica, together with music which is typical of the new style of expression which Monteverdi had displayed in the dramatic works of 1607–08. The central theme of the collection is loss; the best-known work is the five-voice version of Lamento d'Arianna, which, says Massimo Ossi, gives "an object lesson in the close relationship between monodic recitative and counterpoint". The book contains Monteverdi's first settings of verses by Giambattista Marino, and two settings of Petrarch which Ossi considers the most extraordinary pieces in the volume, providing some "stunning musical moments".
Seventh book
While Monteverdi had looked backwards in the sixth book, he moved forward in the seventh book from the traditional concept of the madrigal, and from monody, in favour of chamber duets. There are exceptions, such the two solo lettere amorose (love letters) "Se i languidi miei sguardi" and "Se pur destina e vole", written to be performed genere rapresentativo – acted as well as sung. Of the duets which are the main features of the volume, Chew highlights "Ohimé, dov'è il mio ben, dov'è il mio core", a romanesca in which two high voices express dissonances above a repetitive bass pattern. The book also contains large-scale ensemble works, and the ballet Tirsi e Clori. This was the height of Monteverdi's "Marino period"; six of the pieces in the book are settings of the poet's verses. As Carter puts it, Monteverdi "embraced Marino's madrigalian kisses and love-bites with ... the enthusiasm typical of the period". Some commentators have opined that the composer should have had better poetic taste.
Eighth book
The eighth book, subtitled Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi ... ("Madrigals of war and love") is structured in two symmetrical halves, one for "war" and one for "love". Each half begins with a six-voice setting, followed by an equally large-scale Petrarch setting, then a series of duets mainly for tenor voices, and concludes with a theatrical number and a final ballet. The "war" half contains several items written as tributes to the emperor Ferdinand III, who had succeeded to the Habsburg throne in 1637. Many of Monteverdi's familiar poets – Strozzi, Rinuccini, Tasso, Marino, Guarini – are represented in the settings.
It is difficult to gauge when many of the pieces were composed, although the ballet Mascherata dell' ingrate that ends the book dates back to 1608 and the celebration of the Gonzaga-Savoy marriage. The Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, centrepiece of the "war" settings, had been written and performed in Venice in 1624; on its publication in the eighth book, Monteverdi explicitly linked it to his concept of concitato genera (otherwise stile concitato – "aroused style") that would "fittingly imitate the utterance and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare", and implied that since he had originated this style, others had begun to copy it.
The critic Andrew Clements describes 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 ... the pieces collected in Book Eight make up a treasury of what music in the first half the 17th century could possibly express."
Other Venice music 1614–1638
During this period of his Venetian residency Monteverdi composed quantities of sacred music. Numerous motets and other short works were included in anthologies by local publishers such as Giulio Cesare Bianchi (a former student of Monteverdi) and Lorenzo Calvi, and others were published elsewhere in Italy and Austria. The range of styles in the motets is broad, from simple strophic arias with string accompaniment to full-scale declamations with an alleluia finale.
Monteverdi retained emotional and political attachments to the Mantuan court and wrote for it, or undertook to write, large amounts of stage music including at least four operas. The ballet Tirsi e Clori survives through its inclusion in the seventh book, but the rest of the Mantuan dramatic music is lost. Many of the missing manuscripts may have disappeared in the wars that overcame Mantua in 1630. The most significant aspect of their loss, according to Carter, is the extent to which they might have provided musical links between Monteverdi's early Mantuan operas and those he wrote in Venice after 1638: "Without these links ... it is hard to a produce a coherent account of his development as a composer for the stage". Likewise, Janet Beat regrets that the 30-year gap hampers the study of how opera orchestration developed during those critical early years.
Apart from the madrigal books, Monteverdi's only published collection during this period was the volume of Scherzi musicale in 1632. For unknown reasons, the composer's name does not appear on the inscription, the dedication being signed by the Venetian printer Bartolemeo Magni; Carter surmises that the recently ordained Monteverdi may have wished to keep his distance from this secular collection. It mixes strophic continuo songs for solo voice with more complex works which employ continuous variation over repeated bass patterns. Chew selects the chaconne for two tenors, Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti, as the outstanding item in the collection: "The greater part of this piece consists of repetitions of a bass pattern which ensures tonal unity of a simple kind, owing to its being framed as a simple cadence in a G major tonal type: over these repetitions, inventive variations unfold in virtuoso passage-work".
Late operas and final works
The last years of Monteverdi's life were much occupied with opera for the Venetian stage. Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, gives his chapter on this topic the title "Opera from Monteverdi to Monteverdi." This wording, originally proposed humorously by the Italian music historian Nino Pirrotta, is interpreted seriously by Taruskin as indicating that Monteverdi is significantly responsible for the transformation of the opera genre from a private entertainment of the nobility (as with Orfeo in 1607), to what became a major commercial genre, as exemplified by his opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643). His two surviving operatic works of this period, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione are held by Arnold to be the first "modern" operas; Il ritorno is the first Venetian opera to depart from what Ellen Rosand terms "the mythological pastoral". 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."
Il ritorno, says Carter, is clearly influenced by Monteverdi's earlier works. Penelope's lament in Act I is close in character to the lament from L'Arianna, while the martial episodes recall Il combattimento. Stile concitato is prominent in the fight scenes and in the slaying of Penelope's suitors. In L'incoronazione, Monteverdi represents moods and situations by specific musical devices: triple metre stands for the language of love; arpeggios demonstrate conflict; stile concitato represents rage. There is continuing debate about how much of the extant L'incoronazione music is Monteverdi's original, and how much is the work of others (there are, for instance, traces of music by Francesco Cavalli).
The Selva morale e spirituale of 1641, and the posthumous Messa et salmi published in 1650 (which was edited by Cavalli), are selections of the sacred music that Monteverdi wrote for San Marco during his 30-year tenure – much else was likely written but not published. The Selva morale volume opens with a series of madrigal settings on moral texts, dwelling on themes such as "the transitory nature of love, earthly rank and achievement, even existence itself". They are followed by a Mass in conservative style (stile antico), the high point of which is an extended seven-voice "Gloria". Scholars believe that this might have been written to celebrate the end of the 1631 plague. The rest of the volume is made up of numerous psalm settings, two Magnificats and three Salve Reginas. 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.
The posthumous ninth book of madrigals was published in 1651, a miscellany dating back to the early 1630s, some items being repeats of previously published pieces, such as the popular duet O sia tranquillo il mare from 1638. The book includes a trio for three sopranos, "Come dolce oggi l'auretta", which is the only surviving music from the 1630 lost opera Proserpina rapita.
