Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi, whose full name was Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (Cremona, baptized May 15, 1567 - Venice, November 29, 1643), was a Italian composer, violagambist, singer, choir director and priest. He composed both secular and sacred music and marked the transition between the polyphonic and madrigal tradition of the 16th century and the birth of lyrical drama and of opera in the XVII century. He is a crucial figure in the transition between Renaissance and Baroque music.
Born in Cremona, where he did his first musical studies and compositions, he began his music studies with Marco Antonio Ingegnieri, Kapellmeister of the Cathedral of Cremona, and at the age of 16 he published his first works. He developed his career first at the court of Mantua (c. 1590-1613) and then, until his death, in the Republic of Venice. Surviving letters from him give insight into the life of a professional musician in Italy at the time, including income, patronage, and political issues.
Much of the musical output, including many stage works, has been lost. His surviving music includes nine collections of madrigals, in which he displays his mastery of the madrigal technique; large-scale religious works, such as his Vespers of the Blessed Virgin of 1610, and three complete operas. In 1599, he married Claudia de Cataneis, who died in 1607, and in that same year The Fable of Orpheus premiered, his first musical drama, considered the first opera in history, such and how it is understood today. His next opera L'Arianna (1608), whose music has been lost except for the famous "Lamento", cemented his fame.
In 1613, he was choirmaster and director of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, the city where he composed most of his sacred works. To inaugurate the first theater in this city, he composed more operas. In his religious music he used a wide variety of styles, ranging from the polyphony of his Mass of 1610 to the highly virtuosic operatic vocal music and the antiphonal choral compositions of his Vespers of the Blessed Virgin , also from 1610. The work Selva morale e spirituale, published in 1640, is an enormous compendium of sacred music. In 1637, he composed a new series of operas, of which only The Return of Ulysses to the Fatherland (1641) and The Coronation of Poppaea (1642) have survived.
While he worked extensively in the earlier Renaissance polyphony tradition, as evidenced by his madrigals, he undertook major developments in form and melody and began to employ the basso continuo technique distinctive to the Baroque. He combined homophonic and contrapuntal writings, where he freely used harmonies and dissonances. No stranger to controversy, he defended his sometimes novel techniques as elements of a seconda pratica, in contrast to the more orthodox earlier style which he termed prima pratica. Largely forgotten during the 18th century and much of the XIX, his works enjoyed a rediscovery in the early XX century. He is considered a significant influence on European musical history and as a composer whose works are regularly performed and recorded.
Biography
Historical context: Italy at the time
Monteverdi is generally described as an "Italian" composer, although at the time the concept of "Italy" existed only as a geographical entity. Although the inhabitants of the peninsula shared much in common in terms of history, culture, and language, in political terms the people experienced several layers of authority and jurisdiction, mostly foreign. In the first instance, they were subject to the local rulers of their City-States, powerful families like the Gonzagas and the Medicis. Above them were the imperial powers, in the 16th century mainly Spain, and also the Habsburg authority of Vienna, in their role as Holy Roman Emperors, guardians of the Catholic faith.
Cremona: childhood and adolescence (1567-1591)
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was born in Cremona and baptized in the church of SS Nazaro e Celso on May 15, 1567. His name appears in the registry as "Claudio Zuan Antonio", son of "Messer Baldasar Mondeverdo". His family was humble and he was the first son of the apothecary Baldassare Monteverdi and his first wife Maddalena (née Zignani). They had been married at the beginning of the previous year. Claudio's brother, Giulio Cesare, was also a musician. He had two other brothers and two sisters from Baldassare's marriage to Maddalena and his father's subsequent marriage in 1576 or 1577. Cremona was under the jurisdiction of Milan, a Spanish possession, so Monteverdi was technically born a Spanish subject. Cremona it was close to the border of the Republic of Venice and not far from the lands controlled by Mantua, in the two states that Monteverdi later made his career in.
There is no clear record of his early musical training, or evidence that, as is sometimes claimed, he was a member of the Cathedral choir or studied at the University of Cremona. His first published work by him, a set of tripartite motets, Sacrae cantiunculae (Sacred Songs ) for three voices, was published in Venice in 1582, when he was fifteen. years. In this, and in his other early publications, he described himself as the student of Marco Antonio Ingegnieri, who was from 1581 (and possibly 1576) to 1592 the Kapellmeister at the Cathedral. Musicologist Tim Carter deduces that Ingegneri "gave him a strong foundation in counterpoint and composition", and that Monteverdi would have also studied playing violin-family instruments and singing.
His early publications also give proof of his connections beyond Cremona, even in his early years. His second published work, Madrigali spirituali (Spiritual Madrigals , 1583), was printed in Brescia. His next works (his first published secular compositions) were five-part madrigal sets, according to his biographer Paolo Fabbri: "the inevitable testing ground for any composer of the second half of the century XVI … the secular genre par excellence». The first book of madrigals (Venice, 1587) was dedicated to Count Marco Verità of Verona and the second (Venice, 1590) to the president of the Senate of Milan, Giacomo Ricardi, for whom he had played the viola da braccio in 1587.
Mantua (1591-1613)
Court Musician
In 1590 or 1591, he entered the service of Duke Vicente I Gonzaga of Mantua. In the dedication to the duke of his third book of madrigals (Venice, 1592) he recalled that "the noblest exercise of the vivuola opened the fortunate path to his service". In it, he compared his instrumental performance with the "flowers" and his compositions as "fruits", which as they mature "may more dignifiedly and perfectly serve you", indicating his intentions to establish himself as a composer. In the dedication of his second book of madrigals, Monteverdi described himself as a player of the vivuola (which could mean viola da gamba or viola da braccio).
The duke was eager to establish his court as a musical center and sought to recruit leading musicians. When Monteverdi arrived in Mantua, the Kapellmeister at court was the Flemish musician Giaches de Wert. Other notable court musicians during this period included the composer and violinist Salomone Rossi, Rossi's sister, the singer Madama Europa, and Francesco Rasi. In 1599, he married the court singer Claudia de Cataneis, the daughter of a performer. of viola, with whom he had two sons, Francesco (b. 1601), who was a musician like his father, and Massimiliano (b. 1604), a Carmelite religious, and a daughter who died shortly after birth in 1603. The brother de Monteverdi, Giulio Cesare, joined the court musicians in 1602.
When Wert died in 1596, his position was taken over by Benedetto Pallavicino, but the duke clearly appreciated Monteverdi and accompanied him on his military campaigns in Hungary (1595) and also on a visit to Flanders in 1599. There in the city from Spa, his brother Giulio Cesare informed him that the canto alla francese had been found, and brought back to Italy. Monteverdi may have been a member of the duke's entourage in Florence in 1600 for the wedding by Marie de' Medici and Henry IV of France, during the celebrations Eurídice by Jacopo Peri (the oldest surviving opera) premiered. On Pallavicino's death in 1601, Monteverdi was confirmed as the new Kapellmeister.
Controversy with Artusi and second practice
In the early 17th century century, Monteverdi found himself at the center of musical controversy. The influential Bolognese theorist Giovanni Artusi attacked his music, without naming the composer, in his essay L'Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (Artusi, or on the imperfections of music moderna) of 1600, followed by a sequel in 1603. Artusi quoted excerpts from Monteverdi's still unpublished works (they later formed part of his fourth and fifth books of madrigals of 1603 and 1605) and condemned his use of the harmony and his innovations in the use of musical modes, compared to the orthodox polyphonic practice of the 16th century. Artusi tried to maintain correspondence with Monteverdi on these issues. The composer refused to answer, but found a defender in a partisan pseudonym, "L'Ottuso Academico" ("The Obtuse Academician"). Finally, Monteverdi responded in the preface to the fifth book of madrigals that his duties in the He was prevented from a detailed answer by the court, but in a note to the "studious reader", he stated that he would publish a response shortly, Seconda pratica, overo Perfettione della Moderna Musica (The Second Style or Perfection of modern music). This work never appeared, but a later publication by Claudio's brother Giulio Cesare made it clear that the seconda pratica that Monteverdi advocated was not seen by him as a radical change or his own invention, but rather an evolution of earlier styles (prima pratica) that was complementary to them. Monteverdi defended himself in a writing published in 1607, arguing that, while the old style, which he called prima pratica, was suitable for the composition of religious music (and he did so for many years), the seconda pratica, where “ words are masters of harmony, not slaves”, was more appropriate for madrigals, a composition in which it was vital to be able to express the emotional lines of the text. His great achievement as a composer of operas was to combine the chromaticism of the seconda pratica with the monodic style of vocal writing (a flowery vocal line with a simple harmonic bass) developed by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini..
In any case, this debate seemed to raise the profile of the composer and led to reprints of his early books of madrigals. Some of his madrigals were published in Copenhagen in 1605 and 1606, and the poet Tommaso Stigliani published a eulogy of him in his 1605 poem "O sirene de 'fiumi". The composer of comedy madrigals and theorist Adriano Banchieri wrote in 1609: "I must not fail to mention the noblest of composers, Monteverdi... his expressive qualities truly they deserve the highest commendation and we find in them innumerable examples of incomparable declamation... enhanced by comparable harmonies". Modern music historian Massimo Ossi has placed Artusi's theme in the context of Monteverdi's artistic development: "If the controversy seems defining Monteverdi's historical position, also seems to have been about stylistic developments that by 1600 Monteverdi had already overcome".
The non-appearance of Monteverdi's promised explanatory treatise may have been a deliberate ploy, since by 1608, according to Monteverdi's calculations, Artusi had fully reconciled himself with modern trends in music and seconda pratica was already well established. Monteverdi did not need to re-examine the matter. On the other hand, letters to Giovanni Battista Doni from 1632 show that Monteverdi was still preparing a defense of the seconda pratica, in a treatise entitled Melodia and may still be working on it at the time of her death ten years later.
Opera, conflict and departure
In 1606, Vincent I's heir, Francis IV, commissioned him the opera The Fable of Orpheus, with a libretto by the court official of the Duke of Mantua Alessandro Striggio the Younger, for the Carnival season of 1607. Two performances were held in February and March of that year. Among the singers was Rasi in the title role and who had sung in the first performance of Eurydice witnessed by Vincent I in 1600. It was his first musical drama and marked the transition to the Baroque. This opera represents perhaps the most important evolution in the history of the genre, establishing itself as a cultured form of musical and dramatic expression. Through the skilful use of vocal inflections, Monteverdi tried to express all the emotion contained in the actor's speech, reaching a chromatic language of great harmonic freedom. The orchestra, greatly enlarged, was used not only to accompany the singers, but also to establish the different atmospheres of the scenes. The score of Orfeo contains fourteen independent orchestral parts. The public applauded this opera with great enthusiasm and his next opera, L'Arianna (libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini), from 1608 and intended to celebrate the marriage of Francis IV to Margaret of Savoy. All the music of this opera is lost, except for "Ariadne's Lament", which became extremely popular. The entertainment ballet Il ballo delle ingrate also belongs to this period.
The strain of the hard work Monteverdi had been putting into these and other compositions was exacerbated by personal tragedies. His wife died in September 1607 and the young singer Caterina Martinelli, intended for the title role of Ariadne, died of smallpox in March 1608. He also resented his increasingly poor financial treatment by the Gonzagas. He retired to Cremona in 1608 to recuperate, and wrote a bitter letter to Vincent I's minister, Annibale Chieppio, in November of that year seeking (unsuccessfully) "an honorable dismissal". Although the duke increased his salary and pension, and Monteverdi returned to continue his work at court, he began to seek patronage elsewhere. After publishing Vespers of the Blessed Virgin in 1610, which were dedicated to Pope Paul V, he visited Rome, apparently hoping to place his son Francesco in a seminary, but it seems that he also looking for alternative employment. In the same year, he may also have visited Venice, where a large collection of his sacred music was being printed, with a similar intention.
Duke Vincente I died on February 18, 1612. When Francis IV succeeded him, court intrigues and cost-cutting led to the dismissal of Monteverdi and his brother Giulio Cesare, who returned, almost penniless, to Cremona. Despite Francis IV's own death from smallpox in December 1612, Monteverdi was unable to return to favor his successor, his brother, Cardinal Fernando I. In 1613, after the death of Giulio Cesare Martinengo, the composer auditioned for his position as a teacher in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, for which he presented music for a mass. He was appointed in August 1613 and given 50 ducats for his own expenses (which were stolen, along with his other belongings, by brigands in Sanguinetto on his return to Cremona).
Venice (1613-1643)
Maturity (1613-1630)
Martinengo had been ill for some time before his death and had left the music of San Marcos in a fragile state. The choir had been neglected and management ignored. When Monteverdi came to take his position, his primary responsibility was to recruit, train, discipline, and manage the musicians of San Marcos (the capella), who were rising about 30 singers and six instrumentalists. Numbers could be increased for large events. Among those recruited to the choir was Francesco Cavalli, who joined in 1616 at the age of 14. He maintained his contact with San Marco throughout his life and developed a close association with Monteverdi. Monteverdi also sought to expand the repertoire, including not only the traditional a cappella repertoire of Roman and Flemish composers, but also examples of the modern style that he favored which included the use of the basso continuo and other instruments. Apart from this, of course, he was expected to compose music for all the major church festivals. This included a new mass each year for Holy Cross Day and Christmas Eve, cantatas honoring the Venetian Doge, and many other works (many of which are now lost). Monteverdi was also free to earn income by providing music for other churches. Venetian and other patrons and was frequently commissioned to provide music for state banquets. The procuradores of San Marcos, for whom he was directly responsible, showed his satisfaction with his work in 1616 by increasing his annual salary from 300 to 400 ducats.
The relative freedom granted to him by the Republic of Venice, compared to the problems of court politics in Mantua, is reflected in his letters to Striggio, particularly in his letter of March 13, 1620, when he refused a invitation to return to Mantua, extolling his present position and finances in Venice, and in reference to the pension Mantua still owed him. As a citizen of Mantua, however, he accepted the commissions of the new Duke Ferdinand, who had formally renounced his Cardinal in 1616 to assume the duties of the state. These included the balli Tirsi e Clori (1616) and Apollo (1620), an opera Andromeda (1620) and an interlude Le nozze di Tetide, for Ferdinand's marriage to Catherine de' Medici (1617). Most of these compositions were long overdue in creation, partly, as evidenced by surviving correspondence, because of the composer's unwillingness to prioritize them, and partly because of constantly changing court requirements. have lost, apart from Tirsi e Clori, which was included in the seventh book of madrigals (published in 1619) and dedicated to Duchess Catherine, for whom the composer received a pearl necklace from the Duchess. He completed a later important commission, the opera La finta pazza Licori, to a libretto by Giulio Strozzi, for Vincent II, who succeeded Ferdinand to the dukedom in 1626. Due to the illness of the latter (died 1627), never realized and also lost.
He also received commissions from other Italian states and their communities in Venice. These included, for the Milanese community in 1620, music for the feast of Saint Charles Borromeo, and for the Florentine community a requiem mass for Cosimo II de' Medici (1621). Monteverdi performed on behalf of Paolo Giordano II, Duke of Bracciano., to organize the publication of works by the Cremona musician Francesco Petratti. Among Monteverdi's private Venetian patrons was the nobleman Girolamo Mocenigo, in whose house the dramatic entertainment Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda was premiered in 1624. i> based on an episode in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated. spend time there during 1627 and 1628.
Monteverdi's musical direction received the attention of foreign visitors. Dutch diplomat and musician Constantijn Huygens, attending a Vespers service at the church of the SS Giovanni e Lucia, wrote that “I heard the most perfect music I have ever heard in my life. It was conducted by the very famous Claudio Monteverdi... who was also the composer and was accompanied by four theorbos, two cornettos, two bassoons, a large basso de viola, organs and other instruments...". mass and provided other musical entertainment for the 1625 visit to Venice of Crown Prince Wladislaus IV of Poland, who may have sought to revive attempts made a few years earlier to lure the composer to Warsaw. He also provided chamber music for Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count of the Palatinate-Neuburger, when the latter was paying an incognito visit to Venice in July 1625.
Monteverdi's correspondence in 1625 and 1626 with the Mantuan courtier Ercole Marigliani reveals an interest in alchemy, which the composer had apparently taken up as a hobby. He analyzed the experiments to transform lead into gold, the problems of obtaining mercury and mentioned the commissioning of special containers for his experiments in the Murano glass factory.
Despite his generally satisfactory situation in Venice, Monteverdi experienced personal problems from time to time. On one occasion, probably due to his extensive network of contacts, he was the subject of an anonymous complaint to the Venetian authorities alleging that he supported the Habsburgs. He was also subject to concern for his children. His son Francesco, while studying law in Padua in 1619, in the composer's opinion was spending too much time with music and therefore transferred him to the University of Bologna. This did not have the expected result and it seems that he was resigned to Francesco having a musical career: he joined the choir of San Marco in 1623. His other son Massimiliano, who graduated in medicine, was arrested by the Inquisition in Mantua in 1627 for read forbidden literature. Monteverdi was forced to sell the necklace he had received from Duchess Caterina to pay for the (ultimately successful) defense of his son. He wrote to Striggio at this time seeking his help and fearing that Massimiliano might be subjected to torture. It seems that Striggio's intervention was helpful. Financial concerns at this time also led him to visit Cremona to secure a church canonry.
Rest (1630-1637)
A series of disturbing events disturbed the world of Monteverdi in the period around 1630. Habsburg armies invaded Mantua in 1630, besieged the plague-stricken city, and after its fall in July looted its treasures and they scattered the art community. The plague reached Mantua's ally Venice by an embassy led by Monteverdi's confidante Striggio, and over a 16-month period caused more than 45,000 deaths and left Venice's population in 1633 at just over 100,000. inhabitants, the lowest level for about 150 years. Among the victims of the plague was Monteverdi's assistant at San Marco and a notable composer in his own right, Alessandro Grandi. The plague and the aftermath of the war had an inevitable detrimental effect on the economy and artistic life of Venice, his younger brother Giulio Cesare also died at this time, probably from the plague.
By then, Monteverdi was sixty years old, and his pace of composition seemed to have slowed. He had written an arrangement of Strozzi's Proserpina rapita, which has been lost except for a vocal trio, for a Mocenigo wedding in 1630 and produced a mass for the deliverance of St. Mark's plague which was performed in November 1631. His set of Scherzi musicali was published in Venice in 1632. In 1631, he was admitted to the tonsure and was ordained a deacon, and later a priest, in 1632. Although these ceremonies had place in Venice, he was nominated as a member of the clergy of Cremona. This may imply that he intended to retire there.
Last years (1637-1643)
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In 1637, the Teatro San Cassiano, the first opera house in Europe, was inaugurated, stimulating the musical life of the city and coinciding with a new explosion of the composer's activity. The year 1638 saw the publication of his eighth book of madrigals and a revision of the Il ballo delle ingrate. The eighth book contains a ballo, "Volgendi il ciel", which may have been composed by Emperor Ferdinand III, to whom the book is dedicated. In the years 1640-1641, Selva morale e spirituale was published, an enormous compendium of sacred music where the full range of styles used by Monteverdi was once again appreciated. Among other commissions, he wrote music in 1637 and 1638 for Strozzi's "Accademia degli Unisoni" in Venice and in 1641 a ballet, La vittoria d'Amore, for the court of Piacenza.
He was not yet completely free of his responsibilities to the musicians of San Marcos. He wrote to complain about one of his singers to the procurators, on June 9, 1637: «I, Claudio Monteverdi... come humbly... to expose how Domenicato Aldegati... a bass, yesterday morning... at the moment of the greatest concurrence of people… spoke these exact words… "The Music Director comes from a brood of ferocious bastards, a thief, fucked up, bastard… and I shit on him and whoever protects him…"”.
Monteverdi's contribution to opera in this period is remarkable. He revised his earlier opera L'Arianna in 1640 and wrote three new works for the commercial stage, Ulysses' Return to the Fatherland of the same year, performed by first time in Bologna with Venetian singers, Le nozze d'Enea e Lavinia (1641, music lost), and The Coronation of Poppaea (1643). The introduction to the printed setting of Le nozze d'Enea, by an unknown author, acknowledges that Monteverdi must be credited for the revival of theater music and that he "will be seen in later times, for his compositions surely they will survive the ravages of time." These works, composed at the end of his life, contain scenes of great dramatic intensity where the music reflects the thoughts and emotions of the characters. These scores have influenced many later composers and are still maintained in today's repertoire.
In his last surviving letter of August 20, 1643, Monteverdi, already ill, was still awaiting the settlement of the long-disputed pension of Mantua and asked the Doge of Venice to intervene on his behalf. He died on November 29 in 1643 in Venice, after paying a brief visit to Cremona. After solemn funerals were held simultaneously in the Cathedral of San Marco and in the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Frari, his remains were buried in the latter. He left an extensive body of work that would influence all subsequent music.
Work
Background: from Renaissance to Baroque
There is a consensus among music historians that a period extending from the mid-15th century to around 1625, characterized in Lewis Lockwood's phrase by "substantial unity of perspective and language", should be identified as the period of "Renaissance music". Music literature has also defined the following period (covering music from about 1580 to 1750) as the era of "baroque music". It is in the overlap of these periods that the late 16th century It was in the early XVII that much of Monteverdi's creativity flourished. He stands out as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque.
By the Renaissance era, music had developed as a formal discipline, a "pure science of relationships", in Lockwood's words. By the Baroque era, it had become a form of aesthetic expression, increasingly more used to adorn religious, social and festive celebrations in which, according to Plato's ideal, music was subordinated to the text. Solo singing with instrumental accompaniment, or monody, acquired greater importance towards the end of the century XVI and replaced polyphony as the primary means of dramatic musical expression. This was the changing world in which Monteverdi was active. Percy Scholes in his The Oxford Companion to Music describes the "new music" thus: "[Composers] discarded the choral polyphony of the madrigal style as barbaric and established dialogue or soliloquy for individual voices, imitating more or less the inflections of the speech and accompanying the voice by playing simple supporting chords. The short choruses were interspersed, but were also homophonic rather than polyphonic."
Compositions
The works of Claudio Monteverdi are usually classified according to the Stattkus catalog (Claudio Monteverdi: Verzeichnis der erhaltenen Werke), published in 1985 by the German musicologist Manfred H. Stattkus. In 2007, a second, revised and completed edition was published.
Madrigals
Ingegneri, Monteverdi's first tutor, was a master of the musica reservata vocal style, which involved the use of color progressions and figuralism. Monteverdi's early compositions were based on this style. Ingegneri was a traditional composer of the Renaissance, "somewhat 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 1582-1583. Paul Ringer writes that "these adolescent efforts reveal a palpable ambition combined with a compelling mastery of contemporary style", but at this stage show their creator's competence rather than startling originality. Geoffrey Chew classifies them as "not in the most modern line for the period", acceptable, but outdated. Chew rates the 1584 Canzonette collection much higher than the earlier juvenile: "These short three-voice pieces draw on the airy, modern style of Marenzio's villanellas, [drawing on] a substantial vocabulary of madrigalisms related to the text".
The canzonetta form was widely used by composers of the time as a technical exercise and is a prominent element in their first book of madrigals published in 1587. In this book, playful settings and pastorals again reflect Marenzio's style, while Luzzaschi's influence is evident in his use of dissonance. The second book (1590) begins with a Marenzio-inspired setting of a modern verse, "Non si levav ' ancor» by Torquato Tasso, and concludes with a text from 50 years earlier: «Cantai un tempo» by Pietro Bembo. Monteverdi set the latter to music in an archaic style reminiscent of the late Cipriano de Rore. Among them is "Ecco mormorar l'onde", heavily influenced by De Wert and hailed by Chew as the great masterpiece of the second book.
A common thread running through these early works is their use of the imitatio technique, a general practice among composers of the time in which material from previous or contemporary composers was used as a model for his own work. He continued to use this procedure well beyond the years of his apprenticeship, a factor which in the eyes of some critics has compromised his reputation for originality.
Monteverdi's first fifteen years of service in Mantua are marked 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. in this period is a matter of conjecture, as his many obligations at the Mantuan court may have limited his opportunities, but several of the madrigals he published in the fourth and fifth books were written and performed during the 1590s, some of which figure prominently in the Artusi controversy.
The third book strongly shows the greatest influence of Wert, at the time his direct superior as Kapellmeister in Mantua. Two poets dominate the collection: Tasso, whose lyrical poetry featured prominently in the second book, but is here represented through the more epic and heroic verses of Jerusalem Liberated, and Gian Battista Guarini., whose verses had appeared sporadically in Monteverdi's previous publications, but form about half of the content of the third book. Wert's influence is reflected in Monteverdi's frankly modern approach and his expressive, chromatic configurations of Tasso's verses. Of Guarini's arrangements, Chew writes: "The epigrammatic style... closely matches a poetic and musical ideal of the epoch… [and] often depends on strong final cadential progressions, with or without the intensification provided by strings of suspended dissonances.” Chew cites the setting of "Stracciami pur il core" as "an excellent example of Monteverdi's practice of irregular dissonance". Tasso and Guarini were regular visitors to the Mantuan court. The composer's association with them and their absorption of his ideas may have helped lay the foundation for his own approach to the musical dramas he created a decade later.
As the 1590s progressed, Monteverdi moved closer to the form that he would in due course identify as the seconda pratica. Claude V. Palisca cites the madrigal "Ohimè, se tanto amate", published in the fourth book, but written before 1600 and one of the works attacked by Artusi, as a typical example of the composer's developing powers of invention. In this madrigal, Monteverdi again departs from established practice in the use of dissonance, through a vocal embellishment that Palisca describes as échappé. Monteverdi's daring use of this device is, according to Palisca, "like a forbidden pleasure". In this and other settings, the poet's imagery was paramount, even at the expense of musical consistency.
The fourth book includes madrigals that Artusi opposed for 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. In addition to Tasso and Guarini, Monteverdi performed musical verses by Rinuccini, Maurizio Moro ("Sì ch'io vorrei morire"), and Ridolfo Arlotti ("Luci serene e chiare"). There is evidence of the composer's familiarity with the works. by Carlo Gesualdo and with composers from the Ferrara school such as Luzzaschi. The book was dedicated to a music society from Ferrara, the Accademici Intrepidi.
The fifth book looks more to the future. For example, he employs the concertato style with basso continuo (a device that would become a typical feature of the emerging Baroque era) and includes a symphony (instrumental interlude) in the final piece. He presents his music through complex counterpoints and daring harmonies, although at times he combines the expressive possibilities of new music with traditional polyphony. Aquilino Coppini drew much of the music for his 1608 sacred counterfaction from the third, fourth, and third books. Monteverdi's fifth of madrigals. Writing to a friend in 1609, Coppini commented that the pieces "require, during their performance, more flexible rests and time signatures that are not strictly regular, now advancing or allowing themselves to slow down [...] In them there is a truly marvelous ability to move the affections".
During his years in Venice, he 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 prima pratica manner, together with music that is typical of the new style of expression that had been exhibited in the dramatic works of 1607-1608. 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 on the close relationship between the monodic recitative and counterpoint". arrangements by the verse composer Giambattista Marino and two arrangements by Petrarca that Ossi considers the most extraordinary pieces in the volume and that provide some "stunning musical moments".
While Monteverdi had looked back in the sixth book, he advanced in the seventh book from the traditional concept of the madrigal and monody, in favor of chamber duets. There are exceptions, such as the two lettere amorose (love letters) “Se i languidi miei sguardi” and “Se pur destina e vole”, written to be performed genere representative, both interpreted and sung. Of the duets that are the main features of the volume, Chew highlights "Ohimé, dov'è il mio ben, dov'è il mio core", a romanesque in which two high voices express dissonances above a pattern repetitive bass. 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 for the poet's verse. As Carter puts it, Monteverdi "embraced Marino's madrigal kisses and love bites with... the enthusiasm typical of the period". Some commentators have opined that the composer should have had better poetic taste.
The eighth book, subtitled Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi …, is divided into two symmetrical halves, one for “war” and the other for “love”. Each half begins with a six-voice setting, followed by a large-scale Petrarch setting, then a series of duets primarily for tenor voices, and concludes with a theatrical number and final ballet. The "War" Half it contains several pieces written as homage to Emperor Ferdinand III, who had acceded to the Habsburg throne in 1637. Many of Monteverdi's regular poets—Strozzi, Rinuccini, Tasso, Marino, Guarini—are represented in the composition.
It is difficult to assess when many of the pieces were composed, although the ballet Mascherata dell' ingrate, which ends the book, dates from 1608 and the celebration of the Gonzaga-Savoy marriage. written and performed in Venice in 1624. In his publication in the eighth book, Monteverdi linked it explicitly to his concept of genres concitato (or stilo concitato, "excited style") that it would "properly imitate the expression and accents of a brave man engaged in war" and implied that since it had originated this style, others had begun to copy it. The work first employed instructions for the use of chords string pizzicato as well as evocations of fanfares and other combat sounds. Critic Andrew Clements describes the eighth book as "a statement of artistic principle and compositional authority", in which Monteverdi "shaped and expanded the madrigal form to accommodate what he wanted to do... the pieces assembled in Book Eight form a treasure trove of what music in the first half of the century XVII could express".
The ninth posthumous book of madrigals was published in 1651, a mix dating from the early 1630s with some items being repetitions 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 lost 1630 opera Proserpina rapita.
Operas
In the last five years of Monteverdi's service in Mantua, he completed the operas The Fable of Orfeo (1607) and L'Arianna (1608). He retained emotional and political attachments to the Mantuan court and wrote for her, 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 of madrigals, but the rest of the Mantuan dramatic music is lost. Many of the lost manuscripts may have disappeared in the wars that took place in 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 his early Mantuan operas and those that followed. wrote in Venice after 1638: "Without these links... it is difficult to produce a coherent account of his development as a composer for the stage." Similarly, Janet Beat laments that the 30-year gap hampers the study of how he developed. opera orchestration during those critical early years.
The last years of his life were very busy with opera for the Venetian stage. Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, gives his chapter on this subject the title "Monteverdi Opera to Monteverdi". Taruskin seriously interprets this wording, originally humorously proposed by Italian music historian Nino Pirrotta, indicating that Monteverdi was significantly responsible for transforming the opera genre from a private entertainment of the nobility (as with Orfeo in 1607), to what became an important commercial genre, as exemplified by his opera The Coronation of Poppaea (1643). Arnold considers his two surviving operatic works from this period, The Return of Ulysses to the Fatherland and The Coronation of Poppaea, as the first "modern" operas. The Return is the first Venetian opera to depart of what Ellen Rosand calls "the mythological pastoral". However, David Johnson in The North American Review warns the public not to expect an immediate affinity with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi or Giacomo Puccini: "You have to submit to a much slower pace, to a much more chaste conception of melody, to a style of voice that at first is simply dry declamation and only on repeated hearings does it begin to assume extraordinary eloquence."
According to Carter, The Return is clearly influenced by his previous works. Penelope's lament in Act I is close in character to L'Arianna's lament, while the martial episodes recall Il combattimento. The stile concitato is prominent in the fight scenes and in the murder of Penelope's suitors. In The Coronation, the composer represents moods and situations through specific musical devices: the triple meter represents the language of love; arpeggios demonstrate conflict; the stile concitato represents rage. Debate continues over how much of the extant music of La coronoción is original to Monteverdi and how much is the work of others (there are, for example, traces of of music by Francesco Cavalli).
Sacred music
Monteverdi wrote a great deal of sacred music, including the Messa in illo tempore (1610) and also the collection known as Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, often referred to as as "Monteverdi Vespers" (1610). He also published Scherzi musicale a tre voci (1607), sets of verses composed since 1599 and dedicated to the Gonzaga heir, Francis. The vocal trio in the Scherzi consists of two sopranos and a bass, accompanied by simple ritornellos instrumentals. According to Bowers, the music “reflected the modesty of the prince's means; however, it was the first publication to associate voices and instruments in this particular way."
During the period of his Venetian residence, he composed quantities of sacred music. Numerous motets and other short works were anthologized and published elsewhere in Italy and Austria by local publishers such as Giulio Cesare Bianchi (a former student of his) and Lorenzo Calvi. The range of styles in motets is wide, from simple strophic arias with string accompaniment to large-scale declamations with a hallelujah ending.
Selva morale e spirituale of 1641 and the posthumous Messa et salmi published in 1650 (which was edited by Cavalli), are selections from his sacred music that he wrote for Saint Marcos during his 30-year tenure. He probably wrote much more, but it was not published. The Selva morale volume opens with a series of madrigal settings on moral texts, addressing topics such as "the transitory nature of love, the rank earthly and attainment, even existence itself." They are followed by a mass in the conservative style (stile antico), the climax of which is an extended "Gloria" in seven voices. Scholars believe he may have written it to celebrate the end of the plague of 1631. The remainder of the volume is made up of numerous psalm settings, two magnificats, and three Salve Regina. The volume Messa et salmi includes a stile antico mass for four voices, a polyphonic setting of the psalm "Laetatus Sum" and a version of the Lauretan Litanies that Monteverdi had originally published in 1620.
Other works
Aside from the madrigal books, the only published collection of the composer during his stay in Venice was the volume of Scherzi musicale in 1632. For reasons unknown, his name does not appear on the inscription and dedication it is signed by the Venetian printer Bartolemeo Magni. Carter surmises that the recently ordained Monteverdi may have wished to steer clear of this secular collection.He mixes strophic Continuous Songs for solo voice with more complex works employing continuous variation over repeated bass patterns. Chew selects the chaconne for two tenors, "Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti", as a prominent element in the collection: "The great part of this piece consists of repetitions of a bass pattern that ensures the tonal unity of a simple type, due to to that it is framed as a simple cadence in a G major tonal type: throughout these repetitions, ingenious variations on the virtuoso step work unfold."
Legacy
In his lifetime, Monteverdi enjoyed considerable status among musicians and the public. This is evidenced by the scale of their funeral rites: "[With] truly royal pomp, a catafalque was erected in Frari's Chiesa de Padrini Minori, decorated throughout in mourning, but surrounded by so many candles that the church resembled a luminous night sky." with stars". This glorification was transitory. Carter writes that at that time, music rarely survived beyond the circumstances of its initial performance and was quickly forgotten along with its creator. In this regard, Monteverdi fared better than most. His operatic works were reinterpreted in various cities in the decade following his death.As Severo Bonini wrote in 1651, every musical household in Italy owned a copy of "Lamento d'Arianna."
The German composer Heinrich Schütz, who had studied in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli shortly before Monteverdi's arrival, owned a copy of Il combattimento and himself borrowed elements from the stile concitato. On his second visit to Venice in 1628-1629, Arnold believes that Schütz absorbed the concepts of basso continuo and expressiveness from word setting, but he believes that Schütz was more directly influenced by the style of the younger generation of Venetian composers, including Grandi. and Giovanni Rovetta (Monteverdi's successor at San Marco). Schütz published a first book of Symphoniae sacrae, arrangements of Biblical texts in the seconda pratica style, in Venice in 1629. Es steh Gott auf, from his Symphoniae sacrae II, published in Dresden in 1647, contains specific quotes from Monteverdi.
After the 1650s, Monteverdi's name quickly disappeared from contemporary accounts, his music largely forgotten except for the "Lamento," the prototype of a genre that would endure into the century XVIII.
Interest in Monteverdi revived in the late 18th century and early XIX among music scholars in Germany and Italy, although it was still considered essentially a historical curiosity. The greatest interest in his music began in 1881, when Robert Eitner published an abridged version of the score for Orfeo. Around this time, Kurt Vogel made the scores for the madrigals from the original manuscripts, but took a more critical interest in the operas, after the discovery of the manuscript of The Coronation in 1888 and that of The Return in 1904. Largely through the efforts of Vincent d'Indy, the three Operas were performed in one form or another, during the first quarter of the XIX century: The Fable of Orpheus in May 1911, The Coronation in February 1913 and The Return in May 1925.
Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio praised Monteverdi and in his novel Il fuoco (1900) wrote of “il divino Claudio … what a heroic soul, purely Italian in its essence!». His view of the composer as the true founder of Italian musical lyricism was taken up by musicians who worked with the Benito Mussolini regime (1922-1945), including Francesco Malipiero, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Mario Labroca, who contrasted Monteverdi with the decadence of music. by Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.
In the years after World War II, his operas began to be performed in major opera houses and eventually established themselves in the general repertoire. The recovery of his sacred music took longer. It did not benefit from the Renaissance music revival of the Catholic Church in the 19th century in the way that Giovanni Pierluigi gives Palestrina did so, perhaps, as Carter suggests, because Monteverdi was seen primarily as a secular composer. It was not until 1932 that the Vespers of 1610 was published in a modern edition, followed by the revised from Redlich two years later. The modern editions of the Selva morale and Missa e Salmi volumes were published respectively in 1940 and 1942.
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The revival of public interest in his music accelerated in the second half of the 20th century, reaching a full height in the general early music revival of the 1970s, during which the emphasis turned increasingly towards "authentic" performance using historic instruments. Gramophone magazine notes over 30 recordings of the Vespers between 1976 and 2011, and 27 of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda between 1971 and 2013. Monteverdi's surviving operas are performed regularly today. The Operabase website notes 555 performances of the operas in 149 productions worldwide in the 2011-2016 seasons, ranking Monteverdi 30th of all composers and 8th for Italian opera composers. In 1985, Manfred H. Stattkus published an index to Monteverdi's works, the Stattkus Catalog (Stattkus-Verzeichnis), revised in 2006, giving each composition an "SV" number, for cataloging and referencing.
Monteverdi is lauded by modern critics as "the most important composer of late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy"; "one of the leading composers in the history of Western music"; and routinely as the first great opera composer. These assessments reflect a contemporary perspective, as his music was largely unknown to composers who followed him for an extended period, spanning more than two centuries after his death. They are, as Redlich and others have pointed out, the composers of the 20th and XXI who have rediscovered him and sought to make his music a foundation for their own. Possibly, as Chew suggests, they are drawn to Monteverdi's reputation as "a modern, a rule-breaker, against the Ancients, those who deferred to ancient authority", although the composer was, essentially, a pragmatist, "displaying what can only be described as an opportunistic and eclectic willingness to use whatever be at hand for that purpose". In a letter dated 16 October 1633, Monteverdi seems to endorse his view as "modern": "I would rather be moderately praised for the new style than praised for the ordinary". However, Chew, in his concluding summary, sees the composer historically as pitted both ways, willing to use modern techniques, but at the same time protective of his status as a competent composer in the stile antico. Thus, says Chew, "his achievement of him was both retrospective and progressive." Monteverdi represents the late Renaissance era while at the same time summarizing much of the early Baroque. "And in one respect in particular, his achievement was enduring: the effective projection of human emotions into music, in a manner suitable for both theater and chamber music."
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