Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), Italian composer, the most important figure in the transition from Renaissance to Baroque music.

Born in Cremona, he studied music with the celebrated Veronese theoretician Marco Antonio Ingegneri. At the age of 15, Monteverdi composed his first work, a set of three-part motets, and by 1605 he had composed five books of madrigals. These show a sudden transition from a smoothly flowing texture of the first two books (1587 and 1590) influenced by Marenzio, to a more dissonant, angular and irregular approach, reflecting the meaning of individual words, in the third and fourth books (1592 and 1603), which show the influence of Giaches de Wert, with whom he came into contact when he took employment with the Duke of Mantua in 1592. He became interested in the experimental musical dramas of Jacopo Peri, who was music director at the court of the Medici family, and in similar works by other early composers.

In 1607 Monteverdi's first musical drama, Orfeo, was produced. This opera, which surpassed all previous attempts at musical drama, was possibly the most important development in the history of opera and established it as a serious form of musical and dramatic expression. Through skilful use of vocal inflection, Monteverdi sought to express emotion as it would be expressed in the highly charged speech of a great actor, leading to a chromatic idiom of great harmonic freedom. The orchestra, considerably enlarged and varied, was used not merely as an accompaniment for the singers but also to establish the moods of the various scenes. The score itself contains 14 independent orchestral pieces. The public received Orfeo enthusiastically, and with his next opera, Arianna (1608), Monteverdi's reputation as an opera composer was firmly established.

Monteverdi's harmonic language had already been a source of controversy when Giovanni Artusi wrote an essay in 1600 attacking, among other works, two of his madrigals for straying beyond the bounds of the evenly balanced polyphony that was the aim of Renaissance composition. Monteverdi wrote a defence which was published in 1607 in which he argued that while the old style, which he called the prima prattica, was suitable for church music (and indeed he used it for this purpose for many years to come), a seconda prattica, in which “the words are mistress of the harmony, not the servant”, was more appropriate for madrigals, where conveying the precise emotional contours of the text was paramount. Monteverdi's great achievement as an opera composer was to combine the chromaticism characteristic of the seconda prattica with the monodic style of vocal writing—a single, florid vocal line with a simple harmonic bass—that had been developed by Peri and Caccini.

In 1613 Monteverdi was appointed to one of the most important musical posts in Italy, choirmaster and conductor at St Mark's Cathedral in Venice. From this time on, he wrote numerous operas (many now lost), motets, madrigals, and masses. His church music exploited a range of styles, from the old-style polyphony of the Mass of 1610 to the operatic virtuoso vocal music and antiphonal choral writing (derived from Monteverdi's predecessors in Venice, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli), found in the Vespers, also from 1610 and perhaps his best-known work today. A huge compendium of sacred music is found in the 1640 publication Selva morale e spirituale (“Moral and spiritual forest”), which again displays the complete range of styles in which Monteverdi wrote. In his sixth, seventh, and eighth books of madrigals (1614-1638) he moved ever further away from the Renaissance ideal of equal-voiced polyphony towards the newer styles emphasizing melody, bass line, and harmonic support as well as personal, or dramatic, declamation. In 1637 the first public opera house was opened, and Monteverdi, stimulated by the enthusiastic response to opera, wrote a new series of operas, of which two remain, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, 1641) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea, 1642). Written in Monteverdi's old age, these operas contain scenes of great dramatic intensity in which the vocal and orchestral music reflect the thoughts and emotions of the characters. They influenced many subsequent composers of opera and are still performed today. Monteverdi died in Venice on November 29, 1643.