Claudio Monteverdi, (baptized May 15, 1567, Cremona, Duchy of Milan—died November 29, 1643, Venice) was an Italian composer in the late Renaissance, and the most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music.

Early Career

Monteverdi, the son of a barber-surgeon and chemist, studied with the director of music at Cremona cathedral, Marcantonio Ingegneri, a well-known musician who wrote church music and madrigals of some distinction in an up-to-date though not revolutionary style of the 1570s. Monteverdi was obviously a precocious pupil, since he published several books of religious and secular music in his teens, all of them containing competent pieces in a manner not far from that of his master. The culmination of this early period occurred in two madrigal books published by one of the most famous of Venetian printers in 1587 and 1590. They are full of excellent, attractive works, somewhat more modern in approach than Ingegneri’s, perhaps the result of studying the madrigals of Luca Marenzio, the greatest Italian madrigalist of the time, and others. As yet, however, Monteverdi’s aim appeared to be to charm rather than to express passion; it is exemplified at its best in such a madrigal as the well-known setting of the poem “Behold the Murmuring Sea” by Torquato Tasso.

The Gonzaga Court

It is not known exactly when Monteverdi left his hometown, but he entered the employ of the duke of Mantua about 1590 as a string player. He immediately came into contact with some of the finest musicians, both performers and composers, of the time. The composer who influenced him the most seems to have been the Flemish composer Giaches de Wert, a modernist who, although no longer a young man, was still in the middle of an avant-garde movement in the 1590s. The crux of his style was that music must exactly match the mood of the verse and that the natural declamation of the words must be carefully followed. Since Wert chose to use the highly concentrated, emotional lyric poetry of Tasso and Tasso’s rival Battista Guarini, Wert’s music also became highly emotional, if unmelodious and difficult to sing. It had an immediate effect on Monteverdi, whose next book of madrigals, published in his first year at Mantua, shows the influence of the new movement on him, though his understanding was imperfect. It represented a complete change of direction for him. The melody is angular, the harmony increasingly dissonant, the mood tense to the point of neurosis. Guarini is the favoured poet, and every nuance of the verse is expressed, even at the expense of musical balance.

The new style and ambience seems to have upset his productivity. Although he went on composing, he published little for the next 11 years. In 1595 he accompanied his employer on an expedition to Hungary and four years later to Flanders. In about 1599 he married a singer, Claudia Cattaneo, by whom he had three children, one of whom died in infancy. When the post of maestro di cappella, or director of music, to the duke became vacant on the death of Wert in 1596, Monteverdi was embittered at being passed over, but he finally achieved the position in 1602, at age 35. He published two more books of madrigals in 1603 and 1605, both of which contain masterpieces. The avant-garde manner was now better assimilated into his idiom. While his aim was still to follow the meaning of the verse in great detail, he solved the purely musical problems of thematic development and proportion. Although the dissonances became more severe and the melody sometimes still more angular, the total effect was more varied in emotion and less neurotic. If Guarini’s eroticism stimulated a sensual musical style, Monteverdi often gave his mature madrigals a lightness and humour, seeing the essence of a poem rather than its detail.

It was the advanced musical means, especially his use of intense and prolonged dissonance, that provoked attacks by the conservatives on Monteverdi, who became a figurehead of the avant-garde group. The attacks by a Bolognese theorist, Giovanni Maria Artusi, in a series of pamphlets, made Monteverdi the most famous composer of the age and provoked him to reply with an important aesthetic statement of his view on the nature of his art. He disclaimed the role of revolutionary, saying that he was only the follower of a tradition that had been developing for the last 50 years or more. This tradition sought to create a union of the arts, especially of words and music, so that he should not be judged simply as a composer using conventional musical devices. Moreover, the artwork must be powerful enough to “move the whole man,” and this again might mean the abandonment of certain conventions. On the other hand, he declared his faith in another and older tradition, in which music was itself supreme, and which was, in effect, represented by the pure polyphony of such composers as Josquin des Prez and Giovanni Palestrina. Thus, there were two “practices,” as he called them; and that view, which became immensely influential, was to prove the basis of the preservation of an old style in certain types of church music, as opposed to a modern style in opera and cantatas, a dichotomy that can be found well into the 19th century.

If the madrigals of that time gave him a reputation well outside northern Italy, it was his first opera, Orfeo, performed in 1607, that finally established him as a composer of large-scale music rather than of exquisite miniature works. Monteverdi may have attended some of the performances of the earliest operas, those composed by the Florentine composers Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, and he certainly had written some stage music in previous years. In Orfeo he showed that he had a much broader conception of the new genre than did his predecessors. He combined the opulence of dramatic entertainments of the late Renaissance with the straightforwardness of a simple pastoral tale told in recitative, which was the ideal of the Florentines. His recitative is more flexible and expressive than theirs, based on the declamatory melody of his madrigals rather than on their theories about heightened speech. Above all, he had a greater gift for dramatic unity, shaping whole acts into musical units, rather than assembling them from small sections. He also showed a sense of matching the climaxes in the drama by musical climaxes, using dissonance, the singer’s virtuosity, or instrumental sonorities to create the sense of heightened emotion.

A few months after the production of Orfeo, Monteverdi suffered the loss of his wife, seemingly after a long illness. He retired in a state of deep depression to his father’s home at Cremona, but he was summoned back to Mantua almost immediately to compose a new opera as part of the celebrations on the occasion of the marriage of the heir to the duchy, Francesco Gonzaga, to Margaret of Savoy. Monteverdi returned unwillingly and was promptly submerged in a massive amount of work. He composed not only an opera but also a ballet and music for an intermezzo to a play. Further disaster occurred when the opera, L’Arianna, was in rehearsal, for the prima donna, a young girl who had been living in Monteverdi’s home, possibly as a pupil of his wife, died of smallpox. Nevertheless, the part was recast, and the opera was finally produced in May 1608. It was an enormous success. The score has been lost, except for the famous “Lamento,” which survives in various versions and is the first great operatic scena (i.e., a scene of especially dramatic effect, usually with arias).

After this enormous effort, Monteverdi returned again to Cremona in a condition of collapse, which seems to have lasted for a long time. He was ordered back to Mantua in November 1608 but refused to go. He eventually returned, but thereafter he hated the Gonzaga court, which he maintained had undervalued and underpaid him, though he gained a raise in pay and a small pension for his success with L’Arianna. He does not, however, appear to have been uncreative, though the music he wrote in the next year or so reflects his depression. He arranged the “Lamento” as a five-voiced madrigal and wrote a madrigalian threnody on the death of his prima donna. The sestina, published later in the sixth book of madrigals, represents the peak of dissonant, agonized music in this style. In a more vigorous vein, he wrote some church music, which he published in 1610 in a volume containing a mass in the old style and music for vespers on feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The mass was a remarkable achievement, a deliberate attempt to show that the polyphonic idiom was still possible when everywhere it was dying. Still more remarkable is the vespers music, a virtual compendium of all the kinds of modern church music possible at the time—grand psalm settings in the Venetian manner, virtuoso music for solo singers, instrumental music used for interludes in the service, even an attempt to use up-to-date operatic music to set the expressive, emotional words of the Magnificat. Yet, though this music is as “advanced” as possible, Monteverdi makes it an extension of the old tradition by using plainsong tunes—ancient unaccompanied liturgical chants—as the thematic material for the psalms and Magnificats. Above all, it is music of the Counter-Reformation; using all means, traditional and new, secular and religious, it is designed to impress the listener with the power of the Roman Catholic Church and its God.