Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi was baptised on 15 May 1567 in Cremona, Lombardy, a city famous for its violin-makers. The eldest son of a barber-surgeon, he studied music with Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, choirmaster of the cathedral. Very precocious, he published in 1582, aged fifteen, a collection of little three-voice motets, then spiritual madrigals and, in 1587, his first book of secular madrigals.

Around 1590 he entered the service of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga in Mantua, one of the most lavish courts in Italy, as a viol player and singer. He accompanied the duke on military campaigns in Hungary in 1595 and in Flanders in 1599. That same year he married the court singer Claudia Cattaneo, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1601 he became the duke’s master of music. But the work was exhausting and his salary often paid late.

His madrigals caused a scandal. In 1600 the Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi published a pamphlet attacking passages by Monteverdi, still unpublished at the time, which he judged full of incorrect dissonances. Monteverdi replied in the preface to his Fifth Book of Madrigals (1605): there is, he said, a “second practice” in which “the words are the mistress of the harmony and not its servant”. Dissonance became a means of expressing the passions. This quarrel symbolically marks the passage from Renaissance to Baroque.

In 1607 he premiered L’Orfeo in Mantua, to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, performed on 24 February before the Accademia degli Invaghiti. It was not the first opera, but it was the first masterpiece of the genre: Monteverdi brought together expressive recitative, arias, choruses, dances and a richly coloured orchestra to tell the story of the poet who goes down to the Underworld to fetch his wife Eurydice. That same year his own wife Claudia died, leaving him devastated. The following year he composed L’Arianna, of which only the heartbreaking Lamento d’Arianna survives.

In 1610 he published the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, a monument of sacred music combining the old polyphonic style with the new concertato style, perhaps to obtain a post in Rome. After Duke Vincenzo died in 1612, his successor dismissed him. But in 1613 he obtained one of the most prestigious posts in Europe: maestro di cappella of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. He stayed there for thirty years, reorganising the basilica’s music and composing for the Republic’s great festivals.

In Venice he kept innovating. In the Combat of Tancredi and Clorinda (1624) he invented the “stile concitato”, the agitated style, with rapidly repeated string notes imitating galloping horses and clashing swords; it also contains one of the first uses of pizzicato. In 1638 he published his Madrigals of War and Love. In 1630–31 plague ravaged Venice; Monteverdi survived and in 1632 was ordained priest.

In 1637 Venice opened the world’s first public, paying opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano: opera was no longer reserved for princely courts. Monteverdi, in his seventies, wrote for this new public The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland (1640) and The Coronation of Poppea (1643), of astonishing psychological realism. He died in Venice on 29 November 1643 and lies in the basilica of the Frari. He is regarded as the father of modern opera and one of the great figures in the history of music.