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“…have faith that the modern composer builds on foundations of truth.”

– Claudio Monteverdi, reply to Giovanni Maria Artusi (1605)

Claudio Monteverdi was an Italian Catholic priest and prolific composer who served as maestro di cappella (or music director) for the famous San Marco Basilica of Venice. His works included celebrated collections of secular madrigals as well as sacred and liturgical pieces (most notably his Vespers of 1610), but he’s perhaps best known as the first true composer of one of Western music’s most defining artforms: the opera.

An early student of music in his native Cremona, Monteverdi was writing his own compositions at 15 and was soon hired as a court musician by the influential Gonzaga family of Mantua. While employed under the Gonzagas, Monteverdi penned his very first opera, L’Orfeo (1607), a theatrical adventure based on the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The piece would go down in history as the first work to combine and refine all of opera’s musical and dramatic hallmarks (such as arias, recitative, vocal ensembles, expansive orchestras, elaborate sets, and thrillingly emotional plotlines)—making it the world’s first-ever opera that was genuinely worthy of the name.

Though L’Orfeo marked the birth of something new, Monteverdi was equally adept at both the traditional and the modern compositional styles of the day. His repertoire included examples of an earlier school known as stile antico (“antique style”) or prima practica (“first practice”), which favored polyphonic works that placed music front and center. However, he also experimented with stile moderno (“modern style”) or seconda practica (“second practice”) to great effect. This second practice embraced unusual harmonies and focused on using monodic music—solo-voiced melody with supportive accompaniment—to help convey expressive text. While Monteverdi’s use of stile moderno was occasionally met with criticism, he maintained this innovative trend was a natural and logical progression in the pursuit of artistic truth.

From 1613, Monteverdi made his home in Venice, where he took up residence as maestro di cappella of San Marco and, ultimately, became ordained as a priest. Still, his secular musical career was far from over. Following the opening of Venice’s San Cassiano opera house in 1637, Monteverdi would write numerous operas for the Venetian public up until his death in 1643. Many of these operas have been lost to time, but the two that survived—Il ritorno d’Ulisse (The Return of Ulysses, 1640) and L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Poppea’s Coronation, 1643)—occupy a definitive space in today’s operatic canon, particularly for those companies that specialize in Baroque music. This is especially true of Poppea, whose arias and ensembles are frequently performed in isolation to showcase the talents of leading singers worldwide.

Written by Eleni Hagen

Sources:

Buckley, Jonathan (ed.). Classical Music on CD: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides Ltd., 1994.

Grout, Donald Jay and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 6th Edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Riding, Alan and Leslie Dunton-Downer. DK Eyewitness Companions: Opera. New York, NY: DK Publishing, 2006.

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