Claudio Monteverdi

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Aliases: Claudio Monteverde

Baptised: [[15 May 1567

Died: 29 November 1643]]

Monteverdi's compositional career spans sixty years from the end of the Renaissance to the early Baroque: like Beethoven two centuries later he was the major transitional figure between two distinct musical eras.

He was the first composer to realise the potential of opera for expressing powerful emotions, and he brought to his church music the musical innovations of his madrigal and instrumental style that he continued to refine throughout his lifetime.



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Monteverdi's works are sorted below by genre: there are also lists of Monteverdi's works sorted in alphabetical order, or by publication order. You may also wish to see which pages on ChoralWiki link to this page.

Dramatic works

  • Il ballo delle ingrate, ballet, 4vv, 1608, pub. 1638 ( Icon_pdf.gif )
  • Prologue to L'Idropica, comedy with music, 1608 – lost
  • Tirsi e Clori, ballet, 1616 ( Finale-2005 )
  • Le nozze di Tetide, favola marittima, 1616 – work begun and abandoned, lost
  • Andromeda, opera, 1618–20 – lost
  • Apollo, dramatic cantata – lost
  • Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, dramatic scena, 3vv, 2vl, va, vc, hpd, 1624, pub. 1638 ( Icon_pdf.gif Icon_snd.gif Capella )
  • La finta pazza Licori, 1627 – lost
  • Gli amori di Diana e di Endimione, 1628 – lost
  • Mercurio e Marte, torneo, 1628 – lost
  • Proserpina rapita, opera, 1630 – lost, aside from trio:
  • Volgendo il ciel, ballet, ca 1636, pub. 1638 ( Icon_pdf.gif Icon_snd.gif Capella )
  • Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, opera, 1640
  • Le nozze d'Enea con Lavinia, opera, 1641 – lost
  • La vittoria d'Amore, ballet, 1641 – lost
  • L'incoronazione di Poppea, opera, 1642

Secular works

Score listing includes number of voices, instruments, and publication date (if known).

Sacred works

Score listing includes number of voices, instruments, and publication date (if known).

Main publications

Opera

Other dramatic works published in Scherzi musicali (1607), Madrigali guerreri et amorosi (1638), and Madrigali e canzonette (1651) below.
Secular vocal

Sacred vocal

Life

Claudio (Giovanni Antonio) Monteverdi was born in Cremona in 1567, and baptised – probably at an age of several days – on the 15th of May. Monteverdi's father Baldassare was a chemist and also practiced medicine; his mother Maddalena (née Zignani) died young, and Baldassare married twice more. Claudio had one elder sister, a younger brother Giulio Cesare who also pursued a musical career, and three more half-siblings from his father's second marriage. Both Claudio and Giulio Cesare received a good musical education from Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, who was maestro di capella of Cremona Cathedral, and whom Monteverdi would acknowledge as his teacher on the title page of his first book of madrigals. Claudio was clearly a precociously gifted boy, at the age of 15 sending a collection of three-part motets to be published in Venice by the printing house of Gardane, and following these with two further publications before he reached the age of 18, the latter of which, the volume of three-part canzonets, was published by Ricciardo Amadino, whose printing firm would go on to publish nearly all of Monteverdi's subsequent work.

By the time Monteverdi was ready to publish his second book of five-part madrigals, he had evidently outstripped his teacher and was looking for a musical posting outside Cremona; he visited Milan to obtain patronage, and within three years he was in full-time employment as a violinist or gamba player at the court of the Gonzaga family in Mantua. The third book of madrigals that was published soon after show the influence of the Mantuan maestro di capella, Giaches de Wert, but Monteverdi's fame quickly spread and he became one of the leading court musicians. After the death of de Wert in 1596 he was succeeded by a more senior musician, Pallavicino, but upon his death in 1601 came Monteverdi's opportunity as musical director of the Mantuan court. In the meantime, Monteverdi had married one of the court singers, Claudia de Cattaneis, on 20 May 1599, who would bear him three children; Francesco (1601–?1677/78), Leonora (1603), and Massimiliano (1604–61).

In 1600 Monteverdi was the subject of an attack by the musical theorist Artusi, who criticised certain of Monteverdi's harmonic practices and his modern style of word-painting, concerning works which were yet to appear in print but must have been circulating in manuscript. In 1603 and 1605 Monteverdi published the fourth and fifth books of madrigals, including much of the secular music he had worked on in the previous decade at Mantua that had attracted the ire of Artusi. The fifth book includes a brief reply to the criticism, which was amplified two years later by Monteverdi's younger brother Giulio Cesare in the introduction to the Scherzi musicali of 1607; this only served to further popularise Monteverdi's music and enhance his fame.

[to be continued...]

View the Wikipedia article on Claudio Monteverdi.

External links

Monteverdi: List of Works

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