The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Monteverdi [Monteverde], Claudio (Giovanni [Zuan] Antonio)

(b Cremona, 15 May 1567; d Venice, 29 Nov 1643). Italian composer. The most important musician in late 16th- and early 17th-century Italy, he excelled in nearly all the major genres of the period. His nine books of madrigals consolidated the achievement of the late Renaissance masters and cultivated new aesthetic and stylistic paradigms for the musical Baroque. In his operas for Mantua and Venice he took the experiments of the Florentines and developed powerful ways of expressing and structuring musical drama. His three major collections of liturgical and devotional music transcend the merely functional, exploiting a rich panoply of text-expressive and contrapuntal-structural techniques. Although he composed little or no independent instrumental music, his writing for instruments was genuinely innovative. Schrade’s famous assessment (1950) of Monteverdi as ‘creator of modern music’ may be exaggerated, but his significant place in music history is assured.

1. Cremona.

2. Mantua.

3. Venice.

4. Theoretical and aesthetic basis of works.

5. Tonal language.

6. ‘Imitatio’ and use of models.

7. Early works.

8. Works from the Mantuan years.

9. Works from the Venetian years.

10. Historical position.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TIM CARTER (1–3, work-list), GEOFFREY CHEW (4–10, bibliography)

Monteverdi, Claudio

1. Cremona.

Monteverdi was baptized (on 15 May 1567) in SS Nazaro e Celso, eldest son of an apothecary, surgeon and doctor, Baldassare (b c1542), and Maddalena Zignani (they married in early 1566). Baldassare had four sons and two daughters by Zignani and his second wife, Giovanna Gadio (married 1576/7); a third marriage, to Francesca Como in 1583, was childless. Claudio’s younger brother Giulio Cesare (bap. 31 Jan 1573) also became a musician.

The young Monteverdi was precocious, publishing his first collection, the three-voice Sacrae cantiunculae (dedication dated 1 August 1582) at the age of 15. In it he styled himself ‘discepolo’ of Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di cappella of Cremona Cathedral, whose teaching he honoured in four further publications. These lessons may have been private: there is no record of Monteverdi singing in the cathedral choir. But Ingegneri, a fluent composer, gave his pupil careful training in counterpoint and text-setting by way of three-voice motets, four-voice spiritual madrigals, three-voice canzonettas and two books of five-voice madrigals. Presumably Monteverdi had vocal lessons – he later taught singing – and certainly tuition on string instruments (the viol and viola da braccio). He was ambitious, publishing his music in Venice with the presses of Angelo Gardane (the motets and five-voice madrigals) and Giacomo Vincenti and Ricciardo Amadino (the canzonettas): only the spiritual madrigals were issued locally, in Brescia. When old enough to seek employment, he looked first to Verona (his first book of five-voice madrigals was dedicated on 27 January 1587 to Count Marco Verità, a prominent patron there) and then to Milan, where he played the viola da braccio for Giacomo Ricardi, to whom he dedicated his second book (the last to mention Ingegneri) on 1 January 1590. Finally, he was appointed ‘suonatore di vivuola’ to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.

Monteverdi, Claudio