2. Mantua.

Monteverdi moved to nearby Mantua in 1590 or 1591. The Gonzagas employed a select band of musicians for court service headed by the renowned Giaches de Wert, whose influence is immediately apparent in Monteverdi's third book of madrigals, dedicated to Duke Vincenzo on 27 June 1592. Poets and artists associated with Mantua and nearby Ferrara (the Gonzagas were closely allied with the Este dukes) also offered a fertile environment: verse by Tasso and in particular Guarini (whose famous Il pastor fido was mooted for performance in Mantua in the early 1590s) had a powerful influence, as did the musical environment of Ferrara and its virtuoso singers. The third book also consolidated an association with the Venetian printer Ricciardo Amadino which lasted over 20 years.

In Mantua Monteverdi began low down in the ranks as he learnt the trade of the court musician, a position emphasized by his marriage (on 20 May 1599) arranged with the court singer Claudia Cattaneo, daughter of his colleague in the string band, Giacomo. But Monteverdi's reputation was on the increase: four of his canzonettas were published by Antonio Morsolino (RISM 1594¹⁵), and three years later six madrigals were printed in Fiori del giardino (Nuremberg, 1597¹³). His music was now being sent to Ferrara (four canzonettas in late 1594) and he would have dedicated his next book of madrigals to Alfonso II d'Este had the duke not died in late 1597. Monteverdi was well enough respected to head the three other musicians accompanying Duke Vincenzo on his expedition to Hungary (June–November 1595) against the Turks – where he may have met the Florentine patron and theorist Giovanni de' Bardi – and to form part of his retinue on a tour to the Flemish town of Spa in June–October 1599, where Monteverdi reportedly discovered the ‘canto alla francese’ (the meaning remains unclear). He was probably among the musicians accompanying Duke Vincenzo to Florence for the festivities celebrating the wedding of Maria de' Medici and Henri IV in October 1600, including Jacopo Peri's opera Euridice. His failure to succeed Wert in 1596 – the post went to the older Benedetto Pallavicino – was probably more a matter of precedence than of talent.

Guarini's Il pastor fido finally received three performances in Mantua in 1598, the last on 22 November before the visiting Margherita of Austria, bride of Philip III of Spain; the wedding had been celebrated in Ferrara the week before (Philip III was represented by proxy), with Duke Vincenzo (Margherita's cousin) acting as host. Her visit to Ferrara coincided with the performances of madrigals by Monteverdi and other moderns sponsored by the dilettante Antonio Goretti which prompted the so-called Artusi–Monteverdi controversy. Giovanni Maria Artusi, a Bolognese canon and conservative music theorist, launched his attack in his L'Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica (1600), followed by the Seconda parte dell'Artusi (1603). His sights were set not just on Monteverdi – the theorist Ercole Bottrigari is treated more harshly – but the young composer was an easy target. L'Artusi cites passages from anonymous madrigals later published by Monteverdi (in his fourth and fifth books), criticizing their irregular dissonances and modal improprieties. Monteverdi was initially defended (according to the Seconda parte dell'Artusi) by an unknown academic styled ‘L'Ottuso’. He himself entered the fray with a postface to his fifth book (1605), glossed in the Dichiarationeappended by Giulio Cesare Monteverdi to his Scherzi musicali (1607), as a manifesto of the ‘second practice’. Here he promised a treatise entitled Seconda pratica, overo Perfettione della moderna musica.

Monteverdi was no theorist, and his references to humanist musical thought appear both casual and opportunistic. But the notion of two practices, the first with music as mistress of the oration and the second with oration as mistress of the music, justified contrapuntal licence in the service of text expression and permitted different styles to co-exist for different ends, offering a remarkable solution to the aesthetic dilemmas of the late Renaissance. Artusi responded (as Antonio Braccino da Todi) in two further treatises (only one of 1608 survives) but softened his tone. The controversy scarcely damaged Monteverdi's career, even if it may have contributed to the 11-year gap between the publication of the third and the fourth books of madrigals (although the third book was meanwhile reprinted three times). Indeed, after the death of Pallavicino on 26 November 1601, Monteverdi was finally appointed Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga's maestro della musica. He was granted Mantuan citizenship on 10 April 1602 and moved to a house nearer the ducal palace (in the parish of S Pietro); he also celebrated his promotion in the title-pages of his fourth book of madrigals (dedicated to the Accademia degli Intrepidi, Ferrara, 1 March 1603) and his fifth (to Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, 30 July 1605).

Monteverdi was now known as far away as Copenhagen (six madrigals were included in two anthologies by Melchior Borchgrevinck, RISM 1605⁷ and 1606⁵); and the Italian poet Tommaso Stigliani included a madrigal in his praise (O sirene de' fiumi, adorni cigni) in his Rime (Venice, 1605). His court duties included teaching (the virtuoso tenor Francesco Campagnolo and, from mid-1603, the young soprano Caterina Martinelli), the direction of a female vocal ensemble, and theatrical composition, with a ballo, Gli amori di Diana ed Endimione, for Carnival 1604–5, and the opera Orfeo commissioned by Prince Francesco Gonzaga, heir to the throne, for Carnival 1606–7. Orfeo was performed before the Accademia degli Invaghiti on 24 February 1607 and repeated at least once at court (on 1 March; a third performance was also planned). Monteverdi's friend Cherubino Ferrari, author of two encomia in the fifth book of madrigals, praised it highly when the composer visited Milan in August, and the score was published in Venice in 1609 (dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga on 22 August). There were also several performances in Salzburg between 1614 and 1619, probably due to the presence there of the virtuoso tenor Francesco Rasi, who had sung the title-role in Mantua.

After sending off his Scherzi musicali (dedicated to Francesco Gonzaga on 21 July 1607), Monteverdi returned to Cremona; his wife was ill and receiving care from his father. He was still composing, sending a sonnet setting to Duke Vincenzo in Genoa on 28 July and promising another; both were perhaps included in the sixth book of madrigals. His increasing fame is clear: the first four madrigal books were reprinted in Venice (the fifth was already in its better second edition); he was admitted to Cremona's Accademia degli Animosi on 10 August 1607; and spiritual contrafacta of his madrigals by Aquilino Coppini were published in Milan in early September (two more volumes followed in 1608 and 1609). But Claudia's death on 10 September (she was buried in SS Nazaro e Celso) was a grievous blow, leaving him sole guardian of three children (another daughter died shortly after birth): Francesco Baldassare (bap. 27 Aug 1601), Leonora Camilla (bap. 20 Feb 1603) and Massimiliano Giacomo (bap. 10 May 1604). He was deeply reluctant to return to Mantua but received a formal summons from the court official Federico Follino (24 September) ‘to acquire the greatest fame which a man may have on earth’ in the forthcoming festivities celebrating the wedding of Prince Francesco Gonzaga and Margherita of Savoy.

Monteverdi was to compose some of the intermedi accompanying Gabriello Chiabrera's play L'idropica, a sung and danced Ballo delle ingrate, and a new opera, Arianna. He probably started working on Arianna in late October 1607, when its librettist Ottavio Rinuccini visited Mantua (he arrived on the 23rd). Monteverdi now faced competition from the Florentine Marco da Gagliano, brought to Mantua by the melomane Prince (from December 1607 Cardinal) Ferdinando Gonzaga: Gagliano's Dafne was performed in Carnival 1607–8, and Monteverdi wrote bitterly (on 2 December 1608) of the rewards gained by his rival. Both Arianna and the Ballo delle ingrate were revised by order of Duchess Eleonora Medici-Gonzaga: she had a competitive eye on the wedding celebrations currently being prepared in Florence. A crisis was also caused in early March by the death from smallpox of the young soprano Caterina Martinelli, who was to have played Arianna: she was replaced by the renowned actress Virginia Ramponi-Andreini (‘La Florinda’), a member of the Comici Fedeli contracted to perform in the Mantuan celebrations. The opera, staged on 28 May, was a great success, with Andreini moving the audience to tears in Arianna's lament, the only section of the opera that survives. It is possible that the lament had been added to the opera specifically to cater for Andreini's talents.

Monteverdi returned exhausted to Cremona, and although he sent a new madrigal back to Mantua (perhaps to Cardinal Ferdinando) on 26 November, he was in a state of nervous collapse. In November–December 1608 first his father and then he himself tendered his resignation: responding to a direct command to return in order to provide music for a ‘balletto’ for Carnival 1608–9, Monteverdi wrote a rancorous letter to the duke (2 December) deploring his mistreatment. Duke Vincenzo responded, confirming an annual pension of 100 scudi on 19 January 1609 and increasing his salary to 300 scudi (plus 35 scudi for housing) one week later; securing regular payment of the pension was to trouble Monteverdi until his death. Thus he was back in harness: in summer 1609 he composed music for the duke and auditioned potential court musicians; in early 1610 he sent a score of Orfeo to Prince Francesco Gonzaga in Turin; and in early summer 1610 the arrival in Mantua of the virtuoso soprano Adriana Basile prompted a flurry of compositions, including the Sestina sv111 and the polyphonic Lamento d'Arianna sv107 later included in the sixth book of madrigals. However, he remained restless. The publication of his Missa … ac vespere (sv205–6, dedicated 1 September 1610) was followed by a trip to Rome, via Florence, to present the volume to its dedicatee, Pope Paul V. He said that the trip was to secure a place at the Seminario Romano for his son Francesco, but his secretive behaviour raised suspicions that he was seeking another post and sowed seeds of considerable doubt concerning his loyalty to the Gonzagas.

Nothing came from Rome. Monteverdi's subsequent enthusiasm for the Friday evening concerts in the Gonzaga palace, described in letters to Cardinal Ferdinando of December 1610 and January 1611, and his sending an eight-voice Dixit Dominus and other music to Prince Francesco on 26 March 1611 may have sought to placate his employers. His third, fourth and fifth madrigal books were again reprinted in 1610–11 (and the 1610 Missa ‘In illo tempore’ in Antwerp in 1612). But the performance of psalms by Monteverdi in Modena at Christmas in 1611 reportedly went down badly, and things soon became still worse. When Francesco Gonzaga became duke on Vincenzo's death (18 February 1612) he reduced his lavish court. That, as well as intrigue from Cardinal Ferdinando's favourite musician Santi Orlandi and further signs of dissent from Monteverdi, led to the abrupt dismissal of him and his brother on 29 July. Monteverdi returned to Cremona (with only 25 scudi to his name, he claimed) and then visited Milan (rumours of a disastrous performance in the cathedral there were countered by Alessandro Striggio). The sudden death of Duke Francesco on 22 December 1612 and the accession of Cardinal Ferdinando as regent further favoured Orlandi, now maestro di cappella. Only by luck did things turn for the better in mid-1613. Giulio Cesare Martinengo, maestro of S Marco, Venice, died on 10 July, and Monteverdi auditioned for his post on 1 August, providing music for a Mass. He was appointed on 19 August 1613 at a salary of 300 ducats, and arrived in Venice in early October after an eventful journey from Mantua including highway robbery.

Monteverdi, Claudio