4. Theoretical and aesthetic basis of works.

Monteverdi's work has usually been discussed in terms of stylistic opposition between a prima pratica (‘first practice’) and a seconda pratica (‘second practice’). This opposition originates in concepts of the period, as outlined below, and at first sight supplies a useful means of distinguishing between retrospective and modern elements in Monteverdi's music in technical, aesthetic and historiographical terms. Indeed there is a substantial 20th-century literature in which it is used in this sense, the prima pratica being used to mean the stricter style of Palestrina and his Roman contemporaries, and the seconda pratica the freer, more rhetorically expressive concertato style of the north Italian composers.

Such a two-style framework admittedly provides a convincing interpretative key for some important aspects of Monteverdi's output, especially in the first decade of the 17th century. It has served to highlight the contrast between new, extrovert, expressive, theatrical ‘Baroque’ elements, and established, relatively restrained, participant-orientated ‘Renaissance’ elements. But it should be used with caution: the powerful narrative unity (or duality) it confers on Monteverdi's development as a composer is largely fictitious. The demands placed upon him as a professional musician working in various contexts (Cremona, Mantua, Venice and for the Habsburgs), besides his own eclectic opportunism as a composer, meant that he drew promiscuously on several different, and almost incompatible, styles and aesthetic ideals. Even as early as the 17th century, Berardi went beyond the notion of two practices, referring to a mysterious terza pratica. But to call on this as a means of broadening the debate seems a half-measure, and also seems likely to cause yet further confusion: Gary Tomlinson has identified as a third practice Monteverdi's evolution of ‘new modes of musical expression and structure to accommodate the new poetics of Marinism’ (D1987, p.215), and Tim Carter has used the term ‘terza prattica’ in a related but slightly different sense to describe Monteverdi's extensive use of Venetian triple-time canzonetta structures in the late works, especially in laments such as the Lamento della ninfa (Arnold, D1963, 3/1990, p.161), and the aesthetic that they imply. The reality seems too complex to be accommodated even by a threefold scheme: modern as well as conservative elements occur side by side already in the a cappella style of the late 16th century, and several different novel vocal and instrumental styles beyond this were variously current in north Italy during Monteverdi's lifetime. Moreover, the usefulness of the term ‘seconda pratica’ has been compromised by its use at one time or another to define almost any musical innovation of the early 17th century – one or other new aspect of aesthetics: the monodic style; the rhythmic regularity in one or more of the new aria styles; the new harmonic, ‘vertical’ organization of textures; the new basso continuo textures; and several more.

It is the famous controversy with G.M. Artusi (see §2 above) that provides the primary evidence for a careful definition of the term, though even this is unsatisfactory in some respects. In L'Artusi (1600) the theorist attacked Monteverdi as a breaker of the rules of counterpoint authoritatively established by Zarlino, especially in his use of irregular, unprepared dissonances and his neglect of modal unity; and in defending himself Monteverdi invoked this seconda pratica, which, he claimed, permitted licences in these areas, as opposed to a prima pratica that he said was Zarlino's concern. However, allusions to the seconda pratica stretch over a long period, during which far more than two distinct styles are evident in Monteverdi's work alone, and refer to an even longer and even less homogeneous period: indeed the composer's brother, Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, in 1607 claimed that the seconda pratica had begun with Rore. Accordingly, it is difficult to know precisely what the scope of Monteverdi's projected treatise on the seconda pratica would have been, had he ever completed it.

The Artusi controversy focussed attention also on the relationship between music and text, and specifically on attitudes to Platonic ideas concerning music. Here there was no ostensible disagreement between Artusi and Monteverdi, both of whom were content to defer to Plato's authority and to his commonplace requirement that the music should be subservient to the text. Indeed, Monteverdi in the preface to his eighth book of madrigals claimed to be uniquely faithful to Plato, and to be restoring an ancient threefold taxonomy of ‘agitated’, ‘moderate’ and ‘relaxed’ genres, often in the modern literature interpreted without further ado as styles (see Stile concitato). But these references are again problematic: the eighth book is not typical of all of Monteverdi's output, the composer was by no means a musical antiquarian, and his appeal to Plato may have been no more than a conventional rhetorical adornment for his argument, intended as a compliment to his patron.

Another key concept that has been invoked for understanding the aesthetic underlying Monteverdi's music is that of mannerism, implying the deformation of Renaissance ideals (not necessarily according to antique models). The term is sometimes used by modern critics, even though there is nothing in Monteverdi's own writings to illuminate its use; others use the term Marinist (see above). Such terms usually imply the relevance of a rhetorical model, or models, to the music, and in Monteverdi's case these are mostly derived from the literary poetics of Chiabrera, Tasso, Guarini or Giambattista Marino, or the musical poetics of Wert. For example, Monteverdi's adoption of a consciously mimetic style in his madrigals from the fifth book onwards, and especially in the sixth, seventh and eighth books, and their consequent fragmentation of form, is felt to owe something to an extreme rhetorical model such as has been discerned in Marino, and this is sometimes felt to work to the detriment of the late music. The secondary literature probably owes an unconscious debt to the 18th-century Arcadians, particularly Crescimbeni, who regarded Guarini and, especially, Marino as deformers of the ideal of Tuscan poetry as the latter had been cultivated from Petrarch to the 16th century. So again, aesthetic categories built on rhetorical interpretations of Monteverdi's music provide a useful interpretative key, but have their limitations.

Monteverdi, Claudio