The Magnificat is a ‘canticle’, a non-metrical, song-like passage of text drawn frombooks of the Bible other than the Book of Psalms. The Magnificat – the Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary – comes from the Gospel of St Luke, 1:46–53, and represents Mary's joyful response to the message given her by the Angel Gabriel that she was to bear the son of God. In the Catholic liturgy this canticle was set to be read or sung daily towards the end of the main evening Offce of Vespers. It forms the climax of the service, and while it is being sung a priest censes the altar. The Magnificat is preceded by the singing of an antiphon specific to the particular day on which it was being performed, and followed by the ‘Gloria Patri’ and a repetition of the antiphon. This whole unit is then followed by a prayer and the dismissal of those who have celebrated Vespers.

The text of the Magnificat is laid out in the Liber Usualis (an abbreviated compendium of texts and music for the Mass and Offce) as follows. (The English version is the one given in the Book of Common Prayer.)

Seven of the fourteen compositions comprising Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine are based on psalm or Magnificat tones, so it is appropriate that this analysis be devoted to one of those pieces. However, with the exception of the two settings of the Magnificat, which are parallel in many respects, the role of the psalm tone in the construction of each psalm differs significantly, and the psalms differ radically from the Magnificats. Therefore, the analysis of no single composition can serve as a model for the others, and each must be addressed separately, with quite different observations to be drawn from each. Of these seven compositions, the six-voice Psalm 121 (Book of Common Prayer 122), ‘Laetatus sum’, is the most complexly organised and the one whose compositional techniques most adumbrate methods of organising concertato psalms in subsequent decades. Rather than the chant serving as an organising force, as in the other psalms and the two Magnificats, the structure of the text is the principal organising element. The cantus firmus is mixed together with repetitive bass patterns, imitative polyphony, chordal homophony, virtuoso solo melismas, duets, trios and falsibordoni. The chant appears only intermittently, either as a solo vocal line or as a single voice in a four- or six-part texture. When it does appear, the chant is usually accorded some prominence either by its position in the texture or by long note values.

Monteverdi's music might seem to be relatively straightforward in terms of its surviving sources, given that the vast majority of it seems to have been printed during his lifetime. The main exceptions are the late Venetian operas surviving in manuscript, for reasons that will become clear. However, scholars have tended to assume that once print became a standard, and standardised, medium of musical transmission, at least by the 1540s, manuscripts increasingly gained a secondary status. They were still of use in local or individual circumstances – either for practice or presentation – or in the case of music for limited consumption or for particular instrumental repertories (often those not using mensural notation). But these sources and their contents remained marginalised from a mainstream that was more and more defined by printed musical texts. The Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music compiled by the Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies at the University of Illinois (1979–88) stops at 1550, and the efforts to deal with later manuscripts on the part of the Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM) have been famously problematic, though RISM completed its catalogue of printed music by individual composers, 1500–1800, in 1981. Further, print is presumed somehow to grant the musical object some kind of permanence, and also some kind of status as a ‘work’ that therefore can be inserted (or not) into a canon, and into its place in music history.

This is the opening piece of the cycle of five continuo madrigals that Monteverdi placed at the end of the Fifth Book. As I argued in the preceding chapter, these madrigals, all but one of which are taken from Battista Guarini's Rime, are arranged to form a kind of narrative. Beginning with ‘Ahi, come a un vago sol’ we are introduced to the opening stages of an amorous infatuation – brought on by the glance of a woman's beautiful eyes – into which the poet allows himself to be drawn in spite of his better judgement. His ambivalent attitude is made clear in this poem, in which he laments that ‘it does no good to hide’ even if, because he has been in love before, he knows that he will be hurt again. In the next poem, ‘Troppo ben puòquesto tiranno Amore’, his ambivalence is the focus, as fear and temptation compete, but by the third madrigal, ‘Amor, se giusto sei’, it is clear that the lover has given in, and he begs Love to be just and make his beloved as receptive to him as he is to her. By the fourth poem – “‘T'amo, mia vita’”, la mia cara vita’ – he wallows in the sound of his beloved's words (‘I love you, my life’), and in the fifth – ‘E così poco a poco’ – he is consumed by the affair, ‘like a moth to the flame’, conscious that to try to put out the blaze merely makes it worse.

‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’, deservedly the best-known madrigal of Monteverdi's Second Book (1590), occupies a centrally important place within that volume; it represents a particularly rich version of imitatio (see Chapter 3, above), and established durable new models for musical form and tonal organisation. Anna Maria Monterosso Vacchelli has suggested that it is also the central madrigal of an interrelated group of three, ‘Mentr'io mirava fiso’, ‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’ and ‘Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori’ (Nos. 12, 13 and 14 in the Second Book), together projecting the most modern aspect of the volume. (These are their numbers in the first edition, not in the less reliable later editions, nor in Malipiero's Collected Edition.)

Essential models for modern style in the Second Book include Marenzio, already identified in Chapter 3, above, and the Eighth Book of Madrigals for five voices (1586) of Giaches de Wert, a friend of Tasso, who supplied most of Monteverdi's texts for this volume. ‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’ interweaves two sharply different models from Wert's Eighth Book, ‘Io non son peròmorto’ and ‘Vezzosi augelli’; both have been identified hitherto, but only in isolation from one another.

In November 1619 Francesco Dognazzi, maestro di cappella to the Duke of Mantua whose forebears had been Monteverdi's employers, arrived in Venice (see Monteverdi's letter of 8 March 1620). When Santi Orlandi, who had been in charge of music at the Gonzaga court, had died in the previous July, Monteverdi had been invited to return to the Duke's service. In Venice, where rumours of Monteverdi's departure from his post at S. Marco were already rife, Dognazzi's mission was to advance the cause of a return to Mantua. In this he failed. Writing to Alessandro Striggio, a Mantuan court secretary who had been Monteverdi's librettist for Orfeo, Monteverdi enumerated some of his reasons for staying in Venice:

From Monteverdi to Monteverdi

This conceit, famously coined by Nino Pirrotta, summarises a central problemraised By Monteverdi's operas: the stylistic gulf between the first, Orfeo, and the last, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea. Scholars have generally rationalised this gulf by invoking the different systems of patronage of ducal Mantua and republican Venice, where the respective works were performed, as well as the composer's own development over the course of the three and a half decades that separate them. Aside from the different circumstances surrounding the performance of the works – Orfeo was staged in a room of the ducal palace before a small group of aristocrats, while Ulisse and Poppea were produced in a public theatre before a socially mixed audience of several hundred – the composer himself had naturally matured. The sometime faithful servant of the Gonzaga household had become maestro di cappella at S. Marco, the dominant musical personality in Venetian society, a figure of enormous prestige. The change was not only psychological, of course: the late operas come after the composition of many madrigals (the Sixth to Eighth Books, published from 1614 onwards, after he had left Mantua for Venice, comprise some seventy madrigals) and a lengthy, sustained commitment to sacred music, as well as a number of smaller-scale dramatic or para-dramatic works written for private patrons.

When Monteverdi was hired by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga to join the court musicians at Mantua, he described himself as a player of the vivuola. Yet it is obvious that he was also expected to compose, for he had already published several collections of music for three and four voices, two of which were of sacred music. Indeed, Monteverdi's very first publication, at the age of fifteen (1582), was a set of twenty-three three-voice motets, many based on antiphon texts for various of the Offces, which he entitled Sacrae cantiunculae tribus vocibus. In the very next year the young Claudio displayed his growing compositional skill by expanding his texture to four voices for a set of eleven Madrigali spirituali, only the bass voice of which survives today. It was only after these initial forays in religious music that the young composer turned his hand to three-voice secular Canzonette (1584) and his first two books of five-voice madrigals (1587 and 1590). So by the time he entered Gonzaga service, Monteverdi had already established himself as a significant composer of both sacred and secular music in northern Italy.

Only one more book of madrigals appeared during Monteverdi's first decade in Mantua (in 1592), but during that time he had already composed those madrigals on texts of Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido that would make him both famous and notorious because of the polemics with the conservative theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi that lasted from 1600 to 1608. Several of these madrigals were contrafacted and published with Latin spiritual texts by a Milanese rhetorician, Aquilino Coppini, in 1607. Before 1610, Monteverdi published no more sacred music, a gap of twenty-seven years from his Madrigali spirituali, yet that does not mean he was completely silent in the religious sphere during this period. Unfortunately, so much of Monteverdi’s music, especially his sacred music, was never published, and far more was lost than ever appeared in print.

It is now more than twenty years since the appearance of The New Monteverdi Companion, edited by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune, to whom this book is dedicated. During those years the re-evaluation of Monteverdi and his work by performers and historians alike has proceeded apace and shows no sign of abating. New generations of performers now work comfortably with the instruments of Monteverdi's day and continue to explore the types of vocal production with which he might have been familiar; and listeners can now experience a wide range of live and recorded interpretations of Monteverdi's music. More is known now about the context in which Monteverdi worked, and fresh questions have been asked about his musical output, not least those arising from the so-called "New Musicology". On his operas alone three new books have appeared within the last five years.

The Lamento della ninfa, included by Monteverdi in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638), has been a focus of hot debate over aesthetic and expressive issues in the composer's Venetian secular music. It was identified by Ellen Rosand in 1979 as a prototypical example of a ground-bass pattern moving from tonic to dominant through a descending minor tetrachord – the so-called ‘emblem of lament’ that then, in diatonic or chromatic form, and with or without a cadential extension, permeated Baroquemusic, via Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (Dido's concluding ‘When I am laid in earth’) to the Crucifixus of Bach's B minor Mass, even extending into the Classical period and beyond (the opening of Mozart's D minor string quartet, K. 421). In 1987, Gary Tomlinson sought to reconcile his disparaging view of Monteverdi's apparent decline from Renaissance subtlety into Baroque sterility with his undoubted sense of the power of this ‘through-composed dramatic scena’: the Lamento della ninfa is ‘a brilliant anomaly’ – ‘In it, from the foundation of Marinism, with materials touched bymemories of lighter styles, Monteverdi erected an enduring monument to the Petrarchism of his youth.’ In 1991, Susan McClary picked up on Tomlinson's notion of it being a ‘dramatic scena’ and explored the piece as a prototypical (again) mad-scene, worthy of comparison with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Richard Strauss's Salome, and Schoenberg's Erwartung.

The myth of early opera

Early opera is often regarded as a completely new genre, created ex nihilo by a small circle of theorists and musicians in Florence and Rome as a conscious attempt to reinvent Ancient Greek tragedy which, some believed in the later sixteenth century, was sung throughout. Although this view has been justifiably criticised on a number of occasions, it still tends to be the prevalent model for the rise of opera even in recent encyclopaedias and textbooks.

However, none of the dramatic pieces which were, or may have been, performed musically in their entirety between 1590 and 1608 in Florence, Rome and Mantua, can be regarded as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense because of their choice of subject, place and characters. Instead of depicting the tragic entanglements of kings and their like, situated in palaces or other appropriately courtly surroundings, early operas are generally set outdoors in country settings and are concerned with the loves of gods, semi-gods, shepherds and nymphs. In this respect they belong instead to the contemporary tradition of the pastoral play, a dramatic genre that evolved only in early modern times, even though it referred to the long-standing, but non-dramatic bucolic tradition of Greek and Roman classical authors. The most influential contemporary examples of this new type of pastoral play in Italy were Torquato Tasso's Aminta and Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido.

When Monteverdi arrived in Mantua, he stepped from the provincial Cremonese environment into one of the most cosmopolitan and artistically ambitious courts of northern Italy. Under the Gonzagas’ rule, Mantua had been for over a century an important commercial centre, and its financial resources had fuelled the patronage goals – musical, artistic, and literary – of a succession of rulers: in the first decades of the sixteenth century the Marquis Francesco and his wife, Isabella d'Este, established a permanent musical chapel and through their court composers, Marco Cara and Bartolomeo Tromboncino, cultivated the development of such Italian vernacular forms as the frottola; Duke Federico II and in particular his brother, Cardinal Ercole, enhanced the sacred cappella; Guglielmo, himself a competent composer, built the basilica of Santa Barbara and as a strongly religious ruler fostered primarily sacred music, employing such composers as Alessandro Striggio, Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Giaches de Wert, and Benedetto Pallavicino, as well as maintaining a correspondence with Palestrina, whom he tried to hire and from whom he sought advice on his own compositions; and Monteverdi's direct employer, Vincenzo I, sought to make Mantuan music competitive in its forward-looking style with that of the Ferrarese court under Alfonso II d'Este, encouraging the composition of secular works by Wert, Pallavicino and Monteverdi himself.