Monteverdi studies have been associated with the so-called ‘new musicology’ since the first time the latter was mentioned in print, in a column reviewing the 1991 meeting of the American Musicological Society for the New York Times. Papers on Bob Dylan, desire in Skryabin, reflections of Nazi ideology in German musicology during the Second World War, and the gendered rhetoric of the Monteverdi/Artusi controversy served the author as signs of

Using the phrase ‘new musicology’ three more times as he cautiously welcomed a ‘classic paradigm shift’, the writer conferred the status of a movement on an eclectic group of papers whose authors had never met. Yet the label, and the sense that it referred to some kind of movement, stuck. It was in part because the Monteverdi paper sparked criticism when it was published, leading the author to compare ‘new musicology’ to the ‘second practice’, that the label ‘new musicology’ has had a special resonance in Monteverdi studies. This essay will survey the intersections of Monteverdi studies with the new approaches to music scholarship that emerged, mainly in the United States, over the last twenty years.

Ulisse has repeatedly turned to song to express his growing optimism – with Minerva, with Eumete, with Telemaco, and in his defeat of the Suitors. His confrontation with Penelope, so long awaited by him and by us, will be different. Resourceful Ulisse will not attempt to reach her with music, but with speech, the mode of expression she herself had adopted, we imagine, ever since his departure. Monteverdi takes special pains with Ulisse's speech, mustering his most carefully controlled eloquence. Here, notably, Badoaro's libretto is adequate to the task; the composer adds very little, content to exploit rhetorical emphases – parallelisms, repetitions, enjambements, images – already built into the text.

In a series of brief speeches, each countered by Penelope's stolid denial of her feelings and refusal to trust her senses, Ulisse enlists all his powers of persuasion, an effort marked, among other things, by repeated attempts to dislodge Penelope from her fixation on D, symbol of her faith – he moves several times to A, finally to G. He presses his suit with wide-ranging, strongly shaped melodic lines, extended phrases and expressive harmony. Her resistance, in contrast, is expressed in speech-like music of narrow compass placed low in her range, short phrases, strongly cadential harmony, and uniformly slow harmonic rhythm.

Music at the Ducal Court of Mantua in 1590

Early in 1590, the most probable date at which Monteverdi entered the employment of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, the Palazzo Ducale offered an environment wherein music was cultivated under three distinct identities. One was the duke's personal cappella of clergy and choir, maintained within his entourage to discharge his obligations as the orthodox and dutiful master of a great Christian household. It has long been considered that Monteverdi's engagement at the Gonzaga court was exclusively as a secular musician, but a new appraisal of the documentary evidence indicates that this is rather a misapprehension. He was recruited to the central musical department of the household, the cappella (chapel). Whatever that term was to come to mean in future times, in Counter-Reformation Mantua under the devout dukes Guglielmo and Vincenzo it could only maintain its historic signification as the household department to which the duke committed the ordering both of his personal daily devotions and of those conducted in his name. Thus, in 1589 the staff of his cappella comprehended personnel both sacerdotal and musical: a principal chaplain, four priests (of whom three were also fully qualified as singers), a maestro di cappella (the director of music, since 1565 the composer Giaches de Wert), and ten adult male singers.

Precise identification and detailed knowledge of the spaces, both indoor (rooms, theatres, churches) and outdoor (gardens, courtyards, public squares, towers) in which individual musical works or whole repertories were performed, or for which they were conceived, should be essential for study of the production, composition and performance of music in any age. The realisation of this objective, however, often turns out to be impossible because of gaps in documentation or remodelling of the places concerned. The presence in this Companion of a contribution specifically devoted to the spaces in which Monteverdi's music was heard, and for which he composed during his employment at Mantua, demonstrates how such an approach, once only vaguely acknowledged, has in recent years become a recognised methodology. Monteverdi himself, speaking of the madrigals in his Fifth Book (1605), reminded its dedicatee, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, of the many times in which he had heard them ‘in his royal chamber’ before they were published, as if himself to spur us on to this final, interdisciplinary frontier of musicological research.

An investigation of the relationship between music and spaces for music during Monteverdi's Mantuan years runs into various problems. The configuration of the Gonzaga palace today consists of numerous buildings added over the centuries to the original medieval nucleus, which faces on to the Piazza Sordello (formerly the Piazza San Pietro). Various individual buildings have been joined together to form inner courtyards, gardens, galleries and elevated walkways, resulting in the complex structure of a palace ‘in the form of a city’ (Baldassare Castiglione) which is still visible today, albeit partially demolished and rearranged.

Monteverdi's move to Venice as maestro di cappella of the basilica of S. Marco in 1613 ostensibly forced a shift in his professional commitments away from court music in favour of the church. However, the impact was not necessarily as marked as one might expect. In fact, notwithstanding the size and complexity of Monteverdi's two ‘Venetian’ collections of sacred music – the Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the posthumous Messa … et salmi (1650), plus a few pieces in anthologies – the composer published surprisingly few of the sacred and spiritual works that he must have written during his thirty years at S. Marco. Conversely, and despite appearances (five madrigal books published by 1605, only three from 1614 to 1638, plus a further posthumous volume in 1651), Monteverdi's secular output remained significant in terms both of surviving works and of what we know (from his letters and other sources) of his musical commitments.

However, there are a number of diffculties in assessing this output. One, also shared with the sacred music, concerns chronology. Monteverdi published his Sixth Book of Madrigals in 1614, his Seventh in 1619 and his Eighth in 1638. Between the Seventh and Eighth Books came reissues of Monteverdi's first six books of madrigals (1620–22), of the Seventh (1622, 1623, 1628) and of the 1607 Scherzi musicali (1628); the 1623 edition of the Lamento d'Arianna (also including the lettera amorosa and partenza amorosa from the Seventh Book); an edition corrected by Monteverdi of Arcadelt's four-voice madrigals (Rome, 1627); the second book of Scherzi musicali of 1632; and a few settings included in anthologies edited by Venetian associates such as Giovanni Battista Camarella (?1623) and Carlo Milanuzzi (reissue of 1624), or by the printers Bartolomeo Magni (1624) and Alessandro Vincenti (1634).

In an anonymous letter, written just two years before Monteverdi died, and printed with the libretto of his opera Le nozze d'Enea con Lavinia, the author recommends the composer to the audience and imagines the fate of his music in the far-distant future:

The future predicted in this letter seems substantially to have come true. Centuries after his death Monteverdi's works continue to be appreciated in far-flung parts of the world, they continue to console us, and we still think of Monteverdi as a great musical figure. As for the ravages of time, over three hundred of his works have managed to survive together with one hundred and twenty-seven of his letters and numerous other documents directly relevant to his life and times.

The mere fact of the survival of many of Monteverdi's compositions would be remarkable, but his music has also accomplished something else: it has reached out to exert a formidable influence on the imaginations of many recent composers. Numerous adaptations and arrangements of his works have appeared over the past hundred years (those by D’Indy, Orff, Respighi, Hindemith, Maderna and Henze are only the most famous), and his musical procedures have shown a remarkable capacity to insinuate themselves almost seamlessly into the creative fabric of our modern musical languages.

Monteverdi's appointment in 1613 as maestro di cappella of S. Marco, Venice, brought him financial security in a post that also allowed him a good deal of freedom to accept commissions elsewhere, both in and outside the city. His initial salary of three hundred ducats was raised by the Procurators of S. Marco to four hundred in August 1616,1 making him, in his own words

Monteverdi's reference here to his assistant choirmaster is a reminder that he was not alone in shouldering the responsibilities of providing music for S. Marco. He inherited, and was later able to appoint, assistants who were not only performers, but also able composers of sacred music – Marc'Antonio Negri (singer and assistant choirmaster from 1612), Alessandro Grandi (singer from 1617, assistant choirmaster from 1620) and Giovanni Rovetta (singer from 1623, assistant choirmaster from 1627).

In these two reports of performances of Vespers music by Monteverdi, separated by more than 350 years, there are striking resemblances between the things that each writer chose to mention and those they did not. Both are fascinated by the performing forces, singling out certain instruments for particular comment – names, numbers and unusual, even exotic, features. Each mentions the singers as well, but generically, not as individuals. There are hints at the skills of the musicians but neither writer chooses to focus on the music he heard in terms either of its content, structure, meaning or genre (sacred music), nor its relationship to the event at which it was heard – in the first case as part of a service in a church and in the second, a performance in a concert hall. Instead, they both engage with Monteverdi's music as something that happens, a visual as well as an aural experience for an audience focused on the performers, rather than with the music as ‘composition’ or sound object.

This guide to Monteverdi's music is constructed in three sequences. The first is a catalogue of Monteverdi's works, both surviving and lost, in as near as possible date order, followed by a list of undated manuscript sources. In the case of sources containing more than one work, the contents of the volume are listed in the order in which they appear in the earliest, or the only, source (this order is not always followed in later and modern editions – see Chapter 3, above). The second sequence is a catalogue, by short title only, of prints and manuscripts containing contrafacta of Monteverdi's music: that is, adaptations of his settings by a different author to texts that are usually sacred or spiritual in character (the first lines of these settings are given in the Index). The third sequence is an index of first lines and titles, which serves as an index both to the catalogue and to the discussion of individual works in the text of this book. Each work can be traced in the catalogue from the index through an identifier, which includes the date of publication or first performance, or the year(s) in which a work, now lost, is discussed in Monteverdi's letters or another source; manuscripts are identified by the sigla for the library in which they are located. Dates or library sigla followed by [CF] refer to contrafacta. Dates followed by a superscript number follow the convention found in RISM (Répertoire international des sources musicales, the International Inventory of Music Sources), specifically in the volume Recueils imprimés XVIe-XVIIe siècles (Munich-Duisburg, 1960).

It is not easy to trace Monteverdi's musical apprenticeship reliably, for the facts are scanty. In his published volumes up to the Second Book of Madrigals (1590) he merely describes himself as the ‘disciple’ (discepolo) of the composer Marcantonio Ingegneri, maestro di cappella of Cremona Cathedral; later, he looks back to Ingegneri as a respected composer of the old school. But many of his works, up to and beyond the Second Book, are modelled on works by composers of his own and earlier generations, sometimes well outside the range of Ingegneri's musical language, and he seems also to have used modelling to alter and renew musical style in general. The music of these early books, and of their models, thus represents the only surviving evidence of Monteverdi's musical education; and the latter can, therefore, be traced only through musical analysis.

At this period, the use of models was prompted by rhetorical and educational principles. And so Monteverdi's early compositions may support three hypothetical reconstructions: first, of some aspects of his musical education (perhaps under Ingegneri's guidance, if it was Ingegneri who had the generosity to recommend the young composer to imitate most of the available models, old and new); second, of some of the processes by which musical style evolved at this period; and third, perhaps the most important, of some of the aesthetic implied by Monteverdi's works.