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.