"Ah, alas!" The "faithful shepherd" Mirtillo's woeful sigh of unrequited love, delivered with outrageous musical dissonances, has rung through the ages since the first publication of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigal "Cruda Amarilli" in 1605. But there is far more to the composer's nine books of madrigals than dissonant progressions--they are an integral part of the intellectual, artistic, and practical worlds of creation and performance in Italian musical and literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While Monteverdi is also recognized for his operas and sacred works, it is no surprise that the madrigal dominated his output through his long career in Cremona, Mantua, and Venice. Author Tim Carter illustrates how the composer's wonderfully witty settings of Italian verse ran the gamut from compositions in the traditional polyphonic style for five unaccompanied voices to those in more modern idioms for one or more singers and instruments. Their poets included the major figures of the day--Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini, and Giambattista Marino--as well as the classics, not least of all Petrarch, with texts that embraced all the current literary genres from lyric through epic to dramatic. Monteverdi also repeatedly asked and answered the fundamental question of any musical setting of poetry concerning the relationship between poetic and musical voice(s). Carter offers a more holistic perspective than has been adopted in the partial studies of Monteverdi's madrigals to date and moves far beyond conventional views of the composer and his work. He considers how Monteverdi engaged with poetry, with sound, and with the performers for whom he was writing. As Carter shows, Monteverdi was irascible, exasperating, and prone to error. Yet his astonishing musical mind was also inventive, playful, and capable of the most extraordinary wit--producing madrigals that continue to invite new approaches both to their study and to their performance.

Publisher Description

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, it is aimed at students, performers and music-lovers in general and adds significantly to our understanding of Monteverdi's music, his life, and the contexts in which he worked. Chapters offering overviews of his output of sacred, secular and dramatic music are complemented by 'intermedi', in which contributors examine individual works, or sections of works in detail. The book draws extensively on Monteverdi's letters and includes a select discography/videography and a complete list of Monteverdi's works together with an index of first lines and titles.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is well known as the composer of the earliest operas still performed today. His Orfeo, Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, and L'incoronazione di Poppea are internationally popular nearly four centuries after their creation. These seminal works represent only a part of Monteverdi's music for the stage, however. He also wrote numerous works that, while not operas, are no less theatrical in their fusion of music, drama and dance. This is a survey of Monteverdi's entire output of music for the theatre - his surviving operas, other dramatic musical compositions, and lost works.

"Claudio Monteverdi's sixty-year compositional career spans one of the most crucial junctures in Western music. Laying the groundwork for harmonic tonality - the pervasive musical language of Western culture until the twentieth century - Monteverdi's break with the self-contained harmonic world of the Renaissance and his confident assertion of human rationality and order through music was a crucial contribution to the emergence of the Baroque style." "Monteverdi's Tonal Language is a provocative new examination of the theoretical issues surrounding the emergence of early seventeenth-century tonality combined with systematic analysis of a wide range of Monteverdi's secular works. Eric Chafe argues that the composer's music was rooted in a strong sense of musical logic and a secure grasp of tonality combined with Monteverdi's assertion that music should be dominated by allegory Chafe offers a new framework for understanding the complex historical style and systematic features of the tonal language of Monteverdi's time and the composer's particular version of it." "Building on Carl Dahlhaus's analysis of emerging tonality in Monteverdi's madrigals, Chafe expands the scope of the "modal-hexachordal" system rooted in the composer's work at the time of his fourth and fifth madrigal books. In addition to covering text-music relationships of a large and representative amount of Monteverdi's music, Chafe discusses several unexplored areas crucial to any understanding of the composer's tonal language. The two madrigals "Cor mio, mentre vi miro" (from Book Four) and "O Mirtillo" (from Book Five) illustrate the theoretical features of early seventeenth-century tonality. Chafe examines the pronounced sense of tonal clarity that distinguishes the Fourth Book of Madrigals, and he articulates the tonal styles Monteverdi used as organizing criteria in the Fifth Book. In subsequent chapters he demonstrates how the characteristic devices of Orfeo emerge as basic properties of the "modal-hexachordal" system, and discusses Monteverdi's creation of ordered reality in Il Ballo delle in grate and the "Lamento d'Arianna." He further argues that the Sixth Book symbolized the interaction of polyphonic madrigal and monody, and demonstrates convincingly that the Seventh Book was a milestone in Monteverdi's creative development, assuming the characteristics that marked his later tonal style. In the Eighth Book the composer set forth a manifesto for the allegorical nature of Baroque music; Il ritorno d'Ulisse un patria is a mature working out of the potential of tonal allegory. Finally in the last three chapters, Chafe discusses the tonal-allegorical framework, aspects of musical characterization, and questions of authenticity in Monteverdi's last opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Claudio Monteverdi's historical position in music has been compared to that of Shakespeare in literature: almost exact contemporaries, each worked from traditional beginnings to transform nearly every genre he attempted. In this book, Massimo Ossi delves into the most significant aspect of Monteverdi's career: the development, during the first years of the seventeenth century, of a new compositional style he called the seconda prattica or "second manner." Challenged in print for the unconventional aspects of his music, Monteverdi found himself at the center of a debate between defenders of Renaissance principles and the newest musical currents of the time. The principles of the seconda prattica, Ossi argues in this sophisticated analysis of Monteverdi's writings, music, and approaches to text-setting, were in fact much more significant to the course of Monteverdi's career than previously thought by modern scholars-not only did Monteverdi continue to pursue their aesthetic and theoretical implications for the rest of his life, but they also affected his dramatic compositions as well as his chamber vocal music and sacred works. Ossi "divines the oracle" of Monteverdi's ambiguous theoretical concepts in a clear way and in terms of pure music; his book will enhance our understanding of Monteverdi as one of the most significant figures in western music history.