Claudio monteverdi fun facts
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Noon Edition
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Welcome to Harmonia . . . I’m Angela Mariani.
Claudio Monteverdi’s long career spanned a period marked by big changes to the Italian musical landscape. He witnessed a shift from Renaissance to Baroque compositional aesthetics, the rise of the violin family of instruments, and the establishment of opera as a public institution, to name a few. From ballets to mass settings and madrigals that run the gamut from chamber pastimes to staged spectacles, Monteverdi left us a wealth of music for all occasions that continues to delight audiences of today. Join Harmonia this hour as we take a sonic journey through some of the musical places and spaces Monteverdi inhabited during his extraordinary life.
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Uno + One: Italia nostra
Tenet
Avie Records | AV2303 (2013)
Claudio Monteverdi
Tr. 5 Ohime ch’io cado, ohime (4:29)
[Ensemble] Tenet’s version of Claudio Monteverdi’s “Ohime, ch’io cado, ohime; Ah me, I fall, ah me.” Jolle Greenleaf, soprano, with violini
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La Morte d’Orfeo
Instead of the little tears that were shed at the end of Arianna’s lament in 1608, here, as semi-deo ex machina, Vanità/Orfeo takes over and revenges the lieto fine (happy end) that was imposed on the opera in the edition of 1609. The first performed version of 1607 ended with Striggio’s verses of liquidation by Bacchanti (furies), shaped as Bacchanale choirs alternating soli. The music of that ending is lost, just like the rest of Arianna, and leaves us curious about its character.
Several scholars agree that the later (printed) version would not have been possible in the narrow space of the Orfeo première. Monteverdi’s dedication to Prince Francesco of the 1609 print made Nino Pirrotta finally exclude the possibility of elaborate machine work for descending and ascending gods.
Serenissimo signore mio signore et patrone colendissimo, La favola d’Orfeo che già nell’Accademia de gl’Invaghiti sotto gl’auspitij di Vostra Altezza fù sopra angusta Scena
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Claudio Monteverdi, (baptized May 15, 1567, Cremona, Duchy of Milan—died November 29, 1643, Venice) was an Italian composer in the late Renaissance, and the most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music.
Early Career
Monteverdi, the son of a barber-surgeon and chemist, studied with the director of music at Cremona cathedral, Marcantonio Ingegneri, a well-known musician who wrote church music and madrigals of some distinction in an up-to-date though not revolutionary style of the 1570s. Monteverdi was obviously a precocious pupil, since he published several books of religious and secular music in his teens, all of them containing competent pieces in a manner not far from that of his master. The culmination of this early period occurred in two madrigal books published by one of the most famous of Venetian printers in 1587 and 1590. They are full of excellent, attractive works, somewhat more modern in approach than Ingegneri’s, perhaps the result of studying the madrigals of Luca Marenzio, the
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