Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, string player, choirmaster, and priest. He is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods. His surviving music includes nine books of madrigals, large-scale religious works, and three complete operas. His opera L’Orfeo is the earliest of the genre still widely performed.
About Claudio Monteverdi in brief
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, string player, choirmaster, and priest. He is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history. His surviving music includes nine books of madrigals, large-scale religious works, and three complete operas. His opera L’Orfeo is the earliest of the genre still widely performed. His letters give insight into the life of a professional musician in Italy of the period, including problems of income, patronage and politics. He defended his sometimes novel techniques as elements of a seconda pratica, contrasting with the more orthodox earlier style which he termed the prima Pratica. Largely forgotten during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, his works enjoyed a rediscovery around the beginning of the twentieth century. His first published work, a set of motets, Sacrae cantiunculae for three voices, was issued in Venice in 1582, when he was only fifteen years old. His second work, Madrigalii, was printed at Brescia in 1610, according to his biographer Paolo Paolo Fabbri: “the secular genre of the second half of the sixteenth century… was the par excellence of the Counts of Marco” He died in Venice, where he was maestro di cappella at the basilica of San Marco, and was buried in the San Marco Cathedral.
He was the first child of the apothecary Baldassare Montever di and his first wife Maddalena ; they had married early the previous year. His brother Giulio Cesare was also to become a musician; there were two other brothers and two sisters from Baldassar’s marriage to Maddalna and his subsequent marriage in 1576 or 1577. There is no clear record of his early musical training, or evidence that he was a member of the Cathedral choir or studied at Cremona University. He wrote works for Venice, including Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea. In his lifetime the concept of ‘Italy’ existed only as a geographical entity, and the people experienced various layers of authority and jurisdiction. In the first instance they were subject to the local rulers of their city-states, powerful families such as the Gonzagas. And in the case of CremonA, part of the Duchy of Milan, it fell under the control of the Spanish Empire, in 1559. He worked extensively in the tradition of earlier Renaissance polyphony, and undertook great developments in form and melody, and began to employ the basso continuo technique, distinctive of the Baroques. His next works were sets of five-part madrigal, which were dedicated to his first Count, Count Marco Fabbrio. His last work was the Vespro della Beata Vergine of 1610.
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