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Apart from its climactic lament which became his greatest hit his second

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Apart from its climactic lament, which became his greatest hit, his second opera, Arianna (1608), by grievous contrast, was lost, as were several of his later theatre pieces. His last two great operas, Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) - more focused than ever upon the essential human passions - survive only in skeletal sources.Long before that, Monteverdi had come under attack from more conservative theorists for, in their view, seeking to substitute a thinner, flashier musical manner for the cumulative richness and substance of the old contrapuntal tradition. In response, Monteverdi defined what he was up to as a "Second Practice" that did not negate the virtues of the polyphonic "First Practice", and he promised in due course to publish a textbook outlining his new theories of word setting, expression and harmony - though he never actually got round to it.When, on the other hand, he brought out his great collection of church music, including what we now know as the Vespers of 1610 with all its new-found flamboyance and richness of instrumental colour, he took care also to include a polyphonic mass to demonstrate he could compose in old First Practice as skilfully as anyone. Employed, increasingly unhappily, by the tight-fisted Gonzaga dynasty in Mantua since the early 1590s, Monteverdi brought forth his "story in music", La favola d'Orfeo, in 1607 - when, fortunately for posterity, the score was immediately printed. But it was Monteverdi who first realised the full-scale possibilities of the new-fangled genre. Some of the later madrigals are virtually operatic scene.In fact, it had been the use of monody in courtly masques, and attempts to revive ancient Greek drama in Florence and elsewhere that led to what is generally thought to be the earliest true opera, Peri's (subsequently lost) Dafne in 1597.

One can follow his absorption of the new trend most clearly in the eight books of madrigals he published between 1587 and 1638, as he moves from polyphony to more individualised and declamatory vocal writing, with added continuo accompaniment from Book Five (1605) onwards. But he must soon have picked up the new fashion for so-called monody: for setting words not to a polyphonic web of equal voices, but for solo voice or voices, plus accompaniment, with all the possibilities of intensified expression such textures offered. And while it is also true that Monteverdi was less a great original than the artist and thinker who best understood the emergent trends of his time and gave them definitive expression, the same could be said of Schoenberg or Stravinsky.Born in Cremona, he evidently absorbed all that his eminent teacher, Ingegneri, had to teach him of traditional counterpoint early on, publishing a set of motets at 15. He was not, of course, claiming that Monteverdi invented expressionism and tone-rows; rather that he was the first important musician to embody the historical awareness, the self-conscious aspiration towards the expressively new that ultimately led to such developments. Apart from the fact that his pleas and imprecations are directed at court functionaries rather than arts boards or the controller of Radio 3, he almost sounds like your average modern composer.Monteverdi, Creator of Modern Music was in fact the title of an influential pioneering study published in 1950 by the scholar Leo Schrade. He frets about conditions of performance, shrewdly sizes up performers and rivals, vividly describes getting mugged on the road from Mantua to Venice, complains continually of ill health and overwork, and, most of all, of the difficulties of getting promoted and paid by his capricious patrons. But from Monteverdi we have a sizeable selection of his correspondence; some 130 surviving letters in the authoritative edition of Denis Stevens.The man who emerges is passionate, idealistic, touchy, concerned about his family, proud of his skill and resentful of its undervaluation.

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