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I met Claudio Monteverdi many years before he began working on the music he would publish in 1610. I was from Rimini and, like many musicians of our time, I spent much of the year moving from one city to another. Bologna was a frequent stop, Ferrara had been even more so in earlier years, Venice attracted anyone who had something to publish, and Mantua remained one of those places where, sooner or later, one inevitably found oneself.
Claudio and I were almost the same age, and that had made our friendship easy. I did not depend on him, I was not one of his singers, and I had no position to ask of him. I could therefore afford to discuss his music without being expected to approve of it on principle, something I believe he appreciated, at least on the days when he was in a good mood.
In January 1610 I returned to Mantua after several months spent between Bologna and Romagna. I wrote to him as soon as I arrived, and he invited me to call the following morning.
I found him sitting at his computer, with a psalter open beside the keyboard and several handwritten pages scattered across the table. Claudio had developed the habit of working on paper and on screen at the same time, with the result that he produced so many versions of the same piece that it was often difficult to know which was actually the latest.
On the monitor I could see the verse Deus in adiutorium meum intende. A little later he played a recording. The Gregorian intonation was followed by a broad entrance of voices and instruments, and it took me only a few bars to recognise something I had already heard three years earlier in Orfeo.
I pointed out that he was bringing the music of the Toccata into Vespers.
“The music never signed an exclusivity agreement,” he replied.
It was a joke, but it contained a good deal of his way of thinking. Claudio did not see an absolute barrier between theatrical and sacred language. What mattered to him was the function the music assumed in its new context and its relationship with the words.
At the time I could not have known that those bars would become the opening of what Claudio would call the Vespro della Beata Vergine da concerto, composto sopra canti fermi — the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin in concertato style, composed upon cantus firmus — one of the most remarkable parts of the great publication he was preparing.
For years he had maintained that rules ought to serve the expression of the text. That conviction had brought him criticism and controversy, above all from Giovanni Maria Artusi. Claudio insisted that he no longer thought about it, although on his computer he kept a folder labelled ARTUSI, full of documents he rarely opened and had never quite managed to delete.
During those months he looked tired. The Gonzaga court had given him prestige and opportunities, but it continued to demand music, spectacles, ceremonies and rehearsals. His phone often rang while he was working, and almost invariably it meant yet another request from the court.
The death of his wife Claudia in 1607 had also changed him greatly. Claudio spoke little about her, but he had withdrawn more deeply into his work and had begun to think with increasing urgency about the future of his children and the possibility of leaving Mantua.
The Vespers of the Blessed Virgin project grew slowly.
At first I thought he was preparing a few psalms for some particular solemn occasion. Then he showed me the Dixit Dominus, the Laudate pueri, the Laetatus sum, the Nisi Dominus and the Lauda Jerusalem. What struck me most was the constant presence of the cantus firmus.
Anyone who knew Monteverdi only through the controversies surrounding him might have imagined a musician determined to free himself from tradition. The opposite was true. Liturgical books and psalm tones were constantly open on his table. The Gregorian chant remained recognisable while around it a much more modern style took shape, built from contrasts, alternations, instruments and solo voices.
Once I remarked that it was curious to see the supposed destroyer of ancient music spending so many hours over Gregorian chant.
He pointed towards the phone.
“That is why one should never believe everything one reads.”
Alongside the psalms he was working on the Missa In illo tempore, based on a motet by Nicolas Gombert. Its language was austere and contrapuntal, almost a demonstration of his complete command of the older style.
It seemed obvious to me that Claudio wanted to show both sides of his art. When I mentioned this, he corrected me. He did not want to prove that he could write in every style; he merely wanted to prevent others from saying that he could not.
Among the pieces intended for the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, some had a much more intimate character.
Nigra sum surprised me with the sensuality of its vocal line. The words from the Song of Songs seemed almost to summon the world of the madrigal. Claudio, naturally, saw nothing strange in this. For him, the desire contained in the text did not need to be diminished merely because the music belonged to a sacred setting.
Pulchra es also had an intimate quality, built around two voices that sought one another out and intertwined. Claudio recorded several rehearsals on his phone, moving the singers around the room to alter the way they heard and responded to each other.
That evening he sent me three recordings. I chose the second. He replied that he preferred the third.
The following morning he had chosen the second.
I said nothing. I had learned that with Monteverdi some victories were better enjoyed in silence.
In Duo Seraphim, by contrast, the musical construction followed the theological meaning of the text directly. Two voices represented the two seraphim; a third entered when the words referred to the three heavenly witnesses, and at et hi tres unum sunt the three lines came together.
With Audi coelum, Claudio began to work above all with distance. He wanted a voice to answer from another place, almost like an echo from heaven. We moved the second tenor farther and farther away, first to the end of the room, then into the corridor and finally behind a door. We recorded the effect on the phone, and Claudio spent a long time listening to the difference created by real physical space.
Many years later I would think back to that rehearsal when I first entered St Mark’s Basilica.
In 1610, however, Venice chiefly represented the place where the volume would be printed.
Ricciardo Amadino knew Claudio well and had already published several of his works. This did not prevent Monteverdi from sending him endless corrections. Every time a version appeared to be final, another one followed.
On the computer there were files called FINAL, FINAL2, LAST, REALLY_LAST, and even NEW2. Once we spent almost half an hour trying to locate the correct version of one of the psalms.
It was not in any of the folders Claudio regarded as definitive.
During the summer, the Roman project became more concrete.
Claudio was concerned about his son Francesco and hoped to secure him a good place at the Roman Seminary, but it was clear that the journey might also allow him to present the new publication personally to Pope Paul V and explore new professional possibilities.
The dedication to the Pope made that intention even more apparent.
The volume, after all, presented an extraordinarily complete image of the composer: on one side the Missa In illo tempore and his command of traditional counterpoint; on the other the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin and the sacred concertos, with soloists, instruments, echoes, concertato writing and techniques developed in both theatre and madrigal.
The Sonata sopra Sancta Maria ora pro nobis was one of the pieces that impressed me most during its preparation. The instruments moved continuously while the voices repeated the same Marian invocation.
Claudio listened to the rehearsals on the computer, stopped the recording, altered small details and began again.
One evening the power failed.
The monitor went dark together with the lamps, and for several minutes the room was lit only by candles. The Gregorian book still lay open on the table.
Claudio picked it up.
“At least this never switches itself off.”
When the power returned, we discovered that the file had been saved. It was one of the rare occasions on which I saw Monteverdi genuinely grateful to technology.
Towards the end of the summer, the Ave maris stella and the two versions of the Magnificat also appeared. The very existence of two alternatives made me realise that perhaps I had been mistaken in looking for one single destination for all this music.
I kept wondering for which feast the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin had been conceived. Mantua? Santa Barbara? Rome? Some particular Marian celebration?
Once I asked Claudio when he intended to have the entire Vespers performed.
He looked at me with some surprise.
“All of it? That depends on the feast, the singers, the instruments and, above all, the money.”
The answer stayed with me. To my mind, the volume was already beginning to assume the shape of a unified work. To him, it was still a collection of musical possibilities that could adapt themselves to different places and occasions.
By September the printing was well under way.
When I saw one of the first copies, I was struck by the solemnity of the title page. The printed page gave the impression of something that had always existed in finished form, while I had witnessed the hesitations, second thoughts, misplaced files, rehearsals, telephone calls and last-minute corrections.
Inside that volume I could now see, fixed permanently on the page, the Missa In illo tempore and the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin I had watched grow over the preceding months, one psalm, one concerto and one correction at a time.
In October Claudio left for Rome.
The professional breakthrough he may have hoped for did not come. Mantua remained the centre of his life for a while longer, and his relationship with the Gonzagas continued to deteriorate.
Then, in 1612, after Duke Vincenzo’s death, Monteverdi was dismissed.
I was in Rimini when I heard the news. I sent him a message saying that I was sorry.
His reply arrived the following day:
Less than I ought to be.
I understood that he was wounded, but those few words also contained the relief of a man who finally had nothing left to lose.
The real turning point came in 1613.
Giulio Cesare Martinengo, maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in Venice, had died. Claudio applied for the position and on 19 August was appointed to succeed him.
I visited him a few months later.
We entered the basilica together on a relatively quiet morning. Claudio studied the galleries, the domes and the distances between the different parts of the building. At one point he took out his phone, recorded a few seconds and then clapped his hands to listen to the returning echo.
I immediately thought of Audi coelum and, more generally, of the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin I had heard taking shape in Mantua.
Claudio seemed to have found a place in which many of those ideas could develop naturally. I do not believe, however, that the Vespers had been written for St Mark’s. That music belonged to an earlier moment in his life and probably to no single place at all.
Many years passed.
Claudio remained maestro di cappella in Venice until his death in 1643. I continued my life as a musician, returning more and more often to Rimini and travelling less as I grew older.
I kept a great deal of material from those years: letters, photographs, messages and recordings. Some of it was lost during transfers from one computer to another, while other files survived for no particular reason.
Long after Claudio’s death, I came across an old folder bearing simply his name.
Inside was a recording from January 1610.
I opened it.
For several seconds there was nothing but the sound of the room: a chair being moved, someone coughing. Then came the intonation:
Deus in adiutorium meum intende.
The Domine ad adiuvandum followed, the opening of the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin which none of us at the time could have imagined would survive through the centuries.
The sound quality was terrible, yet I immediately remembered that morning in Mantua: the psalter open beside the computer, the phone lying near the inkwell, and Claudio trying to make ancient chant coexist with music that many people would have thought belonged to another age.
For years I had wondered whether he understood the importance of what he was writing.
Probably not.
During those months he had much more immediate problems in front of him: the court, his family, Rome, the printer, the singers, the corrections, the need to find a different future.
At the end of the recording someone missed an entry. There was a brief silence, followed by Claudio’s voice:
“Again. And this time, if possible, all in the same key.”
Everyone laughed.
I smiled too.
That was the Monteverdi I remembered best: not the man in the portrait or on the title page, but the colleague who could argue for hours over a single note and, once a rehearsal finally worked, immediately find something else that needed correcting.
I started the recording again.
Deus in adiutorium meum intende.
On the table my phone lit up with a new message.
This time I decided not to look at it.
After all those years, Claudio could finally have precedence.
