Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo wasn’t the first opera, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1598) bears that honour. However, L’Orfeo is the earliest opera that is still on our opera stages, and for an opera to hold our attention for over 400

Commissioned for the 1606/7 Carnival season, Monteverdi’s first opera L’Orfeo was performed in Mantua on 24 February 1607. Essentially, it was commissioned by Francesco Gonzaga in competition with his brother Ferdinando Gonzaga, both sons of the Duke of Mantua. Claudio

We were listening to a bit of Bill Evans the other day and something struck us as very familiar about it. We heard, of all things, an odd bass line, played very slow – descending. And then the trumpets came

By the time of his seventh book of madrigals in 1619, Monteverdi was in the middle of changing the concept of the madrigal and starting to approach the musical style that would become the most prominent in the following centuries:

Claudio Monteverdi was a precocious musical talent who published his first collection of madrigals at age 15. Ambitious and highly confident he was hired as a singer and instrumentalist by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua in 1590. Mantua and nearby

When Claudio Monteverdi secured his first job at the ducal court in Mantua, he had to report to the maestro di cappella Giaches de Wert. A Franco-Flemish composer actively working in Italy, Wert was one of the leaders developing the

Creator of modern music In 2017 we celebrate the 450th birthday of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). He was the most important musician in late 16th and early 17th-century Italy, and the first great composer of opera. He developed powerful ways of

Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of the Blessed Virgin The musicologist Denis Arnold once famously suggested that to perform the Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin), composed by Claudio Monteverdi is “to court disaster.” Arnold further asserts, “To write