This collection of reprinted essays takes the trends of the author's Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (also in the 'Variorum' series) in a somewhat different direction. If the focus there was primarily on archival documents, here it is on the actual music. The starting-point is similar - the rise of the 'new music' for solo voice and basso continuo in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florence, in particular the songs of Giulio Caccini. But it moves on to broader aesthetic issues crystallized in contemporary theoretical debate and musical practice - not least the rise of aria-based styles - and concludes with a series of studies of Claudio Monteverdi's works for the theatre, including the operas Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and the ever-problematic L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643).

This collection of reprinted essays takes the trends of the author's Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence (also in the 'Variorum' series) in a somewhat different direction. If the focus there was primarily on archival documents, here it is on the actual music. The starting-point is similar - the rise of the 'new music' for solo voice and basso continuo in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florence, in particular the songs of Giulio Caccini. But it moves on to broader aesthetic issues crystallized in contemporary theoretical debate and musical practice - not least the rise of aria-based styles - and concludes with a series of studies of Claudio Monteverdi's works for the theatre, including the operas Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and the ever-problematic L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643).

For more than three decades Richard Charteris has researched European music, sources and collections, focusing particularly on late Renaissance England, Germany and Italy. This group of essays, many concerning previously unknown or unexplored works and materials, covers the 16th and early to mid 17th centuries. The studies involve variously 'new' compositions, music manuscripts and editions, and documents that relate to figures such as the Italians Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi and Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, the Germans Hans Leo Hassler and Adam Gumpelzhaimer, as well as the Englishmen John Coprario, John Dowland, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes, William Lawes, Peter Philips, and the French composer Marin Marais. In addition, Charteris elucidates contemporary performance practice in relation to works by Gabrieli, investigates printed music editions that originated from the Church of St Anna, Augsburg, and evaluates materials in collections, inlcuding ones in Berlin, Hamburg, Kraków, London, Regensburg and Warsaw.

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, it is aimed at students, performers and music-lovers in general and adds significantly to our understanding of Monteverdi's music, his life, and the contexts in which he worked. Chapters offering overviews of his output of sacred, secular and dramatic music are complemented by 'intermedi', in which contributors examine individual works, or sections of works in detail. The book draws extensively on Monteverdi's letters and includes a select discography/videography and a complete list of Monteverdi's works together with an index of first lines and titles.

"Includes full-length Harmonia Mundi CD"--Cover, p. 1.

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. Monteverdi s 1607 version of the legend of Orpheus is arguably the first masterpiece of opera. Composed for the court of Mantua, where Monteverdi was employed, it is very different from his two other surviving operas, which he wrote more than30 years later to entertain Venetian audiences in the first public opera houses. Orfeo was long considered untranslatable, because the text is so closely tied to the music, and the Venetian librettos owe some of their brilliance to Spanish Golden Age theatre. This opera guide is an opportunity to read all three of Monteverdi s stage works together, in Anne Ridler s graceful translations."

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective. Ellen Rosand considers these works as not merely a pair but constituents of a trio, a Venetian trilogy that, Rosand argues, properly includes a third opera, Le nozze d'Enea (1641). Although its music has not survived, its chronological placement between the other two operas opens new prospects for better understanding all three, both in their specifically Venetian context and as the creations of an old master. A thorough review of manuscript and printed sources of Ritorno and Poppea, in conjunction with those of their erstwhile silent companion, offers new possibilities for resolving the questions of authenticity that have swirled around Monteverdi's last operas since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Le nozze d'Enea also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting new light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon.

"Ah, alas!" The "faithful shepherd" Mirtillo's woeful sigh of unrequited love, delivered with outrageous musical dissonances, has rung through the ages since the first publication of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigal "Cruda Amarilli" in 1605. But there is far more to the composer's nine books of madrigals than dissonant progressions--they are an integral part of the intellectual, artistic, and practical worlds of creation and performance in Italian musical and literary culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While Monteverdi is also recognized for his operas and sacred works, it is no surprise that the madrigal dominated his output through his long career in Cremona, Mantua, and Venice. Author Tim Carter illustrates how the composer's wonderfully witty settings of Italian verse ran the gamut from compositions in the traditional polyphonic style for five unaccompanied voices to those in more modern idioms for one or more singers and instruments. Their poets included the major figures of the day--Torquato Tasso, Battista Guarini, and Giambattista Marino--as well as the classics, not least of all Petrarch, with texts that embraced all the current literary genres from lyric through epic to dramatic. Monteverdi also repeatedly asked and answered the fundamental question of any musical setting of poetry concerning the relationship between poetic and musical voice(s). Carter offers a more holistic perspective than has been adopted in the partial studies of Monteverdi's madrigals to date and moves far beyond conventional views of the composer and his work. He considers how Monteverdi engaged with poetry, with sound, and with the performers for whom he was writing. As Carter shows, Monteverdi was irascible, exasperating, and prone to error. Yet his astonishing musical mind was also inventive, playful, and capable of the most extraordinary wit--producing madrigals that continue to invite new approaches both to their study and to their performance.

Claudio Monteverdi's historical position in music has been compared to that of Shakespeare in literature: almost exact contemporaries, each worked from traditional beginnings to transform nearly every genre he attempted. In this book, Massimo Ossi delves into the most significant aspect of Monteverdi's career: the development, during the first years of the seventeenth century, of a new compositional style he called the seconda prattica or "second manner." Challenged in print for the unconventional aspects of his music, Monteverdi found himself at the center of a debate between defenders of Renaissance principles and the newest musical currents of the time. The principles of the seconda prattica, Ossi argues in this sophisticated analysis of Monteverdi's writings, music, and approaches to text-setting, were in fact much more significant to the course of Monteverdi's career than previously thought by modern scholars-not only did Monteverdi continue to pursue their aesthetic and theoretical implications for the rest of his life, but they also affected his dramatic compositions as well as his chamber vocal music and sacred works. Ossi "divines the oracle" of Monteverdi's ambiguous theoretical concepts in a clear way and in terms of pure music; his book will enhance our understanding of Monteverdi as one of the most significant figures in western music history.