Magnificent Monteverdi

Tom Ford pays tribute to the ground-breaking Italian composer, born 450 years ago, one of the great musicians celebrated in the V&A‘s upcoming exhibition Opera: Passion Power and Politics.

Let’s get something straight from the outset: Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 music drama L’Orfeo, favola in musica was not the first opera. It wasn’t even close. Like the story of Orpheus himself, the idea that Monteverdi single-handedly gave birth to the modern music drama is nothing more than myth.

As with most great landmarks in Western music, the rumblings begin long before the main event. For instance, Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, from 1722, had many precursors and models.

We are also quick to assert that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the first instance of choral music within a symphonic setting; yet his contemporary Peter Winter beat him to the punch with his SchlachtSinfonie, composed a good decade earlier in 1814.

Like Bach’s and Beethoven’s respective compositions, what should be attributed to Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is the distinction of being the first ‘great’ example. In a tiny courtly room in Mantua in 1607, Monteverdi gave the world what can be described as the finest exposition of what we now know as ‘opera’ (a term that was not used until the middle of the17th century).

Music drama did not appear with a bang; rather, it gestated in and around the Italian provinces for most of the 16th century. The popular story that a small number of Florentine humanists consciously crafted the idea of music drama as a reinvention of the Ancient Greek tragedy is misleading. While admiration for antiquity was an ever-present sentiment in Renaissance Italy, the re-creation of Greek tragedy was not their sole intent.

As Monteverdi scholar Joachim Steinheuer explains, the model for the musicians and dramatists of the Italian Renaissance was immersed in an earthly, pastoral context: