4 - Monteverdi at Mantua, 1590–1612

Summary

Music at the Ducal Court of Mantua in 1590

Early in 1590, the most probable date at which Monteverdi entered the employment of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, the Palazzo Ducale offered an environment wherein music was cultivated under three distinct identities. One was the duke's personal cappella of clergy and choir, maintained within his entourage to discharge his obligations as the orthodox and dutiful master of a great Christian household. It has long been considered that Monteverdi's engagement at the Gonzaga court was exclusively as a secular musician, but a new appraisal of the documentary evidence indicates that this is rather a misapprehension. He was recruited to the central musical department of the household, the cappella (chapel). Whatever that term was to come to mean in future times, in Counter-Reformation Mantua under the devout dukes Guglielmo and Vincenzo it could only maintain its historic signification as the household department to which the duke committed the ordering both of his personal daily devotions and of those conducted in his name. Thus, in 1589 the staff of his cappella comprehended personnel both sacerdotal and musical: a principal chaplain, four priests (of whom three were also fully qualified as singers), a maestro di cappella (the director of music, since 1565 the composer Giaches de Wert), and ten adult male singers.