10 - The Venetian secular music

Summary

Monteverdi's move to Venice as maestro di cappella of the basilica of S. Marco in 1613 ostensibly forced a shift in his professional commitments away from court music in favour of the church. However, the impact was not necessarily as marked as one might expect. In fact, notwithstanding the size and complexity of Monteverdi's two ‘Venetian’ collections of sacred music – the Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the posthumous Messa … et salmi (1650), plus a few pieces in anthologies – the composer published surprisingly few of the sacred and spiritual works that he must have written during his thirty years at S. Marco. Conversely, and despite appearances (five madrigal books published by 1605, only three from 1614 to 1638, plus a further posthumous volume in 1651), Monteverdi's secular output remained significant in terms both of surviving works and of what we know (from his letters and other sources) of his musical commitments.

However, there are a number of diffculties in assessing this output. One, also shared with the sacred music, concerns chronology. Monteverdi published his Sixth Book of Madrigals in 1614, his Seventh in 1619 and his Eighth in 1638. Between the Seventh and Eighth Books came reissues of Monteverdi's first six books of madrigals (1620–22), of the Seventh (1622, 1623, 1628) and of the 1607 Scherzi musicali (1628); the 1623 edition of the Lamento d'Arianna (also including the lettera amorosa and partenza amorosa from the Seventh Book); an edition corrected by Monteverdi of Arcadelt's four-voice madrigals (Rome, 1627); the second book of Scherzi musicali of 1632; and a few settings included in anthologies edited by Venetian associates such as Giovanni Battista Camarella (?1623) and Carlo Milanuzzi (reissue of 1624), or by the printers Bartolomeo Magni (1624) and Alessandro Vincenti (1634).