Claudio Monteverdi: Madrigals, Book IV

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the greatest composers in the history of music, but paradoxically he is, at the same time, a great unknown to the contemporary public. For some reason, music consumption has focused on barely two and a half centuries, from the last baroque (Scarlatti, Bach or Haendel) to the great masters of the first half of the 20th Century. Almost everything prior to 1700, encompassed under the generic label of "ancient music", appears in musical programs with much less frequency, regardless of its value or its beauty.

This fourth set of madrigals, selected by Monteverdi himself for publication, dates from 1603, eleven years after his last collection. Much has been written about the reason for this delay, because until then Monteverdi had published with assiduity. A set of circumstances seem to complicated the author's life during that period. In the first place, his travels through Europe accompanying the court of Duke Gonzaga, his mentor and patron, kept him quite busy, although they also served to meet other musicians and artists who helped the evolution of his art. Also influenced his marriage to the singer Claudia Cattaneo, who had previously been the Duke's own lover. But perhaps the main reason for this parenthesis has been the famous dispute he had with Giovanni Maria Artusi, an aggressive defender of the traditional rules of music and composition, who violently opposed any attempt to go against them.

The result of this battle between the old and the new music is this Fourth Book of Madrigals, which deepens the expressive innovation that had already characterized its previous production, and which will continue in the Fifth Book, which will follow this stylistic line, as a kind of appendix and natural continuation of this work.

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