As the custom of the time required, all musicians undertook their apprenticeship under the auspices of the parish and the church choir. Monteverdi’s musical formation was at the hands of Ingegneri, a learned polyphonist of Palestrina’s lineage, and he was encouraged by his father, a doctor and cerusio (apothecary) whose shop was next to the Duomo (cathedral). As a member of that cathedral, while still a boy Monteverdi was initiated into church polyphony, the stile osservato, the so-called Ars perfecta which sought to reflect formal perfection with its rules and figures of imitative counterpoint which the Franco-Flemish Cantors had disseminated throughout Europe.

During precisely the period of Monteverdi’s apprenticeship, the madrigal continued to consolidate its ascendancy in the secular domain, employing an ever more expressive and liberated polyphony in which the beginnings of an already ‘vertical’ harmony founded on the idea of the chord were combined with a taste for chromatic ruptures and for rhythms readily becoming syllabic. What resulted was often something like a preliminary sketch of that dramatic declamation which the Florentine melodramatists were to introduce at the very end of the 16th century.

It was in 1582 that the adolescent Monteverdi, now also a viol player, wrote his first collection, the 3-voiced Sacræ Cantiunculæ, marked by Ingegneri’s influence. There followed the Madrigali Spirituali and the secular Canzonette in which he asserted his musical savoir-faire, before the publication of the First and Second Books of Madrigals (1587 and 1590), which announced his entry into the discourse of his times, marking the real beginning of his public career.

At the Court of the Gonzagas

It was to the recommendation of one Signor Ricardi, a Milanese nobleman, that Monteverdi owed his appointment at the very beginning of the 1590s (the precise date is not known) to a position at the sumptuous Mantuan Court, where he was welcomed by the Gonzagas as a singer and viol player. There, he found in Duke Vincenzo a difficult, capricious and demanding master who liked to blow hot and cold in his attitude toward his chapel, which was under the direction of the ‘excellent’ (Claudio’s word) Jacques de Wert, a completely Italianised Fleming—as evidenced by his grasp of the language in his eleven Books of Madrigals. Nonetheless, under the impetus of that unpredictable prince this environment was very favourable to both music and the plastic arts, and writers and painters such as Rubens, who worked there in about 1603 or 1605, found protection and commissions.

At the outset, it was Monteverdi the madrigalist on whom Duke Vincenzo made his demands. By the time of his Second Book of Madrigals Monteverdi was no longer a novice (far from it, in fact) and that picture of nature, Ecco mormorar l’Onde, where song becomes ‘a painting of the word’ according to the highest descriptive principles propounded by the virtuosos of the genre, had brought him a (shall we call it) ‘Marenzian’ renown, where subtle expression and charm are one. But as it happens, under the pressure of external events the situation was to be radically transformed within a few years in a way decisive for the evolution of music.

In Florence the madrigal, though seeming paradoxically to be at the height of its vogue and popularity, had recently been judged wanting by the humanists (writers, musicians, philosophers) of the Camerata dei Bardi, who gathered to discuss the ideals of ancient Greece and the renewal of Classical tragedy, which they believed was originally sung.