How music catches up - Listen - Monteverdi and his constellation

How music catches up

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Music can help us to grasp the true modernity of this enormous shift in human consciousness. Monteverdi’s first opera, L’Orfeo (1607), is almost a manifesto for the power of music now elevated to a level of virtuoso craftsmanship and universal human emotion. John Eliot Gardiner guides listeners through two centuries of musical and poetic evolution which laid the foundations for this remarkable achievement.

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The window of opportunity closes

Monteverdi’s swan-song, L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), is a high-water mark of the new genre of public opera, Shakespearean in its contrasts of high and low-life characters, political chicanery and outrageous theatricality. It coincides with the death of the last two in this constellation of...

Published 09/25/20

Celebrating the self

The focus is now on the growing awareness of the physical, mental, and psychological attributes of the individual, and the development of a new philosophy which leads ultimately to Descartes’ formulation: cogito ergo sum. The first public opera house opens in Venice in 1637. Monteverdi, now...

Published 09/18/20

“More beautiful than the truth”

Visual art – and especially the work of Caravaggio and Rubens (in different but complementary ways) now aimed to intensify sensory experience and drama. What Monteverdi called the “natural path to imitation” was a radical bid to represent, magnify and even ‘improve’ upon nature through song and...

Published 09/11/20