Thoroughly modern Monteverdi

‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal to submit to the Inquisition, is a familiar one. It’s the battle cry not of a reformer but of a revolutionary, a passionate teller of truths.

It’s a credo he shared with composer Claudio Monteverdi. Born barely three years after the astronomer, Monteverdi faced his own inquisition. Defying those who would make music an immoveable sphere, bound in place by harmonic proprieties and structural conventions, he made works that rejected tidy formalism in favour of messy, fleshy humanity. His was music that moved in every sense, that lived as vividly as those who inspired it. He may celebrate his 450th anniversary this year, but Monteverdi was the first modern composer.

‘It solicits the ear and roughly, harshly strikes it… those dissonances are crude, ugly and insupportable.’ Provoking critical scorn with his experimentation long before Stockhausen or Boulez, Monteverdi’s musical prescience cannot be overstated. If Wagner is the father of contemporary music, then Monteverdi is its grandfather, transforming music from a beautiful act of artifice into one rooted in human truths and emotions, from a language that spoke only in smiles and affirmatives to one capable not only of mirroring but of challenging the world around.

‘The aim of all good music,’ Monteverdi wrote, ‘is to affect the soul.’ This agency took many forms — the expansive variety and soaring beauty of his 1610 Vespers, the deft character-portraits of his late operas — but nowhere is it more richly explored than in the composer’s madrigals, a sequence of secular works of unprecedented emotional breadth, a musical rival to the sonnets of Petrarch or Shakespeare.

When we think of a great composer we think of symphonies — large-scale works that carry the weight of moral and social conflict; of heroic struggles against authority, and of strength in adversity.