One figure stood out above all others in music around 1600, just as Josquin Desprez had around 1500. Claudio Monteverdi, an enormously imaginative and innovative composer, also has the distinction of being the first great composer whose music was attacked for being too radical. Radical it was. Monteverdi has aptly been called “the last great madrigalist and the first great opera composer”; indeed, while his earliest madrigals are close in style to those of Thomas Weelkes, some of his later ones are more like small, self-contained opera scenes.

Monteverdi’s career was long and fortunate. He was a quick starter, publishing a little book of sacred songs while only fifteen, and he was still composing operas into his seventies. He first worked at the music-loving court of Mantua, in northern Italy. There he wrote his first opera, Orfeo (Orpheus, 1607), famous in music history as the first masterpiece of opera. He was then appointed choirmaster of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, the most prestigious musical position in Europe, where the Gabrielis had held forth. (Even before moving to Venice he had composed a collection of motets that rivaled anything the Gabrielis produced, in its rich amalgam of solo voices, multiple choirs, and instruments.) At the end of his long career, in the 1640s, Monteverdi helped inaugurate public opera, Venice’s greatest contribution to the history of music.

After Orfeo, none of Monteverdi’s operas were printed, and some have been completely lost — a grievous loss indeed. All we have left of his Arianna is the heroine’s big lament, one of the greatest hits of the day, which Monteverdi published in several different arrangements. Fortunately, two late masterpieces have survived: The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea.