Monteverdi: Vespers (1610)

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Sep 25, 1997 - Music - 140 pages
Monteverdi's Vespers is an exceptional collection of sacred music, both in the inventiveness of the compositions that it contains and in the debate that it has provoked over its use in the seventeenth century and over Monteverdi's intentions in publishing it. This Handbook provides a guide to the music in all its aspects - from an introduction to the service of Vespers itself, through the practice of chanting psalms in plainsong to analysis of Monteverdi's settings, ranging from the rhetoric of the motet 'Nigra sum' to the sub-text of the psalm 'Laetatus sum'. It also examines the issues involved in performing the Vespers and evaluates various scholarly debates on the music, challenging the long-held ideas that the sacred concertos are antiphon substitutes and that the music could not have been performed at Santa Barbara, Mantua. The book includes the texts and plainsongs used by Monteverdi, and a discography.
 

Contents

The 1610 settings and the liturgy of Vespers
6
Problems posed by the 1610 Vespers
15
The 1610 print and Monteverdis career
23
Monteverdi and church music at Mantua
29
Three theories
30
Motives for publication
35
Suited to the chapels or chambers of princes
41
Duo Seraphim
43
Lauda Jerusalem
74
Ave maris stella
76
The Magnificat settings
77
Issues of performance
82
Performance with period instruments
85
Performance with solo voices
87
Instrumental accompaniment
89
Transposition
90

Nigra sum and Pulchra es
47
Audi coelum
54
Sonata sopra Sancta Maria
56
And all on a cantus firmus
60
Response Domine ad adiuvandum
61
Dixit Dominus
62
Laudate pueri
64
Laetatus sum
67
Nisi Dominus
72
Tempo and proportions
91
Liturgical and concert performance
92
Second Vespers for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin 15 August
95
Plainsongs texts and translations
100
Notes
121
Select bibliography
130
Discography
134
Index
137
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