1 For an excellent summary of the recent recording history and the implications of its status as a ‘concert work’, see Lindsay Kemp's review ‘Monteverdi's Vespers: Which Recording Is Best?’, Gramophone, 9 February 2015, <http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/monteverdi-vespers-which-recording-is-best> (accessed 6 December 2016). For the most recent edition and a summary of previous editions, see Claudio Monteverdi, Vespro della beata vergine, ed. Uwe Wolf (Stuttgart: Carus-Verlag, 2013), Foreword, XIV–XV. The most extensive and comprehensive study of the work is Jeffrey Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

2 For reference, the liturgy of Vespers consisted of: versicle/response, followed by Gloria and Alleluia; five psalms, each preceded and followed by an antiphon; chapter (lesson); hymn; Magnificat, preceded and followed by an antiphon; collect and final responses.

3 The Vespers forms the second half of the set of seven partbooks entitled Sanctissimae Virgini Missa senis vocibus ac Vesperae pluribus decantandae, cum nonnullis sacres concentibus (Venice: Ricciardo Amadino, 1610). Monteverdi's original print order is: response (‘Domine ad adiuvandum’); five psalms (‘Dixit dominus’, ‘Laudate pueri’, ‘Laetatus sum’, Nisi dominus’ and ‘Lauda Jerusalem’) interspersed with four motets (‘Nigra sum’, ‘Pulchra es’, ‘Duo seraphim’ and ‘Audi coeli’); Sonata sopra ‘Sancta Maria’; hymn (‘Ave maris stella’); Magnificat (seven-voice version); Magnificat (alternative six-voice version).

4 Monteverdi, Vespro della beata vergine, ed. Wolf, Foreword, XIII.

5 Mauro Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi's Staging of the Self (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 153–5.

6 Ibid., 169.

7 Tim Carter, ‘Beyond Drama: Monteverdi, Marino, and the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614)’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 69 (2016), 1–46 (p. 8).

8 Ibid., 5.

9 The seemingly unifying element of the chant cantus firmi is made explicit in the title of the original 1610 basso continuo part: ‘Vespro della B. Vergine da concerto, composta sopra canti fermi’. For its relation to the contemporary context of psalm and Magnificat settings, see Paulo Fabbri, Monteverdi (Turin: E. D. T. Edizioni, 1985); trans. Tim Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114–15.

10 Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 129.

11 See Claude V. Palisca, ‘The Artusi–Monteverdi Controversy’, The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), 127–58, repr. in Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 54–84; and Tim Carter, ‘Artusi, Monteverdi, and the Poetics of Modern Music’, Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hanning (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1992), 171–94.

12 Indeed, Monteverdi, in his preface to the entire publication, implies that he is partly responding to recent criticism: ‘& claudantur ora in Claudium loquentium iniqua’ (‘and so that the mouths of those speaking unjust things against Claudio may be closed’). This, together with his obvious unhappiness with his appointment in Mantua, may well have created something of a ‘mid-life crisis’ for the composer, something that could well have inspired him to work in such detail and intensity on the dual publication of 1610. For a re-evaluation of this period of the composer's biography, see Tim Carter, ‘Monteverdi and Some Problems of Biography’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 18/1 (2012), <https://sscm-jscm.org/jscm-issues/volume-18-no-1/monteverdi-and-some-problems-of-biography>.

13 It is notable that as soon as more than one viable musical style is acknowledged, the number of possible styles, together with their countless combinations, begins to multiply in theoretical discourse (Monteverdi himself comes up with a threefold categorization of style in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (1638)). For a useful survey of this process from the time of Monteverdi to Mattheson, see Claude V. Palisca, ‘The Genesis of Mattheson's Style Classification’, New Mattheson Studies, ed. George J. Buelow and Hans Joachim Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 409–23.

14 Carter, ‘Beyond Drama’, 8.

15 Indeed, there is a possibility that Monteverdi reused this piece because the pope may have met the composer in Mantua shortly after the original performance of Orfeo in 1607. Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 14.

16 John Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers (1610), Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63.

17 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 51.

18 Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 190–202, provides a rigorous and perceptive analysis of diegesis and mimesis – the narrative and the lyric – in music as well as other arts.

19 It is instructive to compare this opening with that of one of Monteverdi's later settings of the same text, the second one in Selva morale. Here the melodic repetitions are similar, as is the shuttling harmony (between tonic and dominant), but the effect is more conventionally rhetorical without the direct reference to the psalm tone.

20 Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers, 62–3. Monteverdi had also used the secular equivalent of falsobordone on occasions in his earlier madrigal collections, such as in ‘Sfogava con le stelle’ from Book IV and ‘Che dar piu vi poss'io’ from Book V.

21 Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers, 62.

22 Ibid., 67–72; Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 225–31.

23 The first ‘Dixit dominus’ contains a brief passage based on the psalm tone, and the first Magnificat opens with an expanding allusion to the intonation of the psalm tone, similar to that of the larger Magnificat setting of 1610.

24 Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 223. See bars 71–8, ‘et ratum carum pariter’.

25 Indeed, this text, together with its puns, had been used several times in the years immediately preceding Monteverdi's setting. See Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 148–52.

26 Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 264–92.

27 In some ways, the actual acoustic in which Monteverdi might have performed some or all these pieces is immaterial here, since the music seems designed to create the illusion of reverberation. But Roger Bowers's suggestion that some of this music may have been performed in the chapel of the ducal palace brings up the tantalizing possibility that it was designed to create the illusion of space in what may have been quite a dry acoustic. Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and Sacred Music in the Household of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua, 1590–1612’, Music and Letters, 90 (2009), 331–71.

28 Monteverdi's use of a male singer for what is obviously a female voice in the text from the Song of Songs might be yet another example of the narrative experimentation that the composer was exercising in the madrigalian context. It also perhaps serves to reflect the spiritual appropriation of eroticism so central to the meditative practices of the time.

29 Following the notation in the original print, there is a particularly unusual pattern to the first half of the chant. The first three rests each grow by a beat (minim, semibreve, dotted semibreve), which causes the ‘Ma-’ of ‘Maria’ to be syncopated. As if to compensate, the ‘ri’ is double length and is not separated from the next syllable. However, Kurtzman clearly considers the second rest, a semibreve, to be an error, thus bringing the ‘Ma-’ out of its syncopated position (and indeed this mark – if it is indeed a semibreve rest – is very poorly printed). See Claudio Monteverdi, Vespro della beata vergine (1610), ed. Jeffrey Kurtzman, performing score (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 132 (bar 219).

30 Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers, 57.

31 See Fabbri, Monteverdi, 115.

32 For speculations about Monteverdi's composition of church music in Mantua, see Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and Sacred Music’.

33 Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers, 230.

34 For an extensive examination of the concept of representation, see Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 35.

35 Ibid., 9–16.

36 This is an approach that I have developed at length in Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Of the many recent explorations of the connections between the classical music tradition and Western modernity, Julian Johnson's Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) is perhaps the most far-reaching.

37 Andrew Dell'Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2011), esp. pp. 31–6, 55–80.

38 Ibid., 55.

39 Ibid., 132.

40 Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2–9, 45–61.

41 Ibid., 99–111.

42 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd edn (1694), Book 2, Chapter 27/16; ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894; repr. Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 224.

43 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, 12.

44 Ibid., 358.

45 Recent Monteverdi scholarship has begun to observe other novelistic features in Monteverdi's works, from the intersubjective and self-reflective content of the poetic texts and musical scoring of the later madrigal books to the development of operatic structures that move towards disregarding the dramatic unities. Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera, 207, 245.

46 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), ii: The World (1985), Chapter 6: ‘Description of a New World; and the Qualities of the Matter of Which it is Composed’, 90–2 (p. 90).

47 For an excellent study of fictionality, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), i: History, Geography, and Culture, 336–63.

48 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, the Matter, Form, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651), Chapter 31; ed. Nelle Fuller (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 162.

49 Ibid., Chapter 42; ed. Fuller, 209, 238.

50 Ibid.; ed. Fuller, 209.

51 Ibid.; ed. Fuller, 209–10; indeed Hobbes quotes Jesus's saying from Matthew x. 28: ‘Fear not those that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul’ (ibid., 240).

52 Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction; ed. Fuller, 47: ‘Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal […]. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State […] which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.’

53 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 38.

54 Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and Sacred Music’, 370.

55 Ibid., 370–1.