The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance (review)

The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance. By Jeffrey Kurtzman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xix, 603 p. ISBN 0-19-816409-2. $90.]

"Comprehensive" and "authoritative" are words that come to mind in characterizing Jeffrey Kurtzman's new book on Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610. Kurtzman has devoted much of his career to studying Vespers music in the seicento, and his scholarship includes an important dissertation ("The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 and Their Relationship with Italian Sacred Music of the Early Seventeenth Century" [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1972]), a seminal book (Essays on the Monteverdi Mass and Vespers of 1610 [Houston: Rice University Press, 1978]), numerous distinguished articles, a major bibliography of printed music for Vespers (as yet unpublished), and more recently, an ambitious set of editions of seventeenth-century music for Vespers and Compline (Music for Vespers and Compline (Responses, Psalms, Canticles, Antiphons, and Hymns), 1600-1700, vols. 11-20 of Seventeenth-Century Italian Sacred Music [New York: Garland Publishing, 1996-]; vols. 17-20 forthcoming). The present book, along with Kurtzman's new critical edition of the 1610 Vespers (Vespro della Beata Vergine [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]), have therefore been eagerly awaited, for they offer the author's latest views on a work that is arguably one of the most widely admired examples of so-called early music--and unquestionably one of the most controversial.

The book falls naturally into three sections: "Context" (two chapters on the principal questions surrounding the work, and two devoted to overviews of Vespers music by Monteverdi's predecessors and contemporaries), "The Music" (six chapters of detailed description and analysis of all the Vespers music from Monteverdi's 1610 edition), and "Performance Practice" (thirteen chapters covering virtually every aspect of performance). Six appendixes, including a richly detailed discography, round out the volume.

The opening chapter, "Sources, Controversies, and Speculations: The Early and Modern History of Monteverdi's Vespers," begins by tracing the Vespers from Ricciardo Amadino's original edition to the present, discussing editions of the music, significant secondary literature, and numerous recordings. This ingenious structure allows Kurtzman to write the first thorough reception history of the work and simultaneously provide detached, objective descriptions of the sometimes heated debates concerning it. Only toward the end of the chapter does he begin to weigh in on the central controversies, often by glossing the work of other scholars. For example, he endorses Graham Dixon's suggestion that much of the music may have been conceived originally for a celebration of the feast of Saint Barbara at the ducal church in Mantua. On the other hand, he expresses reservations about another theory that has gained considerable currency, David Blazey's proposal that Monteverdi's Sonata sopra Sancta Maria was intended as a substitute antiphon for the Magnificat and consequently was misplaced in Amadino's edition. Kurtzman finds this idea "plausible, though . . . troubling," preferring the "hard evidence" (p. 34) of the ordering of compositions found in the edition. On the question of the liturgical unity of the Vespers, he assumes a sensible middle ground, maintaining that the music from the 1610 edition could have been used to provide the major items in canto figurato for the celebration of Vespers, while allowing that Monteverdi perhaps envisioned additional performance possibilities, particularly the extraction of works from the collection for use in other contexts. Finally, it is clear throughout the book that Kurtzman sees all five sacred concertos (including the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria) as antiphon substitutes, intended to replace the repetition of the chant antiphons following each psalm.

A short, closing section of this initial chapter provides a thumbnail biographical sketch of Monteverdi's activities in the years around 1610, exploring the origins of the Vespers, the composer's motives for publishing a major collection of sacred music, and the possible performance of parts of the collection in connection with Monteverdi's audition for the position of maestro di cappella at...