Claudio Monteverdi

Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona in 1567 and spent his first career at the ducal court of Mantua, working his way up from string player to music director. There he wrote Orfeo in 1607, one of the very first operas and the earliest one still regularly staged.

In 1613 he won the most prestigious musical job in Italy, director of music at St. Mark's basilica in Venice, and held it for thirty years. He was ordained a priest in his sixties yet never gave up the stage: when Venice opened the first public opera houses, Monteverdi, past seventy, wrote new works for them. He stands at the hinge between the older world of church and chamber singing and the newer world of opera.

Begin with Orfeo, then the Vespers of 1610, a grand and varied evening service that shows nearly everything he could do.