Revolutionary Revived

For a composer who got a first New York performance of some of his music last week, Claudio Monteverdi goes a long way back. While he was composing his Vespers and Magnificat, Rome's St. Peter's Cathedral was still abuilding, Shakespeare was writing his Winter's Tale, Galileo was pondering the mysteries of the stars in their courses, Rembrandt and John Milton were toddling infants, and New York City--the year was 1610 --had not yet been thought of.

Composer Monteverdi's Vespers and Magnificat, which includes ten of his 70-odd sacred works, begins with a stately blaring of trumpets and trombones, suddenly quiets to let a Latin choral pianissimo float sweetly through the air. In the movements that follow, Monteverdi sings the praises of God; sometimes, as in excerpts from the Song of Songs, with a distinctly earthy flavor; sometimes with a powerful, jagged emphasis; often, in the vocal solos and duets, with highly ornamental flights of fancy; always with a markedly modern feeling for the accents of individual words. The performance, by the 150-voice Dessoff Choir under Conductor Paul Boepple, was a labor of love and thoughtfulness, if not of the most compelling interpretation.

The hour-and-a-half performance was one more sign of revived interest in the man who stands at the fountainhead of modern musical style. In the past few seasons, Monteverdi's operas Orfeo and Coronation of Poppea and the scenic cantata Battle of Tancred and Clorinda have had concert performances in Manhattan, and record companies--whose search for new repertory material is partly responsible for the revival--have already put out 17 Monteverdi LPs.

Born in 1567, the son of a doctor in Cremona (where the Stradivari were later to make violins), Monteverdi was a child of the late Renaissance. He was taught the same rigid rules of church composition as Palestrina, but quickly showed revolutionary tendencies: his madrigals, which he began publishing at 20, were damned for their "illegal" chords. By the time of his death in 1643, he had discovered harmonies which might have given Wagner himself a turn, sizzled the Italian ear with its first violin tremolos, startled it with its first plucked strings, and helped set music on an entirely new course.

Only seven of Monteverdi's 19 operas and other dramatic works can be found today, and none has ever been performed at the Metropolitan Opera. But many of his masses and motets and his 250-odd madrigals are being dredged up for performance and recording. Composer Monteverdi might have been surprised at all the modern interest;he gave little thought to musical immortality. But he was fully aware that he had been the first to describe specific human emotions in Western music. "I have thought it best," he once noted down, "to make known that the investigation and first essay of this genus, so necessary to the art of music, came from me."

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