Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespro della beata Vergine – familiarly known as his Vespers – is not one work but many. The volume he took to the press in 1610 under the title Sanctissimae virgini missa senis vocibus, ac vesperae pluribus decantandae, cum nonnullis sacris concentibus (“To the most holy Virgin: A Mass for six voices, and Vespers to be sung by many [voices], with some sacred compositions”) offered several different kinds of sacred pieces for different kinds of occasions and venues: grandiose psalm and canticle settings for festive Vespers services are juxtaposed with more intimate works for solo voices and continuo that might have served as spiritual chamber music at court. In these works are united the solemnity of plainchant, the splendor of High Renaissance polyphony, and the sexiness of early Baroque solo song – a fitting musical embodiment of Monteverdi’s own career, which spanned Renaissance and Baroque eras.

This eclecticism is part of the fascination of the Monteverdi Vespers. Yet it also raises several questions. Were the works that make up the Vespers conceived of and composed as a unit, or collected over a long period of time? Can they be linked to some festive occasion at the ducal court of Mantua, where Monteverdi was employed as maestro della musica until 1612? What kind of performing forces were used – an ensemble of soloists, or a combination of soloists and choir? And were the pieces that make up the Vespers we know today ever actually performed as a single liturgical and musical unit in Monteverdi’s lifetime? Music historians may never know the answers to these questions, so it is up to performers to exercise their imagination and discretion. If, for example, the Vespers had ever been performed as a whole in Monteverdi’s time, it would almost certainly have been in church, in the context of a liturgy. With this in mind, Pacific Collegium’s performances of the Vespers, commemorating the 400^th anniversary of their publication, present this sublime collection of works in two very different contexts: in the concert setting most familiar to modern-day listeners, and in the liturgical context of a Vespers service.

Though published in 1610, the Vespers may have been composed as early as 1607 or 1608. (They were certainly composed after 1607, the year in which Monteverdi composed L’Orfeo, since Monteverdi reused musical material from that opera: the fanfare-like setting of the opening response Domine ad adjuvandum, and the florid echo passages for violin in the Magnificat on the half-verse “Et exaltavit humiles.”) It was once assumed that the Monteverdi composed the Vespers for the basilica of San Marco in Venice, where he became chapelmaster in 1613 – a venue renowned for elaborate polyphony since Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli began publishing double-choir motets in the 1570s and 80s. Yet even if Monteverdi did eventually use pieces from the Vespers in his audition for this post (another uncertainty), it is unlikely that this was the original purpose of the work; the San Marco post only became available upon the unexpected death of the previous chapelmaster, Giulio Cesare Martinengo, in 1613.

In contrast, we know of several occasions in Mantua at which the Vespers – or parts thereof – may first have been performed. One possibility is a “solemn Vespers” celebrated at the church of Sant’Andrea, Mantua, as part of the wedding festivities for Francesco Gonzaga, son of the Duke of Mantua, to Margherita of Savoy in late May 1608. This service also established a chivalric order of Christ the Redeemer with Francesco as its first member – an incongruous setting for a Vespers of the Virgin, though Monteverdi’s psalm and Magnificat settings could have graced any festive Vespers service. In any case, Monteverdi’s highly sensual solo settings of the Song of Songs texts Nigra sum and Pulchra es would have been quite appropriate for a wedding. The birth of a daughter, Maria, to Francesco and Margherita in July of the following year, might also have warranted music and liturgy of special festivity – here a celebratory Marian Vespers might have been especially fitting, since the baby girl was the namesake of the Blessed Virgin. A final possibility – put forth by Graham Dixon in 1989 – is that parts of the Vespers were composed for the ducal chapel of Santa Barbara in Mantua, perhaps even for the patronal feast of St. Barbara (December 4), and later re-marketed as a Marian collection, with the addition of more explicitly Marian pieces. All this must remain conjectural, however, until more specific evidence comes to light.

The overall structure of Monteverdi’s Vespers corresponds to the traditional order of the office of Vespers, celebrated in the late afternoon to early evening as one of the eight canonical hours (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline) observed in churches in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. All these services featured the recitation of psalms and the singing of a strophic hymn proper to the day or time of day. In addition, the “major” offices of Matins, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline also culminated with a canticle, usually taken from a Gospel text; at Vespers, this was the Magnificat, the song of Mary from Luke 1:46–55. Thus is it not surprising that the core works of Monteverdi’s Vespers correspond to these central items: massive settings of five psalms, the Marian office hymn Ave maris stella, and the Magnificat, for voices and obbligato instruments. The five psalms set by Monteverdi belong to the “female cursus” – the sequence of psalms used for feast days of Mary and other female saints, all of which make some reference either to childbearing (such as, “he maketh the barren woman... to be a joyful mother of children” in Laudate pueri) or to a feminine-gendered Jerusalem as the mother of its inhabitants (“he hath blessed thy children within thee” in Lauda Jerusalem).

Some of Monteverdi’s most astonishing writing can be heard in these larger movements. Each is based on a traditional Gregorian psalm tone – one of the recitation formulas used for chanting psalms and canticles in the liturgy – and in each Monteverdi applies an astonishing wealth of compositional techniques to embellish what are probably the most monotonous of all Gregorian chants. Sometimes the chant melody is stated as a cantus firmus around which voices or instruments weave a filigree of counterpoint; sometimes Monteverdi employs the technique of falsobordone, in which the unmetered psalm tone is harmonized in block chords (every other verse of Dixit Dominus begins this way). At other times the plainchant is almost hidden, embedded in an inner voice (Nisi Dominus, Lauda Jerusalem); sometimes it is readily audible at the top of the texture as a harmonized melody (as in Ave maris stella, in which the hymn melody is transmuted into an elegant triple-meter dance tune). In Monteverdi’s capable hands, the possibilities are seemingly endless.

(In these chant melodies, incidentally, lies yet another mystery of the Vespers. Typically, the recitation tone used to chant a given psalm or canticle matched the mode of its associated antiphon, which in turn depended on the occasion. Yet no Marian liturgy of Monteverdi’s time has yet been found whose antiphons correspond to the series of psalm tones used by Monteverdi in the Vespers – possible proof that the psalms were not necessarily composed for a single occasion, but collected over time. For this performance, the chant antiphons that precede the psalms are taken from the Common of the Blessed Virgin Mary, though not all of these antiphons correspond exactly to the plainchant modes used by Monteverdi. At the liturgical performance on Sunday, October 31, however, the Magnificat antiphon for First Vespers of All Saints’ Day will be used.)

Interspersed with the psalms are five movements of a different kind: four solo motets for one to six solo voices and basso continuo accompaniment, and an instrumental Sonata sopra Sancta Maria incorporating a vocal ostinato. These are “some sacred compositions” promised by the title page of the 1610 print, and their original function is still unknown; they may have been meant as antiphon-substitutes to be performed after each psalm, as paraliturgical music to be performed between psalms, or simply as sacred chamber music. The intimate, highly expressive style of the solo motets – they are essentially early-Baroque love songs with (mostly) Marian texts – contrasts beautifully with the grandeur of the liturgical settings.

Most of the texts of the motets fit with the general Marian theme with the collection. The texts of Nigra sum and Pulchra es are from the Song of Songs, whose famously sultry love poetry had long been associated with the liturgies of Mary and other virgin saints. (The Song of Songs was traditionally regarded as an allegory of the love between God and the church, and Mary was considered a figure of the church.) Monteverdi’s choice of vocal forces for these two pieces seems incongruous at first: Nigra sum is set for a tenor voice, but is a text spoken by the “black but beautiful” female beloved, while Pulchra es, spoken by the male lover, is sung by two sopranos. In Monteverdi’s time, of course, all soprano parts would have been taken by boys, at least in a liturgical setting. As for Nigra sum, a quick look at its text shows that most of it actually relates the words of the king exhorting the beloved to “arise and come away”: the musical setting is suitably insistent and impassioned, especially on the key words “Surge, amica mea, et veni.” Duo seraphim, one of the most vocally florid pieces in the entire Vespers and the only one of the solo works not in praise of Mary, begins with two voices, representing the two angels calling to each other, and expands to three voices to portray the three persons of the Trinity. Audi coelum is set to a Marian devotional poem in free verse, and features an echo at the end of each line, to be sung by a second singer at some distance from the tenor soloist; it culminates in a chorus, resolving to praise the heavenly beloved “world without end.” Finally, the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria weaves the plainchant response “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis” (“Holy Mary, pray for us”) into a brilliantly showy sonata for eight instruments – a fitting encapsulation of the marriage of old and new that so characterizes the Vespers.

Esther Criscuola de Laix recently completed her Ph.D. in Music History and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also organist and music director at St. Thomas' Anglican Church, San Francisco.