Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures in the history of Western music, a composer who stood at the border of two eras and in his own work united Renaissance polyphony with a new, Baroque expressiveness. He was an unsurpassed master of the madrigal, bringing this genre to emotional heights.
But his chief achievement is the birth of opera as a great genre: his “Orfeo” (1607) is considered the first operatic masterpiece, where music for the first time became a means of true drama and the expression of human feeling. Monteverdi championed the right of music “to serve the word” and to express the passions, laying the foundations of the entire subsequent operatic tradition. His late operas (“The Coronation of Poppea”) astonish with their psychological depth. Monteverdi is the true father of opera and one of the geniuses who defined the face of European music.
