Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine da concerto composto sopra canti fermi, for six voices and six instruments, will officially open the 43rd edition of the Monteverdi Festival at Vespers time on Sunday, June 7, at 6:00 PM in the Church of Sant’Agostino.

The performance of this monumental musical work, now firmly established within the festival’s programming, will be entrusted to Leonardo García Alarcón, conducting Cappella Mediterranea and the Choeur de Chambre de Namur.

The work bears the publication date of 1610, in Venice. By then, the composer was nearing the end of his relationship with Mantua (he would move to Venice three years later, in 1613) and created a vast musical fresco rooted in the education he received within the musical chapel of Cremona Cathedral. Stylistic features and compositional techniques appear reworked—albeit with important innovations of his own—from what had already existed within the Cremonese repertoire.

The references are numerous. In 1573, Ippolito Cammatarò, a Roman musician and chapel master in Cremona between 1571 and 1572/73, published in Venice his Salmi corista for eight voices, compositions written and performed during his years beneath the Torrazzo and already incorporated into the repertoire of the Cremonese chapel thanks to the support of Nicolò Sfondrati (bishop of the city before ascending to the papacy).

Two elements confirm that these compositions formed part of Monteverdi’s musical inheritance. Some of the psalms set by the Roman composer also appear in Monteverdi’s Vespers because they belonged to the liturgy of Vespers itself. But another aspect is particularly significant: Cammatarò explicitly states on the title page that these compositions could be performed accompanied by “every sort of instrument.” This is precisely the performance practice that Monteverdi would adopt—with extraordinary artistic individuality—in his 1610 Vespers.

The Roman composer’s writing, especially in the Dixit Dominus (the same psalm later set by the Cremonese composer), already displays that grand polychoral style which Monteverdi would render astonishingly effective in his own work. The same may be said of another psalm shared by both collections, the Laudate Pueri. Monteverdi advanced beyond the distribution of music for eight voices, preserving a choral component while transforming what, in Cammatarò, functioned as a second choir into music for soloists. Yet the original roots remain.

In this regard, the influence of Marc’Antonio Ingegneri on Monteverdi is undeniable: successor to Cammatarò as chapel master at Cremona Cathedral and direct teacher of the “Divine” Claudio himself. Here too, examples of the Cremonese stylistic roots of the Vespers are numerous.

One detail is particularly important for understanding how Monteverdi learned to alternate monumental choral sections with passages for solo voices. In 1573, Ingegneri published the Liber Primum Missarum cum quinque et octo vocibus. Within the Missa Voce Mea, the Crucifixus section of the Credo already features a sudden expressive reduction from eight voices to only three—as if these passages were intended for soloists rather than the larger vocal ensemble.

This device is employed extensively by Monteverdi’s teacher also in the celebrated Responsories for Holy Week, published in 1588, precisely when the future composer of Orfeo was deeply involved in Cremona’s musical circles.

There is another detail that further illuminates Monteverdi’s relationship with his teacher. In Ingegneri’s Sacrae Cantiones cum Quatuor Vocibus (1586) appears the so-called Duo Seraphim clamabant, a motet that would later become one of the most famous sections of Monteverdi’s “Mantuan” Vespers. It is striking to observe how, despite different vocal scorings, an expressive and atmospheric similarity emerges between the two compositions—that of the teacher and that of the student.

Perhaps a memory. Perhaps a tribute from the pupil to the master he had left behind in Cremona.