Monteverdi’s Vespers

No job in Rome

Monteverdi's so-called Marian Vespers are considered the portfolio with which he fished for a job in Rome. He indeed shows that he is skilled in all the styles and techniques that mattered at that time: from the intimate solos and duets in the new opera style to the great polyphonic, even ten-part psalms. All this based on the age-old Gregorian chant and interspersed with sumptuous instrumental music.

Highlight of the early Baroque

Unfortunately for the Pope, instead of St. Peter's in Rome, it was St. Mark's in Venice. It is one of the great achievements of the early music movement that the Marian Vespers have since the 1970s been a companion to Bach's Passions and Mozart's Requiem at the lonely height of the very best religious works ever written.