ABSTRACT
This interesting letter gives us a number of details about two compositions the date from the year as Orfeo. Both had sonnet texts and one of them, at least, had already been finished by the time Monteverdi wrote to Genoa. The copy of the music which Monteverdi apparently enclosed with the letter has not survived, but the most obvious place to look for these two sonnet settings is in the next secular collection he published—his sixth book of madrigals of 1614. The crucial evidence here is the contribution to the completeness of explanation that Marenzio's setting of the second section of Zefiro toma provides for events in Monteverdi's music. Monteverdi's rare choice of triple time for the opening music of this a cappella madrigal seems to have temporarily neutralized our usual alertness to quotation in this repertory. The real source of Monteverdi's extraordinary intensity at these points can now be revealed.
