ABSTRACT
Claudio Monteverdi may not have been 'the creator of modern music', as Leo Schrade has styled him, but he did play the leading role in the creation of opera. To a great extent the madrigal served Monteverdi as a laboratory for experiments in welding music ever more closely to text. In responding to Busenello's libretto, to its words, poetic lines, formal patterns, ideas and actions, Monteverdi draws upon a lifetime of practice as a madrigalist and a musical dramatist. Monteverdi shifts with extraordinary ease between unmeasured and measured music, in and out of aria - or arioso - style. Monteverdi exploits the speech/song contrast in more subtle ways as well. Ottone's mood is eloquently, and literally, manifested in Monteverdi's wandering, irresolute melodic line. Monteverdi's setting of Arnalta's panicked response to the attempted murder of Poppea in Act II scene 14 surely embodies stage action.
