Latin sacred music played a distinctly subordinate role in Monteverdi’s oeuvre throughout the first half of his life. The fifteen-year-old composer’s three-part Sacrae cantiunculae of 1582 are little more than the usual apprentice pieces based on traditional material, and in the decades that followed he was occupied almost exclusively with his secular commitments at the Gonzagas’ Mantuan court (1590-1612), but then in 1610, shortly before his move to Venice and almost exactly halfway through his creative career, he published a large volume of sacred music containing not only a Mass but also his Marian Vespers. We know from a letter from a Mantuan courtier that the collection went to press in july 1610; by September, with the addition of the dedication, the printing was complete. As dedicatee Monteverdi chose Pope Paul V, hoping - in vain - that the pope might thereby be induced to award his son Francesco a scholarship to the Roman Seminary. Accordingly, when Monteverdi set off for Rome in November 1610, it was with the Vespers in his valise, a démarche not dissimilar to Bach's equally premeditated visit to Dresden to hand over the first movements of his B minor Mass to the Prince-Elector’s court.
With his Vespers of 1610, Monteverdi made what might be described as a secular contribution to sacred music. To what extent the work may also be seen as a contribution to strictly liturgical music is a question that is inevitably raised by the remarkable compilation of texts that the composer has chosen to set. Admittedly, all the main elements of the Vespers of the Commune in Festis Beatae Mariae Virginis are here: the five psalms, “Dixit Dominus” (109), "Laudate pueri” (112), “Laetatus sum" (121), ”Nisi Dominus'” (126) and "Lauda Jerusalem” (147), together with the hymn Ave maris stella and the Magnificat. Written for large forces, these seven numbers are all based on plainsong themes. Between them, however, solo movements have been introduced whose words have no place within an established Marian liturgy. The leading Monteverdian scholar Leo Schrade attempted to explain this by interpreting the solo sections as replacements for the antiphons which, liturgically speaking, are associated with each of the psalms. Objections can be raised to this interpretation both on principle and in detail, but at least it does not violate the unity of Ivlonteverdi's overall design and requires no additional numbers to complete it. A different standpoint has been adopted by Denis Stevens, for example, who has drawn attention to the wording of the 1610 edition, “cum nonnullis sacris concentibus” (with some sacred motels), arguing that all the texts that are not part of the liturgical Vespers were added by the printer on his own initiative and should therefore be omitted from any performance of the work and replaced by antiphons. Unfortunately, Stevens’s choice of antiphons is not entirely convincing, while his assumption that Monteverdi or his printer obscured the intended cohesion of a multi-movement work by interpolating extraneous numbers is in itself extremely implausible, not least because it completely ignores the artistic unity of the whole. (The inclusion of the “lesser Magnificat” towards the end of the work cannot be raised as an objection to this underlying unity, since in substance and design it is clearly an alternative to the "larger Magnificat” that ends the piece, requiring, as it does, smaller forces and no melody instruments.) ln short, Monteverdi’s Vespers shares with Bach’s B minor Mass the fate of having had its unity called into question by writers of a rationalistic bent.
The Vespers is a summation of all the manifold experiences that Monteverdi had managed to accumulate during his years in Mantua, where he had broken new ground in the concertato and dramatic fields. The affinity with L’Orfeo (1607) is evident, for example, in the virtuoso handling of the pairs of cornetts and violins, whose echo effects in the ”Deposuit” in the Magnificat recall similar passages in Orfeo’s great scene in the underworld. The affinity is even more striking in the opening number, ”Deus ad adiuvandum", which is an adaptation of the toccata for brass and woodwind that launches the opera. Legitimation for this selfborrowing may be found in the fact that both pieces have an introductory function, which is fulfilled by the festive fanfare in both works. But the Vespers achieves its deeper historical and spiritual significance by virtue of its combination of, on the one hand, the newer musical expressive language and its devices (devices on which the whole of the later history of music was ultimately to be based) and, on the other, the old monophonic style of church singing, a style which, like some timeless dogma, permeates all the choral movements as well as the sonata in the form of cantus firmui. The result, especially in the Magniricat, is a tension thay is stretched almost to breaking point and that only the genius of a Monteverdi could contain within artistic bounds.