The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 Music, Context, Performance [Hardcover]

This is the only extensive study of the Monteverdi Vespers, vastly expanding on the author's 1978 set of essays on the subject, long since out-of-print. The volume studies the Vespers from the perspectives of its musical and liturgical origins and context, presents analytical essays on the music, and examines seventeenth-century performance practice as it pertains to the Vespers. Appendices include bibliographies and an analytical discography.

Authoritative...monumental...invaluable...enviably thorough...Kurtzman succeeds in offering a quantum leap forward of the greatest significance. --Music and Letters

Kurtzman has distilled his encyclopedic knowledge of early seventeenth-century Italian liturgical music....Although centered on the Vespers, the discussion touches on many subjects that will hold the attention of anyone interested in early seventeenth-century Italian sacred music. What Kurtzman has done, then, is to use one of the great (and problematic) masterpieces of music to shed light on an entire repertory....This book is a major contribution to the scholarship not only of Monteverdi's Vespers, but also of North Italian sacred music of the early part of the seventeenth century. --Journal of the American Musicological Society