Product Description: Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-century opera examines the composer's celebrated final works—Il ritorno d'Ulisse (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642)—from a new perspective...read more

Describes how forty years of accutely conscious development by composers, librettists, singers, and others in Venice established the conventions which turned opera from a courtly entertainment into an art form found on the stages of all Europe