Thirty years ago, Claudio Gallico — one of the foremost scholars of musical Humanism and the Renaissance — playfully imagined himself as an ageing Monteverdi, coming across a number of small notebooks filled with yellowed pages: notes, memories, outpourings and confessions from a lifetime. The result was an imagined yet historically rigorous diary, in which events, often merely evoked, are illuminated by the rich humanity and strong moral character of its protagonist.
Monteverdi’s Autobiography is therefore an openly fictional work, but also an extraordinary achievement in bringing music history to a wider audience, written with timeless elegance. It is a book that continues to speak to us, not least through the voice of a scholar who devoted his life to understanding, studying and bringing renewed attention to Monteverdi and his work.
