1521–1603 · Baroque
Philippe de Monte (around 1521 – 1603) was a Flemish Renaissance composer who, from 1568 until the end of his life, served the Habsburg courts in Vienna and Prague. He wrote masses and motets, but is remembered above all for his Italian madrigals — he wrote more of them than any other composer of his time. The site's collection is made up of these madrigals, a good place to start getting to know his music.
Philippe de Monte was born around 1521 in Mechelen, and it was as a boy chorister at that city's St Rumbold's Cathedral that he took his very first music lessons. Many young Flemish composers of his generation later crossed into Italy to build a career, and Monte did the same, working there for a time as a composer, singer and teacher: he was based in Naples for a spell, and Cardinal Orsini also took him on in Rome.
In 1541 Monte is recorded as a music tutor to the noble Pinelli family of Naples. Later, in 1550, he was a singer at the cathedral of Cambrai.
Queen Mary I of England was on the throne and married to Spain's King Philip II when Monte, in 1554–1555, sang in Philip's court chapel in London. By his own account, he disliked that job because every other singer there was Spanish. It was in England, though, that he became acquainted with the then-young William Byrd, with whom he later corresponded.
In 1560 Monte returned to Naples — the exact reason for this move to Italy is not known. He was unlikely to have supported the Reformation, yet he took part in various intellectual exchanges on sensitive topics, some of them with Italian academics.
Monte stepped into the post of Kapellmeister at Maximilian II's Vienna chapel in 1568, taking over from Jacobus Vaet. Gardano in Venice brought out most of what Monte wrote, holding sole rights to his music in Italy: he chose Italian printers because they sat right next to the madrigal's own homeland. New musicians joined the chapel under him, and within just two years Lassus himself praised how good the music-making in Vienna had become. Across his first decade at court, Monte also taught actively.
Once Maximilian II died in 1576, Monte moved into the role of Kapellmeister for Rudolf II and kept it to the end of his days, serving the Habsburg courts in both Vienna and Prague. He never appears, despite all he achieved there, to have served a church post or belonged to a nobleman's household. Philippe de Monte's life ended in Prague, on 4 July 1603.
Monte's renown reached across Europe, and copies of his music were printed again and again, circulating widely. He has been called a quiet and unassuming man. Among his numerous pupils was Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, from Padua; through him and others, Monte's compositional skill and experience carried forward into the generation that built the early Baroque style. He is regarded as one of the most prominent composers, and Monte's madrigals are still performed today.
Monte wrote both sacred and secular music. Many of his roughly forty masses use the parody technique, built on other composers' works — among them Josquin, Verdelot, Lassus, Palestrina and de Rore — as well as on his own earlier pieces. But the central place in his output belongs to Latin motets and Italian madrigals: he published more than a thousand madrigals, in 34 books printed mainly in Venice — a number that has made him regarded as the most prolific madrigalist in the whole history of music. He grouped his madrigals into thematic cycles: for instance, "Già havea l'eterna", a cycle of eight madrigals based on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and the five-madrigal cycle "La dolce vista". More than any other madrigalist, he drew on the verses of Petrarch's Canzoniere, and he also set words by Bembo, Sannazaro, Guarini and Tasso; among his roughly fifty chansons are some written to verses by Ronsard.
Stylistically Monte is even and, especially in his Habsburg years, conservative: the bold experiments with harmony and rhythm typical of French and especially Italian music in the second half of the sixteenth century passed him by. Imitative polyphony dominates his texture, with homophony appearing less often — as, for instance, in the eleventh book of five-voice madrigals, published in 1586. This evenness of style makes it hard to single out just a few standout pieces from his output.
The site has 24 of Monte's madrigals on Italian texts. Twenty-one pieces are at an elementary+ level, and three more at an intermediate level. A good place to start getting to know this music is with the madrigals in the "Where to start" section, such as "Piango, che Amor con disusato oltraggio" or "Oime dov'è'l mio core?", both elementary+; once the fingers are more confident, the intermediate-level madrigal "Amor, che sol dei cor leggiadri ha cura" is a natural next step.