The Messa a quattro voci et salmi (1650) and Monteverdi’s Venetian church music

Monteverdi’s Messa a quattro voci et salmi collected by the Venetian music printer Alessandro Vincenti and published in 1650, tends to be marginalised in studies of the composer, but it is an important document both in its own right and for questions that it raises about the musical sources on which Vincenti based his publication and about Monteverdi’s working practices in composing multiple settings of a limited number of psalm texts both for San Marco, Venice, and for other patrons who paid for his services over a period of thirty years. This paper argues that Monteverdi did not deposit the manuscripts of his concertato psalms in the choir library of San Marco, but rather retained them in his own private library, bringing them to San Marco or other churches as required.  It further argues that Vincenti probably acquired the manuscripts of the 1650 collection very soon after Monteverdi’s death, before the dispersal of the composer’s Nachlass. One of the attractions of the position of maestro di cappella at San Marco was that it allowed the incumbent the freedom to provide sacred music for other patrons, and through this Monteverdi was able to earn up to half as much again as his regular salary, though the demands on him for new versions of a common repertoire of psalms must have been considerable. The 1650 collection, viewed in tandem with the Selva morale of 1641, shows that Monteverdi re-used material from one setting to another, revising, expanding and cutting it, and disguising the reuse of material by writing, in particular, different openings to the settings in which material is duplicated. By retaining the settings in his own library Monteverdi was able to hide this process, and it would have remained largely hidden but for the 1650 collection. Finally, the paper highlights one area of such patronage that would deserve further research – commissions from the foreign communities working in Venice. Evidence is provided of such commissions from the Milanese and Florentine communities.