Monteverdi Festival

The Monteverdi Festival is an international event that celebrates the music of Claudio Monteverdi, the legendary composer and father of Italian opera, in his hometown.
For over forty years, the Monteverdi Festival has been committed to promoting Monteverdi’s work throughout Italy and globally. The festival focuses on the broader musical repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries, encompassing sacred and secular music. It brings this ancient music to life through authentic performances and interpretations supported by thorough musicological and instrumental research. It brings this ancient music to life through authentic performances and interpretations supported by thorough musicological and instrumental research.

Claudio Monteverdi is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost innovators in music history and the creator of opera, the globally renowned Italian musical genre.
The Monteverdi Festival, organized by the Ponchielli Theater Foundation in Cremona and led by artistic director Andrea Cigni, features leading international artists and emerging young talents in its productions. Since 2021, the festival’s principal musical director has been Antonio Greco.
We deeply thank the festival’s main sponsors and invaluable partners for their indispensable support.

The more we study and perform Claudio Monteverdi’s work, and the more we strive to come closer to the original performance techniques, the more we realise how deeply it is rooted in its era. But at the same time it anticipates future eras with dizzying visionary power, and these two deepens our admiration for him and his work ‘where everything was born and everything is reborn’. In that fabulous past lie both our present and the germs of the future. Monteverdi was the father of melodrama, but also a multifaceted and complete author of sacred and profane masterpieces, vocal and instrumental, for the theatre, the church and the concert halls (which did not yet exist): in short he is our father in the heaven of music.
It is truly impossible to recount il divin Claudio and his all-embracing artistic personality: this ‘Festival 2024’, ten days of Monteverdi, always Monteverdi, emphatically Monteverdi, aims to try anyway.

Starting from a strong idea (questionable of course as everything is questionable) but, let’s say, at least a clear one: putting Monteverdi back in his own time, offering performances that comply with the philology of each text and the historically informed praxis; but the aim is also to show the links with musicians who preceded him and more so with those who followed him. It is to be aware that Monteverdi’s time is our time; that nothing is more contemporary than this man, and that the task of those who deal with him, organisers and artists, critics and intellectuals, politicians and spectators, is to seek our present in his past. Operas and masses, madrigals and canzonettas, ‘moral forests’ and Tasso’s battles: Monteverdi is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of infinite pieces that we will never be able to fit together. In the end, those pieces compose the portrait of an immense artist who, after four centuries, continues to astound and move us, exalt us and make us think. Above all he is still, and always will be, able to surprise us.