And who was this Monteverde to whom we look back through three hundred years of musical history? One of the most interesting facts about him is that he was born in Cremona, that famous “violin town,”[35] where music was literally in the air, although the Amatis and Stradivaris were not yet working. Claudio Monteverde was born in 1567. He was a contemporary of Gasparo di Salò and Maggini.[36] At an early age he was an expert violist and was taken into the service of the Duke of Mantua. The Duke’s Court was the centre of every luxury and elegance in Lombardy and music had long been one of the arts beloved there.[37] The Mantuan collection of instruments was famous; and the Duke, like all other noble princes of the time, had his own band of private musicians. At their head for his _Maestro di Capella_, he had a very learned musician named Marc Antonio Ingegneri; and young Monteverde was put under him at once to finish and perfect his musical education. Ingegneri, however, was unusually fond of counterpoint and of writing fugues and Monteverde cared very little about _polyphonic_ music. And we can imagine, therefore, that when at the age of sixteen he burst forth with a beautiful _Book of Madrigals_—madrigals were all the rage in those days—his artistic nature sought relief from studies that he thought horribly dry and tiresome, but which undoubtedly did him a lot of good. This set of madrigals was so well received that he followed it with four more books of this lovely, lyrical form. Then in 1603 Ingegneri died and Monteverde was chosen to succeed him. He had been superintending the music at the Court of Mantua for four years and providing brilliant entertainments and concerts of all kinds when the Duke’s son, Francesco di Gonzaga, married Margharita, Infanta of Savoy. It was a brilliant alliance; and the Duke of Mantua, wishing to celebrate it in royal style, charged Monteverde to write the most splendid opera possible and to stage it in the most magnificent manner. So Monteverde composed _Orfeo_. This was one of the most popular of all subjects. It seems as if every Italian composer had to write the search of Orpheus for his beloved Eurydice. Ever since Dante had drawn his fantastic scenes of the _Inferno_, Italian audiences had thrilled to stage pictures of the lower regions for three hundred years! But it was strange that Monteverde should have picked out this subject; for while he was writing his opera his own lovely wife died and he was in bitter grief for her. So, perhaps, one reason that Monteverde’s _Orfeo_ is so vital a work lies in the fact that the composer was singing of his own despair. We often see in histories of music that Monteverde astonished the musical world with a novel Orchestra in _Orfeo_ and that he introduced a great many new instruments into his score.