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Monteverdi and His Constellation
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Monteverdi and His Constellation

By: John Eliot Gardiner
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An unconventional, brilliant new biography of composer Claudio Monteverdi – from the bestselling biographer and acclaimed conductor John Eliot Gardiner.

This book positions Claudio Monteverdi amidst seven leading lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Bacon, Kepler, Rubens, Shakespeare and Caravaggio.

Using Monteverdi as the sun, centre of those six other greats, this book argues that across these tumultuous centuries when science was reconfiguring man’s entire relation with the cosmos, and many were arguing for the ‘science of music’, Monteverdi became a key to understanding and bringing together all of this knowledge. As it became believed that art and music could, like nothing else, reflect the human soul, Monteverdi’s music represented and unlocked the shift in human thought and the attitude toward modernity encapsulated by a sudden prizing of subjectivity and self-reflection.

This book will reintroduce Monteverdi in a new light, with a new significance, but it’s also a wider study of these centuries and the speed at which thought and art were changing.

©2026 John Eliot Gardiner Civilization Entertainment & Celebrities Europe Professionals & Academics Science & Technology World
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Critic reviews

PRAISE FOR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER’S MUSIC IN THE CASTLE OF HEAVEN
'John Eliot Gardiner's book is, apart from anything else, a tremendous feat of narrative: he has the rare gift of always putting the camera in the right place. He tells this long and richly involved story in a way that makes everything clear, and sets the life and the music in a historical perspective where every detail is relevant and every comment illuminating. Simply as a biography this is splendid, but the fact that it comes with such a wealth of musical understanding and experience makes it invaluable. I learned an enormous amount, and I know I'll return to it again and again'
Philip Pullman
'How typical of John Eliot Gardiner to combine such great erudition with equal passion and enthusiasm. His book made me want to rush and listen to all the music he writes about, whether familiar or unfamiliar. A wonderful treasure chest'
Sir Simon Rattle
'There is something awesome about John Eliot Gardiner's achievement in this book: the interpretation of what to most of us can appear a great and mysterious force by a man whose entire life has prepared him for the task. Stunning'
Tom Holland
'A most impressive book. Not only does it contain an accessible guide to many of the major works of JS Bach, it also presents a well-considered portrait of the composer and his creative character … This book is going to be as indispensible to Bach scholars as it is to general readers'
John Butt
'A unique portrait of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time by one of the greatest musical geniuses of our own age. John Eliot Gardiner uses his extraordinary immersion in Bach's music to illuminate Bach the man more brilliantly than in any previous work, and has created his own deeply moving work of art'
Amanda Foreman
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