By 1605, the year Monteverdi published his fifth book of madrigals, his music was moving quickly away from a polyphonic ideal toward a dramatic and monodic one. He was searching for a viable musical style that could be the basis for opera. While a number of his contemporaries were also on this path, especially in Florence, most of them plunged ahead recklessly, producing no music of real value in the process. By contrast, Monteverdi, a trained craftsman to the core, carefully cultivated the new music from the roots of the polyphony he had learned. What he discovered became the foundation of all European music after him. Book 5 is considered by many commentators to be the turning point in this development. It contains in equal measure progressive and conservative tendencies, often within the same piece. The collection is in fact modeled around two dramatic madrigal cycles, but Monteverdi reserves his most forward-looking music for a series of six concertato pieces at the end of the collection.

Troppo ben può is one of the concertato pieces, extremely interesting and unique in how it plays successfully between the traditional polyphonic ideals and the new dramatic ones. On the one hand it sounds like a Baroque cantata, with ever-refreshing alternations between solos and larger groups over continuo, but it actually unfolds according to the text-specific logic of a traditional madrigal. It should be expected that the music to be set up according to the dramatic situation in the text, as it usually is in these pieces. But the texture changes occur freely, whenever a verbal inflection suggests it. The animated, imitative setting of the final line, "Seize him that he may never flee you," clearly recalls the Janequin-like setting S'andasse amor from

Book 2, which also has a hunting theme. Clearly Monteverdi had no anxiety about blending the old and new idioms. He wasn't a raging avant-gardist, pressing forward at all costs, burning bridges as he went. He was a careful, loving musician and a dedicated craftsman, and that's the reason for his astonishing success.

© Donato Mancini, All Music Guide