At first listen, much of Monteverdi's religious music doesn't sound "religious" at all, at least not in a customary way. The term sacred motet has to be taken with some salt, for the style of many of these late sacred works is exactly that of his secular, concertato music. O quam pulchra es is an especially fine and convenient example. Nothing outward reveals its religious intent. Even the text, which begins "O how fair thou art, my dove, my fair one!" is indistinguishable from the poems used in madrigals, except that the beloved in this case is actually the Virgin Mary, who was deeply venerated in Venice, where Monteverdi was at the time he composed the motet.

The solo tenor carries a gorgeously spacious melody full of long, languorous notes and teasing rests that create a delicious anticipation, the whole swathed in a slow, warm sense of rapture. It opens with a falling sixth, as Monteverdi's arioso pieces often do, and pushes on slowly, hanging around frilly ornaments and lavish melismas whenever possible, as if in sensual contemplation of their pure, excellent beauty. It is a setting in which the magnificence of the virtuoso is fully glorified by the simple harmonic backing. He creates a perfect climax in his setting of the last line: at "languish with love," just like he might in a secular madrigal, the bass becomes chromatic, enveloping the main line in lush dissonances.

If it seems contradictory now to compose sacred music in such an outwardly secular style, the atmosphere of Venice at the time should be recalled. Even the nuns there lived a life of ease, dressed in high fashion, waking late, gossiping, eating sweets, and generally just gallivanted about in the most harmless, carefree way. The churches themselves, by contemporary accounts, were more concert halls than places of worship; people attended in order to hear the beautiful music and gabbed away during the rest of the service. There just wasn't room in the airy Venice of the 1620s for old-fashioned, Netherlandish solemnity. O quam pulchra es, despite its title, is a song of common joy, as if celebrating the gift of earthly life was the most meaningful prayer Monteverdi could possibly make.

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