Claudio Monteverdi, whose 450th anniversary we celebrate this year, was almost as good at grumbling as he was at composing. He had entered the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga at Mantua in the early 1590s and, by 1601, had become the duke’s maestro della musica. Regrettably, as Monteverdi explained in a missive of 1604, the wages did not always arrive in timely fashion. On this occasion he hadn’t been paid for five months and was obliged to “kneel before you with the greatest possible humility, and beg you to be so good as to cast your gaze not upon my boldness in writing this letter, but rather upon my great distress”. Worse yet, Monteverdi had been made to work ridiculously hard, so he felt the need to “beseech your highness for the love of God never to burden me again either with so much to do at once or in so short a time”. Such pressure, Monteverdi added with a hyperbolic flourish, might just lead to his “life’s abridgement”.