There used to be a conventional wisdom that the music of Schumann's last years is not up to much, presumably on account of his mental illness. Perhaps the centrepiece of this prejudice is the fact that his 1853 Violin Concerto was rejected by Joachim, to whom it was dedicated, and was not included in the "complete" Schumann edition compiled by Brahms. It was not released to the public until 1934.

Melancholic poetry provided endless nourishment for musical creativity in the late Renaissance. In his first recording for harmonia mundi, Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in music from the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Bryd to Gesualdo, Italian and English madrigals rub shoulders with motets and Tenebrae responsories, finding pleasure even in meditating on what causes one's pain.

The transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque eras did not mark one sudden change of forms or styles, nor did it signal the end of what Claudio Monteverdi called the prima pratica, or the primary practice of Renaissance polyphony. However, a new emphasis on powerful emotional expressions became a central feature of what he dubbed the seconda pratica, which came to the fore with the development of opera, most notably in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607. Composers paid special attention to the innovations in the music of Venice, which eventually spread throughout Europe in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and such figures as Monteverdi, Antonio Lotti, and Antonio Caldara, long associated with the city, became exemplars of the new Venetian style, in both secular and sacred music.