The musicological puzzle concerning Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’ missed a number of crucial pieces in 2012. The famous cycle thus remains enshrouded in questions and mysteries to this very day. What was the composer’s aim in creating this unusual combination of liturgical Gebrauchsmusik and freer pieces? Was the vesper cycle conceived as a whole? Are the compositions correctly referred to as ‘Maria vespers’? Or did the composer have a difference holy person in mind? And why was this innovative collection published in ‘antique’ style with a Mass? The importance of this collection published in 1610 is not being called into question. Monteverdi’s Vespers take place at the heart of the musical maelstrom, which was without a doubt early Baroque. Rather than being a mishmash of styles, however, the result is a homogeneous and convincing whole in which text and rhetoric reign. More than four centuries after its creation, the vesper cycle is still regarded as Monteverdi’s signature work.