Opera

The opera—a full-length musical drama, complete with costumes and staging, which is sung throughout—first arose in the 1590s. Its appearance marked a change from traditional Renaissance music to a new style known as Baroque*. Modern opera has its roots in late-Renaissance Italian music, literature, and theater, as well as humanist* thought.

Opera's Greek Influence. Tales from ancient Greek mythology inspired many early operas. The first known opera, Daphne, told the story of a nymph* whom the Greek god Apollo loved. Its first performance occurred in Florence, Italy, in 1598. Planned and sponsored by silk merchant Jacopo Corsi, the opera formed part of the city's Carnival celebrations. (Carnival was a festive event that took place before Lent, the solemn period leading up to Easter.) Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote the opera's music to accompany the poet Ottavio Rinuccini's text. Only six short sections of this work survive.

Soon after creating Daphne, Peri and Rinuccini teamed up again to produce a second opera, called Eurydice. This work, also based on Greek mythology, focused on the wife of the musician Orpheus. It premiered in Florence in 1600 as part of the marriage celebration of MARIE DE MÉDICIS (of the ruling MEDICI family) to King Henry IV of France. A complete printed musical score from Eurydice still exists.

Interest in ancient Greece grew throughout the Renaissance, inspiring a group of musicians in Florence to create an informal academy called the Camerata. The amateur composer Giovanni de' Bardi organized the academy as a place where the city's most important musicians, intellectuals, poets, and philosophers could gather to discuss ancient Greek music. They learned about the subject from the Italian humanist Girolamo Mei. Mei believed that the ancient Greeks had chanted their tragedies in a style midway between speaking and singing. He also thought that many Greek tunes had focused on a single note. The members of the Camerata decided that ancient Greek music could move listeners better than the music of their time because it was vocal, followed the text closely, and consisted of only one melody. They believed that Renaissance music failed to stir people because it often involved several melodies that moved against each other.

Renaissance Influences. A key factor in the development of opera was the musical style that came to be known as recitative in the early 1600s. Recitative stressed musical simplicity. By using the patterns of regular speech, the singer could communicate the emotion of the work's text. In the early recitatives, composers wrote only one note for every syllable of text. In addition, they kept the voice's range (its ability to hit high and low notes) narrow, and avoided patterns of rhythm and melody.

Existing forms of Renaissance drama also influenced opera. Early operas were similar to pastoral* tragicomedies—plays that combined elements of comedy and tragedy in a rural setting. Giovanni Battista Guarini established this style in 1590 with his work The Faithful Shepherd. Italian dramas called intermedi, short pieces shown between the acts of Renaissance plays, also affected opera. Intermedi had first appeared in the 1400s at the court of Ferrara. They combined music, drama, dance, and in most cases, costumes. The opera Daphne begins exactly like one of the intermedi performed at a Medici wedding in 1589.