Page 64 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

62

ONE OF THE MOST

MAGNIFICENT AND

EXPENSEFULL

DIVERSIONS

EURIDICE (1600), JACOPO PERI

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS
Early opera
BEFORE
c.700 bce Ancient Greek
drama incorporates music.
Greek myth identifies Orpheus
as the “father of songs.”

1598 Peri collaborates with
Jacopo Corsi on La Dafne,
the first opera, to a libretto by
Ottavio Rinuccini, staged at
the Palazzo Corsini, Florence.
AFTER
1607 Monteverdi’s first opera,
L’Orfeo, is staged in Mantua.
1637 The first public opera he conditions for the Orpheus and Eurydice climb out
of the Underworld in Edward Poynter’s
house—the Teatro San birth of opera were painting of 1862. The Greek myth was
Cassiano in Venice—opens T right in Florence in a particularly apt subject for opera
the 1590s. Large-scale theatrical
with Francesco Manelli’s entertainments utilizing music, because Orpheus was a musician.
L’Andromeda (now lost).
known as intermedi, often
1640 Monteverdi composes performed as interludes during introduction of recitative (recitar
Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, his spoken plays, were commissioned cantando), the art of speaking in
first opera written for a public for dynastic celebrations, such song, that defined opera.
theater in Venice. as weddings and baptisms. Their Florentine intellectual societies,
musical sections—songs (or “arias”), most notably the Camerata de’
dances, and choruses—were Bardi, which met at the house of
themselves interspersed with patron, playwright, and composer
spoken dialogue. It was the Giovanni de’ Bardi, had included in

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