The Birth of Opera:

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CHAPTER 30

• The Birth of Opera
• Florence, Mantua, and Venice

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• Opera the term, which literally means "work,"
  was first employed in the Italian phrase opera
  drammatica in musica (a dramatic work, or play,
  set to music). In the West, opera first appeared
  in Florence, Italy, at the turn of the
  seventeenth century. The fundamental premise of
  opera is that sung music can heighten the
  emotional intensity of a dramatic text.
• Libretto The text that conveys the story of the
  opera, written in poetic verse.

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Early Opera in Florence

• Florentine Camerata A "club" or "circle" of
  prominent Florentines gathered to discuss
  literature, arts, and science in the home of
  Count Giovanni Bardi as early as the 1570s. The
  members of the Camerata sought to create a modern
  music that approximated the vocal declamation of
  ancient Greek tragedy.
• Vincenzo Galilei musician, scientist, and member
  of the Florentine Camerata. He is important to
  history for several reasons he was the father of
  the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei he was one
  of the earliest advocate of equal temperament
  he was one of the first to argue for a new style
  of solo singing in his important treatise Dialogo
  della musica antica, et della moderna (Dialogue
  on Ancient and Modern Music).

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Funeste piagge

• Stile rappresentativo a vocal expression
  somewhere between song and declaimed speech
  advocated by the members of the Camerata. The
  singer emphatically declaimed the text so that
  the pitches and rhythms of the voice matched
  exactly the rhythms, accents, and sentiments of
  the text. The bass moves more rapidly or slowly
  as the text requires.

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Composer-singer Jacopo Peri portraying the
mythological poet-singer Arion in Florence in 1589

• Ottavio Rinuccini Florentine court poet and
  author of the early opera libretti Dafne (1598)
  and Euridice (1600), the latter based on the
  story of Orpheus and Euridice.
• Jacopo Peri Florentine composer and singer, he
  created the first true operas the now mostly
  lost score to Rinuccini's Dafne (1598), a unified
  multi-scene drama entirely sung and the first
  completely preserved score to Rinuccini's
  Euridice (1600).
• Giulio Caccini Florentine composer, singer, and
  music teacher. Only months after the performance
  of Peri's Euridice, he rushed into print his own
  setting of Rinuccini's libretto, intent on making
  sure his own Euridice was seen to be as timely
  and novel as Peri's. In 1602 he published Le
  nuove musiche (The New Music), a collection of
  solo madrigals and strophic solo songs.

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• The Orpheus Legend is the mythological tale of
  the poet-singer Orpheus, the son Apollo, of the
  Greek god of the sun and of music. Orpheus (in
  Italian Orfeo) falls in love with the beautiful
  human Euridice, who dies shortly after their
  marriage as a result of a snake bite. Through
  the divine musical powers of his voice, Orpheus
  descends to the Underworld determined to restore
  Euridice to life. This he nearly accomplishes,
  overcoming the furies of Hades with the beauty of
  his expressive song. This mythological tale is
  important to the history of opera as numerous
  composers would set it to dramatic music over the
  next three centuries.

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• In the preface to Le nuove musiche, Caccini was
  first to describe early Baroque vocal ornaments,
  which he also wrote out directly in the score
  (see Anthology, No. 80).
• Esclamazioni the inflections of longer notes by
  means of slight crescendos and diminuendos.
• Passaggio the practice of filling in larger
  melodic intervals with running scales.
• Trillo a repeating percussive effect placed on a
  single pitch.
• Gruppo the counterpart of our modern
  neighbor-note trill.

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Early opera in Mantua Monteverdi's Orfeo.

• Apparently inspired by Peri's Euridice, Claudio
  Monteverdiin the early 1600s director of music
  at the northern court of Mantuatook up the
  legend of Orpheus and Euridice in his opera
  titled Orfeo (1607), based on a new libretto by
  Alessandro Striggio. Compared to earlier
  settings of the Orpheus legend, Monteverdi's is a
  richer, more opulent score. As well as a larger
  number and variety of instruments, Orfeo features
  diverse kinds of music choral songs, choral
  dances, instrumental interludes, and various
  kinds of solo singing.
• Toccata an instrumental piece for keyboard or
  other instruments, requiring the performer to
  touch the instru-ment with great technical
  dexterity. Literally meaning "a touched thing," a
  toccata is an in instrumental showpiece.
  Monteverdi's Orfeo opens with such a "toccata"
  (Anthology, No. 81a), a brief fanfare that also
  exemplifies the remarkable variety of instruments
  of the Baroque period.

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• Recitative musically heightened speech that in
  opera usually tells the audience what has
  happened. As it attempts to mirror the natural
  stresses, the stile recitativo ("recited style")
  is often made up of rapidly repeating notes
  followed by one or two longer notes at the end of
  phrases, after which the reciter might rest to
  catch a breath (Ex. 30-3).
• Simple recitative A recitative that is
  accompanied only by the basso continuo.

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• Arioso style a manner of singing halfway between
  a recitative and a full-blown aria. It involves
  fewer repeating pitches and is rhythmically more
  elastic than a purely declamatory recitative, but
  it is not as song-like and expansive as an aria.

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• Aria Italian for "song" or "ayre," is more
  florid, more expansive, and more melodious than
  recitative or arioso. Invariably, an aria sets a
  short poem made up of several stanzas. Indeed, a
  closed strophic poem in the libretto became a cue
  to the composer to create a lyrical aria. While
  the recitative maintains a narrative function,
  the expressive lyricism and affective rhetorical
  power of an aria provides the musical high points
  of most operas. When set for two or three
  singers, an aria is called a "duet" or "trio."
• Strophic variation aria An aria in which the
  same melodic and harmonic plan appears, with
  slight variation, in each subsequent strophe.
  Possente spirto from Monteverdi's Orfeo
  (Anthology, No. 81b-d) is an example of a
  strophic variation aria.

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Early opera in Venice

• When the first public theater opened in Venice in
  1637, opera as we know it today was born. While
  in Florence, Rome, and Mantua opera was sponsored
  by aristocratic courts, in Venice it became the
  enterprise of wealthy merchant families who saw
  it as a way to make money. The audience was no
  longer a select group of two-hundred aristocratic
  guests, but a fee-paying crowd of as many as
  1,500 drawn from many sections of society.
• The transition from courtly to commercial opera
  led to important changes star singers acquired
  great importance and wealth as opera houses
  competed amongst themselves for audience more
  and more, composers were forced to tailor the
  music to suit the voice of leading singers, while
  librettists wrote texts that would appeal to
  their audience stage machinery and elaborate
  sets created an air of the spectacular (Ex. 30-3).

Ships sail on the high seas as gods descend from
heavens in Giacomo Torelli's stage set for the
opera Bellerofonte (Venice, 1642).
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• In 1613 Monteverdi quit his job in Mantua and
  moved to Venice, where he had accepted the
  prestigious position of maestro di cappella
  (director of music) at St. Mark's Basilica. In
  1640, three years after the first public theater
  was opened for business in Venice, Monteverdi
  returned to the operatic stage apparently for the
  first time since his Mantuan years. He did so
  with Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of
  Ulysses), followed by Le nozze d'Enea (The
  Marriage of Aeneas, 1641) and L'incoronazione di
  Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642). The
  latter, based on a historical rather than
  mythological subject matter, is considered by
  many today as the greatest opera of the
  seventeenth century.
• Other important composers of Venetian opera are
  Monteverdi's pupil Francesco Cavalli and follower
  Antonio Cesti.

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Point of Discussion

• The exquisite and memorable finale of Poppea, the
  duet "Pur ti miro" (Anthology No., 82), may have
  been added later to Monteverdi's opera, and
  perhaps was not composed by Monteverdi at all.
  Does it matter? Do questions of authenticity
  diminish or augment the aesthetic worth of a work
  of art? Should modern stage productions
  eliminate or include the final duet according to
  its authorship?