Wikipedia Tour: Essential Opera (2 of 21)

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Origins of opera

[Setting designed by Bernardo Buontalenti for the third intermedio (of six) from the 1589 Medici wedding: Apollo defeats the monster terrorizing Delos. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who reused some of the material in the first opera Dafne in 1597.]
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The word "opera" means "work" in Italian (from the plural of Latin opus meaning "work" or "labour") suggesting that it combines the arts of solo and choral singing, declamation, acting and dancing in a staged spectacle. The form arose in Italy from a background of various forms of courtly entertainment, and though the first operas were modestly staged compared to other contemporary forms of sung drama, opera outlasted these, and was to make the transition from the court to the public theatre, having taken on the spectacular stagings typical of the intermedio.

"Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today,^[1] although with only five instrumental parts it was much more like a chamber opera than either the preceding intermedi or the operas of Claudio Monteverdi a few years later. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the "Camerata". Significantly, Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who had written some of the 1587 Medici intermedi, in which Peri had also been involved; Rinuccini appears to have recycled some of the material, at least from the scene illustrated at right. Most of the music for "Dafne" is unfortunately lost (the libretto was printed and survives), but one of Peri's many later operas, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day.

Traditions of staged sung music and drama go back to both secular and religious forms from the Middle Ages, and at the time opera first appears the Italian intermedio had courtly equivalents in various countries.

Contents

• 1 Italian origins of opera
• 2 The French ballet de court and the English masque
• 3 The first English opera
• 4 Other ancestors of opera
  • 4.1 Religious
  • 4.2 Secular
• 5 Notes
• 6 References

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