The Persistence of Allegory by Brown Jane K.;

Author:Brown, Jane K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2007-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

The Emergence of Opera and Dance

The idea for a play which would be sung rather than spoken arose from discussions among intellectuals at Florence in the late sixteenth century. Neoplatonism was in fashion, and because music was central to Platonist theories of the harmony of the cosmos, the group was especially interested in the recent emergence of monodic (as opposed to polyphonic) singing. Monody, they realized, shifted the listener’s focus from the thematic meaning of the text to the expressiveness of the individual voice.3 In the fourth book of his De modis, which was circulating unpublished beginning in the late 1560s, Girolamo Mei connected the new music to drama with the assertion that ancient tragedy was entirely sung; Vincenzo Galilei transmitted the idea in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna of 1581 and connected it to discussions of Arisotle’s Poetics.4 Music quickly became connected to the catharsis debate. At the same time, the influence of Vitruvius had established that classical drama involved stage spectacle. Because deus ex machina and other spectacular elements were understood to be ancient, elaborate stage design readily found its place in the new model of ancient drama. The first real opera (a designation about which there is astonishingly little disagreement), Dafne, was performed in Florence in 1598. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, the music (no longer extant) by Jacopo Peri and Jacopo Corsi. Musical settings by Peri and Giulio Romano Caccini of Rinuccini’s next opera, Euridice (1600, 1602), and Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), the earliest opera still performed, followed soon after. As Greek tragedy reborn from neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, and the Vitruvian revival, opera was thus multiply neoclassical.

The genre spread rapidly, but its patterns settled only gradually into those familiar today. Opera was taken up in Rome by the Barberini family in the 1630s, who had it performed to large audiences, and then in Venice, where entrepreneurial rather than court performance became the norm.5 From the numerous extant libretti of the period we know that Venetian opera already connected a written dramatic text with spectacle, dance, and music. As the century progressed, librettists progressed from mythological subjects to history, romance, pastoral, history of the Near East and novellas in their search for novelty (Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice 156). Routines became standard that go back through Spanish comedy to pastoral and ultimately Roman comedy. Since finances dictated that the expensive machinery be constantly reused, the increasing pressure to perform ever new material, the emergence of virtuoso singing and the cult of the prima donna in the latter part of the century often combined to overwhelm the coherence of the libretto and music. An evening might consist of only the most spectacular scenes of various operas, three acts of three different operas, or one opera with music by different composers in different acts. Until well into the eighteenth century libretti were recomposed for each run, even if the same composer was still responsible, and the name of the composer was less likely to be preserved than that of the librettist or the stage engineer.

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