23 - Early Opera : The Initial Phase

Summary

WHEN Nino Pirrotta wrote that “few other genres have their beginnings as precisely determined as opera,” and that “its landmark is the first performance of Euridice, with music by Jacopo Peri” (6 October 1600), he was articulating the settlement of a dispute whose claims and interests remain difficult to untangle, both theoretically and descriptively. The solution of the dispute largely depends on what we choose to isolate as the essence of the new musical theater. For Pirrotta it was the development of a declamatory style linking music to speech patterns, that is, of a recitative style. Peri's achievement in this area—the formulation of the linguistic principles underlying his theory of recitative as well as the demonstration of such principles in the “realistic eloquence” of his style—is what ultimately made his Euridice the archetype of opera in the eyes of modern historians.

The heated argument that witnessed the birth of court opera defines it both as a cultural phenomenon and as a historiographical concept. Peri and his two rivals, Giulio Caccini and Emilio de’ Cavalieri, may seem to share with modern scholarship the desire, or perhaps the need, to explain the origins of this most unusual invention. In actuality, their “emplotted accounts” imposed the structure of a narrative on a series of events whose meaning derived from a conflict of authorship and the institutionalization of the early operatic experiments as court ceremonies. Concomitantly, and more importantly to us, they gave verbal expression to a wide compass of practices and ideas that shaped the humanistic concern with music, speech, and theater, the mechanisms of artistic patronage, and the relationship between the Florentine cultural aristocracy and the Medici court.

The starting point of the public declarations that prefaced the publication of Peri’s, Caccini’s, and Cavalieri's first demonstrations of the new theater was the unattainable model of Greek drama. “It has been the opinion of many,” Ottavio Rinuccini wrote in the dedication to Maria de’ Medici of his libretto of Euridice, “that the ancient Greeks and Romans, in representing their tragedies upon a stage, sang them throughout.