Chapter 2 - First operatic forms

Summary

The impulse to draw these elements together to create the opera itself was provided by the Florentine Camerata, a loose assembly of musicians, artists and poets who were concerned with the performance of Greek drama and music. A great deal of theoretical writing had come down from the classical period, but none of it offered a basis for practical performance, especially frustrating because of the known close relationship between Greek music and the drama. This became central to the debate as to how these admired plays might be performed as part of the Renaissance revival of the classical arts.

The stile rappresentativo

Several members of the Camerata were involved in La pellegrina, among them Peri, Caccini and their patron Giovanni de’ Bardi. In a letter, de’ Bardi's son Pietro later related how Vincenzo Galilei (the mathematician's father) ‘was the first to let us hear singing in stile rappresentativo…Accordingly he let us hear the lament of Count Ugolino, from Dante’, and goes on to say that Caccini and then Peri experimented with the new style and that Peri ‘together with Giulio [Caccini] sweetened this style and made it capable of moving the affections in a rare manner…The first poem to be sung on the stage in stile rappresentativo was the Story of Daphne by Signor Ottavio Rinuccini, set to music by Peri…I was left speechless’ (Strunk, 1998: 523–5). The first experiments with the stile rappresentativo were in the form of the lament followed by a full-scale dramatisation of the legend of Daphne. Like Poliziano, despite their admiration for the classics, these men chose not to set extant classical plays with their own vernacular texts. This was a modern, experimental medium.