Premiered: 1602, Florence Libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini, after Ovid Prologue The figure of Tragedy introduces the opera, explaining that to make the story suitable for marriage celebrations, the original ending has been altered. Act I The act opens in an Arcadian village, with Euridice preparing for her marriage to Orfeo, along with nymphs and shepherds ...
1551–1618, Italian At age 13, Giulio Caccini arrived at the court of the de’ Medici family in Florence and very quickly proved himself immensely gifted in several musical skills – as singer, composer, teacher, lutenist and harpist. In 1598, Caccini helped Peri compose Dafne. In 1600, he became superintendent of musicians and actors at ...
(Jool’-yo Ka-che’-ne) c. 1545–1618 Italian composer Caccini was a singer and instrumentalist at the Medici court. His most important publication was Le nuove musiche (‘The New Music’, 1602), which contained madrigals and strophic songs with basso continuo. Its preface, in which ornamentation and figured bass are discussed, outlines the stile rappresentativo. In this new monodic style he sought to follow ...
1587–c. 1637, Italian Francesca Caccini was the daughter of composer and singer Giulio Caccini (1551–1618). She sang at lavish musical entertainments staged in Florence and also performed in Paris with her mother and sister in 1604–05. Francesca, known as La Cecchina (‘The Little Fairy’), was extremely versatile: she was not only a singer, but a talented performer on ...
1600–69, Italian Priest and librettist Giulio Rospigliosi served the opera-loving Barberini pope Urban VIII. Urban’s family gave Rospigliosi a magnificent setting for his libretto for Il Sant’Alessio (1632) by Stefano Landi, which was performed at the opening of the opera house in the Barberini palace in 1632. Three more libretti in the next decade included Rossi’s Il palazzo incantato. ...
‘Julius Cesar in Egypt’ Handel’s operas usually revolve around the voices and particular gifts of the singers that were available to him. Giulio Cesare in Egitto was created in 1724 as a vehicle for Senesino and Cuzzoni, although the characteristic trademark of Handel’s best operas is that the emotions and experience of the characters are not sacrificed to the virtuosity ...
(Det’-rikh Books-te-hoo’-de) c. 1637–1707 German composer Buxtehude was born in Scandinavia, but from 1668 until his death held the post of organist at St Mary’s, Lübeck. The position did not require him to provide much in the way of vocal music; he also wrote cantatas and arias for the Abendmusiken (public concerts), in which he was deeply involved. His cantatas ...
c. 1550–1602, Italian Emilio de’ Cavalieri – composer, teacher, dancer and organist – was born in Rome. At the de’ Medici court in Florence, he organized the family’s spectacular celebrations and was also involved with the innovative Camerata group and their experiments into the stile rappresentativo (representative style). In 1589, Cavalieri contributed madrigals and concluding music ...
1561–1633, Italian Like his rival and fellow Roman Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri possessed several musical talents. He was a composer, singer and harpist. In 1588, also like Caccini, Peri joined the Medici court in Florence. At age 27, he was, it seems, an attractive addition to one of the most glittering courts in ...
Spanning nearly the entire seventeenth century, the Early Baroque era was a time of great change in music. In the Italian cities that led musical taste at the end of the Renaissance, a flowering of new genres of vocal music accompanied by instruments supplanted the unaccompanied Mass and motet. Among these, the opera and oratorio still exist in ...
Opera, with its unique blend of poetry, drama and music, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in ancient Greek theatre. The grandiose, all-encompassing music dramas of Verdi and Wagner may seem a world away from the era of Aristotle and Plato, but this noble civilization, which held music and theatre in high ...
The revival and imitation of ancient theatrical genres in sixteenth-century Italy bore fruit in seventeenth-century England and France in the works of the great dramatists of those countries: William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In Italy, however, the sixteenth-century innovations in spoken drama were followed in the next century not by a great national ...
Classical ideals began to emerge and take shape in musical treatises in the late fifteenth century. One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music ...
The Renaissance, with its renewed interest in the music of the ancient world, is where the true roots of opera lie. The word ‘Renaissance’ means ‘rebirth’ and refers to the revival of the artistic and intellectual ideals of classical civilization following the intervening Middle Ages. The Renaissance began in Italy in the late fourteenth century and later spread to ...
Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (‘The Book of the Courtier’) was published in 1528 and became the most influential book of manners of its time. It was still being reprinted well into the eighteenth century and was translated into many languages. The Courtier presents a series of evening conversations purported to have taken place at the court of Urbino, ...
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