History of Opera in Italy to the 17th Century
{"Image DocumentName": "History of Opera in Italy to the 17th Century", "Image ImageDescription": "The Birth of Opera. One of the most important innovations of the seventeenth century was opera. The first opera was performed just before 1600 in Florence, and by the middle of the century opera houses were being built throughout Europe to house the new art form. The first great composer of operas was the Italian Monteverdi, whose L Orfeo is the earliest opera still to hold the stage. Among later musicians of the period to write works for the theater was the German Georg Frideric Handel, many of whose operas were composed to Italian texts for performance in England. History of Opera in Italy to the 17th Century. Renaissance: During the 15th and much of the 16th century Italy functioned largely as an importer of musical talent. Nevertheless, toward the end of the 15th century, distinctively Italian secular music began to reappear at some of the Italian courts. In Florence, during the time of Lorenzo de Medici ( ), carnival celebrations were enriched by canti carnascialeschi (carnival songs). In Mantua composers developed the frottola, a homophonic (chordal), clearly phrased, strophic piece. The carnival songs and frottole were significant in preparing the ground for the 16th-century madrigal, one of the great flowerings of Italian musical art. In the earlier part of the 16th century madrigals were written by French and Netherlandish composers as well as Italians such as Costanzo Festa ( ). The late madrigal, written in the last third of the century, was dominated by the Italians Luca Marenzio, Carlo Gesualdo, and Claudio Monteverdi. Sacred music developed in two main centers--Rome and Venice. The Roman school is epitomized in the works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Working under the influence of the Counter Reformation, Palestrina wrote several hundred motets and 105 masses. The Venetian school had its founding father in the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, who was director of music at Saint Mark s Cathedral from 1527 to Willaert, his student Andrea Gabrieli, and Andrea s nephew Giovanni Gabrieli developed a polychoral (multiple choruses) style of composition that gave special force to the contrast and opposition (both spatial and aural) of mixed groups of performers. Venice was also an important center of music printing from as early as the beginning of the 16th century. The Odhecaton, printed by Ottaviano dei Petrucci in 1501, is the first printed collection of part songs. Petrucci printed more than 50 volumes of secular and sacred vocal music as well as a few volumes of music for the lute. Baroque: The period of Italy s greatest musical influence throughout Europe lasted from the end of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century. During this time new attitudes toward the relationship of text and music and toward the states of mind most suitable for expression in music generated changes in the treatment of dissonance, rhythm, and texture. The resulting style of the baroque music affected old genres and brought forth several new ones, such as the opera, oratorio, cantata, concerto, and sinfonia. The earliest operas that have survived complete are Euridice by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, performed in Florence in 1600, and Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo by Emilio de Cavalieri (c ), performed in Rome in Peri, Caccini, and Cavalieri were all associated with a group of Florentine humanists called the Camerata, who hoped to achieve in their own time the great effects attributed to music by the ancient Greeks. To accomplish this goal they instituted a style of reciting in music, the stile recitativo (recitative), that allowed the text to be projected with clarity. The voice was accompanied by chords notated in a shorthand called figured bass. The full expressive possibilities of the new style were first demonstrated by Monteverdi in his opera Orfeo (1607). Rome was a center of operatic composition from about 1620 until the late 1630s. In 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, and until the end of the 17th century, Venice was the operatic capital of Italy. Some of the finest Venetian operas were written by Monteverdi and his pupil Pier Francesco Cavalli.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}