![]() The composer quickly followed the success of this work with another production, Arianna, in 1608, a work that was even more widely admired at the time than Orfeo. Each stanza of the aria was preceded by a ritornello, a refrain or instrumental passage played by the orchestra. The composer conceived of his arias as songs that set to music in a verse style each of the strophes or stanzas of the poetic text. In Orfeo Monteverdi's arias make modest demands upon the singer, and they present the poetic text in a relatively simple and straightforward way. In contrast to the virtuosic skill that was necessary to perform many arias written later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the arias of Monteverdi's Orfeo were relatively simple, conceived in much the same way that Giulio Caccini had advocated in his Le nuove musiche. His work was composed of a mixture of recitative, arias, choruses, and instrumental music, and the drama was preceded by a prologue that made use of a toccata theme played by the orchestra's trumpets, an innovation that laid the foundation for the overtures that were later to become common at the beginning of operas. ![]() But in his Orfeo Monteverdi made use of the new types of music that were to become increasingly important to composers of operas and instrumental music during the Baroque era. These musical interludes had long been staged between the acts of Italian dramas or they had been inserted into court spectacles intended for the entertainment of honored guests. Monteverdi's earliest opera did not break completely from the tradition of staged intermedi that were still popular in his day. ![]() For his subject Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio had chosen the ancient myth of Orpheus, the god who was able to shape the outcome of history through his musical powers. In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo had set a new standard for operatic production. To understand the great range of operatic productions that existed in seventeenth-century Italy, we must consider some of the most important milestones in operatic production. This brief snapshot, though, does not suggest the wealth of creativity that existed in the genre in seventeenth-century Italy as a new and enduring art form appeared within the brief space of a generation or two. Despite the intentions of French composers like Jean-Baptiste Lully or the Italian Arcadian reformers, opera remained a popular form of entertainment, and the taste for lavish productions neverĬompletely disappeared from the genre. These reforms emanated from France and the Arcadian Academy of Rome and they advocated greater purity and simplicity in the genre, an elimination of comedy and spectacle, and a concentration on ancient myths and pastoral themes. Finally, as the seventeenth century came to a close, a reforming impulse began to affect the genre. During these years opera became increasingly laden with lavish spectacle, and regional centers of production began to display many tendencies adapted from their own local theatrical traditions. ![]() At this time opera was referred to as dramma per musica, or "drama in music." By 1650, the new opera house styles of productions common at Venice had become increasingly common elsewhere in Italy, and the art form spread north to France and other cultural centers throughout Europe in the decades that immediately followed. Cassiano, the first public opera house that catered to an urban clientele. A new phase began in 1637, however, with the founding of Venice's Teatro S. In the earliest period between 16, opera remained the preserve of Italian court nobility, and it flourished in the cultivated humanists circles that were common in the great aristocratic households throughout the peninsula. Several stages have been observed in the history of seventeenth-century Italian opera. Florence was the site of the first "opera" performance in 1598, but similar musical dramas were being staged in Rome and Mantua within a few years. By the final years of the sixteenth century, these kinds of works were themselves becoming the center of theatrical performances, and they quickly became a new staple of lavish entertainment and spectacle. The musical dramas known as "operas" today trace their origins to the experiments concerned with recreating the drama of the ancients that occurred in Florence in the late sixteenth century as well as to older forms of intermedi and intermezzi-musical interludes that were performed as short works between the acts of comedies and dramas or within other larger musical entertainments. ![]() Italian Opera in the Seventeenth Century Origins and Development. ![]()
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