The Florentine Camerata, a group of highly influential thinkers, poets, and musicians, met regularly in the decades leading up to Peri’s premiere. Opera was conceived by committee, a sure recipe for disaster. The music is now lost with only the text surviving and accounts are vague and minuscule. Jacopo Peri composes Daphne (1598), the establishing introduction to the form.

As with many created forms, opera had a difficult infancy and these early years are worthy of an opera themselves. For example, the chorales of the Church and the musical morality plays such as Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum (1151) were more interested in praise of God than of suspenseful enticement of the audience. Although earlier examples of vocal music existed they did not have the focus on plot, character and spectacle that was given to opera. The original idea of opera was to recreate Greek drama, retaining, as Marianne McDonald reveals, Aristotle’s elements of tragedy: plot, character, thought, language, spectacle and music. It was one of its greatest, if misguided fruits.

The Renaissance’s fascination with the ancient world of the Greeks and the Romans created opera. Unlike other musical forms it did not evolve in relation to other music developments, such as sonata form arising from the development of equal temperament. The Inspiration of Opera- Greek Theater Origins

Famous opera music