It might seem that opera, as it developed in Western Europe in the late 16th century, was all a

terrible mistake. The interests of the time, scientific and cultural, had brought close attention to the
world of ancient Greece and Rome, but if opera was ever intended as a revival of classical Greek
tragedy, then it was singularly wide of the mark. Opera, in fact, reflected elements of classical Greek
and Roman thought and practice, but had an equal debt to its own immediate predecessors and to
the society in which it developed.

In the 16th century there was nothing particularly new about drama and nothing new in the
combination of music and drama. Such a combination had had a place, after all, in medieval Christian
liturgy, with plays and music re-enacting events associated with Easter and with Christmas. From this
a larger repertoire had grown, with plays based on events recorded in the Bible or derived from
Christian tradition. Music was associated with dramatic action in secular performances of one sort or
another. Court entertainments of various kinds took place in which elements of drama and music
were combined. An extravagant example is recorded in accounts of the Feast of the Pheasant in
Burgundy in 1454. Following the Turkish capture of Constantinople a court banquet was given in an
attempt to arouse interest in a Crusade. On this occasion singers in the guise of musical blackbirds
emerged from a giant pie for the edification of the guests. Such diversions, whether primarily
political or artistic, took place throughout Europe. The essential difference in the new art of opera lay
in its developed dramatic structure. This, in turn, was associated with a much more dramatic style of
music, drawing on the classical art of rhetoric, the art of public speaking, which, nominally at least,
formed part of the new education.

The period now known as the Baroque developed in the last decades of the 16th century. It is
distinguished, above all, by the development of what has become known as dramatic monody. Here
a simple form of melody closely follows the rhythms and intonations of speech, accompanied by
simple if occasionally startling chords. The new technique of composition made opera possible. Plays
with songs and dances were one thing, but works providing a dramatic combination of words and
music throughout were something different.

There were three principal elements from the ancient world that influenced the new form: Greek
and Roman tragedy, ancient rhetoric, and the work of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Interest
in classical Greek tragedy brought with it the understanding that music and dance had been essential
elements of performance. With the music now lost, a new music was created. At the same time the
rules and conventions of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric came to be reflected in drama. The new
art of opera could also seek theoretical support from the works of Plato and Aristotle. From Plato
came the idea that certain kinds of music were rightly associated with certain states of mind or soul.
In the philosophical dialogue The Republic Plato’s hero Socrates suggests that some kinds of music
should be banned, because of the effect they have on character. Others are to be encouraged as
fostering bravery or prudence. This was at the basis of what became the Doctrine of the Affections,
the association of certain pieces of music with certain states of mind, so that a sad song, for example,
might both express the feeling of the singer and arouse a similar feeling in those who heard it. From
Aristotle came the now fundamental connection of music with poetry and rhetoric, together with the
suggested moral purpose of drama. Through the proper exercise of the emotions of pity and fear,
exercised on suitable subjects, an audience would undergo a moral cleansing, a catharsis. Opera,
then, had a moral purpose. It was soon, of course, to have a political one.
From the very beginning opera brought together all the arts. It involved painting, poetry, drama,
dance and music, making it the most complex of art forms. It was, as Samuel Johnson later pointed
out, exotic and irrational, and, as many have found, remarkably expensive. It remained, nevertheless,
of continuing social and political importance. In the first respect it edified and entertained, and in the
second it served as an expression of the power and splendour of the monarch in an age of kings.

ITALY

Early Opera

There was always argument about who composed the first opera. Some of his contemporaries
regarded the Roman composer Cavalieri’s La rappresentatione di anima e di corpo (The
Representation of Soul and Body), from 1600, as the first true example. Written for the Oratorian
movement of St Philip Neri, and with a dramatic content recalling that of medieval morality plays,
combining drama with the new music, the work had some claim to priority. Allegorical figures
dispute in a work that seeks to show the superiority of the spiritual. The composer himself claimed to
have been the first to unite music and drama in this way, although rivals claimed to have done the
same things some years before.

While Cavalieri’s work entertained and edified the entire College of Cardinals in Rome, other early
operas were designed as court entertainments of a more secular kind. Such works were staged,
notably, for the Medici rulers in Florence and, most memorably of all, at Mantua. It was there that
Monteverdi had his Orfeo staged in 1607, followed the next year by Arianna, now lost. The subject of
Orfeo (Orpheus) had already been treated in Florence by the composers Peri and by Caccini. The
story had an obvious relevance. The legendary musician Orpheus, grieving at the loss of his beloved
Eurydice, attempts to save her from the Underworld by the power of his music and is almost
successful, thwarted only at the last minute by his own doubts. Orpheus not only demonstrates the
importance of music. He is also represented as a shepherd among shepherds, making it possible for
the poet and composer to draw on an existing literary and musical tradition. Pastoral poems and
romances were set in a conventional Arcadia, where the only troubles that arose came from the
thwarted love of amorous shepherds, whose heartache often proved fatal. The Italian madrigal, the
part-songs of the 16th century, often set pastoral verses, drawing on another tradition of the ancient
world. Here the life of the shepherd was idealised in an urban or court view of the country, a
convention that could present the ageing Queen Elizabeth of England as Oriana, Queen of the
Shepherds, shortly before her death.

Opera as court entertainment continued, often under enlightened patronage. It was in Venice, in
1637, that the first public opera house was opened. Venice was a commercial republic, ruled by an
oligarchy, but without a royal court. The commercial aspect of opera could here be exploited, so that
by the end of the century there were seven Venetian opera houses, dominated, after the death of
Monteverdi in 1643, by the composer Cavalli, followed by Legrenzi. Venetian opera, not uninfluenced
at first by the opera of Rome, spread throughout Italy and to other parts of Europe. As a more
popular form than early courtly opera, it offered a mixture of the serious and the comic.
Monteverdi’s Orfeo had no comic relief, but his two later surviving operas, written for Venice in the
early 1640s, include elements of comedy. They also followed a convention now established, that of
the happy ending. There was still, as before, a strong element of spectacle, with elaborate stage
machinery that allowed transformation scenes and grandiose effects, with a complementary
extravagance of costume and decor. Leading composers of the later years of the 17th century and
early years of the 18th also include Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples and Rome, father of the keyboard
composer Domenico Scarlatti.

Early opera had involved madrigals, dramatic monody and set songs, or a mixture of these. As the
17th century went on, there developed a gradual distinction between recitative and aria. The first of
these, lightly accompanied often simply by chords, follows the rhythm and stresses of speech
without the formal structure of a melody. Recitative, in fact, is dialogue set to music. The aria is a
song, often in a form that frames a middle section in identical outer sections, the second of which
might be ornamented by the singer. While the plot may be carried forward by the recitative, the aria
tends to embody one state of mind. Both had an important part to play in what followed, although
audiences tended to pay more attention to arias and much less to recitative, which seemed tedious.