Toward a New Genre: Opera

New Modes of Thinking

By the 1580s, theoretical advances in music and the madrigal's apparent shortcomings in expressing emotions caused music thinkers and practical musicians alike to seek new directions. Although the madrigal continued in England into the early seventeenth century, it began to loose its vitality and import in Italy.

As noted. the madrigal was a hybrid form, a combination of highly-regulated imitative techniques and frottola texture. Despite the beauty and sophistication of the genre, the rules imposed upon the music in the imitative sections effectively prevented the construction of natural melodic lines, creating instead music that seemed plagued by artifice. Madrigalisms such as tone painting, so revolutionary and exciting at inception, became targets of mockery.

Two developments, a philosophical shift in thought based on Greek drama and a new concept of musical texture, led to the creation of the opera and recitative and effected developments that would resonate in all the other genres except the fugue in the period to follow.

The Florentine Camerata: New Concepts of Melody

The Florentine Camerata (fl. 1573-92) was a loose group of intellectuals based at the home of Count Giovanni Bardi in Florence. As noted in the text, the group included Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer and a significant music theorist in his own right. The central figure, however, was Girolamo Mei. Mei was a humanist who immersed himself in the newly discovered and newly translated ancient manuscripts made available as part of the flowering of humanist scholarship. In particular, Mei read in Greek every available ancient treatise about music.

Dissatisfied with the shortcomings of the madrigal, he sought in Greek knowledge other musical means to express human emotion. His studies led him, as evident in his letters around 1577, to a startling conclusion: Greek drama was powerful because it was sung throughout. To Mei, effective melody should reflect the natural inflection of speech. For example, excited happiness is externalized in speech by a rise in pitch and an increase of speed. In anger, the voice drops and speech slows.

Monody and Recitative

The application of Mei's concepts regarding melody could not be applied, however, without the concurrent development of new concepts of musical texture. The singer Giulio Caccini (c1550-1618), along with singer Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562-1621) and others, experimented with grafting Mei's new ideas of melody to contemporary musical texture in little pastoral scenes produced at the royal apartments of Bardi and confederate members of the nobility.

Caccini's Le nuove musiche, likely composed in the 1590s but not printed until 1602, was the first music collection to feature a new musical texture, monody. The term derives from the Greek monos, alone, and aieden, to sing. The chordal textures promoted in the frottola and nascent bass frameworks served as the starting point. In monody, the soprano and the bass lines, the voices most clearly audible, became the most important and highly developed and the inner voices were reduced to filler chords.

In their early experiments, Peri and Caccini sought to reconcile the emotive power of speech with tradition concepts of melody. The result was a style of singing, called stile recitativo or recitative, which was essentially part song and part speech. The music was conceived for a solo singer and hence featured no imitative writing, contained no strophic or repeated sections of music as in dance, and no regular or repeated harmonic plan.

Instead, the music was through composed and roamed, free of the strictures of the learned style, through whatever harmonies and key areas as the composer thought best to express the emotion of the text. The rhythms were also extremely flexible to reflect speech. Note the similarity to the procedures and character of early Christian centonization. Similarities are also shared with the recitation of epic poems (chanson de geste) during the Middle Ages.

Peri's opera Euridice, mounted in 1600, is the first opera to survive in its entirety and the first to contain true recitative. It was sung by a few singers and accompanied by a few lutes, hidden from view by a screen, in a private apartment. The story is derived from the mythological tale of Orpheus and Euridice.

In the myth, a snake fatally bites Euridice. Orpheus charms the gods with his music upon the lyre and they allow him to retrieve his beloved from the underworld, provided neither look back as they ascend. Orpheus loses Euridice not only once, but twice. In a precedent that set the tone for the vast majority of later operas, the story focuses upon love and loss. Caccini also set the myth as an opera. The term "opera" is the plural of opus, or "work." Hence "pera" is the list of musical works to be performed and the musical equivalent of word "menu."

A few years later, in 1607, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) also set the myth as an opera, Orfeo. Monteverdi is a difficult figure to address in music history because he was at once a master of the older madrigal style and the newer style of monody. Caught up in a debate about the merits of monody, he coined two terms which have remained both accurate and in circulation. Stile antico referred to music governed by the tenets of the learned style, or pervasive imitation. Stile moderno referred to monody and recitative.

One contribution is certain: Monteverdi saved opera. Peri and Caccini's operas suffered from the very element that made them progressive, recitative. The early operas contained too many extended sections of recitative. To the literate, the marriage of music and poetic text represented a valid entertainment. To those with poorer educational circumstances or who did not understand the language, recitative could present a true listening challenge.

Monteverdi's musical treatment in Orfeo did not diminish recitative, but he was careful to offer relief in the form interpolations of music in other styles. Strophic, monodic arias with dance rhythms and orchestral pieces were placed strategically to relieve the recitative and to frame scenes. His large-scale planning was careful that the each section of music related in a tonally coherent way to the preceding and following ones. Even his recitatives featured formal harmonic plans instead of wildly freewheeling. In addition, Monteverdi used a relatively large orchestra. Although he included no pieces in which all the instruments played together, he used different smaller combinations to create color and additional relief.

By mid-century, the recitative portions had been significantly diminished in size and consequence. Public audiences grew less interested in the emotional impact of the recitative and more interested in the beauty of the aria, the competition of singers talents, the ever-increasing flamboyance of stage scenery and costumes, and the general entertainment value of a night at the opera. Recitative was reduced to transitional material. It still featured melody that imitated speech and was dense in textual material, but it assumed the role of giving the information necessary to move the story along, set the scene, or prime the next aria. By mid century, opera became a series of pretty arias with short recitatives inserted between them.

The art and music of the Baroque era can be described as one of contrasts. The contrasts do not seem as clearly defined as in later periods, but during the period from the late sixteenth century until the end of the the seventeen century, artists and musicians strove to infuse their work with emotion.

For the musician, embracing affect was limited somewhat by the lack of plasticity of form. The technical capabilities of the instruments of the time also imposed constraints. For example, contrasts in dynamics (loudness and softness) could be attained only by suddenly paring down the number of musicians playing.