![]() Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Italian word was first used in the sense "composition in which poetry, dance, and music are combined" in 1639 the first recorded English usage in this sense dates to 1648. Opera is also the Latin plural of opus, with the same root, but the word opera was a singular Latin noun in its own right, and according to Lewis and Short, in Latin "opus is used mostly of the mechanical activity of work, as that of animals, slaves, and soldiers opera supposes a free will and desire to serve". ![]() The Italian word in turn derives from the Latin opera. The Italian word opera means "work", both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. Traditions of staged sung music and drama go back to both secular and religious forms from the Middle Ages, and at the time opera first appears the Italian intermedio had courtly equivalents in various countries. Most of the music for "Dafne" is lost (the libretto was printed and survives), but one of Peri's many later operas, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who had written some of the 1587 Medici intermedi, in which Peri had also been involved Rinuccini appears to have recycled some of the material, at least from the scene illustrated at right. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. Significantly, Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the " Camerata". The earliest operas were modest productions compared to other Renaissance forms of sung drama, but they soon became more lavish and took on the spectacular stagings of the earlier genre known as intermedio.ĭafne by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today, although with only five instrumental parts it was much more like a chamber opera than either the preceding intermedi or the operas of Claudio Monteverdi a few years later. The word opera, meaning "work" in Italian, was first used in the modern musical and theatrical sense in 1639 and soon spread to the other European languages. The art form known as opera originated in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it drew upon older traditions of medieval and Renaissance courtly entertainment. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who reused some of the material in the first opera Dafne in 1597. ![]() ![]() Setting designed by Bernardo Buontalenti for the third intermedio (of six) from the 1589 Medici wedding: Apollo defeats the monster terrorizing Delos. ![]()
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