Most early baroque operas were based on greek mythology and

Arrive at Opera as we know it today: Peri’s and Monteverdi’s operas

Since the early twentieth century, European musical style has significantly changed its tradition for music as having take place around 1600.[footnoteRef:1] In general, it is described as the transition from Renaissance to Baroque style. Opera as an art originated from Italy in the 16th century and it spread out to Europe. This work is associated with drama, dance, vocal and visual music with impressive effects of the Greek and Romans. Orpheus was the greatest of musicians in ancient Greek mythology, it is challenging the gods with his capability to sing and play. Euridice by Peri and Orfeo by Monteverid are well-known works of early opera, which made use of Orpheus’ story and the same libretto. Peri’s Euridice is first survived and credited with early advances in opera composition as recitative and advancing Florentine Camerata’s ideas of Greek drama. On other hand, Monteverdi’s Orfeo Baroque operatic works include a variety of genres and types of styles. The text and plots are drawn from classical antiquity or ancient history, and the action involves a variety of special scenic effects.[footnoteRef:2] Because both works used the same libretto, in examining the two is very informative between two operas. Monteverdi’s opera is more widely known and performed today because it has a greater variety of musical style and richer sounds in instrumental and chorus. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the operas of Peri and Monteverdi’s libretto in various adaptations. This essay will cover an examination of monadic style works, instrumentations, and choral music. Ultimately, it will be shown that the conceptual and composers goals of Jacopo Peri and Claudio Monteverdi are in setting text to music. These ideas and changes effectively influenced the gradual growth of opera with the invention and improvement of today’s opera. [1: David Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque. New York; Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014, 35.] [2: Schulenberg, 59.]

Before we examine Peri’s Euridice and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, it is necessary to acknowledge the experiments of Florentine Camerata. Florentine Camerata was an important group who met to discuss societies or academies and they were leading to write an ancient Greek and music. Florentine Camerata involved in Vincenzo Galilei and Giulo Caccini, but also Jacopo Peri, Ottavio Rinuccini, and Girolamo Mei participated. Florentine Camerata started with the experiment of stile recitative, which was a Greek style between speech and songs that was eventually called opera.

Rinuccini’s poems were a favorite subject for operas because the mythical hero is himself a singer and the combination of a simple action with a diversity of expressive situations.[footnoteRef:3] Peri was the monadic of the Florentine composers who wrote Eurydice, which is the earliest surviving opera with a completed setting of Rinuccini’s poem. It premiered on October 6, 1600 at the Pitti Palace in Florence as a wedding celebration of Henri IV and Marie de’ Medic of France. During the Counter-Reformation, the group of Florentine Camerata attempted to transfer a direct emotional impact to the audience. Jacopo Peri was one of the members who stringently followed a monody style; recitative and aria. Peri’s new invention, recitative, composing style is a “speech-like musical declamation.”[footnoteRef:4] Characteristically a singer sings to the emotional and expressive content of the words as natural delivery, during “changing harmony both matches the emotion and underpins the metrical stresses of the poetry.”[footnoteRef:5] Ex. 1 demonstrates this basic principle through Pastore’s opening recitative shows. [3: Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short Histroy of Opera. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 43.] [4: Mark Ringer, Opera's first master : the musical dramas of Claudio Monteverdi / Mark Ringer. n.p.: Pompton Plains, N.J. : Amadeus Press, 2006, 24. ] [5: Tim Carter, Monteverdi's musical theatre / Tim Carter (n.p.: New Haven : Yale University Press, c2002), 5.]

Ex. 1 Jacopo Peri, Euridice [scene 1]

Shown Ex1, basso continuo prolongs to a chord and the bass part plays as the melody line moves pitches against between consonant and dissonant. Consonances progress on all stressed syllables. It shows that the rhythmic and pitch accents marked as circles and the harmonic repetitions or changes marked as triangles, all follow by emphasis on texts. The first syllable of ‘liete’ and ‘tutte’ (not shown in ex. 1) are the highest note (e) in the passage that is there for emphasis, while the high (d) on ‘ciel’ (heaven) is word painting.[footnoteRef:6] Undoubtedly, Peri’s monadic style was leading into the making of an opera with Italian composers for more than a century; including Monteverdi which was adapted by Peri’s monadic style later for his Orfeo. Monteverdi used the same mythological story of Orfeo and Euridice. [6: Carter, 26.]

However, Peri’s declamatory speech is flows with predictability so that the audiences sought more tunes in the opera. Taking this into consideration, Monteverdi adopted Peri’s monadic style but he was determined to write with more power and depth of expression in his opera. The main difference between their recitatives is Monteverdi’s speeches in the performing dramatic dialogue which utilizes unpredictable melodic styles and spontaneous expression.[footnoteRef:7] This was evidenced in Monteverdi’s Orfeo where he used different instruments to deliver the continuo part for certain passages or characters. He uses “a mall organ with wood pipes joins the traditional theorbo to accompany the messenger and subsequently accompanies Orfeo’s lament.”[footnoteRef:8] [7: Ringer, 16.] [8: Schulenberg, 63.]

Monteverdi’s variety duets and dances and extended the instrumental ensemble makes it better reproduce the drama. The development of instrumentation by Monteverdi’s Orfeo is one of the most influential contributions to today’s opera. For example in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, when Orfeo found his wife was died, the music transform from the major to minor mode and the organ adds in scene to reflect his emotion’s through the music and instrumentation. As mentioned previously, the Florentine Camerata was the experiments of monody skills in opera rather than instrumental. In early opera, the ritornello is seldomly played after the final section, so the ritornello is a repeating coincides with the number of verses. However, Monteverdi concerned to use an instrumental movement which is composed to introduce a song, ensemble or chorus, and play between each of its verses.[footnoteRef:9] Monteverdi thought that instrumentation was just as important as the voices, thus he created instrumental movements – ritornello, sinfonia, toccata, and moresca - it used in different ways in instrumental movement and on different scales.[footnoteRef:10] One of Monteverdi’s great instrumental works, Toccata, has a short and radical opening like Prelude. It is written in all C major chords but sounds in D major due to mutes are required which raise the trumpets by one tone. During the Toccata, Monteverdi wrote to all the instrumentations to play; he used for 40 instruments in his published score; [9: David R. B. Kimbell, Italian Opera. National Traditions of Opera. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 76] [10: Kimbell, 76.]

two each are listed of harpsichords, chamber organs, archlutes (three occur in the score itself); one regals (portables reed organ resembling a tiny harmonium); one large double harp; ten normal strings of the violin family together with two tiny kits, and five viols; a high recorder; four trombones (five occur in the score); two cornetti (small wooden horns); three muted trumpets, and one (clarion) trumpet played high, with drums not mentioned but customarily present.[footnoteRef:11] [11: Robert Donington, The opera. n.p.: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, 22.]

Those are period instruments, either preserved as unique or reformed; because of Monteverdi specified instruments in his score, it is the point of transition from the Renaissance era to Baroque period so it with particular use of polyphony. These continuo ensemble and trumpets are extremely rich and have the sound of the strings glorious with timbre.

The ritornellos is particularly noticeable “such dance-songs as ‘Lasciate I monti’ (Act I), ‘Vi ricordo’ (Act II), and ‘Vanne Orfeo’ (Act V), where the rhythms, which have necessarily to be treated with some restraint for the singing voices, can be developed and decorated with splendid uninhibited verve by the five-part instrumental ensemble.”[footnoteRef:12] According to Schulengerg, as a string player could notice that Monteverdi should have known string instruments and it closed to string players’ capabilities. Monteverdi calls for unusual instruments in score such as “piccioli alla francese – apparently, small violins of a type then associated with French music – and flautini.”[footnoteRef:13] As I examined Peri’s and Monteverdi’s instrumental music in operas, I could detect why Orfeo is more remarkably noticeable from the earlier operas than the abundance, diversity, and importance of the instrumental music. Monteverdi’s innovation was an integrated musical form as monody, chorus, and he also extended an orchestra. [12: Kimbell, 79.] [13: Schulengerg, 67.]

Types of monadic style is comparable that Recitative style is declamatory speech, in contrast, Aria is the free-rhythm, more florid, and musically either solo and solos alternating with chorus. Both Peri’s and Monteverdi’s operas are sequences by a five episode structure that each act interspersed by a closing chorus. However, the difference is Peri’s strophic song and Monteverdi’s madrigal song[footnoteRef:14] and his Arias are strophic but strophes are varied to reflect the text. [14: Robert Cannon, Opera. Cambridge Introductions to Music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 18. ]

As we know, Peri’s songs are in the nature of lyrical interludes in the action; it’s placed usually at the ends of scenes. Peri’s setting, sung by Orphesus in the closing section is a well-known example of “Gioite al canto mio.”[footnoteRef:15] Monteverdi was inspired by Peri’s Aria and Monteverdi developed different approaches of conveying melodic song in the madrigal. In Monteverdi’s madrigal in chorus, the voices were joined with instrumental ensembles and they include solos and dances that have sounded glow with it. For instance in Orfeo, after the shepherdess tells the marriage god Hymen to pray of Orfeo and Euridice, a shepherd in chorus and shepherdesses sing for a Nymph, who are punctuated by a lively dance celebrating the marriage. This is one of my favorite scenes that Monteverdi’s chorus. After the sinfonia linking acts 1 and 2 follows from a song and rhythm related to those heard in the “Ecco Orfeo”. And it followed by Orfeo’s upcoming Aria, “Ecco pur ch’a voi ritorno”.[footnoteRef:16] Because it is impressive that Orfeo is alternating with Aria then a madrigal and a ballet. [15: Grout and Williams, 45.] [16: Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune, The Monteverdi companion; edited by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (n.p.: New York, Norton, 1968), 261-262]

Moreover, Grout and Williams claim that “Passente spirto” is a remarkable example of the florid solo style of this period. It includes six strophes that have essentially identical bass in the fifth of melodic variations. The first four strophes, Monteverdi wrote were in a different set of vocal embellishments which he built-in adding staff in the score. “These embellishments are certainly comparable to those an accomplished singer of the time would have been expected to add to a plain melodic line.”[footnoteRef:17] A solo instrument “concertize” – that is, collaborates and competes – with the voice, as Monteverdi does here, was one destined to become important in later seventeenth and eighteenth century opera aria.”[footnoteRef:18] [17: Grout and William, 56.] [18: Grout and William, 56.]

Both Peri’s and Monteverdi’s operas are not the first operas; however, their operas are new phenomenons that achieve artistic development through an innovation of the ideas of ancient Greek drama. Peri’s opera was paid close attention to monadic styles such as recitative and aria. Although, the element of Monteverdi’s opera was not created by himself, conductor “Nikolaus Harnoncourt says “he blended the entire stock of newest and older possibilities into a unity that was indeed new” and Musicologist Robert Donionton writes, “[the score] contains no element which was not based on precedent, but it reaches complete maturity in that recentyle-developed from . . . Here are words as directly expressed in music as [the pioneers of opera] wanted them expressed; here is music expressing theme . . . with the full inspiration of genius.””[footnoteRef:19] Monteverdi’s opera is not only combines’ elements of Peri’s monadic style, but also he also formed new techniques through monadic style, instrumentations, and choral music and started with a Greek myth. These ideas and changes successfully arrived at Opera as we know it today. [19: Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/music/chapter/monteverdis-lorfeo/]

Bibliography

Carter, Tim. Monteverdi's musical theatre / Tim Carter. n.p.: New Haven : Yale University

Press, c2002.

Schulenberg, David. Music of the Baroque. New York; Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014

Grout, Donald Jay and Williams, Hermine Weigel. A Short Histroy of Opera. 4th ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003

Ringer, Mark. Opera's first master : the musical dramas of Claudio Monteverdi / Mark

Ringer. n.p.: Pompton Plains, N.J. : Amadeus Press, 2006

Kimbell, David R. B. Italian Opera. National Traditions of Opera. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Donington, Robert. The opera. n.p.: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978

Cannon, Robert. Opera. Cambridge Introductions to Music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel. The Monteverdi companion; edited by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (n.p.: New York, Norton, 1968