Opera Development in Italy essays

Opera Development in Italy essays Although opera did not originate in Venice...it found a most nurturing environment in the Most Serene Republic (Rosand, p. 8). Much of Europes music was dominated by Italian opera during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The wealthier upper class would commission huge works that combined music, drama, and dance for the first time in history. This combination of the fine arts was the birth of opera. Several cities in Italy, Florence, Naples, Rome, and Venice in particular, contributed to the development and perfection of the new genre (Kimbell, p. 26). The entire opera movement was born in Florence, Italy. It all started with Bardi and the Florentine Camerata, which met in an attempt to recreate Greek drama. At the time, it was assumed that early Greek tragedies were sung, and therefore, people wanted to recreate this sound (Sternfeld, p. 56). This camerata influenced the rise of music in Florence, but the city was not eager to support opera. One distinct characteristic of opera that was partially developed in Florence is monody. Monody is an accompanied solo song. It soon became an almost essential part to any opera. Florence also produced such musical geniuses as Cavalieri, Peri, and Caccini. Florences upper-class, wealthy community supported the opera greatly, which helped to establish Italy as one of the centers of opera during the entire Baroque movement. Naples is most known for the opera buffa, or the comic opera. This Neapolitan opera, as it was called at the time, was only successful within the city, though. Its relevance to everyday life and the rise of dialect comedies caused people to fall in love with this different type of opera. The dialect comedies put emphasis on local plot settings, in order to further bring out the humor (Galatopoulos, p. 44). In Rome, the Catholic Church, rather than the wealthy public, gre ...