Venice, 1620

neighbors in other commerce-dominated Northern Italian principalities to recreate the music of the ancient Greeks. Although recent historiographical research has altered some of the details in the story, it is clear that new theatrical forms combining drama, dance, song and instrumental music came together in Northern Italy just before 1600 as something that was qualitatively new. This innovative performance style which eventually would become known as “opera” emerged in response to debates over the extent to which the emotional impact attributed to ancient Greek drama was related to the music provided by the chorus. Many of opera’s originators, including Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei, desired to break out of the limitations of medieval polyphonic choral music and looked to imagined Greek roots for validation of the new style. This pioneering form of vocal dramatic theater was strikingly new, like many of the royal regimes of the time. Opera was associated as well with Greek and Roman classicism, the core of legitimacy in European culture. Young Absolutist rulers across Europe hoped that such legitimacy would attach itself to their own sovereignties. Opera offered important armament for consolidating state power. Initially, opera’s words were more important that its music. The poet Ottaavio Venice has always been a city apart. Cut off from the European mainland by tricky wetlands, Venetians elevated their access to the sea and their seamanship to secure incredible wealth through trade and commerce. Unlike other European city states of the early modern era, Venice was a Republic. The key executive position of Doge rotated among elite families who established a tightly controlled oligarchy over all aspects of Venetian life. The Republic was, in important ways, one of Europe’s first secular authoritarian regimes. Music and art always have been important to the city. Both were put in the service of legitimating the regime while simultaneously providing expressive outlets in a society that was tightly organized from above. Following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Venice’s control over trade with the East waned. Europe’s major trade routes steadily shifted to the Atlantic, taking economic supremacy and political power with them. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Venice faltered and began redefining itself as Europe’s pleasure capital. The city leveraged gambling, courtesans, luxury goods, music and drama, and festivals to preserve its economic well-being. One new art form, opera, led the way. Opera emerged from the attempts of late-sixteenth-century Florentines and their

that would eventually rise to challenge royal and aristocratic domination across the continent. The genre’s connection to commerce was nowhere more evident than in Venice. Claudio Monteverdi is credited with consolidating the new performance art during the first decades of the seventeenth century. He was born in Cremona, and had won fame as a composer and performer of madrigals working in the court of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga. The 1607 performance of his Orfeo in Mantua’s Ducal Palace is considered by many to mark the initial consolidation of opera as a distinct art form. Monteverdi moved to Venice in 1613 to become the conductor in residence at the Basilica of San Marco, where he wrote operas and liturgical music that are still performed today. Monteverdi established opera as an art that could express the complexities of the human condition, and he secured Venice’s claim as its most important center. He and his colleagues in Venice transformed opera by turning what had been the plaything of dukes and princes into a genuinely public art. Venetian performance under their guidance favored grand spectacle over intellectual contemplation. In this regard, Monteverdi produced operas intended for a broader audience than the small circle of aristocrats who could fit into a ducal drawing room. Following the opening of Venice’s first opera house in 1637, Monteverdi and his colleagues began to write for stages Rinuccini began writing the librettos for increasingly sophisticated intermedi during court theatrical performances in the latter years of the sixteenth century. The intermedi at a performance of La pellegrina during the May 1589 wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine marked a departure as small musical skits interspersed throughout the evening constituted a single, integrated story bringing together verse and music for the first time. After experimenting with a number of alternative performance forms blending music and drama under the patronage of prominent Florentine Jacopo Corsi, Jacopo Peri set Rinuccini’s verse to music to retell the ancient legend of Daphne. In so doing, Peri and Rinuccini produced what many historians consider to have been the first opera. Other similar works followed Peri and Rinuccini’s Dafne, including their own Euridice, which was written two years later in honor of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV, King of France. The first opera to be performed in Rome, Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s La rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo, was staged in the Oratorio di Santa Maria in Vallicella as early as February 1600. Opera, however, proved to be politically paradoxical. On one hand, it was kept afloat by wealthy patrons who were looking for confirmation of existing social and political hierarchies; on the other hand, opera houses were commercial operations, reflecting the economic ethos of an emerging proto-capitalist bourgeoisie

that were constructed expressly for the presentation of musical drama. Such purpose-built theaters, initially purely a Venetian phenomenon, spread across Europe. These theaters took the form of amphitheaters with balconies arranged around the theaters’ outer edges. This form created the effect of having the audience seated at the windows of palazzosoverlooking the city’s numerous public squares. As Daniel Snowman tells the story in his masterful The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera (2009), the rudiments of an opera house came about by covering a Venetian piazza with a domed roof.

Venetian opera’s connection with public demand cultivated a distinctive form of musical drama that would sell tickets. The city’s indigenous performance style favored formal arias in an elegant bel canto style. This preference promoted a more individualistic form reflective of republican life, as opposed to greater dependence on choral and orchestral music embracing communal virtue. Plots became progressively more complex to hold commoner attention; the trappings of classical Greek mythology so important to the young Absolutists elsewhere fell by the wayside. Theatrical display beginning with elaborate stage machinery cast a spell on commoner audiences looking for spectacle and amusement.

Venice, a city of some 180,000 souls at the time, supported nine commercial opera houses by the end of the seventeenth century. As the city’s fortunes faltered, opera’s animating creativity moved with time to Naples, Paris, Vienna and London. Opera has remained a favored Venetian past time that continues to enliven local life. Meanwhile, the peculiarities of Venice’s urban form and political structure altered opera forever.

Teatro la Fenice in Venice Italy. Photo: Alejandro. 2017. Flickr.com. CC license 2.0 image.