Dafne

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Dafne
Opera by
Daphne chased by Apollo.jpg
Librettist Ottavio Rinuccini
LanguageItalian
Based on Daphne myth
Premiere
1598 (1598)
Palazzo Corsi, Florence

Dafne is the earliest known work that, by modern standards, could be considered an opera. [1] [2] [3] The libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini, based on an earlier intermedio created in 1589, "Combattimento di Apollo col serpente Pitone," and set to music by Luca Marenzio, survives complete. [4] The opera is considered to be the first "modern music drama." [5]

Contents

The mostly lost music was completed by Jacopo Peri, but at least two of the six surviving fragments are by Jacopo Corsi. Dafne was first performed during Carnival of 1598 (1597 old style) at the Palazzo Corsi. [6]

History

Most of Peri's music has been lost, despite its popularity and fame in Europe at the time of its composition, but the 455-line verse libretto was published and survives. Florence's ruling Medici family was sufficiently taken with Dafne to allow Peri's next work, Euridice, to be performed as part of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV's wedding celebrations in 1600. [7] [8]

The opera was written for an elite circle of humanists in Florence, the Florentine Camerata, between 1594 and 1597, with the support, and possibly the collaboration, of the composer and patron Jacopo Corsi. [9] [10] However, the first confirmed, non-public, performance of the work for Don Giovanni de' Medici was held in 1597 thanks to Marco da Gagliano. On Peri's own account, the opera seems to have been performed during three carnival celebrations (1595–1598), with the opera having been composed the year prior. The opera was later performed in 1599 at the Palazzo Pitti and at the Palazzo Guicciardini Corsi Salviati no later than January of the same year, but dates of performances are under scholastic debate. [10]

As an attempt to revive Greek drama, [11] it was a long way off from what the ancient Greeks would have recognized as dramatic art. [9]

Story

The opera's story regarding Apollo falling in love with the eponymous nymph, Daphne, takes its inspiration from Ovid and his narrative poetry, "Metamorphoses," a work in wide usage within the operas composed within the Florentine, Mantuan, and Roman operatic spheres. [12]

According to Rinunccini's libretto, Apollo saves mankind by shooting Python, and soon pushes Cupid into an archery contest to see who's the better shot. As a way to get back at him, Cupid shoots him and makes him fall in love with Daphne. In order to get away from Apollo, Daphne turns into a laurel tree which Apollo then makes a crown of, this becoming the symbol of poetry, music, and freedom. [13]

Music

Dafne is scored for a much smaller ensemble than Claudio Monteverdi's slightly later operas, namely, a harpsichord, a lute, a viol, an archlute, and a triple flute. [11] [ further explanation needed ] Drawing on a new development at the time, Peri established recitatives, melodic speech set to music, as a central part of opera. [9]

Peri's musical language was a conglomeration of his contemporaries and the experimentation with the invocation of human speech in music through recitative and musical prosody. For Peri, he strove to replicate the flow and musicality of speech in his writing, while contemporaries Emilio de' Cavalieri and Giulio Caccini sought different but similar compositional goals. [14] As a result, the music written for the opera may have been co-written with help from Caccini but contemporary research does not support this. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daphne</span> Figure in Greek mythology

Daphne, a figure in Greek mythology, is a naiad, a variety of female nymph associated with fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacopo Peri</span> Italian composer and singer (1561–1633)

Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer, singer and instrumentalist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. He wrote what is considered the first opera, the mostly lost Dafne, and also the earliest extant opera, Euridice (1600).

The Florentine Camerata, also known as the Camerata de' Bardi, were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama. They met at the house of Giovanni de' Bardi, and their gatherings had the reputation of having all the most famous men of Florence as frequent guests. After first meeting in 1573, the activity of the Camerata reached its height between 1577 and 1582. While propounding a revival of the Greek dramatic style, the Camerata's musical experiments led to the development of the stile recitativo. In this way it facilitated the composition of dramatic music and the development of opera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emilio de' Cavalieri</span> Italian composer

Emilio de' Cavalieri, or Emilio dei Cavalieri, was an Italian composer, producer, organist, diplomat, choreographer and dancer at the end of the Renaissance era. His work, along with that of other composers active in Rome, Florence and Venice, was critical in defining the beginning of the musical Baroque era. A member of the Roman School of composers, he was an influential early composer of monody, and wrote what is usually considered to be the first oratorio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesca Caccini</span> Italian composer

Francesca Caccini was an Italian composer, singer, lutenist, poet, and music teacher of the early Baroque era. She was also known by the nickname "La Cecchina", given to her by the Florentines and probably a diminutive of "Francesca". She was the daughter of Giulio Caccini. Her only surviving stage work, La liberazione di Ruggiero, is widely considered the oldest opera by a woman composer. As a female composer she helped to solidify the agency and the cultural and political programs of her female patron.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marco da Gagliano</span> Italian composer

Marco da Gagliano was an Italian composer of the early Baroque era. He was important in the early history of opera and the development of the solo and concerted madrigal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacopo Corsi</span> Italian composer

Jacopo Corsi was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque and one of Florence's leading patrons of the arts, after only the Medicis. His best-known work is Dafne (1597/98), whose score he wrote in collaboration with Jacopo Peri. Six fragments of the score have survived, two by Corsi and four by Peri. The libretto, by Ottavio Rinuccini, has survived intact. Despite priority quibbles at the time, Dafne is generally accepted as the first opera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottavio Rinuccini</span>

Ottavio Rinuccini was an Italian poet, courtier, and opera librettist at the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. In collaborating with Jacopo Peri to produce the first opera, Dafne, in 1597, he became the first opera librettist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Italian opera</span> Operas in Italy or in the Italian language

Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are amongst the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world.

<i>Euridice</i> (Peri) Earliest surviving opera

Euridice is an opera by Jacopo Peri, with additional music by Giulio Caccini. It is the earliest surviving opera, Peri's earlier Dafne being lost. The libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini is based on books X and XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses which recount the story of the legendary musician Orpheus and his wife Euridice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Origins of opera</span>

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 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 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.

<i>LArianna</i> Opera by Claudio Monteverdi

L'Arianna is the lost second opera by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. One of the earliest operas in general, it was composed in 1607–1608 and first performed on 28 May 1608, as part of the musical festivities for a royal wedding at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua. All the music is lost apart from the extended recitative known as "Lamento d'Arianna". The libretto, which survives complete, was written in eight scenes by Ottavio Rinuccini, who used Ovid's Heroides and other classical sources to relate the story of Ariadne's abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos and her subsequent elevation as bride to the god Bacchus.

<i>La Dafne</i>

La Dafne (Daphne) is an early Italian opera, written in 1608 by the Italian composer Marco da Gagliano from a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. It is described as a favola in musica composed in one act and a prologue. The opera is based on the myth of Daphne and Apollo as related by Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses. An earlier version of the libretto had been set to music in 1597–98 by Jacopo Peri, whose Dafne is generally considered to be the first opera.

Il rapimento di Cefalo was one of the first Italian operas. Most of the music was written by Giulio Caccini but Stefano Venturi del Nibbio, Luca Bati and Piero Strozzi also contributed. The libretto, by Gabriello Chiabrera, is in a prologue, five scenes and an epilogue and is based on the Classical myth of Cephalus and Aurora.

<i>La Flora</i> Opera by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri

La Flora, o vero Il natal de' fiori is an opera in a prologue and five acts composed by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri to a libretto by Andrea Salvadori. It was first performed on 14 October 1628 at the Teatro Mediceo in Florence to celebrate the marriage of Margherita de' Medici and Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma. Based on the story of Chloris and Zephyrus in Book V of Ovid's Fasti, Salvadori's libretto contains many allegorical references to the transfer of political power, the beauty of Tuscany, and the strength of the Medici dynasty. The score of La Flora is one of only two still in existence out of Gagliano's 14 published stage works. Several of its arias are still performed as concert pieces.

Andrea Salvadori was an Italian poet and librettist. He was born in Florence and educated at the Collegio Romano in Rome. From 1616 until his death in Florence at the age of 43, he was the principal court poet to the Medici family. In addition to numerous theatrical entertainments and poems, he wrote the libretti for five operas, four of which have survived, although only La Flora composed by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri has an extant score. He was married twice, first to Emilia Rigogli by whom he had three sons and then to the painter Alessandra Furini. A collection of Salvadori's principal works curated by his son Francesco was published in 1668.

<i>Dafne</i> (Opitz-Schütz) Opera with libretto by Martin Opitz and lost music by Heinrich Schütz

Die Dafne (1627) is an opera. Its libretto was written by Martin Opitz and its music was composed by Heinrich Schütz. It has traditionally been regarded as the first German opera, though it has also been proposed more recently that it was in fact a spoken drama with inserted song and ballet numbers.

<i>Orfeo dolente</i>

Orfeo dolente is an opera by Domenico Belli to a libretto by Gabriello Chiabrera, an example of "representative style" of the early Baroque era. The work is divided into five interludes which were performed for the first time as intermedi in a performance of Torquato Tasso's play Aminta at the Palazzo della Gherardesca in Florence in 1616.

Dafne in lauro is a chamber opera, a componimento per camera, composed by Johann Joseph Fux to a libretto by Pietro Pariati and performed for the imperial court before dinner on 1 October 1714 in the Favorita garden, Vienna, for the birthday of Emperor Charles VI. The opera is based on the myth of Apollo and Daphne, where Daphne pleads to Diana to be saved from Apollo's pursuit of her and is turned into a laurel tree.

References

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  3. "Travel Advisory; Opera's 400th Birthday Is Celebrated in Vienna". The New York Times . 3 May 1998. Retrieved 7 August 2007.
  4. Sonneck, O. G. (1913). ""Dafne", the First Opera. A Chronological Study". Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft. 15 (1): 102–110. ISSN   1612-0124. JSTOR   929391.
  5. Hoxby, Blair (2005). "The Doleful Airs of Euripides: The Origins of Opera and the Spirit of Tragedy Reconsidered". Cambridge Opera Journal. 17 (3): 253–269. doi:10.1017/S0954586706002035. ISSN   0954-5867. JSTOR   3878297.
  6. Strainchamps, Edmond (2001). "Corsi, Jacopo". Oxford Music Online. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.06571 . Retrieved 2023-07-27.
  7. "Music to the ears". news.com.au . 27 November 2006. Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 7 August 2007.
  8. "Opera Before Gluck". Music With Ease. Retrieved 7 August 2007.
  9. 1 2 3 Jacopo Peri – Dafne page
  10. 1 2 Porter, William V. (1965). "Peri and Corsi's Dafne: Some New Discoveries and Observations". Journal of the American Musicological Society . 18 (2): 170–196. doi:10.2307/830682. JSTOR   830682.
  11. 1 2 Otten, Joseph (1911). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved 7 August 2007.
  12. Sternfeld, F. W. (1978). "The First Printed Opera Libretto". Music & Letters. 59 (2): 121–138. doi:10.1093/ml/59.2.121. ISSN   0027-4224. JSTOR   734132.
  13. Savage, Roger (1989). "Prologue: Daphne Transformed". Early Music. 17 (4): 485–493. doi:10.1093/earlyj/XVII.4.485. ISSN   0306-1078. JSTOR   3127017.
  14. Carlton, Richard A. (2000). "Florentine Humanism and the Birth of Opera: The Roots of Operatic "Conventions"". International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. 31 (1): 67–78. doi:10.2307/3108425. ISSN   0351-5796. JSTOR   3108425.
  15. Gerard, Helen (1924). "THE FIRST OPERA: Presented at Florence in 1600 and again in 1923". The American Magazine of Art. 15 (9): 463–466. ISSN   2151-254X. JSTOR   23929390.