HMR Project: History of Music & Modern Recording

Jacopo Peri Composes the First Operas

Jacopo Peri

Born 20 August 1561 in Rome, Jacopo Peri was also known as Il Zazzerino for his bountiful locks. Though a minor composer, his place in the late Renaissance is established by being credited with writing the first opera, 'Dafne', composed in 1597 to premiere in 1598. Baroque and opera (musical drama) emerged in Italy at about the same time, getting mixed in the operas of Peri. Peri was about eleven when he left Rome for Florence to enter into the Servite Santissima Annunziata monastery to become a singer. Sometime afterward he studied with Cristofano Malvezzi, the latter who may have attended the first meeting of the humanist society think tank, the Florentine Camerata, on 14 January 1573 at the home of Giovanni de' Bardi, Count of Vernio.

"Humanism" didn't get coined as a term until the early 19th century by theologian, Friedrich Niethammer, in reference to education based on classical systems (: ancient Greece). It had been about in one way or another since the 13th century without an identity, particularly in Peri's time when there was a revival of interest in classical Greece that had gone astray since the classical Renaissance. It was time to get serious and serious things were. Polyphony had been undergoing erasure on the chalkboard in sacred music, forces rigidly conservative both Protestant and Catholic. In secular music the conservative force was scholastics or, in so many words, gods Greek. The party that the Renaissance had become was over. It was needful for music to reacquire an intellect, strip down to essentials and interpret the Greeks with as great piety or sincerity as Christians wrote hymns. Baroque was wrought largely in an attempt to accomplish the most with the least, compositions purged bare of clever or arbitrary tricks to achieve counterpoint (trills et al). Peri's solution to troublesome polyphony was as novel as simple in the composing of monodies accompanied by no more than basso continuo. Baroque and opera elaborate for which they are generally known arrived later, after their originating thinning out of too liberal fat.

The return to the ancients or the classical meant Greece in general, as Roman culture was largely a renaming of the Greek preceding it. Rome, however, was behind the greatest achievement in architecture during Peri's time, the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in particular designed by Donato Bramante, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Carlo Maderno and Gian Lorenzo Bernini as of 1546 and completed in 1590. The original St. Peter's Church had been built in the 4th century under Constantine. This immense rebuild had for inspiration the dome of the Florence Cathedral designed by Filippo Brunelleschi looking back to Hadrian's Roman Pantheon constructed from 118 to 125 AD. Hadrian's Pantheon was a redesign of General Agrippa's about 27 BC under Emperor Augustus, that dedicated to the pantheon (all or complete) of Greco-Roman gods. The building of the dome to the Florence Cathedral affected the incipit of the Renaissance in architecture insofar as its original design by Neri di Fioravanti in 1367 had sparked a rejection of the Gothic flying buttress in favor of returning to the classic Roman dome as free-standing architecture. The genius of Filippo Brunelleschi had won the dome's final design in 1418. With its completion in 1436 the Renaissance-to-come had fairly rang its early first bell in Florence.

Rome wasn't the only pagan influence at St. Peter's. Peri was about twenty-five years of age when the Egyptian obelisk was erected in 1586, originally transferred to Rome from Alexandria in 37 AD by Caligula as a witness of empire. As a sundial the obelisk points to the twelve signs of the astrological zodiac, a pseudoscience well above a couple millennia old and studied in virtually every culture on earth, this despite that astrology had ever been, and remains, considered occult by the Church. The symbol of the Cross at the obelisk's top, however, symbolizes victory over paganism while St. Peter's itself was a symbol of the Counter-reformation letting Protestants to know that the Roman Catholic Church was here to stay. Firm alliances with the Holy Roman Empire to the north, Spain to the west and Venice to the east guaranteed it. The knelling of the bell upon the completion of St. Peter's in 1590 could be said to mark the end of the Renaissance and the arrival of a new age to be called Baroque. Such the scene as Peri entered into his thirties.

Roman Pantheon Hadrian

Roman Pantheon to the Gods Completed c 126 AD under Hadrian

Obelisk fountain designed by Giacomo Della Porta in 1575

Sculpted by Leonardo Sormani Marble

Source: Wikipedia

Florence Cathedral

Florence Cathedral Dome completed 1436

Begin the architectural Renaissance beyond Gothic

Source: Wikipedia

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St. Peter's Basilica Dome completed 1590

End the architectural Renaissance toward Baroque

Source: Britannica

As for Peri, having studied with Malvezzi sometime in the seventies during which he sang at multiple churches, he was likely composing by the time he was hired as an organist at the Badia Florentina, an abbey and church, in 1579. His most prestigious position arrived with the House of Medici come 1588. Both a singer and keyboard player for the Medicis, he also composed madrigals, which originated in Italy and were the dominant style of secular vocal music in Europe at Peri's time. He also wrote incidental music for plays, and intermedi (intermezzi), that is, intermissions between acts of plays that featured some or other sort of musical performance.

During the nineties Peri began associating with Jacopo Corsi and the Florentine Camerata. In 1597 Peri, Corsi and poet, Ottavio Rinuccini, collaborated on the creation of 'Dafne' to premiere in 1598 for Carnival at the Palazzo Corsi. While the libretto by Rinuccini survives, the music is lost excepting six fragments, two by Corsi, four by Peri. Two years later Peri and Rinuccini premiered 'Euridice' on 6 October 1600, this a Medici commission yet extant. Three days later on 9 October Peri joined other vocalists in the performance of the opera, 'Il Rapimento di Cefalo' with music largely by baroque composer, Giulio Caccini, and libretto by Gabriello Chiabrera, making that the third earliest opera after Peri's.

'Euridice' Opera by Jacopo Peri w text by Ottavio Rinuccini

Premiere 6 Oct 1600 for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV

Direction: John Walter Hill Euridici: Guilaine Senecal University of Illinois 6 Oct 2000

Among Peri's corpus of madrigals, operas, arias and ensembles, Peri's great contribution to baroque for which he is best known are his monodies with basso continuo, culling away all that isn't needful to compose a song, of which Monteverdi took note and expanded upon to greater fame. Basso continuo bubbled up at the fountainhead of baroque as well. Basso continuo is nearly an old way of saying rhythm bass line, a means of keeping beat trademark to baroque. This had been in practice for some while, but now instrumental parts like basso continuo were showing up in scores. The basso continuo part was written for performance on any of a number of common instruments like harpsichord, organ, lute, et al. It was often optional for performers to choose.

Titles below are stacked by convenience of Carter number in 'Le varie musiche and Other Songs' published in 1985. The number scheme in Carter is divided in five major parts. Nos.1-18 are songs from 'Le varie musiche' of 1609, 8-11 of which are solo madrigals. Nos. 19-25 are arias added to the second edition of 'Le varie musiche' which saw print in 1619. Nos.26-28 are titles printed in books not Peri's own. Nos.29-32 are from manuscripts. Nos.33-35 equal authorship on stylistic grounds or in connection with titles from 'Le varie musiche'.