Opera

L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi

In the early seventeenth century, an exciting new musical genre appeared in Venice. This new type of music would become the dominant European genre for the next two hundred fifty years: opera.

An opera is basically a play (inspired by ancient Greek theater) with the actors singing their dialogue, accompanied by an orchestra. There are three basic forms in which the dialogue can be sung in an opera:

• Recitative: In a recitative, the singers simply make their way through the lyrics with minimal accompaniment. While there is pitch and some semblance of melody, there is minimal structure and forward motion.
• Aria: An aria, in contrast, is a section with a highly developed musical form, recurring motifs, and unified musical ideas. An aria is usually a solo section, although duets and trios are not uncommon.
• Chorus: A chorus is where a large number of people are all singing together, usually to advance the plot in some way.

Throughout much of an opera, the melody will be present in the vocal parts, and the orchestra will simply perform chords to harmonize the voice, creating a homophonic texture. This means there is a clear differentiation between melody and accompaniment, as opposed to monophony (which has only one part) and polyphony (where each part is a melody in its own right, rather than specifically accompanying another part.)

The orchestra accompanied the singers, but also played on its own. There were three main types of purely instrumental music to be heard in an opera:

• Overture: Played before the opera begins.
• Entr'Act: Played at the beginning of each act.
• Intermezzo: Played in between acts.

The first opera was L'Orfeo, composed in 1607 by a Venetian priest named Claudio Monteverdi. The opera's libretto was written by Alessandro Striggio and tells the story of Orpehus, the Greek musician who attempted to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld by lulling Hades to sleep with his music.