Opera began in 1597 with Peri’s lost Dafne
Opera is young beside music history: Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1597) opened the genre. Latin opera means works. Orchestra plus libretto and singers of different tessituras fuse drama, dance, scenery, and costume before live crowds—Florentine Camerata humanists chasing Greek theatre’s ghost.
Peri’s Euridice (1600) and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) fixed early models. Baroque splendour served elites; Classical clarity featured Mozart and Beethoven; later centuries argued whether music, words, or bel canto virtuosity ruled.
Collaborative crews—composer, librettist, conductor, designers—make opera a factory of meaning that mirrors each era’s philosophy and politics on stage.
Sung theatre is far older than the name. Greek tragedy and comedy mixed music with drama; medieval Europe staged Latin liturgical dramas inside churches and vernacular mystery plays outside them; Japan developed nō, with chanted narration and stylised gesture, and China a ritual sung theatre in which music set the mood. Renaissance forms such as the madrigal, the oratorio, the ballet de cour and especially the intermedio, musical interludes slotted between the acts of spoken plays, paved the way. The Camerata itself met under the sponsorship of Count Giovanni de' Bardi, and its members included Vincenzo Galilei, a noted Hellenist and the father of Galileo.
Peri's Dafne, set to a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini about Apollo and Daphne, survives only as its text and a few fragments of music; Peri himself sang Apollo. Giulio Caccini reset Rinuccini's Euridice in 1602 and in the same year published Le nuove musiche, the first theoretical treatise on the new form. Two features made it radical: it was secular at a time when most art music served the church, and it replaced polyphony with monody, a single voice over a basso continuo. The Medici took it up as patrons, the Gonzaga court at Mantua commissioned Monteverdi's Orfeo, Marco da Gagliano set a new Dafne there in 1608, and in Rome Luigi Rossi premiered the lavish Il palazzo incantato for the Barberini family in 1642.
Source: History of opera
