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The Florentine Camerata and the Development of Opera

By 1573, the Churchs long stranglehold on human knowledge and creativity had eased, allowing for new growth the areas of the arts and sciences. With the shift in culture came the creation of the Florentine Camerata, a selection of musicians, writers, and intellectuals working together under Count Giovanni de' Bardi to take advantage of their new freedoms. Among other things, the Camerata focused on the development of music and are generally credited with the formation of opera (Siepmann). At the time, one of the most popular styles of composition was polyphony, which allowed for the use of harmonies in the music, but which also had the unfortunate tendency to obscure the text. To correct this, many members of the Camerata began writing in monody again, which was characterized by a solo melody accompanied by minimal instrumentation (Siepmann). By use of this style, they were able to better reach the audience with the message of the text. This paved the way for the development of opera as a medium of music and text used for dramatic storytelling effect. The monody split into two popular styles: the aria, a solo piece performed by one of the principals; and the recitative, a song style based on the natural cadences of the spoken language. The two came together in Monteverdis LOrfeo (1607), considered one of the best of the early Baroque operas and still performed today (Goddard). It was characteristic of opera at that time not only in musical style but in subject matter, reflecting the trend towards grand tales based on the mythology of the Greeks and Romans. Opera largely consisted of two genres at the time: opera seria, an opera based on a dramatic, serious style, and opera buffa, the comic opera. The two styles never mixed until

Mozarts time with his invention of what is now known as the dramma giocoso, which included both serious and funny elements. From then, opera developed into the style Bel Canto, which was characterized by pieces that emphasized the singers technical ability rather than the emotion of a scene. This resulted in a style that was very formulaic, allowing very little room for interpretation. It wasnt until Richard Wagner began using gesamtkunstwerk, an artistic philosophy focused on the melding of all aspects of artwork into one cohesive whole designed to amplify the emotions and message of the central theme, that opera began to see variety again. Another style he brought with him, through-composition, created continuity in the score of operas that previously had been riddled with jarring breaks between recitative and aria. By no longer making use of discernable breaks between specific arias, the music and, consequently, the story were allowed to flow more easily. Finally, he was extremely influential in popularizing the concept of leitmotifs, distinct musical themes that represented people, emotions, or other concepts of the story. By the end of the 19th century, opera drifted from grand stories about gods and kings to the style verismo, which focused on realism and every-day, ordinary characters. They often tended towards the very dramatic and violent, but were also intended to relate better to the ordinary person. One of the more famous examples of the concept of realistic opera is La bohme, written by Giacomo Puccini and premiered in 1986. Bohme featured uses of leitmotifs and through-composition with a particular blend of wry wit and tragedy which feels extremely real and relatable to the audience, in addition to being an excellent example of the work that had gone into opera before it.

Works Cited

Goddard, Joseph. The Rise and Development of Opera. Google Books. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA6>.

Siepmann, Peter. "The Florentine Camerata, the Inception of Monody and the Birth of Opera." Http://www.petersiepmann.net/. Web. 9 Oct. 2011.