A brief history of Opera

Opera, a staged drama set to music in its entirety, made up of vocal pieces with instrumental accompaniment and usually with orchestral overtures and interludes. In some operas the music is continuous throughout an act; in others it is broken up into discrete pieces, or “numbers,” separated either by recitative (a dramatic type of singing that approaches speech) or by spoken dialogue. This article focuses on opera in the Western tradition. For an overview of opera and operalike traditions in Asia (particularly in China), see the appropriate sections of Chinese music, Japanese music, South Asian arts, and Southeast Asian arts; see also short entries on specific forms of Chinese opera, such as chuanqi, jingxi, kunqu, and nanxi.

Music historians have continued to debate opera’s ancestry. The plays of the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides combined poetic drama and music. During the Middle Ages, biblical dramas that were chanted or interspersed with music were known under various labels, including liturgical dramas (ordines) and similar plays performed in church. These and related musico-dramatic forms may have become indirect ancestors of opera, but the earliest universally accepted direct ancestors of opera appeared in 16th-century Italy.

The courts of northern Italy, especially that of the Medici family in Florence, were particularly important for the development of opera. Indeed, Florence became the birthplace of opera at the end of the century, as the result of the confluence of three cultural forces: an established theatrical tradition, a strong sense of civic humanism, and a distinctly Florentine view of music and music’s relation to the cosmos.

Foremost among the factors that made 16th-century Florence ripe for the advent of opera was its long tradition of musical theatre, manifested principally in the musical productions known as intermedi (or interludes) that were staged between the acts of spoken plays. Intermedi served both to signal the divisions of the spoken drama, since there was no curtain to be dropped, and to suggest the passage of time by suspending the action between one act of the play and the next and, during the interval, by employing characters and themes unrelated to the main plot and only loosely connected from one interlude to another. The Florentine court offered lavish intermedi, planned and rehearsed months in advance and intended to impress invited guests with the wealth, generosity, and power of their Medici hosts. For the so-called 1589 intermedi, which climaxed a monthlong series of events to celebrate the marriage of Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici (Ferdinand I) of Tuscany to the French princess Christine of Lorraine, a huge team of artists, artisans, poets, musicians, architects, and technicians was assembled under the intellectual guidance of the prominent Florentine aristocrat Giovanni Bardi. As the moving spirit behind the program, Bardi worked closely with local poets and musicians—some of whom were involved in the first experimental opera productions a decade later.

Britannica