Episode Notes A part of the Three Minute Modernist Family of Podcasts! Join Our Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/3MinModernist Sources https://web.archive.org/web/20110719215238/http://sscm-jscm.press.illinois.edu/v9/no1/harness.html#ch7 Wikipedia - History of Opera San Francisco Opera - History of Opera ~Script~ It’s the end of the sixteenth century, and there are Humanists run around, willy nilly, being all artsy, and not a little bit fartsy. There’s a strange feeling in the air, like they want to bring Ancient Greece back. The Rennaisancers had focused on biting the entire bit of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, so the Florentine Camerata, arguably the most hipster of any group not based in or around Williamsburg Brooklyn, decided that it was time to bring Greek drama back. But also, they really liked music. And so, Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini created the first modern Opera, Dafne, a retelling of the done-to-death Dafne myth, was performed in 1598. And I would do an entire podcast series on Dafne, if it weren’t almost entirely lost. But Peri’s next work survives, and that’s where my journey starts. What journey, you may ask? Well, I grew up going to the symphony with my grade school class, the Lollipop Concerts they called them. I was secretly buying Mahler and Philip Glass CDs along with The Specials and Gun ‘n Roses at Tower Records during high school, listening to the hits of Stravinsky on our local left side of the dial radio station. I loved orchestral music, I love string quartets. And yeah, I love Death Metal, ska, punk, jazz, bubble gum pop, goth, funk, y’alternative and musicals on and on. But you know, I never got into one of the forms of music that helped define the art music world. One of the forms of musical expression that some point to as the peak of cultural excellence. I just never got into it, and you know what, my goal for 2024 was to get into it. Hard. Because… I Really Wanna Like Opera. OK, I’m Chris Garcia. I’m an archivist, a writer, and pro wrestling enthusiast. I’m decidedly not the target audience for opera these days. When I started looking into the opera world, I wanted to go to the very beginning, but I almost immediately discovered that the first modern opera, Dafne, was lost like tears in the rain. Jacopo Peri’s follow-up, though, was still around. And thus, I headed to YouTube to find it. As they were trying their damnedest to relaunch Greek drama, the second opera, the oldest surviving, was based on another myth – Euryadice. That’s right; we’ve been recycling content for new media since the dawn of time. Like everything I do, I had to dig into the deepest history, and with opera, that’s pretty deep. There’ve been songs that tell stories back beyond recorded history. The oldest existing songs are either religious rites or story songs, or workman’s songs, like the Egyptian song that tells the story of The Two Brothers. The opera, in many ways, eschews these sorts of songs in preference to story. It is the explicit use of theatricality, that these are to be staged stories (at least for the first five hundred years or so) and thus they needed to be presented in a more-or-less specified context – a salon, or later, a theatre, which took them out of the mainstream of music, which was more often encountered in the wild, as it were. Opera did not end up having nearly the influence on modern popular music that orchestral music did. It did, however, lead to the Musical, which is another podcast for another lifetime. OK, the idea to revive Greek drama was interesting. It’s not like the 16th century was some dead zone for theatre. The Brits were doing a lot with theatre at the time, and not just Shakespeare, who was alive and presumably well (if he ever actually existed…) when Peri’s operas debuted. In Italy, though, there was a long history of theatrical starts-and-stops. Ancient Roman theatre basically recycled Greek dramas, though produced some impressive comedies of their own. The Fall of Rome led to a dead period, but the church brought it back using actors and theatrical presentations to tell the stories of parables and other Catholic niceties. These placed the center for drama within churches in Italy, which only started to change with the rise of Comedia del-Arte, which took the show to the streets…or town plazas. Anywhere they could put up a stage, really. In Ferrara and Rome, there were those who had been studying and translating the ancient Greek texts for almost a century. They had started to produce them in theatrical settings, and later theatres, but also they were not averse to doing open-air productions. No matter what the form of artistic expression, there will always be indies. The division between what would become traditional drama and liturgical plays is fairly stark, and at the time could more-or-less be divided ...
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Jun 26 202435 mins