The Hegemony of Opera

In every era, one particular art form holds hegemony: in the Renaissance, it was sculpture, and in the Baroque, it was music. The turn of the 16th century marks the birth of modern music, with a series of significant innovations gaining ground. The sonata, the instrumental work, becomes the victorious opposite of the cantata, the vocal composition: the a cappella style, multi-voiced singing without instrumental accompaniment, recedes. The monody, a solo voice accompanied by instruments, comes to the fore. Compared to the leading melody, the remaining voices' only significance lies in their accompanying chords, thus instruments replace them, and the general outline of this accompaniment is known as basso continuo.

In this, the Baroque reveals its playful and artistic nature, its affinity for pictoriality and mood, its pursuit of heightened artistic refinement, color, and nuance, power, and expressive sensibility, while also displaying a minor regard for the originality, directness, and simplicity of emotional expression. Music thus takes the most powerful artistic form of expression: the dramatic.

Emilio de Cavalieri's work Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo, premiered in Rome in 1600, is considered the first oratorio. This artistic form quickly flourished, and it stands in relation to opera as a sketch does to a painting. The first true opera, Daphne, premiered three years earlier in 1597, written by Ottavio Rinuccini with music by Jacopo Peri during the Florence Carnival. The dramma per musica emerged from the experiments of an intellectual amateur circle; this circle aimed to revive ancient Greek tragedy, conceived as recitations interrupted by choruses and accompanied by the cithara. Accordingly, they chose simple, predominantly mythological themes with singable situations, which were then set to music. This type of opera still bore little resemblance to the opera we know today. It was more a musical recitation than singing, chanted in the manner of medieval church liturgies, accompanied by a sparse, nearly invisible orchestra, yet its impact was enhanced from the start by dance and various spectacles. This new kind of speech, which was much more natural and comprehensible compared to earlier vocal music since it followed normal accents, was called stile parlante.

Monteverdi's Orfeo of 1607 was already a step forward, with livelier recitative and a much more independent role for music, which now also took on the tasks of interludes and tone painting. Monteverdi is also credited with introducing the duet into opera and inventing the violin tremolo, and his first work already featured the leading motif. In terms of external grandeur, Baroque opera productions surpassed all their successors. Bernini, the master of the arts, once presented the Castel Sant'Angelo, with boats and people on the roaring Tiber. Suddenly, the dam that separated the river from the audience was breached, and the waves surged toward the crowd with such force that they fled in panic, but Bernini had calculated everything precisely, and the water stopped just before the first row!

Opera soon became the queen of the era. In 1637, the first public opera house was established in Venice, and by 1650, there were already four. In 1627, the first German opera, also titled Daphne, was written by Heinrich Schütz, a key precursor to Handel and Bach. The aria gradually became distinct from the recitative, the chorus almost completely receded into the background, and singers became mere extras.

Egon Friedell "Az újkori kultúra története III." Holnap Kiadó, Budapest, 1989