The Origins of Opera

Opera, the art form in which a dramatic story is told entirely or largely through singing, is often regarded as one of the great achievements of Western music. Yet it did not evolve gradually out of earlier musical traditions in the way one might expect. Instead, it was deliberately invented, the product of a group of thinkers in Italy around the end of the sixteenth century who set out to create a new kind of theatre. Their experiment gave rise to a form that would spread across Europe and remain popular for centuries.

The people responsible were members of an informal circle of scholars, poets and musicians who met in the city of Florence. This group is often referred to by historians as the Camerata. Its members were fascinated by the culture of ancient Greece, and in particular by ancient Greek drama, which they believed had been sung or chanted rather than simply spoken. They wished to revive what they imagined to be the powerful emotional effect of this ancient theatre, in which words and music had supposedly worked together to move the audience.

A central concern of the group was the relationship between words and music. The elaborate choral music popular at the time often set several voices singing different words at once, which made the text almost impossible to follow. The reformers objected to this, arguing that music should serve the words and make their meaning clear, not bury it beneath layers of competing sound. They wanted a style of singing in which a single voice could deliver a text clearly while the music heightened its emotional force.

Out of these ideas emerged a new manner of singing, sometimes described as a kind of heightened speech, in which a solo voice followed the natural rhythms and inflections of spoken language, supported by a simple instrumental accompaniment. This allowed a character to express feelings and to advance the story in a way that ordinary song, with its repeated words and fixed patterns, could not. It was this flexible, speech-like singing that made sung drama possible, for it enabled performers to carry a narrative forward through music.

The earliest operas took their subjects from ancient myth and legend, drawing on the same classical world that had inspired the reformers. Among the most famous of the early works was one based on the myth of a musician who descends to the underworld to recover his lost wife, a story whose subject was itself the power of music. Composed in the early years of the seventeenth century, this work is often regarded as the first great masterpiece of the new form, combining expressive solo singing with choruses, dances and instrumental passages into a satisfying whole.

At first opera was an exclusive entertainment, performed at the courts of princes and nobles for invited guests on special occasions. It was closely bound up with the display of wealth and power, and ordinary people had no access to it. This began to change when the first public opera houses opened, where anyone who could pay for a ticket was admitted. The appearance of these theatres transformed opera from a private courtly amusement into a form of popular entertainment, and it quickly attracted enthusiastic audiences.

As opera spread beyond Italy, it developed distinct national styles. Composers and audiences in different countries adapted the form to their own languages and tastes, so that the opera of one nation could differ markedly from that of another in its subjects, its balance of singing and spectacle, and its musical character. Debates arose about how opera should be written and what it was for, and these arguments helped to drive the art form forward, producing a rich variety of approaches over the following centuries.

From its beginnings as the deliberate experiment of a small group of Italian enthusiasts, opera grew into one of the most ambitious and enduring of all art forms, uniting music, poetry, drama, design and dance in a single spectacle. The reformers who gathered in Florence could hardly have imagined the scale of what they had set in motion, yet their basic conviction, that music joined to words could move the human heart with unique power, has proved remarkably durable, and continues to fill opera houses around the world.