Jacopo Peri (August 20, 1561 – August 12, 1633) was an Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera. He wrote the first work to be called an opera today, Dafne (1598), and also the first opera to have survived to the present day, Euridice (1600).
Peri was probably born in Rome, but studied in Florence with Cristofano Malvezzi, and went on to work in a number of churches there, both as an organist and as a singer. He subsequently began to work in the Medici court, first as a tenor singer and keyboard player, and later as a composer. His earliest works were incidental music for plays, intermedi, and madrigals.
In the 1590s, Peri became associated with Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in Florence. They felt contemporary art was inferior to classical Greek and Roman works, and decided to attempt to recreate Greek tragedy, as they understood it. Their work added to that of the Florentine Camerata of the previous decade, which produced the first experiments in monody, the solo song style over continuo bass which eventually developed into recitative and aria. Peri and Corsi brought in the poet Ottavio Rinuccini to write a text, and the result, Dafne, though nowadays thought to be a long way from anything the Greeks would have recognised, is seen as the first work in a new form, opera.
Rinuccini and Peri next collaborated on Euridice. This was first performed on October 6, 1600, and, unlike Dafne, has survived to the present day (though it is hardly ever staged, and then only as an historical curio). The work made use of recitatives, a new development which went between the arias and choruses and served to move the action along.
Peri produced a number of other operas, often in collaboration with other composers, and also wrote a number of other pieces for various court entertainments. None of his pieces are performed today, and even by the time of his death his operatic style was looking rather old-fashioned when compared to the work of relatively younger reformist composers such as Claudio Monteverdi. Peri's influence on those later composers, however, was large.
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Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work (called an opera) which combines a text (called a libretto) and a musical score.
Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble.
Opera started in Italy at the end of the 1500's (Jacopo Peri's lost Dafne, produced in Florence about 1597) and soon spread through the rest of Europe.
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Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific revolution. Indeed, his dedication may have brought him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments. His most celebrated works include The New Atlantis.
His works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or, simply, the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology to the present.
Related Reading:
Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin
Music in the Western World: A History in Documents
Francis Bacon
Sylva sylvarum (1626) (Pages 190-193)
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