Additional opera houses soon opened throughout the city, performing a variety of works during Venice’s Carnivale season. Opera was no longer a court entertainment but a commercial enterprise open to the paying public. Several decades later, opera had spread throughout the Italian peninsula, the result of touring companies who performed in all the major cities. The first public opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano, opened in Venice in 1637. Moving to Venice in 1613, Monteverdi subsequently enriched the performance of opera by adding an orchestra, more lavish costumes and sets and a more dramatic vocal style. Claudio Monteverdi was a native of Mantua, Lombardy, who wrote his first opera, La Favola d’Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus), in 1607 for the court.

Peri’s later composition, Euridice, written in 1600 with Giulio Caccini, is the earliest surviving opera and was initially performed as part of a celebration for a Medici wedding, thereby propelling opera into the mainstream of court entertainment. In the 1590s, he met Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in Florence and they invited the poet, Ottavio Rinuccini, to write a text for a new composition. Peri was born in Rome but relocated to Florence to study music. The earliest known opera composition is Dafne, written by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) in 1597. It was based on a number of performance genres that preceded it, including Greek drama, poems sung by a solo vocalist with single instrument backing and madrigals ( a capella singing by 3-6 harmonizing vocalists).

Italian opera is a musical art form that had its beginnings in Florence in the late 1500s.

Italian opera music