Jacopo Peri

Jacopo Peri: The Man Who Invented Opera

On 6 October 1600, in the Palazzo Pitti, the Medici married Maria de' Medici to Henry IV of France and put on an entertainment in which the story was not spoken with musical interludes but sung from beginning to end. A Florentine court tenor called Jacopo Peri sang Orpheus. The piece was *Euridice*, and it is the earliest opera whose music survives. Peri had already done the same thing two years earlier with a work whose score is almost entirely lost.

A Singer at the Medici Court

Jacopo di Antonio di Francesco Peri was born on 20 August 1561 to a middle-class family. His birthplace is disputed — he claimed Roman origins, but the evidence points to Florence — and Florence is where he was raised, educated and employed. He sang at the Servite monastery of Santissima Annunziata, studied with Cristofano Malvezzi, and worked as organist and singer in various churches before entering Medici service around September 1588 as a tenor and keyboard player. He was nicknamed *Il Zazzerino* for his hair. His first compositions were the ordinary furniture of a court musician's life: madrigals, incidental music, and contributions to the lavish *intermedi* that punctuated spoken plays at Florentine festivities.

The Argument About Greek Tragedy

The idea that made him came out of a private argument. Florentine intellectuals had convinced themselves that ancient Greek tragedy had been sung throughout, not spoken, and that modern polyphony — several voices weaving over one another, the words lost in the weave — had destroyed music's ancient power to move an audience. After Count Bardi left for Rome in 1592, these discussions continued under the patronage of the nobleman Jacopo Corsi, whose circle included the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and Peri himself. What they wanted was not a new entertainment. They wanted to reconstruct a lost one.

Dafne

The reconstruction was performed at Corsi's palace, most probably in October 1598: *Dafne*, Rinuccini's pastoral poem set by Peri as a staged drama sung throughout, with the music shaped to carry the characters' feelings. That is the definition of opera, and *Dafne* is the first thing to meet it. Almost none of the score survives, which means the founding document of the most expensive art form in the world exists chiefly as testimony.

Euridice, and the Three Versions

*Euridice* followed for the 1600 wedding, and its history is a mess that tells you a great deal about how the form was born. Peri published his setting in 1601, claiming priority. But the performance on 6 October had used music by his rival Giulio Caccini for the title character, with Peri singing Orfeo to his own music — a hybrid. Caccini then published his own complete setting and had it performed in 1602. Scholars distinguish three *Euridice*s, and the invention of opera turns out to have been a scramble between two singers at the same court.

The occasion was also politics. As the musicologist Kelley Harness reads it, the opera's allegory casts Euridice as Florence and Orfeo as Grand Duke Ferdinando I, whose achievement was restoring Florence's equilibrium between the European superpowers of France and Spain — the very balance the marriage was meant to seal.

What Recitative Actually Did

Peri's solution to the central problem — how do you sing a whole drama without stopping the drama every few minutes — was recitative: a speech-song pitched deliberately between ordinary speech and full song, following the rhythm and rise of the spoken line while remaining music. In his preface he described the aim without ornament: "I dedicated myself wholly to searching out the imitation that is owed to these poems."

The difference between him and Caccini is measurable. Harness notes that Peri's Orfeo ranges from d to f′ and swings harmonically from E flat to B major, where Caccini keeps his within a single octave; Peri uses sudden harmonic juxtaposition, chromaticism, dissonance and rhythmic irregularity to register a character's emotional pressure, and lets Euridice's music change as she does, from a modest nymph into a wife who answers Orfeo in his own idiom. Caccini's writing is smoother and more tuneful. Peri argued that his own was better fitted to the drama.

Overtaken

He kept working — later operas, court music, a collaboration with Marco da Gagliano on *La Flora* — and he kept his Medici positions, but the form he had opened moved past him fast. Within seven years Monteverdi's *Orfeo* had demonstrated what a real composer could build on Peri's foundation, and by Peri's death on 12 August 1633 his own manner sounded antique. Hardly any of his music is performed today.

Why Jacopo Is Called a Genius

The claim for Peri is unusually precise: he solved a technical problem nobody had solved, and the solution became the basis of an entire art form. Recitative is an invention in the engineering sense — a device that did a job no existing musical resource could do: carry continuous dramatic speech at a natural pace while staying sung. Everything from Monteverdi to Mozart to Verdi runs on it. His contemporary Pietro de' Bardi credited Peri with "greater science" than Caccini, which is exactly right: what he had was a worked-out theory of how music should imitate the movement of speech, and the technique to realise it.

The counter-case matters. He did not do it alone. Rinuccini supplied the verse and Corsi the room and the money; Caccini was working the same seam and published a competing *Euridice*; the 1600 performance was a patchwork of both men's music. *Dafne*, the actual first opera, is lost, so the primary claim rests on report rather than score. And Peri was not a great composer. Caccini's setting was judged more melodious even at the time, Monteverdi eclipsed him within a decade, and his output has left the repertoire. He is a genius of invention rather than of composition — the man who built the mechanism somebody else would use to build the cathedral.

Legacy

Everything that followed — four centuries of opera houses, singers, subsidy and argument — descends from a small experimental entertainment staged in a private Florentine palace by men trying to reconstruct a Greek performance practice they had guessed at and got wrong. The Camerata's premise was almost certainly mistaken; the thing they invented while pursuing it was not. Peri's own music is a curiosity now, revived occasionally by early-music specialists. His device is in use every night.

Achievements

• Notable work: Euridice
• Instruments: organ and voice
• Genres: opera