La nascita dell'opera a Firenze

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Florence was no longer the undisputed center of the Renaissance that it had been a century earlier. The city was experiencing under the grand duchy of the Medici a period of refined decadence, in which the arts no longer the engine of a cultural change but an ornament of the court. And yet, precisely in those years, there would be born in Florence an art form destined to conquer Europe: opera.

It all began in the palace of count Giovanni Bardi, a nobleman learned and passionate about antiquity classical. Around the 1573, Bardi gathered a group of musicians, poets and scholars who would take the name of Camerata Fiorentina. They would meet to discuss about music, about poetry and above all about theater Greek, convinced that the music polyphonic of the their time had betrayed the power expressive of the word.

The problem that themselves posed was simple but radical: how could music move the listener if several voices sang together words different? In the theater of the ancients, they argued, the actors recited by singing a line at a time, and so doing they managed to move the audience to the point of tears. It was necessary therefore to invent a new style, in which a single voice would sing the text supported by a simple accompaniment instrumental.

They called it recitar cantando, and from this intuition would be born the recitative, the backbone of every opera to come. The two musicians who most than any others put into practice these ideas were Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. In 1598 Peri composed the Dafne, considered the first opera in history, although the score has been lost. Two years later, for the wedding of Maria de' Medici with Henry IV of France, Peri presented Euridice, the first opera to have come down to us.

It was performances reserved for a public narrow of courtiers and of diplomats, and perhaps would have remained a experiment local if had not been the intervention of a composer of genius: Claudio Monteverdi. In Mantua, at the court of the Gonzaga, in 1607 he presented Orfeo, a masterpiece that united the recitative of Florence to a richness of orchestration and to a depth emotional never heard before. If Florence had invented opera, Mantua to it gave a soul.

But why did the genre take off truly only in Venice? In 1637 opened in the lagoon the Teatro San Cassiano, the first theater opera public in history. For the first time anyone who had the price of the ticket could attend a performance once reserved for princes. Venice, a republic of merchants with a public middle-class and educated, offered the ground ideal because opera could become a phenomenon of mass culture.

The same Monteverdi, by then having moved to Venice as chapel master of of San Marco, composed for those theaters two masterpieces late, The return of Ulysses and the coronation of Poppea. In them the characters are no longer figures mythological abstract, but beings human with passions, weaknesses and contradictions. The audience recognized them as mirrors of itself .

What had remained meanwhile in Florence, the cradle original of the new genre? Little more than the memory of an idea. Opera would return to the city that had seen it born only much later , and in forms by then transformed by the taste of other eras. And yet the legacy of the Camerata was not itself lost: every time that in a theater a singer expresses with a voice alone the pain of a character, the shadow of those Florentines of the sixteenth century remains alive.