What musicians did not dare undertake out of dread of the thunderbolts of the church, a company of literati at Florence commenced in 1580.  The primary purpose was the revival of Greek art, including music.  This association, in conjunction with the Medicean Academy, laid down the rule that distinct individuality of expression in music was to be sought for.  As results, quickly came musical drama with recitative (modern form of the Greek chorus) and solo melody for characteristic parts of the legend or story.  Out of this beginning swiftly grew the opera.  Composers in the new form sprung up in various parts of Italy, though Naples, Venice, and Florence continued to be its centres.

Between 1637 and 1700, there were performed three hundred operas at Venice alone.  An account of the performance of “Berenice,” composed by Domenico Freschi, at Padua, in 1680, dwarfs all our present ideas of spectacular splendor.  In this opera there were choruses of a hundred virgins and a hundred soldiers; a hundred horsemen in steel armor; a hundred performers on trumpets, cornets, sackbuts, drums, flutes, and other instruments, on horseback and on foot; two lions led by two Turks, and two elephants led by two Indians; Berenice’s triumphal car drawn by four horses, and six other cars with spoils and prisoners, drawn by twelve horses.  Among the scenes in the first act was a vast plain with two triumphal arches; another with pavilions and tents; a square prepared for the entrance of the triumphal procession, and a forest for the chase.  In the second act there were the royal apartments of Berenice’s temple of vengeance, a spacious court with view of the prison and a covered way with long lines of chariots.  In the third act there were the royal dressing-room, the stables with a hundred live horses, porticoes adorned with tapestry, and a great palace in the perspective.  In the course of the piece there were representations of the hunting of the boar, the stag, and the lions.  The whole concluded with a huge globe descending from the skies, and dividing itself in lesser globes of fire on which stood allegorical figures of fame, honor, nobility, virtue, and glory.  The theatriccal manager had princes and nobles for bankers and assistants, and they lavished their treasures of art and money to make such spectacles as the modern stagemen of London and Paris cannot approach.

In Evelyn’s diary there is an entry describing opera at Venice in 1645.  “This night, having with my lord Bruce taken our places before, we went to the opera, where comedies and other plays are represented in recitative musiq by the most excellent musicians, vocal and instrumental, with variety of scenes painted and contrived with no lesse art of perspective, and machines for flying in the aire, and other wonderful motions; taken together it is one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent.  The history was Hercules in Lydia.  The sceanes