Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei, opened the way.  He was the active champion of monody, in which a principal melody was intoned or sung to the accompaniment of subordinate harmonies, believing that in music designed to arouse personal feeling individualism should predominate.  The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted.  Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint.  Not content with giving his ideas to the world in the form of a dialogue, Galilei composed two musical monologues, between 1581 and 1590, one to the scene of Count Ugolino, in Dante’s “Inferno,” and one to a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah.  These the chroniclers tell us he sang very sweetly, accompanying himself on the lute.  He was also a fine performer on the viola.

A dramatic representation at a court marriage, in 1590, in which the artificially constructed ecclesiastical music illy fitted the text lauding the bride’s loveliness, gave a new impulse to the “Academy” efforts.  Soon there was produced at court, by a company of highborn ladies and gentlemen, two pastoral plays:  “Il Satiro” and “La Disperazione di Fileno,” so set to music that they could be sung or declaimed throughout.  The author of the text was Signora Laura Guidiccioni, of the Lucchesini family, renowned in her day for her poetic gifts and brilliant attainments.  Signor Emilio del Cavalieri was the composer, and he triumphantly announced his music as that “of the ancients recovered,” having power to “excite grief, pity, joy and pleasure.”

These two “musical dramas,” as they were called, contained the germs of modern opera, despite their crudities of harmony and monotonous melody.  That noble songstress, Vittoria Archilei, known as “Euterpe” among her Italian contemporaries, greatly enhanced the success of the new venture with her superb voice, artistic skill, musical fire and splendid intelligence.  She “whose excellence in music is generally known,” as we are told, and who was able to “draw tears from her audience” at the right moment, also aroused enthusiasm for a third work of a similar nature by the same authors, “Il Giuco della Cieco,” that appeared in 1595.

Besides being the first to tell the entire story of a play musically and to utilize the solo, Cavalieri introduced various ornaments into vocal music and increased the demands on instrumentation.  He did not succeed, however, in satisfying the Academicians with his attempt to grasp the medium between speech and song, and his choruses were thought tedious because of their employment of the intricate polyphonic style.  Further reform was desired.