This came through Jacopo Peri, maestro at the Medician court, and after 1601 at the court of Ferrara.  In studying Greek dramas, as he states in one of his writings, he became convinced that their musical expression was that of highly colored emotional speech.  Closely observing diverse modes of utterance in daily life, he endeavored to reproduce soft, gentle words by half-spoken, half-sung tones, sustained by an instrumental bass, and to express excitement by extended intervals, lively tempo and suitable distribution of dissonances in the accompaniment.  To him may be attributed the first dramatic recitative.  It appeared in his “Daphne,” a “Dramma per la Musica,” written to text by the poet Rinuccini and privately performed at the Palazzo Corsi, in 1597.  This was actually the first opera, although the term was not applied to such compositions until half a century later.  Several solos were added by the court singer, Giulio Caccini, who composed a number of songs for a single voice, “in imitation of Galilei,” as a contemporary stated, “but in a more beautiful and pleasing style.”  Invited three years later to produce a similar work for the festivities attending the marriage of Henry IV. of France with Maria di Medici, Peri wrote his “Eurydice,” and once more Signora Archilei interpreted the leading role, greatly to the composer’s satisfaction.  It was the first opera performed in public.  The singing had a bald accompaniment of an orchestra placed behind the scenes and consisting of a clavicembalo, or harpsichord, a viola da gamba, a theorbo, or large lute, and a flute, the last being used to imitate Pan-pipes in the hands of one of the characters.

Seven years afterward, for another court marriage, a musical drama was written by a man of genius who completely broke the fetters of ancient polyphony.  This was Claudio Monteverde, then in his thirty-ninth year, and chapel master to the Duke of Mantua.  He was the first composer to use unprepared chords of the seventh, dominant and diminished, and to emphasize passionate situations with dissonances.  He invented the tremolo and the pizzicato, and originated the vocal duet.  His keen dramatic sense enabled him to arouse interest through contrasts, conspicuously characteristic passages, and independent orchestral preludes, interludes and bits of descriptive tone-painting.

His opera, “Orfeo,” 1608, had an orchestra of two harpsichords, two bass viols, two violas di gamba, ten tenor viols, two little French violins, one harp, two large guitars, three small organs, four trombones, two cornets, one piccolo, one clarion and three trumpets.  In “Tancredi e Clorinda,” produced in Venice, in 1624, a string quartet indicated the galloping of horses, a prototype of the “Ride of the Valkyries.”  Like Abbe Liszt, he took holy orders late in life, without ceasing to compose.  At seventy-four years of age, when the fire of his genius burned brightly as ever, he wrote his last opera “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”  It may truly be said that Monteverde was the great operatic reformer, the Wagner, of the seventeenth century, as Gluck was of the eighteenth.