It’s the end of the sixteenth century, and there are Humanists run around, willy nilly, being all artsy, and not a little bit fartsy. There’s a strange feeling in the air, like they want to bring Ancient Greece back. The Rennaisancers had focused on biting the entire bit of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, so the Florentine Camerata, arguably the most hipster of any group not based in or around Williamsburg Brooklyn, decided that it was time to bring Greek drama back.
But also, they really liked music.
And so, Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini created the first modern Opera, Dafne, a retelling of the done-to-death Dafne myth, was performed in 1598. And I would do an entire podcast series on Dafne, if it weren’t almost entirely lost.
But Peri’s next work survives, and that’s where my journey starts.
What journey, you may ask?
Well, I grew up going to the symphony with my grade school class, the Lollipop Concerts they called them. I was secretly buying Mahler and Philip Glass CDs along with The Specials and Gun ‘n Roses at Tower Records during high school, listening to the hits of Stravinsky on our local left side of the dial radio station. I loved orchestral music, I love string quartets. And yeah, I love Death Metal, ska, punk, jazz, bubble gum pop, goth, funk, y’alternative and musicals on and on.
But you know, I never got into one of the forms of music that helped define the art music world. One of the forms of musical expression that some point to as the peak of cultural excellence. I just never got into it, and you know what, my goal for 2024 was to get into it. Hard. Because…
I Really Wanna Like Opera.
OK, I’m Chris Garcia. I’m an archivist, a writer, and pro wrestling enthusiast. I’m decidedly not the target audience for opera these days. When I started looking into the opera world, I wanted to go to the very beginning, but I almost immediately discovered that the first modern opera, Dafne, was lost like tears in the rain. Jacopo Peri’s follow-up, though, was still around. And thus, I headed to YouTube to find it. As they were trying their damnedest to relaunch Greek drama, the second opera, the oldest surviving, was based on another myth – Euryadice. That’s right; we’ve been recycling content for new media since the dawn of time.
Like everything I do, I had to dig into the deepest history, and with opera, that’s pretty deep. There’ve been songs that tell stories back beyond recorded history. The oldest existing songs are either religious rites or story songs, or workman’s songs, like the Egyptian song that tells the story of The Two Brothers. The opera, in many ways, eschews these sorts of songs in preference to story. It is the explicit use of theatricality, that these are to be staged stories (at least for the first five hundred years or so) and thus they needed to be presented in a more-or-less specified context – a salon, or later, a theatre, which took them out of the mainstream of music, which was more often encountered in the wild, as it were. Opera did not end up having nearly the influence on modern popular music that orchestral music did.
It did, however, lead to the Musical, which is another podcast for another lifetime.
OK, the idea to revive Greek drama was interesting. It’s not like the 16th century was some dead zone for theatre. The Brits were doing a lot with theatre at the time, and not just Shakespeare, who was alive and presumably well (if he ever actually existed…) when Peri’s operas debuted. In Italy, though, there was a long history of theatrical starts-and-stops. Ancient Roman theatre basically recycled Greek dramas, though produced some impressive comedies of their own. The Fall of Rome led to a dead period, but the church brought it back using actors and theatrical presentations to tell the stories of parables and other Catholic niceties. These placed the center for drama within churches in Italy, which only started to change with the rise of Comedia del-Arte, which took the show to the streets…or town plazas. Anywhere they could put up a stage, really.
In Ferrara and Rome, there were those who had been studying and translating the ancient Greek texts for almost a century. They had started to produce them in theatrical settings, and later theatres, but also they were not averse to doing open-air productions. No matter what the form of artistic expression, there will always be indies.
The division between what would become traditional drama and liturgical plays is fairly stark, and at the time could more-or-less be divided into dramas, which were mostly what the Church was presenting, and comedies, which were secular, though when you presented a Greek play, it was always seen as secular, whether or not it was a comedy or a drama, though I’d wager they hoed closer to the dramas than the comedies.
So, if they were reviving Greek drama in Rome and Ferrara, why was Opera needed to act as a part of the revival?
You see the Florentine Camerata believed that the choruses found in Greek drama were originally sung. This is something of an outsider concept, though there is some evidence that might have been, at least at times. They also thought that maybe, just maybe, the entire things had been sung, and those dumb Ferrarans and the smug intelligentsia of Rome had completely botched their revivals because they didn’t realize it.
Never let interstate battles for intellectual superiority go uncommented on.
Now, Italian music has always been there. The Romans had music, I mean how could you not? They tended towards ancient Greek tunings on instruments, but the fall of Rome introduced musical traditions from more of Europe. While there were countless local folks songs, remember Italy wasn’t really Italy until the 19th century. There was liturgical music, chants and plainsong from the monks and congregational choirs started to be formed about this time. There were madrigals, and there were early versions of orchestras as well. One thing that was an important aspect of the rise of the scene that led to opera was monody. These were accompanied solo voice pieces. These were supposedly a revival of Greek musical practices by the folks of the Camerata, but they also went in more for the spirit than any sort of historical accuracy. They tended to be designed for the expression of emotional content, often with stories attached, and often in-character works. These can certainly be seen as the first steps towards arias, no? It was this stream that fed into the likes of Jacopo Peri and company for the first operatic works.
After a solid week of digging into early Italian musical history, it was time to actually approach listening to an opera.
OK, this was not the first time I’ve ever listened to an opera. I actually have been to see them a few times, first at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where I saw Madama Butterfly, and once in San Francisco, where I saw Nixon in China. Admittedly, those are two pretty different ends of the same stick. I shouldn’t say I listened to opera – I heard opera. I had no idea about any of it, no clue what any of it meant, the history, the ideas, the differences that mattered, and the similarities that led to definitions. That, I guess, I was saving for the days when I would have time, like in my early 50s with two nine-year olds running around, a job with an hour commute daily through the mountains, and an active publishing life. Sure, it was the perfect time to undertake a new hobby.
Because I’d be damned if I didn’t become an operaphile.
There are three versions of Eurydice on YouTube, and I chose one that I rather liked because it started with a terrible introduction theme. Literally MIDI music in what is thought of as an Italian Medieval theme, I reckon. The group performing it were graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaine, with a few faculty sprinkled in with ‘em. It was a lovely version, and of the ones I found on YouTube, it was easily the most fulfilling as far as what I want out of an easily accessible opera. I’d say it was the most approachable of all them, which is great for a guy who really doesn’t know how to approach any of this stuff!
The story of Eury0dice? Well, as this was a part of reviving Greek drama, to have Eurydice as one of the first pieces makes total sense. There are no surviving Greek play version of Orpheus and Eurydice, though it appears in reference in a few Roman works, and almost certainly had Greek and Roman adaptations that did not survive. Of course, the story has been adapted hundreds of times since, most famously by Jean Cocteau. The libretto, created by Ottavio Rinuccini, opens with La Tragedia, the Tragic Muse, who sings calls to the audience for emotional reaction. That’s a prologue that, structurally, feels straight out of a Greek play, though I think it would have been done as a Chorus. This is basically telling the audience that there are different tones coming at them soon. I’m not 100% sure from my reading of it, but I think it also kinda serves the same purpose as the TV theme song. It tells you what you’re about to watch, and gives you the tone of the larger piece. So, I can, in my head tie this to the works like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or The Brady Bunch.
I gotta reach sometimes, right?
Now, listening to this on its own, and not speaking a lick of Italian, it feel, how do you say…stiff. A lot of opera does, which is why it can be a daunting hill to climb. On one hand, there is clearly something going on within the music and singing that is establishing both mood and tone, though as we’re a few hundred years divorced from the creation of the work, those connotations may well be completely different today than those of the time. No work is timeless, as the legend William Saroyan says, but this one has something that I can latch on to when I dug into the translation of the lyrics being sung. It’s fascinating to listen while reading the text of the Italian and the English translation, because I can’t help but try to put the English translations into the path of the music as its presented. After the Muse has a lovely conversation with shepards, Dafne enters, which I’m guessing was one of the earliest versions of fan service. Hey, it’s Dafne! Remember her from the last one?
And she announces that Euridice has been bitten by a serpent and is dead.
Killing off your title character in the first act, and not even on stage, is a choice!
Orfeo, usually called Orpheus, was a bard, a poet, and a Theban, if you believe Plutarch. Pretty much all of the Ancients, save for Aristotle, believed Orpheus was a real person, even if his exploits were either created whole cloth, or simply exaggerations. There were many songs and poems that were attributed to Orpheus.
Orfeo and Eurydice are married, and all the nymphs celebrate for ‘em. After he sings a bit about being totes comfortable in the world, Dafne comes and drops the bad news about Eurydice, which leads him to declare his intent to go and plead to bring her back to life.
So, he’s off to the Underworld. There’s a whole thing where Orfeo is talking with the various underworld types, Venus, Pluto, Charon, Rhadamanthus, and a few others. Venus and Pluto are basically the most important. Venus gives Orfeo the idea to sing for Euridice’s release by Pluto, and since he’s able to hit a banger when he needs to, Pluto is so moved that he releases Eurydice and they run back to Thrace together.
The last half is largely in a form called Recitativo. It’s a form that is supposed to resemble spoken language more than operatic singing. I read about it and I kept waiting for it to happen, because it all sounded like Opera to me. I guess I was expecting something more like the talk-singing you find by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, but when I was told that it was something different, I started to dig into the sensation of the singing and the relationship to the words being sung. Clearly, the portions where it is a conversation between characters are far more…well…clear. I opened up two windows on YouTube and listened to the portions of the Prologue, and then the portion just a bit later where we encounter La Tragedia and the portion of Eurydice and the Shepards conversing. There is clearly a different set of markers to each, and I wasn’t sure if it was just less adorned, which I kinda feel might be it, or simply they were simply allowing the language to hit harder. There’s a change in pacing for delivery, that’s for certain.
So, in the end, we get Eurydice and Orfeo back together, and all is right in the world.
The best portions for me is the exchange between Orfeo and Pluto (called Plutone in the opera) where Pluto says Orfeo can take Eurydice
Translated:
Plutone
Descend, noble lover, within our threshold, and your beloeved wife take back with you to the serene and pure sky above.
Orfeo
How fortunate my sweet sights!
How well spilled my tears! How happy am I above all lovers???
Basically, he’s praising his own performance at the same time as seeing Hell Yes, it worked!
That resonated with me, and brought out something I learned from studying musical theatre. Everyone knows the ‘I Want’ song, but there are other types, including the “I wish” and “I’ve got to” songs, but the one that I love is the “Take it on home!” song where the wrap-up for the entire show happens. Cabaret _and _Sweeney Todd are my faves of the type, though there are many of them. It’s really where the play ends and the rest is just tying up the loose ends and letting us know how happy and/or terrible their world is now. That’s clearly what this is, and we get some more Eurydice and Orfeo, along with more shepherds.
So, what did I feel and what did I learn?
First, Eurydice _is the base, not the bridge to Opera. It feels almost fully formed. My limited exposure to other operas left me with a more formal feeling, which might come across as strange considering that this is so structured. It’s also not entirely close to how a Greek drama would be presented, which is par for the course in homage.
And that’s what this feels most like, an homage. I’ve seen, read, and listened to a bunch of interpretations; from _Hadestown _to the awesome Molly Davies version with music by Nick Cave. This one lacks the more modern psychological exploration that most modern versions take, but there is a sense that they were working with new concepts within the piece, and that the original source material, which is important in aspects, is not slavishly held to. That’s important in the idea that this was a re-invention in the form that THEY thought Greek theatre was, or at least should have been.
Eurydice isn’t given much in this version. Oh, she’s there, but it’s Orfeo’s quest that’s the focus, which is an interesting take and one that goes along with the idea that the item being sought is the most significant part of the story. Character hadn’t become the driving force in drama at that point, and here I could see the quite modern complaint of not having any clue about these characters unless you were invested in them ahead of time. It is, of course, one of the most well-known stories in history, and at the time, probably quite well-known among those who would be viewing opera. Still, there’s something here unspoken that I love, the power of the voice to bring about change. It’s Orfeo’s singing that softens Plutone’s heart, so much so that death, the inviolate construct, can be violated. That’s a big statement about the power of art, and while it’s possible the thought never any of the creator’s minds, the fact that the story resolves happily because of the very art that is being presented That might be a post-modernist interpretation, but I am, if nothing else a post-modern being.
So, that’s that. Did I achieve my goal of really liking opera? Well, I didn’t hate it, and in fact, enjoyed both listening to the performed version, and doing the research into the early history of opera. If nothing else, I’m on my way!
I Really Wanna Like Opera was written and edited by Chris Garcia. The version of _Eurydice was performed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, directed by John Walter Hill in October, 2000. They used period instruments for the accompaniment. I ain’t gonna lie, most of the information was gathered from Wikipedia, YouTube, the San Francisco Opera’s History of Opera page, or from a really cool article by Kelley Harness called Le tre Euridici – Characterization and Allegory in the Euridici of Peri and Caccini _that appeared in _The Journal of Seventeenth Century Music in 2003.
We’re a part of the Three Minute Modernist Family of Podcasts. You can find our Patreon at patreon.com/3minmodernist (that’s the number 3, minmodernist)
Next time, join us as I try to really like Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate’s opera, Dido and Aneanas.
