Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri (
August 20 1561 –
August 12 1633) was an
Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the
Renaissance and
Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of
opera. He wrote the first work to be called an opera today,
Dafne (around
1597), and also the first opera to have survived to the present day,
Euridice (
1600).
Peri was probably born in
Rome, but studied in
Florence with
Cristofano Malvezzi, and went on to work in a number of
churches there, both as an organist and as a singer. He subsequently began to work in the
Medici court, first as a
tenor singer and
keyboard player, and later as a composer. His earliest works were
incidental music for
plays and
madrigals.
In the
1590s, Peri became associated with
Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in Florence. They felt contemporary art was inferior to classical
Greek and Roman works, and decided to attempt to recreate
Greek tragedy, as they understood it. Their work added to that of the
Florentine Camerata of the previous decade, which produced the first experiments in
monody, the solo song style over
continuo bass which eventually developed into
recitative and
aria. Peri and Corsi brought in the
poet Ottavio Rinuccini to write a text, and the result,
Dafne, though nowadays thought to be a long way from anything the Greeks would have recognised, is seen as the first work in a new form,
opera.
Rinuccini and Peri next collaborated on
Euridice. This was first performed on
October 6 1600, and, unlike
Dafne, has survived to the present day (though it is hardly ever staged, and then only as an historical curio). The work made use of
recitatives, a new development which went between the
arias and
choruses and served to move the action along.
Peri produced a number of other operas, often in collaboration with other composers, and also wrote a number of other pieces for various court entertainments. None of his pieces are performed today, and even by the time of his death his operatic style was looking rather old fashioned when compared to the work of relatively younger reformist composers such as
Claudio Monteverdi. Peri's influence on those later composers, however, was large.
* "Jacopo Peri", in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742
