The opera combines both music and theatrical performance at once. Such a symbiosis of two directions makes the opera not only an amazing genre, but also attracts more and more fans. If opera is so popular to this day, it will be interesting to know who and when came up with this direction.
Opera genre - Italians mistake
Opera appeared in the Renaissance in Italy. There are many assumptions about who laid the foundation for the development of the opera genre. One of the theories says that the opera, then called the "musical drama", appeared by mistake.
In the XV century, Italians showed great interest in the culture of ancient Rome and Greece, as, in fact, the whole world. But especially many Italian cultural scholars were interested in antique drama. Studying the originals of the tragedies, they noticed that the Greeks put special signs over the words in the text. As a result, Italians suggested that these characters are like modern notes, and the actors playing roles in the tragedies uttered words to the chant.
As historians later found out, this did not quite correspond to the truth, because there are no hints that the Greeks would sing their speeches in productions. Signs were placed so that the actor understood what words to focus on.
But at that moment it didn’t matter anymore, because it was decided that now in order to imitate the ancient culture, it is necessary to write music that could express all the feelings and enabled the actors to sing the words.
Musical drama
The genre of opera has developed dynamically since the 16th century. If we analyze today's opera and operas staged a couple of centuries ago, you can see a huge difference between these works. In this regard, it is very difficult to determine which of the performances of the XVI century was the first opera. According to the surviving documents, scientists found an indication that the first performance under musical accompaniment was staged according to the ancient Greek myth of the god Apollo, and it is called "Daphne".
However, to this day the first musical and dramatic work has not been preserved, but the second opera, which is called Eurydice, has survived. The composer of both operas was an Italian named Jacopo Peri.
Although these two tragedies are the ancestors of the opera genre, they cannot be called operas in the sense that we are used to seeing behind the term. And the name "opera" did not exist then. The Italians themselves used the word “opera” as “composition”, and the set tragedies called “musical drama”. In reality, these were ordinary productions with musical numbers between acts.
