The first opera? That is the way that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is generally presented, for an ordered mind likes to have a point of departure, if not an end.
The date of the performance, 1607, tends to comfort such a mind: the beginning of a century, the beginning of a genre, the birth of a new musical era that, despite the difficulties with lyric creation at the end of the 20th century, seems not to be defunct.
Having said that, however, one feels troubled by the trap of a formula that is perhaps too neat: does spontaneous generation exist more in music than in biology? And what is opera? What do L’Orfeo, Don Juan, the Ring, and Wozzeck have in common? Form? Drama? Nothing at all, taken separately, but together, yes.
And it was precisely by discovering for the first time a mode of convergence (the only one to achieve perfection?) between a dramatic recitative, a continuous melodic expression, and a formal architecture that Monteverdi, yes, wrote the first true opera. |
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