L’Orfeo is a late Renaissanceearly Baroque favola in musica, or opera, by Claudio Monteverdi. It is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, and tells the story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world. It was written in 1607 for a court performance during the annual Carnival at Mantua. After the composer’s death in 1643 the opera went unperformed for many years, and was largely forgotten until a revival of interest in the late 19th century.
About L’Orfeo in brief
L’Orfeo is a late Renaissanceearly Baroque favola in musica, or opera, by Claudio Monteverdi, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio. It is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, and tells the story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world. It was written in 1607 for a court performance during the annual Carnival at Mantua. After its initial performance the work was staged again in Mantua, and possibly in other Italian centres in the next few years. After the composer’s death in 1643 the opera went unperformed for many years, and was largely forgotten until a revival of interest in the late 19th century led to a spate of modern editions and performances. In 2007, the quatercentenary of the premiere was celebrated by performances throughout the world. The opera employs all the resources then known within the art of music, with particularly daring use of polyphony. The work is not orchestrated as such; in the Renaissance tradition instrumentalists followed the composer’s general instructions but were given considerable freedom to improvise. The first work generally recognised as belonging to the genre of opera was Dafne, composed by Jacopo Peri and performed in Florence in 1598. This work combined elements of madrigal singing and monody with dancing and instrumental passages to form a dramatic whole. Only fragments of its music still exist, but several other Florentine works of the same period—Riccardo de Cavalieri’s Euridice and Emilio Caccini’s Ricardo De Cavalieri—survive of many complete representations of the musical Orpheus myth.
More recently, Angelo Poliziano’s lyrical drama La favola di Orfeo has been sung rather than spoken, in at least half of which the spoken part is spoken rather than sung in the second half of the first act of the opera. The last two works were the first to be staged in opera houses, although some leading venues resisted it. After the Second World War many recordings were issued, and the opera was increasingly staged in theatre houses, though some leading venue’s resisted the move. The first modern dramatised performance in Paris, in 1911, was the first modern opera to be seen in theatres, and it was staged in Paris by the Opéra-Comique in the summer of that year. In the early 17th century the traditional intermedio—a musical sequence between the acts of a straight play was evolving into the form of a complete musical drama or “opera” or “favola” The earliest surviving opera is Peri’s Euridice and it is thought to be the first fully developed example of the new genre. The court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga had a long history of promoting dramatic entertainment. A century before the time before the court’s time, Giovanni Battista’s musical establishment had helped produce the musical drama of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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This page is based on the article L’Orfeo published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
