These days it’s believed the duet was actually written by one of Monteverdi’s assistants, but listening to those sensual, crisscrossing vocal lines that still speak to us so directly, despite being written more than 350 years old, do we really care?Ĭlick to load video Opera Introduction: A Beginner’s Guide – Classical Sensibilities Here’s the glorious love duet between Nero and Poppea, ‘Pur Ti Miro’, the closing number of the opera (she gets her man, but history tells how he later kicked her to death while she was pregnant). Monteverdi (1567-1643) wrote at least 18 operas, most of which are lost, but we still have his last masterpiece, The Coronation of Poppea of 1642 – a fabulously soap opera-ish tale about the inexorable rise of the scheming, seductive mistress of Emperor Nero. Officially, the first opera was Jacopo Peri’s Daphne (the score is lost) but the first of real significance, still performed today, is Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1609) based on the Classical legend of Orpheus and Euridice. A group of artists and musicians decided to fuse music, poetry, dancing, drama and painting into one unified art form, with a nod towards the country’s Classical past (and with some Greek legend thrown in for good measure). It all began in Italy around 400 years ago during the Renaissance. Opera Introduction: A Beginner’s Guide – How Did Opera Start?
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