In 1600, the last year of the sixteenth century, Emilio de’ Cavalieri published in Rome his
Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (“The [dramatic] representation of soul and body”), a sacred
play designed, according to the title page, per recitar cantando, “for recitation in singing” (literally, “to
recite singingly”). It was meant for performance by a society of Roman lay preachers called the Oratorio
del Crocifisso (the Preaching Society of the Crucifix), which met in the assembly rooms of the church of
San Marcello where members of the Cavalieri family had overseen the Lenten music for many years,
Emilio himself from 1578–1584. (It was actually performed, however, during carnival in the assembly
hall of the Church of Santa Maria, the so-called Chiesa Nova or “new church”.) In terms of its actual
contents, the rappresentatione was not all that different from the Florentine intermedii, though of course
it was more modest by many orders of magnitude. But it was one continuous dramatic whole rather than
half a dozen loosely connected episodes.
The solo music consisted of a string of little songs (some strophic, some in florid single stanzas like
madrigals, some in dance meters) connected by musicalized prose recitations of the sort that would later
be called “recitativo.” It is notated in score over what was in point of fact (but only fortuitously) the
earliest printed “figured bass”—that is to say, a continuo bass line in which the harmonies to be filled in
are indicated by little numbers (figures) representing intervals (Fig. 19-4).
FIG. 19-3 Jacopo Peri as Arion, singing his own compositions in the fifth intermedio of 1589 (costume design by Bernardo
Buontalenti at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence).EX. 19-1D From the intermedii of 1589, Jacopo Peri, Dunque fra torbid’ onde, beginning