emphasis on the dialogue-music as opposed to the song-and-dance music, and the greater concomitant
emphasis on music that imitated speech as opposed to the music that “imitated” (or simply functioned as)
musical entertainment. Accepting the speech-music—the stile recitativo or stile rappresentativo—as
dramatically viable, and accepting as credible the act of speaking from the stage in song (what Cavalieri
called recitar cantando) required an imaginative leap that not all were prepared (or are even now
prepared) to take. Peri himself put the esthetic problem in a nutshell when he wrote in the preface to
Euridice of his paradoxical aim “to imitate with singing whoever speaks (and without doubt no one ever
spoke singing).”^12
So what made the Florentine (and later Mantuan) musical tales the “first operas” was not the mere fact
that they were sung continuously. So were Cavalieri’s pastorals, and maybe even Isaac’s SS. Giovanni e
Paolo. And there have since been many types of opera, especially but not only comic opera, that do not
use continuous singing but instead alternate singing with spoken dialogue, the very thing that Rinuccini
courageously eschewed in his tales. The novelty of the tales was that they maintained and even
accentuated the dialogue aspect of the drama (which is to say they did not make formal concessions for
the sake of the music) and nevertheless represented all that dialogue through singing. The essential
“operatic” move, then, was the insistence that music function on two levels—as representing music and
also as representing speech—which meant that some of the music was coded one way for the characters
on stage and another way for the audience. There was a music that both the audience and the stage
characters “heard” as music (the songs and dances) and another music that the audience heard as music
but that was “inaudible” to the characters on stage who were represented (albeit through music, and
sometimes very elaborately!) as speaking. (The further complication presented by the instrumental music
can wait for now.) It is a dichotomy that every form of opera, and every opera audience, has had to come
to terms with, and different types of opera can (and in this book often will) be distinguished on the basis
of how they have negotiated this representational crux.
The critic Carolyn Abbate has adopted a useful (and suitably neoclassical) terminology for the “two
musics” that have always coexisted in opera. The kind that is “heard” (i.e., interpreted) both on stage and
in the house as music she calls “phenomenal music,” from the Greek phenomenon, meaning not an
extraordinary thing or occurrence (as in common colloquial usage) but something whose reality exists on
the level of sensory perception. The kind that the audience hears as music but that the stage characters do
not “hear” that way she calls “noumenal music” from the Greek noumenon, the idealized (“Platonic”)
essence of a thing—a higher reality that is hidden from the senses and can only be contemplated by the
mind.^13
Of the six scattered fragments that survive from Rinuccini and Peri’s Dafne in monody collections,
only one counts as “noumenal music” of the kind that distinguishes opera esthetically from other kinds of
sung spectacle. (The rest are dance-songs and a strophic “aria” over a ground bass sung by Ovid directly
to the spectators by way of prologue.) That singular survivor is the recitative “Qual nova
meraviglia!”—“What new marvel is this!”—in which a messenger who witnessed it describes the
nymph’s arboreal transformation (Ex. 19-8).
This is the stile rappresentativo at full strength—the earliest surviving example of it that was meant
expressly for the stage. The text is madrigalian: a single strophe in irregular meter. The bass line is
remarkably static; often whole lines are declaimed over a stationary harmony, and there is no thematic
interplay between voice and accompaniment. Since the versification is irregular, the harmonic changes
are unpredictable. There is, in short, nothing that can be identified as a “purely musical” pattern or
gesture, nothing that aspires to musical wholeness or memorability. Music, far from exulting in its own
stylistic perfection, has been ruthlessly subordinated, a music lover might object, to the text. To which a
strict neoclassicist might respond, that’s just where it belongs.