Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

Emilio de’ Cavalieri produced in Florence a number of sung pastorals of his own composition, with texts
by the same poet, Laura Guidiccioni (née Lucchesini), to whose words he had composed the great
concluding ballo in 1589. According to Jacopo Peri’s own generous remark (in the Preface to Euridice),
these pastorals were the first stage works to put the stile recitativo into practice.

EX. 19-7A   Girolamo    Frescobaldi,    Dunque  dovro   (Aria   di  romanesca), mm. 1–6

EX. 19-7B   Girolamo    Frescobaldi,    Dunque  dovro   (Aria   di  romanesca), mm. 19–24

But we do not know these works, just as apart from a few fragments we do not know what is often
called the first “true” opera. That distinction belongs to La Dafne, after another mythological tale adapted
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which recounts—or rather, represents—the story of the nymph Daphne