EX. 19-8 Jacopo Peri, La Dafne: “Qual’ nova meraviglia!”If the music has to be so minimal why have it at all, both the music lover and the theatergoer might
wonder, to which the dramatist might respond that the musicalization accomplishes definitively what the
actor accomplishes only haphazardly, depending on his gifts—namely the surefire transmission of the
affective content of the words to the listener. The composer, then, functions like a supreme actor or stage
director, able by the use of harmony (especially chromatic harmony, as in the fifth measure) and
dissonance to magnify the rhetorical effects of vocal inflection and delivery.