The bass once again moves to accommodate the E, which becomes the cadence harmony. The third
section begins with the same disruption as the second: a G-minor chord impinging on the cadential E
major. This time, however, the G minor moves through the circle of fifths to a cadence on F, the “Lydian,”
still the symbol—after eight hundred years!—of mollitude (the primary association by now is not to
Plato’s resurrected theorizing but to everyone’s daily experience in church). At the same time the bass
begins to bestir itself iconically, moving rhythmically as one does when animated by determination.
This is no tentative first step like the Dafne recitative. By 1600, at least in Peri’s hands, the stile
rappresentativo was artistically mature, a fully viable seconda prattica—a “second practice,” as
Monteverdi would shortly call it in response to its critics—that would eventually consign the “first
practice,” namely the ars perfecta, to the status of a stile antico.^14
Did it immediately cause a revolution? By all accounts it did not even cause an immediate sensation,
at least with its audience. At the 1600 royal nuptial celebration very few actually heard it. The main
entertainment, as we know, was Caccini’s Rapimento, more of a song-and-dance affair on the spectacular
scale of the traditional Florentine intermedii. It was performed before an audience—a real public—of
3,800 in the enormous hall atop the Uffizi gallery. Euridice was performed three days later, in a small
room in Don Antonio de’ Medici’s apartment on one of the upper stories of the Pitti Palace, for no more
than two hundred specially invited guests selected by Corsi. Many of those who were privileged to hear it
were unimpressed: a joke that made the rounds afterward likened the music to the monotonous chanting of
the Passion on Good Friday (not such a bad analogy, actually, in view of the original purpose of the chant
as a sacralized public oration; but of course that was far from the minds of the jokers).
And yet, clearly, a work performed before those specially invited two hundred (nobles all) inevitably
commanded greater prestige than one open to all comers as a token of the celebrants’ liberality. And the
protocols that applied to intermedii and other festive spectacles remained in force in Euridice, making a
mockery of any claim that the work was a revival of the ancient Greek tragedy. (It is clear from this alone
that no such claim could have seriously been made; the idea is a historians’ conceit hatched long after the
fact.) The tale is furnished with a prologue that has exactly the same function as the prologues to the old