intermedii: to cajole the audience and laud the nuptial pair. La Tragedia herself appears before the
assembled nobles to say that, while her usual role is to draw sighs, shed tears, and “make the faces and
expressions of a crowd in an amphitheater pale with pity,” just this once she is going to relent in honor of
the wedding pair and their friends in attendance: “I thus adorn myself in the realm of Hymen [the marriage
god] and tune the strings [of my lyre] to a gayer mode to give delight to the noble heart.”
And indeed, the play is made to end happily: Orpheus gets Eurydice back with no strings attached;
there is no second death, no second loss. The play remains, as it had to, within the boundaries of the
dramatized favola pastorale, the pastoral play, a light genre that did not exist in classical times. Not only
would a truly tragic representation have been unfit for a festivity of state, but Ovid’s mythological
romance could never have supported one. In a tragedy a hero falls in consequence of a flaw; an accidental
death like Eurydice’s is by no classical definition a tragic one (even if Orfeo does lack the ultimate in
self-control). The early musical plays did not—could not—aspire to the tragic style. Tragic opera came
later, and elsewhere.
ORATORIO
Just a brief word now, in closing, about the genre represented by Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima,
et di Corpo, the sacred play that happened to scoop all the other early figured-bass publications into
print. This work, too, has been claimed for consideration as “the first surviving opera” (to quote the New
Grove Dictionary of Opera). It was produced in Rome in February 1600, about eight months before
Peri’s Euridice saw the stage. It was set to continuous music, though without much recitative, and fully
staged.
The Soul, a soprano, and the Body, a tenor, each with teams of allegorical supporters, advisers, and
tempters, struggle against the blandishments of worldly delights, and are finally successful. The work
ends with spectacular visions of hell and heaven. This too was a favola in musica: the Counter
Reformation’s answer, perhaps, to the Florentine neoclassical entertainments; and if Peri’s pastoral counts
as an opera, so does Cavalieri’s. They were both musicalizations of existing dramatic genres, neither of
them ancient. But the same reservations proposed above—against calling the Florentine musical plays
operas—apply to Cavalieri’s Roman one.
EX. 19-10A Anima mia che pensi, the original lauda (pub. 1577)EX. 19-10B Anima mia che pensi, beginning of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s dialogue setting