The present report is concerned with evaluating the assertions made by Warren Kirkendale with regard to the “birth” of opera, or how it truly originated. Kirkendale has written an article “The Myth of the “Birth of Opera” in the Florentine Camerata Debuked by Emilio de’ Cavalieri: A Commemorative Lecture” in effort to determine exactly where opera began and who created it. We will also compare Kirkendale’s article to Grout, Palisca, and Burkholder’s textbook “A History of Western Music” with their chapter that discusses the invention of opera. Indeed, this topic has been of great debate for decades by music scholars and professionals alike. Kirkendale begins his article with an authoritative notion that Emilio de’ Cavalieri was “by far
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He begins with describing the serious error of attributing the first operas to Jacopo Peri. He says this is not possible because Peri’s “Dafne” wasn’t performed until eight years after the first two operas of Cavalieri. However, a commemoration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of opera in 2000 in Florence assigned Jacopo Peri the creator. Kirkendale goes on to explain why this error may have been made. He suggests that Florentines of the time were envious of Ferdinando Medici’s recruitments from Rome. He says that this envy still stirs in the hearts of some who “do not pardon the fact that the first operas were written by a lady librettist from Lucca and an Oratorian father, respectively, and set to music by a Roman composer who left their city disgusted by the intrigues, to have his “opus magnum” performed in Rome.” Another suggestion is that writers have a prejudice against works of religious content of Rome, and thus would exclude Cavalieri’s “Anima e Corpo”. “Anima e Corpo” is a type of religious-moral opera and secular musicologists do not consider it because it does not deal with aristocratic festivity as so many baroque operas of the time
He begins with describing the serious error of attributing the first operas to Jacopo Peri. He says this is not possible because Peri’s “Dafne” wasn’t performed until eight years after the first two operas of Cavalieri. However, a commemoration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of opera in 2000 in Florence assigned Jacopo Peri the creator. Kirkendale goes on to explain why this error may have been made. He suggests that Florentines of the time were envious of Ferdinando Medici’s recruitments from Rome. He says that this envy still stirs in the hearts of some who “do not pardon the fact that the first operas were written by a lady librettist from Lucca and an Oratorian father, respectively, and set to music by a Roman composer who left their city disgusted by the intrigues, to have his “opus magnum” performed in Rome.” Another suggestion is that writers have a prejudice against works of religious content of Rome, and thus would exclude Cavalieri’s “Anima e Corpo”. “Anima e Corpo” is a type of religious-moral opera and secular musicologists do not consider it because it does not deal with aristocratic festivity as so many baroque operas of the time