Questions 38-50
The Camerata, a club that opened up a new world of music, was founded sometime before 1580 in Florence, Italy. The men and women in this group were musicians, singers, composers, and poets. They met at the home of Count Bardi, the local patron of artists. Among the club's distinguished members were the renowned singer and voice teacher Caccini and Vincenzo Galilei, an amateur musician and the father of Galileo, the famous astronomer.
Opera was conceived in the minds and hearts of these visionaries, motivated by a desire to improve the quality of music for the stage. Searching for direction, they looked to the authority of the ancient Greek dramas and set about trying to revive them. Since the actual Greek music was unknown, the club engaged in arduous study of the writings of the great philosophers. Careful speculation and long, animated discussions revealed the secret of Greek stage music: the perfect union of words and music, achieved by making the words dominant. Based on this profound insight, they established three principles: the text must be clearly understood, the words must be sung, and the music must interpret the feeling of the entire passage.
Those simple statements provided the members of the Camerata with guidelines which served as the foundation for the creation of a new musical form. In 1594, Jacopi Peri composed the music for Rinuccini's libretto, {Dafne,{ which was the first opera ever written. Three years later, in 1597, it was sung by Caccini and his daughter Francesca at a private performance in Florence. With this event, opera was born and her proud parents foresaw a wonderful future.
The Camerata has been compared to Columbus, who set sail to find the riches of the West Indies and instead discovered the treasured lands of the New World. In the process of attempting to revive ancient Greek theater and its music, the Camerata created a new form of musical theater. As the centuries passed, opera grew and developed, endearing itself to millions even to this day.
