Dafne

Dafne is the earliest known work that, by modern standards, could be considered an opera. The libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini survives complete; the mostly-lost music was completed by Jacopo Peri, but at least two of the six surviving fragments are by Jacopo Corsi. Dafne was first performed during Carnival of 1598 (1597 old style) at the Palazzo Corsi.

History

Dafne is scored for a much smaller ensemble than Claudio Monteverdi's slightly later operas, namely, a harpsichord, a lute, a viol, an archlute, and a triple flute. Drawing on a new development at the time, Peri established recitatives, melodic speech set to music, as a central part of opera.

The story of Apollo falling in love with the eponymous nymph, Daphne, the opera was written for an elite circle of humanists in Florence, the Florentine Camerata, between 1594 and 1597, with the support, and possibly the collaboration, of the composer and patron Jacopo Corsi. An attempt to revive Greek drama, according to modern scholarship, it was a long way off from what the ancient Greeks would have recognized.

Dafne (Opitz-Schütz)

Die Dafne (1627) to a libretto by Martin Opitz (which survives), and music by Heinrich Schütz (which is lost), has traditionally been regarded as the first German opera, though it has also been proposed more recently that it was in fact a spoken drama with inserted song and ballet numbers.

History of the work

Opitz was already a friend of Schütz and in all wrote twelve German madrigal texts for him. In 1625 and 1626 Opitz visited the Dresden court, to work with Schütz on a Sing-Comoedie based on the model of Jacopo Peri's Dafne. Opitz rewrote the libretto after Rinuccini, translating it into Alexandrine verse, and his libretto was so highly regarded that it was later adapted back into Italian by later Italian librettists. Opitz and Schütz' were probably attracted by religious content of the work, rather than the purely pagan mythology of Dafne or Euridice. The electoral secretary to the Saxon Court, Johann Seusse also exerted influence on the project.

Modern scholarly reevaluation

Dafne (disambiguation)

Dafne may refer to:

See also