How L'Orfeo Changed Opera Forever 

Another reason L'Orfeo is often considered the first opera is because it's the earliest opera still performed today.

Monteverdi is certainly a fascinating composer, a giant of Western musical development and key in the exciting emergence of the early baroque style. He was a transitional composer, and he was very aware of this indeed!

"Underworld is portrayed by heavy brass" Shows a part with a regal.

Monteverdi's work has the feeling of the beginning of something, when forms were not yet codified and rigid, expectations were nebulous and freedom everywhere.

Jordi Savall is a damn genius interpretting Renaissance music. His L'Orfeo on YT is the best thing ever. My favorite parts: Tocatta and Ritornello (of course), Lasciate i monti, Vi ricorda boschio ombrosi, to name a few.

I am a professional opera singer and teacher. I want to sincerely thank you for making this. It was a pleasure to watch this but also the information that you share is vital to this art-form which I love and live myself.

Claudio Monteverdi was the DW Griffiths of opera, presenting an already existing form in a fundamentally original way!

Monteverdi's operas were important at least in part because he was one of the greatest composers in western music.

8:09 This is NOT a diminished chord but simply an appoggiatura on the leading tone (G#) of the a minor chord in the continuo. Definitely word painting, though

Merci beaucoup for putting your passion into these videos.

The Toccata banged so crazy that Monteverdi used it for his Vespra beata virgina

excellent history of one of the most little discussed uses for music

L’orfeo will always remain as one of my favorite operas

Anybody who's studied opera knows Monteverdi didn't invent opera, but that he created the first great one.

I enjoyed. However, for what it's worth, I was never taught that L'Orfeo was the first opera, but rather that it was the first *great* opera.

9:45 Curiously this so called diminished forth f#-bb (f-sharp - b-flat) sounds like a sweet major third right in ET (Monteverdi certainly would have used a temperament that allowed him to access all keys), but is probably the *choice of non diatonic notes rather than the size of the interval that really creates the dissonant effect*

It would be interesting to compare Orfeo and Ulisse, separated by time, style, technique and place. Monteverdi evolutioned up to a point that everything else in Opera was just a note to his masterpieces Orfeo, Ulisse and Poppaea.

Funny how people talk about "Art of the Renaissance" and "Music of the Renaissance" as if the timelines were roughly symmetrical. In fact, the so-called "Renaissance Period in Art" was well over by the time of Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607.

This was terrific! Learded a great deal. Carole paul Trombonist

EXCELLENT. Content and visual style both clear and accurate. Thankyou

Could you please do a "why listen to Bruckner" video? I keep coming back to him, but I cannot find many good reasons to get serious about his music, but I would like to!

Monteverdi is great not only as a musician, but also as a dramatist. The conclusion of "L'incoronazione di Poppea" was, and still is, a scandal of truth and bitterness: Justice does not triumph on earth! And in the "Ritorno di Ulisse in patria" we have the only aria ever written in any litterature (except the memories of war, of course) about the theme of hungriness. Who has ever dared to compose an aria for a starving begger?! I only remember a rather similar, and also unique, case in Puccini's "Bohème": "Vecchia zimarra". Who has ever dared to write an aria for an old rag?! And at last: compliments for the pronunciation of the reader! This is the english I like!

The local catholic church a few years ago did a "production" of "Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo" which seemed largely intact. I have seen several versions of L'Orfeo My favourite was the "Balkan" style ENO production where the whole cast danced on stage through the ritornello and did tableaux vivants when Musica sang. Their tableaux told the whole story in microcosm. It always struck me that Orfeo is the only singer in all acts and all the other singers have one or two acts only.

Why are most of the picturs irrelevant to what is being said ? Were they bought as a job lot ?

Does anybody know what he says at 5:54? The transcript says 'kitaroni' but I haven't been able to find anything on that (just Instagram hashtags lol).

He simply perfected it

Everybody who's really studied music knows about Dafne and Euridice.

uma dúvida: e "la serva padrona"? não é anterior?

Could you do a viceo about Frederic Chopin ps: love your videos😊

i'm entering the opera realm just now because of violin practise. tell me something: the opera "orfeu et euridice", from Gluck, is important? curious there's separate operas called orfeu and another called euridice.. are those related to "orfeu et euridice"?

This feels like I missed the opening chapter not knowing what Peri did.

𝙲𝚞𝚛𝚎 9:00

Well seven years isn't exactly "way down the list"...

3:15 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lgAt8GGKbUA.html It's probably not Monteverdi who coined that term

no es la primera,.pero si la primera opera autentica

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Mrs Modlish taught me this

I've never heard anyone say Monteverdi invented opera, ever.

Heh. I know all this, and I learned it as an undergraduate music student. Still, very good stuff for the novice. I can't think of anything I'd have changed if I were presenting this to a music appreciation class.

Why fill with anachronistic stock footage? Ugh.

Not true, about "what everyone thinks": In 1980, as an already distracted third year science student, I enrolled in Western Music 101.06, mainly to get access to the music library - 3-4k LPs. The first of my lecturers, Carol Williams, on early to... early baroque, anyway, talked about the transition from the renaissance. She definitely nominated Peri & Caccini as the creators of the first opera. I understood that to be a collaborative effort btw them. Not so? Then she said that it was Monteverdi's Orfeo that really gave it the decisive push into a new era; and I don't think many would dispute that. I did notice the list there of a number of other composers - didn't know about that. I also heard more recently something about a woman being significant in the Peri/Caccini effort... whether one of them was a woman or whether she wrote some of the ... whatever. But basically, bit of a straw man here: anyone who knew anything about music also considered the Peri/Caccini (lost?) opera the first.

While your main point is excellent, it is a contradiction to imply that the renaissance of Greek and Roman ideas, was about “freedom”. As you say, the Greeks often considered music “simply a mathematical concept”. The truth is that Boethius’, in his “De institutione musica” forbade “taking pleasure in the more lascivious modes” and Plato “prescribes that boys should NOT be trained in all modes” of music. Compare this with plainchant music which rebelliously used all the modes to convey the requisite range of emotions found in scripture. The fact is that one of the staunchest supporters of reviving Greek and Roman restrictions on music was the older music theorist Artusi, who attacked Monteverdi in his thesis “Of the Imperfections of Modern Music." The fights of Monteverdi vs. Artusi, and Lusitano vs. Vicentino should make it clear that the young musicians who founded the Baroque era stood firmly against the government influenced policies that would have constricted emotional expression in music by reviving Greek and Roman ideas. (See the dialogues of Socrates in Plato’s Republic to learn the political motivation behind restricting music).

Bravo !!!

Anything before Orfeo werent operas, they were cute guesses.

You have to listen to Ilayaraja India, you will be really feeling well... explain us how knowledge he has in music

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Excellent history! Thanks. Who wrote the first opera ultimately depends upon at what point you call what the composers wrote, “opera.” Although I certainly wouldn’t agree, some might even argue that opera didn’t fully emerge until, not Monteverdi, but Verdi - that all opera before then was but a “pale imitation,” so to speak.

This seems like a good time to remind myself that "opera" is actually plural and means "the works", with the singular form being "opus". At least in Latin.

Whoa he looks exactly like Prince but Italian

Intro: L'Orfeo music with images of modern orchestra instruments is an insult. Come on! Period instruments, please.

Soooo...as "humanistic expressionism", opera was never intended to be the "classical (academic) high art" form as it has been regarded for the last 200 years, right?

I don't know if it's quite fair to Tallis or Byrd or Josquin des Prez or Lassus to say that Monteverdi invented word-painting, or was the first to really pay attention to the text. Don't get me wrong, I think Monteverdi was amazingly inventive, and managed to do very impressive things with secular texts, but other composers were paying attention to texts long before him.

Nice try, but in Italian it's "seconda pratica" or "seconda prattica". Italian was a rather fluid set of dialects in the 18th Century, so there were often variations, but never 'seconda practica'.

Was there any operatic style before L'Orfeo ? The single previous surviving attempt is boring endless declamation, not opera. Orfeo at least contains a few tunes which can be sung in a living way and which are an early form of opera aria. But also Orfeo is very much declamation which requires an audience that can understand the lyrics in Italian.

Not as happy with this vid as I am normally. Effort to put up big words like "Relationship music to text" ok Give us some examples. Then "DIFFERENT TIMBRES that represent each character." No sample music or text. Instead he dashes forward to "atmosphere specific to scene." yay some brief examples !Other timesI we get a claim/conclusion and just have to take his word.

Opera singers. No dynamics except loud and louder.

It takes so little to pronounce Italian names properly. It's painful to hear them butchered.

You’re only looking at the history of western Opera, eastern Opera from Asian countries predates the creation of opera in Europe.

Terrible visuals. "Act Two" ... where the 19th-c flute and bassoon join the violin. Yeah. Right. All you kids should know that many of these visuals and illustrations are completely bogus.

Well opera origin is not as important as COVID origin:)

𝚎𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚖𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚌# 6:32

𝙼𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 1609