The year 16oo is a traditional milestone in the history of Western music. As will be shown later, the quarrels over the respective merits of ancient and modern music were then at their height.
It will also be pointed out that “modern music” then, and for the next two hundred years, referred to music of the Christian era as distinct from music of the ancient Greeks and Romans.6 But in the nineteenth century, with the periodization of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, the latter term comes to mean music since r6oo, the year which saw “the birth of modern opera.”
At any rate, it was in that year that Jacopo Peri’s Euridice was written for the marriage ceremonies of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici, in Florence, and presented as the first public performance in the nuovo stile. This was the name given to a style fostered by some Florentin e experimenters who had been endeavoring to apply the principles of Greek declamation to dramatic Italian verse.
Euridice is usually regarded as “the first opera” by modern historians. ” The first oratorio,” or sacred opera, is, according to general agreement, the Rappresentazione del Anima e del Corpo, by Emilio del Cavalieri, performed in Rome that same year.
One cannot assert positively that these were really the first opera and the first oratorio. The word opera is not used to describe musicdrama until around I65o, and any attempts to locate the first musicdrama might bring forth champions of an Italian madrigal-comedy, or a French ballet de cour of the late sixteenth century, or a medieval mystery play, or even a masterpiece of Greek or Oriental drama.