At that time opera was still quite a new medium. When Cavalli began working  it did not attract huge audience.  However, opera slowly  matured into a popular public spectacle by the end of  composer’s  career. Francesco Cavalli was a driving force behind these  innovations.   He  introduced melodious arias into his music and popular types into his libretti. Each of his operas has a remarkably strong sense of dramatic effect, great musical facility, and grotesque humour.   Good example of it is “La Calisto”, opera with a libretto  by Giovanni Faustini. A myth of Callisto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses served as a source of the story.

La Callisto was not a major success  during Cavalli’s lifetime.  Quite the opposite, it miserably failed. on 28 November 1651 opera premiered  at the Teatro San Apollinare, Venice.  Authors prepared a lavish spectacle for future audience.  Opera house  San Apollinare was specially  equipped with complex stage machinery  to impress and amaze public.  Surpsingly, the first performances did not bring large audience. Even more, the run of first eleven performances  attracted only about 1200 patrons to a theatre that housed 400.  In addition, Faustini died same year during the first run, on 19 December.

In modern times baroque opera La Callisto has been  successfully revived.  The recording of this opera production has been re-released on a compact disc.

Henry wrote his monumental baroque opera to a libretto created by Nahum Tate. It comprises three acts and lasts about an hour. There is some evidence suggesting that opera was played much earlier than the official date. However, formal opening date for now is 1689 when Purcell presented it  in cooperation with dancing master and choreographer  Josiah Priest. Priests’s wife kept a boarding school for young gentlewomen, where Purcell presented his opera for the first time.

Amazingly, at the time “Dido and Aeneas” never found its way to the opera house, though it appears to have been very popular in private circles. Opera became so popular that it  has been extensively copied, but only one song was printed by Purcell’s widow. The complete work remained in manuscript until 1840, when it was printed for the first time by the Musical Antiquarian Society.

No score in Purcell’s hand exists. The only 17th century source is a libretto, possibly from the original performance. Another problem is that no later sources follow the act divisions of the libretto, and the music to the prologue is lost.

First famous opera composition of Lully was named  Cadmus and Hermione.  This French opera had a prologue and five acts.  Philippe Quinault created its libretto, based upon eternal  Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cadmus et Hermione was a big success at its time – it opened in Paris on April 27, 1673 .

Today, probably, this opera will cause us to smile not once. It lavishly praises  King Louis XIV,  and presents him as a Greek god Apollo slaying the Python of Delphi, even though the opera concerns the love story of Cadmus, legendary king of Thebes, and Hermione, daughter of Venus and Mars.

Nevertheless, Cadmus and Hermione represents a turning point in the development of French opera. Lully managed to assimilate both Italian and French styles which made him wildly popular. His mixture of opera and ballet compositions essentially gave Lully complete control of all music performed in France until the end of his days.

So, in case you missed this magnificent film “Farinelli: Il Castrato” made in 1994 by Belgian director Gérard Corbiau, I would recommend it to you wholeheartedly. As the title hints about the king of castrati singers Farinelli who ruled the baroque opera stages of Europe in the 18th century.

The most difficult task for the film authors was the attempt in recreating the sound of castrato singer. It was impossible to find anything similar today. That is why Farinelli’s singing voice was provided by two singers: a soprano, Ewa Małas-Godlewska and a countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin. Each singer was recorded separately and then their voices were digitally morphed.

The film team made its best to show the ups and downs of Farinelli’s life. That is why they took some real events and turned them into a drama. For example, in this film famous composer George Frideric Handel is presented as some kind of nemesis, of the opera singer. And he has a lot of animosity and hostility when Farinelli perfoms in his pieces. But as we know, in reality Handel and Farinelli were quite friendly. 

The significance of this early opera is in its combination of new Baroque music genre and Renaissance elements. Besides, The Legend of the Orpheus is the first large composition that survived to our days with its exact instrumentation, while many other operas of that period are lost to us. It is an entirely new style of music which we know today as musical drama.

The Legend of Orpheus consists of 5 acts, Even today it preserved its dramatic power and lively orchestration. That’s why, Starting with its modern debut in 1904 in Paris, this Monteverdi opera returned to us and since that time saw many productions.

As an intermezzo a rather smaller comic opera Servant Mistress was included as well. It went on for only 45 minutes and was performed between the acts of the Proud Prisoner to entertain the audience. Servant Mistress or in Italian “La serva padrona” was written in the genre of opera buffa which has its roots in the improvisatory commedia dell’arte.

Well, “Proud Prisoner” miserably failed. Even today it does not exist in today’s opera repertoire. However, its intermezzo became huge success and wrote its name into the history of opera. Pergolesi separated it from its bigger brother and made it an opera in its own name that enjoyed fame throughout Europe for years after its premiere.

“La serva padrona” was appealing to people of different European nations because of its characters who motives were easy to understand. Audiences enjoyed the tricks of the cunning maid Serpina who felt that she was the mistress of the household and tricksed her aging master Uberto into marrying her.

The importance of this comic opera is significant. Modern specialists consider it the quintessential piece that bridges the gap from the Baroque to the Classical opera period.

For some reason, probably, under the influence of the famous scholar Girolamo Mei, they decided that ancient Greeks sang rather than spoke the verses during drama performance. Mei was considered an expert of ancient Greece at the times, so he easily convinced the others that ancient Greeks not only sang the chorus part but also entire text of all roles.  This movement of “returning back to the roots” made composer Jacopo Perri create first opera Daphne around 1597. It is lost to us, but his next creation – opera Euridice, written around 1600,  survivied to the present day.

No matter what we may think of this attempt, during the development of both operas Peri invented first recitatives and arias that instantly became the integral part of the play. The star of Jacopo Peri quickly dimmed while the fame of a new opera composer Claudio Monteverdi was on the rise.  The latter’s opera L’Orfeo created in 1607 is still regularly performed and mistakenly presented as the first opera up to this day.