Origins of opera
"Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today, although with only five instrumental parts it was much more like a chamber opera than either the preceding intermedi or the operas of Claudio Monteverdi a few years later. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the "Camerata". Significantly, "Dafne" was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. The libretto was by Ottavio Rinuccini, who had written some of the 1587 Medici intermedi, in which Peri had also been involved; Rinuccini appears to have recycled some of the material, at least from the scene illustrated at right. Most of the music for "Dafne" is lost (the libretto was printed and survives), but one of Peri's many later operas, "Euridice", dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day.
Farnace (opera)
Farnace is an 18th-century Italian opera in 3 acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. It was composed to a libretto by the Italian poet Antonio Maria Lucchini that is best known from a setting by Antonio Vivaldi first produced at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice for the carnival operatic season of 1727. For a performance in the 1760s, it would only be expected that a libretto of such age would be abbreviated and altered to suit contemporary operatic taste; this libretto was unusually old, even older than all but one of the librettos by Metastasio that continued by be set in the 1760s. The cuts and changes in the text made for the 1767 performance of Mysliveček's opera are not attributable. Indeed, they are quite extensive; not a single one of Lucchini's original aria texts was re-set by Mysliveček. However, it is the same cut libretto of Farnace, with small variants, used by the Neapolitan Davide Perez in his opera for the Regio Teatro of Turin in the 1751 Carnival, and repeated in Rome at the Torre Argentina Theatre the following year, and in Messina (Regio Teatro della Munizione) and Neaples (Regal Teatro di San Carlo) in 1753 and again in 1757.