Opera in German
The world's first opera was "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's "Dafne" is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza "Il pomo d'oro" for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", "Seelewig", which foreshadows the "Singspiel", a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. "Seelewig" was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.
Lost operas by Claudio Monteverdi
The first work now generally considered as an opera is Jacopo Peri's "Dafne" of 1597, closely followed by "Euridice" (1600), for which Peri and Giulio Caccini wrote separate musical settings. Ottavio Rinuccini was the librettist for both "Dafne" and "Euridice". In the new genre a complete story was told through characters, and in addition to choruses and ensembles, the vocal parts included recitative, aria and arioso. This was a development from various older forms of musical theatre that had existed since the earliest years of the Italian Renaissance; such forms included the "maschera" ("masque"), the "ballo" (a dance entertainment, often with sung passages), and particularly the "intermedio" or "intermezzo", a short dramatic musical episode inserted as a prologue or "entr'acte" between the acts of straight plays. Another format in the later renaissance period was the "torneo", or "tournament", a stylised dramatic spectacle in which the main singing was performed by a narrator. Sub-operatic forms of dramatic music continued to thrive as opera itself developed; the blurred boundaries that existed for many years between these forms and "opera" has led to debate about how to categorise some works. For example, the precise genre of Monteverdi's "Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda" (1624) has proved particularly difficult to define.