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The Italian word opera means "work", both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. The Italian word in turn derives from the Latin opera.Opera is also the Latin plural of opus, with the same root, but the word opera was a singular Latin noun in its own right, and according to Lewis and Short, in Latin "opus is used mostly of the mechanical activity of work, as that of animals ...
Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are amongst the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world.
Another was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose texts were set to music in 122 operas, twenty of them on his work Faust. He also personally wrote eight librettos for singspiel. [267] Fifty-six operas were also composed on texts by Friedrich von Schiller. [268] Other writers who also inspired numerous operas were Victor Hugo and Aleksandr Pushkin ...
The music of Florence is foundational in the history of Western European music.Music was an important part of the Italian Renaissance.It was in Florence that the Florentine Camerata convened in the mid-16th century and experimented with setting tales of Greek mythology to music and staging the result—in other words, the first operas, setting the wheels in motion not just for the further ...
One of these early "operas" was Cini's principal work which drew on the fables of Cupid and Psyche. This work, which Cini dedicated "to the future of Grand Duchy of Florence"' was performed accompanied by music composed by Alessandro Striggio. Striggio (1535–1589) was the principal composer to the Florentine Medici court.
The new form of opera also borrowed, especially for the librettos, from an existing pastoral poetic form called intermedio; it was mainly the musical style that was new. [21] The instrumentation for an opera from the Camerata composers (Caccini and Peri) was written for a handful of gambas, lutes, and harpsichord or organ for continuo .
With warmth, humor and strong singing, Florentine Opera's "Cinderella' and 'The Child and the Enchantments' make a captivating double fill of musical fairy tales.
It was for Florentine public celebrations that Intermedii came into their own; several were organised by Machiavelli when he was part of the government of the Republic of Florence in the early 16th century, and the returning Medici adopted a policy of keeping the aristocracy occupied by involving them in productions. [3]