Jacopo Peri

Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), Florentine singer and composer of the first important opera.

Peri was born in Rome to a noble Florentine family, and learnt music and singing in Florence at the convent of Santissima Annunziata from 1573. He became organist at the Benedictine Abbey of the Badia in Florence from 1579 to 1605, and by 1588 was in the service of the Medicis as a singer and musician, participating in the lavish court entertainments, where his talent as a self-accompanying singer was much remarked upon.

During the 1580s Peri was part of a circle of poets, philosophers, and musicians meeting at the Count de’ Bardi’s home; in the 1590s he was part of a similar circle based around Jacopo Corsi. At some time in these meetings the idea came up of staging a drama told entirely through music, in contrast to the then fashionable entertainments called intermedi, which consisted of drama with musical interludes. In 1598 Peri and Corsi set Ottavio Rinuccini’s pastoral Dafne to music (Peri himself sang the role of Apollo at the first performance). Dafne is generally accepted as the first opera in the modern style, with solo voices or combinations of soloists supported by instruments—a musical texture known as monody. However, the few fragments that remain are sketchy in achievement compared with Peri and Giulio Caccini’s Euridice (1600) staged at Florence’s Pitti Palace for the wedding of Maria de Medici and Henry IV of France. Peri sang the role of Orfeo. This was a huge success and an artistic breakthrough that provoked intense argument and sparked new experiment for years, leading directly to Orfeo (1607), the first great opera of Monteverdi. Euridice was published in 1616 and often revived.

Peri wrote or had a hand in four more operas: Tetide (1608), for Mantua, was not performed, and neither was Adone (1611). A work of 1617 may be by Peri or Marco da Gagliano or both, but La Sposalizio di Medoro e Angelica (1619; The Wedding of Medoro and Angelico) is definitely a collaboration between the two. Three oratorios—all collaborations with Marco’s younger brother Giovanni Battista da Gagliano—are lost, but there are songs by Peri in the new monodic style in several collections, including one, Le Varie Musiche (1609), devoted to Peri alone.