Monteverde's scores contained, besides recitative, suggestions of melody, but these suggestions occurred only in the instrumental ritornelles. The Venetian composer Cavalli, however, introduced melody into the vocal score in order to relieve the monotonous effect of continuous recitative, and in his airs for voice he foreshadowed the aria form which was destined to be freely developed by Alessandro Scarlatti, who is regarded as the founder of modern Italian opera in the form in which it flourished from his day to and including the earlier period of Verdi's activity.
Melody, free and beautiful melody, soaring above a comparatively simple accompaniment, was the characteristic of Italian opera from Scarlatti's first opera, "L'Onesta nell' Amore," produced in Rome in 1680, to Verdi's "Trovatore," produced in the same city in 1853. The names, besides Verdi's, associated with its most brilliant successes, are: Rossini ("Il Barbiere di Siviglia," "Guillaume Tell"), Bellini ("Norma," "La Sonnambula," "I Puritani"), and Donizetti ("Lucia," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "La Fille du Regiment"). These composers possessed dramatic verve to a great degree, aimed straight for the mark, and when at their best always hit the operatic target in the bull's-eye.
The charge most frequently laid against Italian opera is that its composers have been too subservient to the singers, and have sacrificed dramatic truth and depth of expression, as well as the musicianship which is required of a well-written and well-balanced score, as between the vocal and instrumental portions, to the vanity of those upon the stage--in brief, that Italian opera consists too much of show-pieces for its interpreters. Among the first to protest practically against this abuse was Gluck, a German, who, from copying the Italian style of operatic composition early in his career, changed his entire method as late as 1762, when he was nearly fifty years old. "Orfeo et Euridice," the oldest opera that to-day still holds a place in the operatic repertoire, and containing the favorite air, "Che faro senza Euridice" (I have lost my Eurydice), was produced by Gluck, in Vienna, in the year mentioned. There Gluck followed it up with "Alceste," then went to Paris, and scored a triumph with "Iphigenie en Aulite." But on the arrival, in Paris, of the Italian composer, Piccini, the Italian party there seized upon him as a champion to pit against Gluck, and there then ensued in the French capital a rivalry so fierce that it became a veritable musical War of the Roses until Gluck completely triumphed over Piccini with "Iphigenie en Tauride."