Opera originated in Florence toward the close of the sixteenth century. A band of enthusiastic, intellectual composers aimed at reproducing the musical declamation which they believed to have been characteristic of the representation of Greek tragedy. The first attempt resulted in a cantata, "Il Conte Ugolino," for single voice with the accompaniment of a single instrument, and composed by Vincenzo Galileo, father of the famous astronomer. Another composer, Giulio Caccini, wrote several shorter pieces in similar style.
These composers aimed at an exact oratorical rendering of the words. Consequently, their scores were neither fugal nor in any other sense polyphonic, but strictly monodic. They were not, however, melodious, but declamatory; and if Richard Wagner had wished, in the nineteenth century, to claim any historical foundation for the declamatory recitative which he introduced in his music-dramas, he might have fallen back upon these composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and through them back to Greek tragedy with its bands of lyres and flutes.
These Italian composers, then, were the creators of recitative, so different from the polyphonic church music of the school of Palestrina. What usually is classed as the first opera, Jacopo Peri's "Dafne," was privately performed at the Palazzo Corsi, Florence, in 1597. So great was its success that Peri was commissioned, in 1600, to write a similar work for the festivities incidental to the marriage of Henry IV of France with Maria de Medici, and produced "Euridice," the first Italian opera ever performed in public.
The new art-form received great stimulus from Claudio Monteverde, the Duke of Mantua's _maestro di capella_, who composed "Arianna" in honor of the marriage of Francesco Gonzaga with Margherita, Infanta of Savoy. The scene in which _Ariadne_ bewails her desertion by her lover was so dramatically written (from the standpoint of the day, of course) that it produced a sensation, and when Monteverde brought out with even greater success his opera "Orfeo," which showed a great advance in dramatic expression, as well as in the treatment of the instrumental score, the permanency of opera was assured.