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The illustrious Medici family had always been enamoured of lavish celebrations, and from 1550 on they began to favour the inclusion of performances– one of the main tools of the Baroque –of intermedii “con suoni, canti e balli” (with sounds, songs and dances) in tragic-comic pastoral dramas such as Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Il pastor fido which were then in vogue at the theatre. A new type of entertainment, the Florentine court ballet, developed from these mixed-genre performance experiments, and soon spread throughout Europe (the French Ballet comique de la Reine, staged by Baldassarino da Belgiojoso to celebrate the marriage of the Duc de Joyeuse and Mademoiselle de Vaudémont in 1581, was based on the Florentine model). In other words, artistic, literary and technical elements seemed to be converging into a trend which would result in the melodrama, considered to be a completely new type of all-round, pluralist event, and which would cause an upheaval in terms of its repercussions.
The remarkable adventure of opera began, however, in an almost confidential way, as a battle of wits. Writers, musicians, philosophers, and poets gathered together in 1576 at the palazzo of Count Bardi, a friend of the Medicis, to explore a noble project: the musical melodrama, which embodied the realisation of a humanist dream based on the restoration of Greek tragedy, which was believed to have been sung.
These Camerata fiorentina were thoroughly committed to melodrama, which they saw as a means of affirming the difference between the Italians and the Franco-Flemish, who dominated church music of the time. Their debates centered on the question of how music could be made to speak, or rather how drama could be expressed through music in order to rediscover the original magic of the word, which the ancients attributed to Orpheus (Bardi and his companions based their rhetorical proposals on their studies of Plato and Aristoxenus).
Was this trend a resurrection? A revolution? No, it was more a happy empiricism to which each member of the Camerata brought something of himself; the idea of overturning the established order did not enter their thoughts. However, the desire to rediscover the dramatic and incantatory power of ancient theatre did lead the Camerata to condemn polyphony in no uncertain terms. This was a brave position to take, given the reigning position of the madrigal throughout Italy. It served as a sort of national hymn in which the secular feelings - both voluptuous and sorrowful - of the people could be expressed (Florentine musical taste, on the other hand, was naturally inclined to forms that emphasised melody and monody, and was no stranger to controversy).
Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer) dealt the final blow to counterpoint when he published his Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna in 1581. This work identified the madrigal as the main obstacle to the expression of sentiments and emotion in music.
It is important to emphasise that the Camerata based its arguments on an analysis of ancient texts. Orpheus, who had charmed people (in the true sense of the word) by singing and accompanying himself on the lyre, was a symbolic figure for them, and they believed monodic song was the secret of his oratory powers. Galilei affirmed that the goal of expressive song was to interest the listener in the meaning of the text; the text was the mirror of the affetti and had too often been neglected by the madrigalists, who inevitably distanced themselves from expressivity by having four or five voices sing about the feelings of a single character. This was the opposite of the ancient way, “which awoke the liveliest passions by the sole means of a voice accompanied by a lyre”. Galilei added, “that it is necessary to give up counterpoint and return to the simplicity of the word”.
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