(b Rome, 20 Aug 1561; d Florence, 12 Aug 1633). Italian composer and singer. Trained in Florence, he was organist at the Badia in 1579-1605, and by 1586 was a singer at S Giovanni Battista. From 1588 he served the Medici court as composer and singer; he also played keyboard instruments and the chitarrone. In the 1590s he met with musicians, poets and philosophers at the home of Jacopo Corsi and began to compose in the new recitative style, intended to match the expressive power of ancient Greek music. His first two operas, both to texts by Rinuccini, were Dafne (1598, Florence), composed with Corsi, and Euridice (1600, Florence), partly rewritten by Giulio Caccini for the first performance. Euridice, based on the Orpheus legend, is the earliest opera for which complete music survives. Peri's setting emphasizes both the structure of the libretto (a prologue and five scenes) and its varied emotions, and includes choral numbers, strophic songs and continuous expressive recitatives. His later dramatic works, mostly written with other Florentine composers such as Marco da Gagliano, include several operas, three oratorios (1622-4) and some shorter pieces; one work was staged in Mantua (1620), where he held a court position from 1618. He also wrote a book of songs, Le varie musiche (1609), with some recitative settings, and an instrumental ricercare.
Peri, Jacopo (yä'kōpō pĕ'rē), 1561-1633, Italian composer and singer. Dafne (c.1597), perhaps the first opera, was composed by both Peri and Jacopo Corsi. The librettist, Ottavio Rinuccini, also wrote Euridice, which Peri and Caccini set to music (1600). The music for this opera was performed at the wedding of Henry IV of France to Marie de' Medici.
Jacopo Peri, to whom belongs the distinction of having composed the first opera, was born in Rome but grew up in Florence. A member of a noble family, Peri studied under Cristoforo Malvezzi of Lucca. From 1579 to 1606 he was an organist at the Badia in Florence, and in 1588, he entered the service of the court of the dominant Medici family as maestro di cappella first to Ferdinand I, Duke of Tuscany, and afterwards to his son, Cosimo II. In 1589 he performed to great acclaim in the giant musical production La Pellegrina, organized to commemorate Ferdinand's marriage to Christine of Lorraine.
Peri became associated with a group of humanists in Florence, headed by Giovanni de' Bardi, who were dedicated to attempting a revival of Greek tragedy as the Greeks themselves had experienced it. It was established knowledge that ancient performances had included long set pieces alternating with what might be termed duets and extended choral odes, all sung or declaimed in rhythms that varied according to the emotions being expressed. Dance and instrumental accompaniment were also involved. No music had survived from ancient Greece, however, so these Florentine intellectuals had to make their best guess as to how the music should sound.
The result of this experiment in reconstruction was Dafne, a pastoral drama by the poet Ottavio Rinuccini with music by Peri and Jacopo Corsi. Peri was responsible for the recitatives and some of the musical numbers. Now considered the first opera, Dafne was performed privately in 1597 at Corsi's home in Florence; as word of its novelty spread it received several more performances over the next few years.
In 1600, Peri was commissioned to write a second opera, again with Rinuccini, on the occasion of Maria de' Medici's marriage to Henry IV of France. Drawing on the ancient Greek legend of the miraculous powers of music, they produced Euridice; Peri himself probably sang the role of Orpheus in the first performance. This opera, by virtue of the more public circumstances of its creation, awakened wider interest in the new music. Opera came into its own as an art form over the next few decades.
Peri's compositional style emphasized monody and declamation, a break from the contrapuntal style of his predecessors, and an embrace of the style that would prove the foundation of modern music composition. In addition to Dafne and Euridice, Peri wrote recitatives for Rinuccini's Arianna in 1608 and also composed other operas, ballets, and madrigals. From the early 1600s, Peri was in the service of the Mantuan court, for which he wrote the opera Adone in 1620.
Peri died in Florence in 1633 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella, where his gravestone, crediting him as opera's inventor, is still clearly visible in the nave. Most of his music, including the much of the score to Dafne, is now lost, but Euridice survives and is still occasionally performed. ~ Roberta Klarreich, All Music Guide
Jacopo Peri (20 August 1561 – 12 August 1633) was an Italiancomposer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera. He wrote the first work to be called an opera today, Dafne (around 1597), and also the first opera to have survived to the present day, Euridice (1600).
In the 1590s, Peri became associated with Jacopo Corsi, the leading patron of music in Florence. They felt contemporary art was inferior to classical Greek and Roman works, and decided to attempt to recreate Greek tragedy, as they understood it. Their work added to that of the Florentine Camerata of the previous decade, which produced the first experiments in monody, the solo song style over continuo bass which eventually developed into recitative and aria. Peri and Corsi brought in the poetOttavio Rinuccini to write a text, and the result, Dafne, though nowadays thought to be a long way from anything the Greeks would have recognised, is seen as the first work in a new form, opera.
Rinuccini and Peri next collaborated on Euridice. This was first performed on 6 October 1600, and, unlike Dafne, has survived to the present day (though it is hardly ever staged, and then only as an historical curio). The work made use of recitatives, a new development which went between the arias and choruses and served to move the action along.
Peri produced a number of other operas, often in collaboration with other composers, and also wrote a number of other pieces for various court entertainments. Few of his pieces are still performed today, and even by the time of his death his operatic style was looking rather old-fashioned when compared to the work of relatively younger reformist composers such as Claudio Monteverdi. Peri's influence on those later composers, however, was large.
References
"Jacopo Peri", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
