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The historiography of opera For Italy, as for Europe as a whole, the most remarkable innovation of the entire seventeenth century was without doubt the introduction of opera. The sheer enormity of this ‘invention’ may be gauged in relation to the complexity of its constituent parts: no other form of contemporary artistic expression brings together such numerous, varied and costly means of organization and production. Moreover, the history and fortunes of opera are at all times deeply rooted in historical and social events: conditioned as it is by the various prevailing economic and political situations, opera has been and continues to be exploited as a not insignificant tool of ideological persuasion and mobilization, a public demonstration of sovereign power, a means of collective entertainment, a vehicle for the community celebration of civic events. Down the centuries, the introduction of opera has had enormous repercussions: in Italy, France, England and German-speaking lands, modern operatic life is nothing but the continuation of an institutional tradition which, despite constant transformation (not least in the emergence of many non-European operatic capitals – New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Sydney, etc. – in the course of the twentieth century), can be traced without interruption through three centuries of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of styles The multiplicity of musical styles brought together so perfectly in Monteverdi's Book 8 is indicative of an aesthetic and poetic problem of which the seventeenth century itself – in Italy, as indeed throughout Europe – was fully aware. This awareness was above all empirical: the musician who had lived through the decades surrounding the turn of the century and witnessed the disintegration of vocal polyphony as the dominant musical force of the day had every reason to raise the issue of the proliferation of styles. On the surface, it was a question of pronouncing either for or against ‘modern’ music. Thus, the Della musica dell'età nostra, che non è punto inferiore, anzi è migliore di quella dell'età passata (1640) of the Roman patrician Pietro Della Valle is a controversial attack on a defender of the music of the past; for its author, the fundamental distinction is between a concept of music as counterpoint tout court, and another in which it is seen as a harmony of three identifiable components or requisites: ‘counterpoint’, ‘song’ and ‘sound’. In other words: within the framework of a contrapuntal theory and art handed down from the previous century, different manners of singing and playing now imbue contemporary music with a variety of qualities – all quite separate and distinct. These qualities derive not only from different manners of performance but also from different compositional styles: each musical genre is attributed with specific, variable ‘song’ and ‘sound’ characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]