Discuss the significance of opera as a reflection of the baroque spirit

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The baroque style developed as a way to increase the dramatic expressiveness of religious subject matter. This goal, however, also made its way into the new secular art form, opera. Opera—a form of theater that combines music, drama, dance, and the visual arts—was the quintessential musical genre of the baroque era. Born in Italy, it emerged out of Renaissance efforts to revive the music-drama of ancient Greek theater. In integrating music, drama, and visual display, opera became the ideal expression of the baroque sensibility and the object of imitation throughout Western Europe.
Orfeo, composed in 1607 by Claudio Monteverdi, is considered one of the first full-length operas in music history. In this work, Monteverdi discarded the intimate dimensions of Renaissance chamber music and cultivated an expansive, dramatic style, marked by vivid contrasts of texture and color. Orfeo reflects a typically baroque effort to imbue music with a vocal expressiveness that mirrors the emotional charge of poetry. "The [written] text," declared Monteverdi, "should be the master of the music, not the servant." Monteverdi linked "affections" or specific emotional states with appropriate sounds: anger, for instance, with the high voice register, moderation with the middle voice register, and humility with the low voice register. While the union of music and speech characterized almost all his religious music and smaller secular pieces, it was essential to the effectiveness of his operas.