1. Monteverdi and other musician were treated as performers to the wealthy families at that time. For the case of Monteverdi, he used to perform for the members of Gonzaga family who lived in Mantua area. The families were opera mania, so they had to hire performers for them.
2. Historians recognize Monteverdi as a composer who performed the first work of mastermind in the timeline of opera. Coincidentally, L’Orfeo, performed around February 1607, was Monteverdi’s first piece of work, which shows the dawn of the Baroque Period in Music. The piece of work offers an affluent mixture of ancient Greek myth and 16th-century striking conventions. L’Orfeo left a footprint of score and commands on instrumentation to live up to date (Fisher 6).
3. The first piece of work by a woman to emerge in the opera timeline was Gli amori di Aci e Galatea composed by Santi Orlandi. This is one of the earliest pieces of great works, which is surviving up to date.
4. The period of 1600 witnessed a growing demand for opera music, and by the end of 17th century, Venice alone had over 30 opera houses. Venice, during that period, had staged in the excess of 1,700 operas (Hoying 1). All classes of citizens bought tickets to attend operas, and well-off citizens soon made an income by sponsoring opera functions. This period also signalled the end of Renaissance and ushered in the Baroque period.
5. After the opera houses in the Venice, Rome emerged as the premier of Italian opera. This was as a result most of the composers, mostly priest, lived in Rome. The growing demand for the new opera could not hold in Venice alone.
6. The War of The Buffons is regarded as one of the various elite quarrels that came up between most of the people in the era of Enlightenment. It had its own sections, with the Ancients and the Moderns battling it out in the Literature part. The Science part witnessed a disagreement between the principle of least action and the idea of vis viva (or better known as living force). The occasion marked a particularly bright testimony to the enlightening ferment that left a footprint in the middle decades of the Enlightenment era (Wilson and Reill 43).
7. During the 17th century there was only one English opera artist. At this time the british was still battling political instability.
8. Da Ponte spent most of his life as a poet as well as he was a itinerant scholar. He was born as Emmanuel Conegliano in Ceneda area, Italy, in the year 1749 and lived for 89 years. After doing a wonderful work in the opera industry and visiting many places, he passed away in New York in 1838. His parents were of Jewish origin, but afterwards he converted. After his mother had passed away, he was baptized to enable his father to marry a Catholic woman. Da Ponte was the name he preferred in respect of the bishop of Ceneda. He later became a priest and an author of several great pieces of arts, such as The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni.
9. Francesca Cuzzoni was an Italian opera composer who lived between 1698 to 1770. She first emerged as a singer in 1718 in the name of Dalinda Ariodante and in also in performed London in 1723 by the name Teofane in Ottone. She later emerged as a prominent figure in her written pieces of art, such as Antigona.
Works cited
Fisher, Burton. Mozart's Da Ponte Operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte. Opera Journeys Publishing, 2007. Print.
Hoying, Deanna. A Brief History of Opera. Web. Retrieved from www.kyopera.org/documents/education/operahistory1.pdf
Wilson, Ellen and Peter, Hanns, Reill. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 2nd Ed., New York: Infobase Publishing, 2004. Print.
