8. ‘La stiava dolente in suono di canto’

Abstract

In late February 1607, two central Italian courts invited select guests to celebrate Carnival by witnessing an entirely sung dramatic spectacle in one of their ruling families’ palaces. Each spectacle was meant to be ephemeral, yet each had profound consequences both for its composer’s career and for the then-emergent genre we know as opera. One — composed and performed by and for elite men purportedly interested in the story of Orpheus and Euridice as an allegory of Platonist ethics — was pu..