Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo (1607)

So I guess it's debatable whether this is actually the first opera per se, but it's certainly one of the first, and certainly the first that's actually performed these days. I did want to see Euridice, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere.

So, you watch an opera by a later baroque composer like Handel or Vivaldi, and it's obvious how different it is from your nineteenth-century works, but there's still a pretty clear line of succession. In spite of the differences, they still have a lot in common. Orfeo, I found, was a much more alien proposition. The music isn't wholly unfamiliar; to my unlettered ears, it sounds like it's splitting the difference between Renaissance music and later baroque stuff. But the singing is in a completely different style from more familiar opera (I wish I had the musicological training to enumerate what exactly that means), and the sensibilities of the whole thing are very different. The whole thing is slow and solemn in a way that opera usually isn't. I think this is perfectly captured by this La Scala performance. It's probably actually at least kind of similar to what it would've looked like in the seventeenth century: minimalistic sets (three of them: a garden, Hades, and the shores of Thrace with a single tree), figures dressed in Renaissance garb, and only very constrained, stylized movements and shows of emotion, in stark contrast to the more naturalistic acting (relatively speaking) that we associate with opera. Even in the happy opening section, there's a funereal air to the proceedings (goth kids really ought to love this).  It could certainly come across differently with a different production, but I really think a production like that is called for. Anything much different seems like it would be counter to the music. There was one part that made me laugh: a voice in Hades wonders of Orfeo "will he be able to resist his youthful exuberance?" "Exuberant" is not an adjective I would apply to any of the characters here.

Anyway, the whole thing creates a haunting, otherworldly effect, and I loved it. Monteverdi has two other extant operas, but there are at least four that are lost, and that fact pains me deeply. I mean okay, there may conceivably be more urgent problems, but when I think that substantial amounts of this transcendent music are lost, whereas copies of The Art of the Deal will continue to exist while radioactive cockroaches are swarming over our remains...ugh.