At seventy-four years of age, when the fire of his genius
burned brightly as ever, he wrote his last opera "L'Incoronazione di
Poppea." It may truly be said that Monteverde was the great operatic
reformer, the Wagner, of the seventeenth century, as Gluck was of the
eighteenth.
An epoch-making event in opera history was the opening, in 1637, of the
first public opera house in commercial Venice whose wealth afforded her
citizens leisure to cultivate art. Soon popular demand led to the
erection of many Italian opera-houses. At the same time growing taste
for magnificence of stage setting and brilliant, dazzling, even
extravagant song effects, caused neglect of Academician principles. The
learned and gifted Neapolitan composer, Alessandro Scarlatti, father of
the famous harpsichordist, gave an impulse in his operas, during the
last quarter of the century, to sensuous charm and beauty of melody. He
invested recitative with classic value, enlarged the aria, and devised
the da capo which became a menace to dramatic truth.
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