Who performed the first Opera?
first OPERA.
The first OPERA was Dafne, with libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri, originally performed at the Palazzo Corsi in Florence during the Carnival early in 1597 (exact date unrecorded). None of the music survives except for some brief passages interpolated by Corsi himself. The story was founded on the legend of Daphne and Apollo.
The earliest opera of which both text and music survive is Rinuccini and Pefi’s Euridice, which was performed for the first time at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence on 6 October 1600. The orchestra on this occasion consisted of a clavecin, a chitarone, viol and great lute.
The first English opera, and the first opera performed in England, was Sir William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, presented in five acts with music by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke and the Royalist Capt. Cooke at Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard in Aldersgate Street, London in September 1656. One of the very few theatrical performances countenanced during the Commonwealth, it took as its theme the siege of the city of Rhodes by Solyman the Magnificent in 1522, when 600 knights of the Order of St John held out for nearly six months against a quarter of a million Turks. In treating what was then comparatively recent history it owed nothing to Italian opera, which concentrated exclusively on classical themes. Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes was notable in other respects, for it was the first time movable scenery had been used on the public stage in England, and the first dramatic performance to feature an English actress, Mrs Edward Coleman, who sang the part of Ianthe to her husband’s Alphonso.
