The birth of opera
Like other developments in the early Baroque, opera originated in Italy, but not in the courts of Florence, Mantua or any of the other feudal city-states. Venice, that republic on the Adriatic Sea, was the birthplace of public opera. And, once again, a group of intellectuals was primarily responsible for this innovation--a group of intellectuals, plus a composer and librettist with entrepreneurial spirits.

Benedetto Ferrari and his librettist, Francesco Manelli, were Romans who brought an itinerant group of musicians to Venice for Carnival in 1637. Ferrari's opera Andromeda became the first such work to be performed in the Serenissima (a sobriquet for Venice), at the San Cassiano theater, with the backing of a leading family of Venice, the Tron brothers. The enormous success of this venture led to the establishment of a more permanent opera company in Venice.

Aside from the seeming potential for commercial success, there were several reasons that opera flourished in Venice perhaps more than in other Italian cities. For one thing, its staunch republicanism made a mixed audience more socially acceptable, which meant that more tickets could be sold. Opera was also an ideal vehicle for promoting the political agenda of the republic through allegory. In addition, Venice possessed a sophisticated musical culture associated with the basilica of San Marco, and many of the singers and instrumentalists employed there were happy for a chance to augment their incomes by performing in the opera.

To these advantages one could add the factor that other locations were not as conducive to public opera. For instance, women in Rome were forbidden to appear onstage in public. Although many wealthy patrons gave private performances, this interdict was partly responsible for the tremendous popularity of the castrato, a high-voiced male who had undergone some form of castration in order to prevent his voice from breaking. While this potentially solved the problem of supplying soprano and alto voices for the roles of women in opera, castration was, in its turn, also illegal.

Needless to say, in Venice there were no laws prohibiting women from singing in public. But by 1637 the fashion for the castrato voice was so firmly entrenched that the main male character was usually set as a soprano or mezzo anyway. In an ironic turnaround, sometimes women had to take these roles, if there were no adequate castrati available.

In any case, although this first Venetian opera had aristocratic backing, it was essentially a moneymaking project on the part of the composer and librettist, and anyone who could afford the price of a ticket could attend. It was wildly successful (at least in box-office terms), and it marked the beginning of a series of such entrepreneurial undertakings, some of which involved the construction of new opera houses.

The enterprising Accademia
An organization that was frequently involved in Venetian opera from its beginning was the Accademia degli incogniti. This group of irreverent, iconoclastic intellectuals set the tone for many of the librettos of mid-seventeenth-century Venetian operas, whose plots are shockingly frank and frequently amoral, with gender-bending taken to an extreme that seems daring even today.

The interests of the incogniti were primarily literary rather than musical, but opera's origins were closely linked to the idea of literature and to the supremacy of word over music. The librettist remained the more important of the two collaborators in many ways and retained the right to publish and profit from his libretto, which was often judged as a work of literature in its own right.

	Aria
	An aria is a solo song, normally occurring in the context of a longer work but sometimes autonomous. It is usually formally closed, meaning that it could be removed from its setting and performed independently as a complete musical unit.

But the power of music, and the public demand for a catchy tune, soon asserted itself over the purely literary aspects of opera. What began as a recitative and monody-dominated genre was, by mid-century, much more broken up with arias. In addition, aspects of the productions, such as scenery, costumes (to a lesser extent) and stage machinery, were important crowd-pleasing elements. They were also extremely expensive.

The popularity of opera created another high-ticket item that was gradually making the cost of each production spiral upward, namely, the prima donna and primo uomo. Since it was frequently the famous singers that crowds would come to see, the entrepreneurs were caught in a trap from which opera has never since managed to extricate itself. It is--and always has been--quite simply the most expensive form of live entertainment there is (rock-and-roll superstars possibly excepted): lavish, glorious, absurd, continually teetering on the brink of financial disaster, and irresistible to many.

Oratorios
But opera was not the only forum for dramatic vocal music in the early Baroque. The Italian oratorio, which is rather a different animal from mid-eighteenth-century English oratorio, was also a product of this time period. Oratories, the buildings from which the genre originally took its name, were public prayer halls where nonliturgical devotional events took place.

The Catholic Church was still well aware of the dangers of the Protestant Reformation, which inaugurated a competing Christian faith, and increasingly sought ways to engage the imagination of the public in worship. The Church soon realized that the sensual power of music (which caused it to legislate heavily against certain types of music in churches and convents) could be as easily used to further their message as to lure people away from the Church. Thus the Jesuits in particular began to write dramatic texts with biblical themes, to be set to music and performed in the oratories.

The earliest example of something that resembles such an oratorio is "La Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo" (1600) by Emilio de Cavalieri. Although scholars disagree about whether this work can really be classified as an oratorio, it was composed in Rome, for the Jesuits, and was a conscious attempt to use the new style of music to move people to piety. These early oratorios were sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Latin. They usually included a role for a narrator , (testo or historicus, depending on the language of the libretto), and actively involved a chorus in the action of the drama--both features that distinguish the oratorio from early opera.

	Ground bass
	Ground bass is a repeated melodic pattern in the lowest voice of a musical texture. The popular patterns in the Baroque, the passamezzo antico and passamezzo moderno, the chaconne and the ruggiero (among many examples), were derived from dances of the same names. Upper parts would be varied above this repeating ground, and the composition could be purely instrumental or vocal. The genre of the lament often had a section with a particular descending four-note bass pattern. This pattern became associated with the lament, and thus came to signify lamenting or mourning even when used independently of a text.

The most famous composer of Italian and Latin oratorios in the early-middle Baroque is the Roman composer Giacomo Carissimi. His "Jephte," often considered to be his masterpiece, is a textbook example of this type of work. It includes a historicus and an active chorus, and uses all the styles available to composers at that time, including recitative and short arias, and frequently employs the technique of the ground bass.

Some slightly later composers include Luigi Rossi and Alessandro Stradella--the latter of whom composed oratorios that take the application of secular styles and themes to an extreme, to the extent that some of his works have been described as belonging to a genre known as oratorio erotico.

Another of the most important composers of early Baroque oratorios, however, was not Italian. The German Heinrich Schütz composed several very beautiful and important works that fall into this category, some in German, some in Latin. His oratorios include the "Sieben Worte am Kreuz" (Seven Last Words on the Cross) and three Passions, those of St. Luke, St. John and St. Matthew.

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Not all vocal works were on the monumental scale of operas and oratorios, however. Many composers wrote much smaller works, called cantatas, for performance in more intimate settings. These early Baroque cantatas, again, are not very similar to the Lutheran church cantatas of J.S. Bach. They are generally based on secular subjects, are usually for onlyone voice with continuo (although sometimes more elaborately scored, and including two or more voices), and can consist of little more than a short recitative followed by an aria. The most elaborate might have two or three songlike sections, plus one or two instrumental interludes.

The composer who published more cantatas than any other in the seventeenth century was actually a woman. Barbara Strozzi, the "adopted" daughter of the Venetian

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poet Giulio Strozzi, was a gifted singer and composer who produced eight books of primarily secular cantatas between 1644 and 1664.

As communication, entertainment or religious inspiration, early Baroque music was heard by increasingly wider audiences. These audiences might also have begun to hear greater distinctions between the dramatic vocal forms--operas and oratorios--and instrumental music.