There’s no such thing as a “short history of opera.” Well… there is a famous college textbook called A Short History of Opera… but it’s 800 pages long. I will tell you this historical note about opera, though: it was invented – that’s right, invented – in the late 1500's in Florence, Italy. The inventors were a group of Italian composers, philosophers, and poets known as the Camerata. “Camerata” is from the Italian word camera, which means “room,” and the room, in this case, was the fancy living room of a Florentine count. The Camerata met there regularly, and it was there that they came up with the goal of recreating what they imagined to be the musical style of ancient Greek tragedy. This was a style that one composer described as “speaking in melody.” In the absence of any good recordings of the ancient Greeks, it’s hard to know if the Camerata were right, but in any case the results turned out pretty well. The Italian word opera means “work,” by the way, from the Latin opus, and the term was originally an abbreviated form of opera in musica, or “work of music.”
A Minute with Miles – a production of South Carolina ETV Radio, made possible by the J.M. Smith Corporation.
Miles Hoffman is the founder and violist of the American Chamber Players, with whom he regularly tours the United States, and the Virginia I. Norman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at the Schwob School of Music, in Columbus, Georgia. He has appeared as viola soloist with orchestras across the country, and his solo performances on YouTube have received well over 700,000 views.