The Renaissance in Florence: From Madrigals to Melodrama

Join Dr Joseph Talia OAM, opera singer, artistic director, teacher and scholar, in a musical journey across four centuries, enhancing our appreciation of the qualities that make Italian opera one of the most loved artistic forms of all time, as well as one of the most successful cultural exports of il Bel Paese. In this talk, we shall introduce the socio-cultural conditions that prevailed during the Renaissance, making it a time of unprecedented artistic and intellectual creativity. The patronage of the Medici in Florence was critical to the establishment of the Camerata, a group of artists and intellectuals meeting in Count de’ Bardi’s home. These artists transformed polyphonic madrigals into staged melodrama through the use of monody (a single voice to tell the story). Claudio Monteverdi saw the potential of the idiom and knew that he could do much better: Opera was in good hands.