Abstract

This chapter looks at the rich culture of performance and spectacle that emerged over the course of the sixteenth century with the revival of classical plays and the adoption of the perspective stage set. This culminated in a series of performances in Medici Florence around 1600 that gave birth to opera. Stage sets played a crucial role in the transformation of opera into an immersive environment that transcended sound to appeal to all the senses simultaneously. Already in the intermedi, one of the precursors to opera, gardens and landscapes played a key narrative role, with designs by artists such as Bernardo Buontalenti often mirroring new designs in gardens. As well, the concern for verisimilitude and ‘unity of place’ in the first operas meant that the settings tended to be pastoral settings because it seemed more plausible that characters such as shepherds, shepherdesses, and nymphs would sing their speech. This meant that the powerfully emotional music and poetry of the first operas, with their themes of love and loss of love, tended to be closely associated with landscape settings.

Keywords: Medici, Opera, Stage Sets, Theatre, Bernardo Buontalenti

The best part of all these plays and feste has been the scenes against which they were performed, which were made by one Maestro Pellegrino: there is a road and a perspective of a town with houses, churches, bell towers and gardens such that one can never tire of looking at because of the variety of things in it, all cleverly contrived and well-planned. – Bernadino Prosperi on the set for Ariosto's La Cassaria, 1508.