nt Corsi, with great success, but
the music has been lost, and nothing more definite is known about it.
This beginning of opera, for so it was, was also the beginning of
opera in Germany, as we shall presently see, for about twenty years
later a copy of "Dafne" was carried to Dresden for production there
before the court, but when the libretto had been translated into
German, it was found unsuited to the music of the Italian copy,
whereupon the Dresden director, Heinrich Schuetz, wrote new music for
it, and thus became the composer of the first German opera ever
written. In 1600 the marriage of Catherine de Medici with Henry IV of
France was celebrated at Florence with great pomp, and Peri was
commissioned to undertake a new opera, for which Rinuccini composed
the text "Eurydice." The work was given with great _eclat_, and was
shortly after printed. Only one copy of the first edition is now known
to be in existence, and that, by a curious accident, is in the
Newberry Library at Chicago. The British Museum has a copy of the
second edition of 1608. The opera of "Eurydice" is short, the printed
copy containing only fifty-eight pages, and the music is almost
entirely recitative. There are two or three short choruses; there is
one orchestral interlude for three flutes, extending to about twenty
measures in all, but there is nothing like a finale or ensemble
piece. Nevertheless, this is the beginning, out of which afterward
grew the entire flower of Italian opera. On page 225 is an extract.

The new style thus invented was known to the Italians as _il stilo
rappresentivo_, or the representative style, that is to say, the
dramatic style, and there is some dispute as to the real author of the
invention. About the same time with the production of "Eurydice," a
Florentine musician, Emilio del Cavaliere, wrote the music to a sacred
drama, of which the text had been composed for him by Laura
Guidiccioni, the title being "_La Rappresentazione del Anima e del
Corpo_." The piece was an allegorical one, very elaborate in its
structure, and written throughout in the representative style, of
which Cavaliere claimed to be the inventor. This oratorio, which was
the first ever written, was produced at the oratory of St. Maria in
Vallicella, in the month of February, ten months before the appearance
of "Eurydice" at Florence. It is evident, therefore, that if the style
had been in any manner derived from the Florentine experiments already
n