Opinions are divided as to whether Emilio de’ Cavalieri should be credited with having composed the earliest operas, and whether Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo, first performed in Rome in 1600, should be regarded as the oldest surviving example of the genre. Anima et di Corpo was certainly intended to be a spectacle, but its form and musical content conform much more to what we would now recognise as a sacred oratorio, than to those of music theatre. The expressive flexibility and power of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, composed just seven years later, are far removed from the rather stock forms of De’ Cavalieri’s score, which can sometimes seem like the incidental music to a series of lavish tableaux. René Jacobs, though, sees no objection to calling the work an opera, insisting that the rather “primitive” recitative and straightforward choral writing were deliberately intended to make the text as clear to the audience as possible. Typically Jacobs make the orchestral realisation of the score sumptuous within its turn-of-the-17th-century constraints; no one could mistake this for anything but a grandly ceremonial piece, and his recording now supersedes the performance from the Utrecht early music festival on Alpha as the one that fans of early opera should seek out.
