Medieval liturgy at the origins of Italian opera. An essay

Every year, on Easter Sunday, the Catholic liturgy invites the faithful to listen to the magnificent sequence ‘Victimae paschali’ – to quote the original Latin title – or ‘Alla vittima pasquale’ if, instead, one hears it in Italian. Every year, therefore, on Easter Sunday, the faithful are unwittingly listening to a tiny example of what remains of the distant origins of opera. Please forgive this simplification—perhaps an excessive one—but we find it useful for recounting a piece of musical history that is often underestimated.

We are in the midst of the Late Middle Ages. Monks had long since begun to write down the melodies of the ancient Gregorian chants, which had been passed down orally and without any musical notation, as the tradition was gradually being forgotten. Gregorian chant, originally, did not include the melodies: its notation is called ‘in campo aperto’ precisely because it does not indicate the notes, but only the rhythmic interpretation to be followed for melodies that the monks knew and had no need to write down. From around the year 1000 onwards, it began to become rather difficult to memorise those long chains of notes – the ‘longissimae melodiae’ – which characterised Gregorian melismas. Thus, little by little, the idea of a Swiss monk, Notker Balbulus, proved effective: he saw fit to pair those melodic runs with specially composed poetic texts, thereby making it easier to memorise the melodies. Gradually, these compositions took on a life of their own and became detached from the original Gregorian chants: thus were born the tropes and sequences – original texts set to Gregorian music which, by virtue of their artistic nature, lent themselves well to ‘theatricalisation’. The Easter sequence mentioned earlier, which still survives today in the Catholic liturgy, for example, features a dialogue: ‘Tell us, Mary, what did you see on the way?’ – ‘The tomb of the living Christ, the glory of the Risen One; and his angels as witnesses, the shroud and the garments’.

This medieval liturgical repertoire appears to be closely linked to what Giordano Farina and Maddalena Bonechi, in an essay recently published by Lim, “Dalla liturgia al palcoscenico”, identify as the origin of melodrama and opera. From the year 1000 right up to the sixteenth century – that is, until the Counter-Reformation, which swept away everything that was not liturgical by codifying the Roman Missal – there are thousands of sources, both manuscript and printed, which pass down the figurative ritual performances in which clerics gave voice and form to episodes from the Gospels. It is from here – from medieval tropes and sequences, through the laudes and on to the 15th- and 16th-century performances – that an entire theatrical tradition, albeit sacred and liturgical, must be traced, one which would lead to the birth of Italian melodrama: it is no coincidence that what is considered the first opera in the modern sense, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice of 1600, originated in Florence, where, for a couple of centuries, there had indeed been a deep-rooted theatrical tradition of ‘sacred representations’.