Federico Schneider, Unsuspected Competitive Contexts in Early Opera. Monteverdi’s Milanese Challenge to Florence’s Euridice (1600), Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 2016, 155 pp.

[Autom. eng. transl.] The essay puts under observation the cultural, aesthetic and spiritual context within which the first two melodramas of the history of western music saw the light, two rewrites of the ancient myth of Orpheus: that is, Le musiche sopra l'Euridice by Jacopo Peri , represented in Florence in 1600, and L'Orfeo, fable in music by Claudio Monteverdi, represented in Mantua in 1607. The author, Federico Schneider - whose studies have already turned to the late Renaissance dramaturgy, and particularly to the genre of Pastoral tragicomedy, as well as the literary sources of the Orpheus by Alessandro Striggio, libretto of the Monteverdian work - with this monograph it offers a brilliant, erudite, closely argued contribution on the relations between literary and musical cultures in the early seventeenth century.