Florentine Camerata
The Camerata Fiorentina ( Florentine Camerata ) consisted of a circle of poets, musicians, philosophers and scholars of the nobility who lived in Florence from around 1576 to 1600 around Count Giovanni de 'Bardi and later, from 1592, around the nobles Jacopo Corsi gathered.
The members of the Camerata had a great interest in Greek antiquity , especially in the reproduction of ancient dramas as true to the original as possible. By assuming that the text was sung at that time, a completely new kind of spoken chant was developed, supposedly based on the unanimous ancient chant of the Greek tragedy, the aim of which was the perfect expression of the affect and the intelligibility of the text and therefore only of was accompanied by some supporting chords of the figured bass : the monody . The polyphony, however, was discarded.
Members of the Camerata were the composer Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo Galilei ), Pietro Strozzi, Giulio Caccini , Jacopo Peri , and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and Gabrielo Chiabrera .
The Camerata was with the composer Jacopo Peri and his work La Dafne (text by Rinuccini, music partly also by Corsi; 1598) founder of the musical genre of the opera .
Without recognizing the dogmatic claim of the Florentine Camerata to be in possession of sole musical truth, the now much better known Claudio Monteverdi adopted monody as a possible way of writing his own works and thus helped it to have a momentous impact on music history.