CACCINI, GIULIO, ( b. Rome, Italy, c 1545; d. Florence, 10 Dec 1618. )
Caccini was a lute player and singer at the court of the sixteenth century Duke of Tuscany. By 1589 he had joined the Camerata. This was a group concerned with reviving the role which they believed music to have held in the theatre of the ancient Greeks.
As a composer, Caccini's interest was in writing recitative for the single voice, which he often sang to his own accompaniment. This led to dramatic scenes in which story, character and situation were developed through words and music. The outcome was the beginning of opera as we would recognise it today. The contemporary composer Peri, also a member of the Camerata, worked with similar ideas. Both are rivals for the name of founding father of the new art form.
Le nuove musiche (New Music), published in 1602, contains arias and choruses written by Caccini for these early operas. His development of the experimental ideas of the Camerata marks a change in musical style from polyphony to monody. These ideas were farther developed by the composer Monteverdi and produced later reactions throughout the operatic repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
