Italian opera "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing
The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) is an epistolary novel written by Ugo Foscolo between 1798 and 1802 and first published later that year. It is considered the first such work in Italian literature. A second edition, with major changes, was published by Foscolo in Zurich (1816) and a third one in London (1817). The model was Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774). Another influence is Rousseau's "Julie, or the New Heloise" (1761). Foscolo's work was also inspired by the political events that occurred in Northern Italy