Jacopo Peri
In the 1590s, Peri worked for Jacopo Corsi, the most important patron of music in Florence. They felt that art at that time (music, drama, painting etc.) was not as good as the classical art that had been produced 2000 years ago in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. They wanted to write drama like the old Greek tragedies. In music they started to write "monody", which meant a solo song with a continuo bass accompaniment. They soon started to realize that just monody on its own could become boring, so they developed it into recitative (where the story could be told) and aria (where the singers could express their feelings in song). Peri and Corsi asked the poet Ottavio Rinuccini to write some words for them and together they produced the opera Dafne. It was probably nothing like what the Ancient Greeks would have done, but it was the first opera in modern times.