Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence. By Tim Carter and Richard A. Goldthwaite

Abstract

The only image we have of Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), inventor of recitative and composer of the first extant opera, is the one of him costumed as the legendary musician Arion in the fifth of the intermedi performed in Florence in 1589. This is the image that graces the jacket of the book under consideration, one that goes a long way towards remedying that visual lacuna by painting a portrait in words of the singer-composer, partly through his own written remarks, via a trove of more than two dozen of Peri’s personal account books. Discovered serendipitously by the economic historian Richard Goldthwaite in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, the Peri Archive had been subsumed into a much larger fondo of private account books that had never been completely inventoried. This new information has allowed Goldthwaite and his co-author Tim Carter to place Peri in his social, economic, and musical worlds more completely than any other composer of the late Renaissance. The result is a fascinating complement to the more limited studies published earlier by Tim Carter (Jacopo Peri, 1989) and Warren Kirkendale (The Court Musicians in Florence, 1993).