Amfiparnaso, L'

Madrigal opera by Orazio Vecchi, first produced in Modena, Italy, in 1594, and published in Venice in 1597, described as a commedia harmonica. It consists of three acts and a prologue, and the characters are the stock figures of the commedia dell'arte, but the musical setting of their speech is in the form of madrigals for mixed voices. It has been supposed that the action was produced in dumb-show while the madrigals were sung behind the scenes, but a passage in the text which says that ‘the spectacle is to enter by the ear, not by the eye’ gives good reason to doubt this. The same subject was treated earlier in a smaller form by the Flemish composer Roland de Lassus.