Orpheus in the Marketplace

The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. A large collection of recently discovered account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done much more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the remarkable value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and also opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. At the same time they allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.

Review: Quietly thrilling...[Carter and Goldthwaite] offer a sustained analysis of a recently discovered trove of account books belonging to Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), one of the earliest opera composers. What they reveal has implications for both music history and our understanding of an economy and society in transition, and is a model of interdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities...Even ordinary music lovers will find the exploration of the still underrated Peri intriguing.-- (11/28/2013)

In this bravura example of interdisciplinary history at its finest, two scholars of matchless erudition use the remarkably well-preserved traces of one man's life to provide a fascinating account of economic and musical practice in Florence at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through Jacopo Peri's story, Carter and Goldthwaite indispensably show how social status and wealth might contribute to a musician's aesthetic stance, reputation, and, eventually, canonicity.--Suzanne G. Cusick, New York University