Although this overview of Cavalli’s music is necessarily condensed, it nonetheless succeeds in painting a meaningful picture of both the nature of opera as it was developing in Venice at the time, and the composer’s own artistic and compositional talent. Cavalli was of course influenced by Monteverdi, yet he imbued his music with his own individual style, in effect setting the artistic seal on the rest of the seventeenth century.

One particularly distinctive element of Cavalli’s music is its singability (cantabilità), especially evident in his duets and in his expression of the sensuality omnipresent in post- Renaissance Venetian art and literature. Opera grew out of the Accademie, forums for artistic and literary debate and performance, whose members were inspired by the tales of the Roman world (as viewed with considerable moral — and historical — licence), and by Greek mythology (also revisited