Where Was Opera Born?

Do you want to know the origin of the musical art form or the web browser? Because the answers to those two questions are very different. Oh what the hey, let’s talk about both.

Opera is an Italian word which means “work” – work as in achievement, not the verb. It comes from the Latin opus, as in Mr. Holland’s Opus, a great work. As we understand it today, opera is a type of dramatic musical production wherein all the text is sung. It is distinct from musical theater in that there is no spoken dialogue in opera; it is all sung.

The first opera was written around 1597 by an Italian named Jacopo Peri. This opera, Dafne, was an attempt to revive the Greek style of dramas, in which the action and dialogue took place with a chorus providing commentary. Some people at the time believed that the lines of the Greek chorus were always sung, and that the rest of the dialogue may have also been sung. Thus, the revival attempt incorporated the practice.

Although the score of Dafne has been lost, Peri wrote another opera a few years later called Euridice, and its score has survived to the present. The earliest opera still being regularly performed is L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi. It was first performed in Mantua (northern Italy) in 1607.

Origin of Opera as a Web Browser

The Opera web browser began as a research project in 1994 at Telenor, the largest telecommunications company in Norway. In 1995, it broke away from Telenor as a separate company, Opera Software ASA. As of May 2010, Opera was the 5th most used web browser behind Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.

In Summary: The Birth of Opera

As an art form, opera originated in Italy, where its name comes from, in the late 16th century. As a web browser (which some might consider an art form in itself), Opera originated in Norway in 1994.