The Medici: Sex, Power, and the Birth of Opera

Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo: Part 1

Welcome to Part 1 of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ll be exploring opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off.

To understand the relationship between sexual politics and opera, it’s not an exaggeration to say we should start by revisiting the birth of opera at the end of the 16th Century. We now know that there were cities all over Italy (and beyond) that were experimenting with musical theatre, building off of medieval liturgical plays and the intermezzi that punctuated otherwise spoken plays in the Renaissance. 

But history is written by the victors, and few families “won” the Renaissance as much as the Medici. At the beginning of the Renaissance, circa 1300, they were a respectable but hardly-aristocratic family. By the end of the era in 1600, they were one step below royalty, with many of their descendants marrying into royal families. To talk about power, however, is to talk about sex. And …