(The long established sacred style had offered little opportunity to make music sound as though it had either emotional content or programmatic meaning.) Singers were drawn to opera for the same reasons: it offered them new challenges and more artistic latitude than had sacred music. Composers came to the new form not only because their royal patrons demanded it, but because the theatrical style, stile rappresentativo, let them exercise their expressive skills and find ways to represent varying emotions and dramatic situations with their music. What began as a cerebral salon experiment by the Florentine Camerata, quickly became an elaborate and expensive entertainment format that allowed the leisure class-royalty and courtiers-to exhibit their wealth in displays of extravagance and excess and to do so under the guise of art and culture. Pertinent steps in the development of opera (conveniently, the longest active span of any musical form) now become the path of choice in tracing the evolution of vocal performance. Throughout its history, opera has consistently presented singers with the greatest challenges of any vocal genre.
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