The creation of opera in Florence around the year 1600, or at the beginning of what has been generally called the Baroque period, is only one among many remarkable musical developments which took place in Italy during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century and whose subsequent impact upon European musical culture was profound and lasting. Other striking developments include the efflorescence of deeply expressive Catholic church music with orchestral accompaniment, the invention of virtuosic instrumental genres such as the concerto and the sonata, and the establishment of the musical language of tonality (the system of twenty-four major and minor keys) by composers associated especially with Bologna and Rome. In addition, these one hundred and fifty years formed a vivid era also from political, religious, and social viewpoints, encompassing such diverse and important phenomena as the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the flourishing of literary and intellectual societies known as the accademie, the rise of princely Absolutism with its associated universalizing worldview and its centering of political-cultural power in the aristocratic courts, and the furtherance of Humanist ideals in the major Italian city-states (Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples). The topic of this course thus offers extremely fertile material for the exploration of rich networks of cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual experiences in early modern Europe.