The return to showy productions, to the congregation of purely theatric effects, scenic as well as musical, was swift, and the student of operatic art can to-day discern with facility that the invention of the Florentines was soon reduced to the state of a thread to bind together episodes of pictorial and vocal display.

But in the beginning it was unquestionably the outcome of a hostility to these very things, or at any rate to their merely spectacular employment.
Peri, Caccini, Bardi and others of the Florentine "camerata" were engaged as composers, stage managers, actors and singers in many of the elaborate court spectacles, intermezzi and madrigal dramas produced toward the end of the sixteenth century.

Peri and Caccini were professional singers, and their experiences were not only those of students, but also those of practitioners.

Their revolt against the contrapuntal lyric drama was largely, though not wholly, based on deep-seated objection to the unintelligibility of the text.

It does not require profound consideration to bring us to the opinion that the method of Vecchi was in part an attempt to overcome the innate defect of the polyphonic style in this matter of intelligibility.