Claudio Monteverdi (1567???1643) is generally regarded as the first major opera composer.[2] In Orfeo (1607) he blended Peri's experiments in opera with the lavish spectacle of the intermedi.[3] Later, in Venice in the 1640s, he helped make opera a commercially viable form with Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, one of the earliest operas in the present-day operatic reper