Howard Goodall's Big Bangs: The Inventing of Opera

Howard travels to Florence to explain the events of around 1600, where the operatic form was taking shape. He notices that opera might never have got off the ground at all, as the first couple of attempts were very unpopular. But when Claudio Monteverdi arrived in Mantua to work for the Gonzaga family, he put this new form to spectacular use, writing Orfeo, the masterpiece to which we owe the existence of opera today.