The first ever operas were written around 1600 by Baroque composers including Monteverdi and Cavalli, and the genre quickly took off. Early operas used dramatic text and music to express their stories. Monteverdi's version of the Orpheus story, "Orfeo" was written in 1607. In "Orfeo" he showed that he had a much broader conception of the new genre than did his predecessors. He combined the grandeur of dramatic entertainments of the late Renaissance with the simple pastoral tale told in recitative, which emphasizes and imitates the rhythms accents of spoken language, rather than melody or musical motives. His recitative was flexible and expressive. He showed a sense of matching the climaxes in the drama by musical climaxes, using dissonance,