Musical Theater

An Appreciation

Alyson McLamore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317191032
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Musical Theater: An Appreciation, Second Edition offers a history of musical theater from its operating origins to the Broadway shows of today, combined with an in-depth study of the musical styles that paralleled changes on stage. Alyson McLamore teaches readers how to listen to both the words and the music of the stage musical, enabling them to understand how all the components of a show interact to create a compelling experience for audiences.

This second edition has been updated with new chapters covering recent developments in the twenty-first century, while insights from recent scholarship on musical theater have been incorporated throughout the text. The musical examples discussed in the text now include detailed listening guides, while a new companion website includes plot summaries and links to audio of the musical examples. From Don Giovanni to Hamilton, Musical Theater: An Appreciation both explores the history of musical theater and develops a deep appreciation of the musical elements at the heart of this unique art form.

Part 1

The Antecedents to the Genre of “Musical Theater”

Chapter 1

The Birth of “Staged” Music

The Debut of Opera

Where should we begin a study of musical theater—with ancient Greek plays, medieval dramas, Renaissance intermedi? If we were to journey to Florence in the late sixteenth century, we would find two groups of people cultivating new ideas about music-making—and their concepts can be traced forward through time to the modern musical. Posterity has given the nickname “Florentine Camerata” to the earlier of these groups; like the later group, it was an assembly of artists, writers, musicians, and aristocrats. (See the Sidebar: The Florentine Camerata, Le nuove musiche, and Opera.) These Italians advocated a simpler, more expressive approach to making music, and believed that they were reviving the singing and theatrical practices of the ancient Greeks. By applying this “new” singing style to contemporary dramas, the participants created opera. The birth of opera coincided with what many historians now call the Baroque period—an era beginning around 1600, and lasting until the early eighteenth century. The first of the Florentine operas was Dafne, although scholars disagree about the year of Dafne’s first performance; it may have been as early as 1594 or as late as 1598.

Sidebar: The Florentine Camerata, Le nuove musiche, and Opera

Beginning around 1573, Count Giovanni Bardi di Vernio began to host gatherings of several Florentine scholars, poets, artists, and musicians, including Giulio Caccini and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the famous astronomer Galileo). The group became known as the Florentine Camerata because camerata—meaning “chamber” or “salon”—described the type of room in which the group assembled. Gradually, after corresponding with other people elsewhere in Italy, they conceived the idea for a new melodic style. The vocal music of the earlier sixteenth century had become very complicated, sometimes with several melodies occurring simultaneously; the words often were muddied and hard to understand. In the Camerata’s new style, the melody imitated the rhythm of speech, and the accompaniment was designed to be simple and unobtrusive. The resulting singing style was called stile rappresentativo (“dramatic style”) because of its expressive qualities. Using the new style, Caccini published a collection of short pieces in 1602, which he called Le nuove musiche (“the new music”); the phrase caught on quickly as a nickname for the Camerata’s efforts.

Bardi left Florence in 1592, and another nobleman, Jacopo Corsi, established a similar group. Like the earlier Camerata, Corsi’s group wanted to make vocal music more dramatic, modeling their efforts on what they knew (or thought they knew) of ancient Greek plays. When the technique of stile rappresentativo was applied to longer dramas (not just poems), opera was born.

In 1600, when operas began to be printed, this innovation quickly spread outside of Florence. Other composers soon tried their hands at this new genre. (Musicians use the French word genre to mean “category” or “type.”) A composer’s contribution to an opera is the score—the “music.” An important early opera, L’Orfeo, debuted in 1607 in the ducal palace in Mantua, with a score by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The librettist (poet) Alessandro Striggio (?1573–1630) wrote the libretto (the opera’s poetry or text), basing his story on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. Striggio’s libretto related the myth’s sad tale: Orpheus’s bride Eurydice dies after being bitten by a snake, so Orpheus (a wonderful singer) travels to the underworld to charm the gods into releasing her. The gods agree—but on the condition that Orpheus not look at Eurydice until they have returned to the living world. Alas! En route, Orpheus looks back at his wife, and thus she dies a second time. Although, according to legend, Orpheus starts to hate all women, Striggio changed the ending so that Orpheus is taken to heaven and Eurydice’s image appears in the stars.

Photo 1.1 Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) composed L’Orfeo (1607), which premiered in Mantua

Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claudio_Monteverdi_2.webp

Just like theatergoers today, the Mantuans felt pre-performance electricity before the debut of L’Orfeo. One man explained the novelty to his brother in Rome: “Tomorrow evening the Most Serene Lord the Prince is to sponsor a performance… . It should be most unusual, as all the actors are to sing their parts.” Monteverdi used a large orchestra—in this instance, some forty instruments—to create distinctive accompanimental background sounds for different situations: he employed the louder instruments (including trombones) for scenes set in the underworld, while quieter instruments usually supported Orpheus and his (human) friends. A group of singers known as the chorus also appeared in many scenes.

L’Orfeo was not the first opera, but we regard it as the first operatic masterpiece: it was an expert demonstration of opera’s expressiveness, and it is still performed today. Although musical theater might seem far removed from these early Baroque origins, L’Orfeo and its kindred works laid an important foundation. Not only did opera demonstrate that it was possible for audiences to suspend disbelief and enjoy the phenomenon of actors singing instead of speaking their roles, but it proved that a musical setting could intensify and enhance the emotional reactions evoked by the story.

Opera Goes Public

From Florence and Mantua, opera spread to other Italian cities. However, it was known as “the delight of princes,” since early opera was the exclusive privilege of the nobility and the very wealthy. The powerful Barberini family built a private theater that could hold more than 3,000 people. The first opera in their new theater, Sant’ Alessio (1632), included some unexpected comic scenes. Comedy had not played any part in the very earliest operas; Italians laughed instead at the antics of the commedia dell’arte—skits enacted by traveling troupes of actors portraying stock characters who behave in amusing ways. As humor found its way into opera plots, however, the popularity of the commedia dell’arte waned. Eventually the troupes vanished, but their storylines lived on. (A twentieth-century musical, Pippin, incorporated aspects of the old commedia dell’arte tradition in its costuming and, in part, via its antics.)

Not surprisingly, operas soon began to travel outside the borders of Italy—but it is more surprising that one of the first “exported” Italian operas was composed by a woman, Francesca Caccini (1587–after 1641). She was the daughter of Giulio Caccini, a member of the original Florentine Camerata. Her opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (Ruggiero’s Liberation from the Island of Alcina), had been written in 1625 to honor Prince Władisław of Poland; it was performed in Warsaw in 1628.

Another exciting change took place in Venice, where the first public opera house opened in 1637. Suddenly, an ordinary person did not have to be a guest of a wealthy aristocrat in order to hear opera; he or she needed only to have the price of a ticket. Soon, rival public theaters were built, and between 1637 and 1700, 388 operas were performed in Venice. During the 1680s, the Venetians—some 50,000 inhabitants—would support six opera troupes continuously. By the turn of the eighteenth century, opera houses were as common as movie theaters are today.

When wealthy aristocrats sponsored operas in their private homes and palaces, performances were often lavish. In Venice’s public opera houses, however, theater owners looked for ways to bring down expenses. They reduced the size of the cast—the on-stage performers—with six or eight singers becoming the norm. (And, by also eliminating the chorus, composers were leaving the Florentine Camerata’s “ancient Greek” models far behind.) The orchestras grew smaller as well. Much of this economy was offset by the expense of machinery because the Venetians loved elaborate stage effects. Technicians figured out ways for clouds or other objects to transport the singers from location to location, and they devised many other “magical” transformations. For instance, in one seventeenth-century opera, a scene ends with a fountain mutating into an eagle and flying away. There are clear precedents for The Phantom of the Opera’s collapsing chandelier or Miss Saigon’s helicopter!

Monteverdi’s Final Bow

The music written for mid-seventeenth-century operas was changing as well: it started to perform contrasting functions within the story. Monteverdi’s last opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), illustrates how operatic style had evolved by 1642. Many years earlier, Monteverdi had left Mantua and had been hired as the choirmaster at the prestigious St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Despite that church job, he also “moonlighted” by composing several operas for the burgeoning Venetian opera houses. He wrote The Coronation of Poppea at the age of seventy-five (perhaps with some assistance).

The Coronation of Poppea is somewhat unusual, because the librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello (1598–1659) based the plot on history rather than on myth (although Busenello did incorporate a healthy dose of mythological additions; see the Online Plot Summary 1). There is humor, such as the chattering of the guards who are trying to keep awake outside Poppea’s house, and the “disguise” scene in which Ottone wears Drusilla’s garments. And, in contrast to most dramas, it is a surprise that “evil triumphs” in the story. Nero and Poppea are not virtuous characters; they do not deserve the earthly rewards they receive. (A Roman historian tells us that Nero later kicked a pregnant Poppea to death “in a fit of pique,” but the opera stops short of that unsettling ending to the lovers’ story.)

During “Tornerai?” (Musical Example 1) in Act I, the primo uomo (“leading man”) Nero says a leisurely goodbye to the prima donna (“leading woman”) Poppea after a romantic night together. (Interestingly, both roles were originally written for sopranos, since Monteverdi could draw upon the singing powers of castrati; see the Sidebar: Opera and the Castrati.) The scene incorporates three kinds of singing, used for different functions. The opening of this scene (1) uses a singing style called recitative. Recitative imitates the rhythms (and speed) of speech in a fairly dry, businesslike way, without memorable melodies. In the background, a couple of instruments play chords (groups of notes or pitches played simultaneously) to support the singers during the recitative passages. Nero and Poppea can sing through their lines as quickly or slowly as they wish. Recitative is often used for dialogue and narrative portions within operas, since the quick pace can seem very lifelike.

Photo 1.2 Poppea was the real-life seductress whose affair with Emperor Nero inspired the opera The Coronation of Poppea (1642)

Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poppea_Sabina.webp

Sidebar: Opera and the Castrati

There are thousands of compositions that call for instruments that have fallen into relative obscurity, such as the basset horn or the hurdy-gurdy. Many recent musicians have developed an interest in performance practice—the study of how earlier music was performed—and it is not uncommon now to hear concerts and recordings that feature “forgotten” instruments. Some singers have studied the vocal techniques of the past—but one area of vocal performance practice has been difficult to recreate, and that is the once-widespread use of high-pitched male singers known as castrati.

Castrati were produced by castrating boys before they reached puberty, to prevent them from deve...