Opera: The Basics

Denise Gallo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136088025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Opera: The Basics offers an excellent introduction tofour centuries of opera. Its easy to follow sections explore topics including:

• the origins of opera
• basic terminology
• the history of major opera genres including: serious opera, comic opera, semi-serious opera and vernacular opera.

With key notes, discography and videography, this is the ideal book for students and interested listeners who want to learn more about this important musical genre.

TERMS AND TOPICS

THE ORIGINS OF OPERA

Although opera's theoretical origins can be traced back to the late Renaissance, performances were not documented before 1600, the year music historians use to signal the start of the Baroque era. In addition to opera, this period of astonishing creativity inspired the birth and early development of other major musical genres, including symphony, oratorio, and cantata. Yet as the union of music, poetry, art, and dance, all important to seventeenth-century aesthetics, opera represents the ultimate manifestation of Baroque culture.

Style Periods Relevant to Opera History

Baroque:	1600–1750
Classical:	1750–1816
Romantic:	1816–1900
Modern:	1900–1970
Post-Modern:	1970–present

Music historians have used 1750, the year J.S. Bach died, to designate the end of the Baroque era. Similarly, the beginning of Romanticism centers around the life of another musical icon, Ludwig van Beethoven, who in 1816 began his so-called “Third Style” in which radically innovative works such as the Grosse Fuge for string quartet and the Ninth Symphony were created. The post-Modern era began when composers such as John Cage not only challenged cultural authority but also began to investigate and employ elements from non-Western musical traditions.

As logical as style period dates have seemed in past music history narratives, they are nevertheless arbitrary boundaries centered around a handful of Western art music pioneers. Hundreds of other composers made valuable contributions in the prevailing styles. Although organizing history into periods has provided order to the complicated process of understanding musical forms and characteristics, it has eliminated from standard histories composers who in their day were accepted and well-respected. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the operas of Giovanni Pacini were performed with more frequency than those of his younger rivals, Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti. To restore the place of composers such as Pacini in music history, musicologists are rethinking timelines, often preferring to consider musical developments by century rather than style period.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A GENRE

A study of seventeenth-century music shows that aesthetics varied from one country to another (indeed, from one region or even one city to another). Apart from the most obvious issue—the language of a vocal text—Italian music from this period simply does not “sound” like its French counterpart, and German music doesn't sound precisely like either of those. To a great extent, this can be explained by a proliferation of public and private musical establishments encouraging and supporting diverse traditions. Because most music was commissioned and supported by noble or church patronage, political and religious issues also played a part in generating and maintaining distinct styles. Despite its use in contemporary commentaries and treatises, the widespread criterion of “good taste” by which Baroque compositions were judged could be defined only in terms of a listener's own cultural and artistic experiences.

Nevertheless, certain general characteristics do apply to Baroque music, reflecting the creative environment that encouraged the creation of opera:

• An emphasis on voice, even as a model for instrumental performance
• A move away from polyphony (a musical texture in which multiple independent lines are performed together) to homophony (a melodic line supported by an underlying harmonic accompaniment)
• A tendency to musically represent emotions and passions in order to move the soul of the listener (the so-called “Doctrine of the Affections”)
• A penchant for musical ornamentation, embellishment, and improvisation in performance
• An esteem for poetic texts and classical subjects

All of these proved significant in formulating the theory and compositional techniques that inspired the earliest opera composers and singers.

THE FLORENTINE CAMERATA

Renaissance thought flourished in academies (accademia, pl. accademie), which were societies of intellectuals employing the new “scientific” approach to learning. One such group, referred to as the Camerata by composer Giulio Caccini, gathered at the home of Giovanni de' Bardi in Florence, a city long recognized for literary and artistic pursuits. Through their studies and discussions, the Camerata's musicians and accomplished amateurs proposed that Greek drama had been sung rather than spoken. In addition, the importance of the chorus in Greek plays inspired them to try to apply their ideas to the contemporary stage. This connection between ancient Greek drama and opera would resound repeatedly throughout opera's history, inspiring libretto reformers Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) and composers such as Richard Wagner (1813–1883) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).

Several Camerata members, most prominently Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) and Girolamo Mei, promulgated the group's theories in their writings. Caccini and Jacopo Corsi, among others, employed them in compositions in a new solo vocal style known as monody. These pieces showcased the dramatic potential in the relationship between music and text, inspiring entire musical dramas (dramme per musica). To differentiate them from spoken drama, such works also were called opere per musica (sing., opera per musica), or stage works set to music. In time, this designation was simply shortened to “opera.”

Monody

The polyphonic madrigal, a favorite with musical amateurs and dilettantes, dominated Renaissance secular vocal music. Its texture traditionally featured (often intricate) combinations of several distinct melodic lines that created chordal harmonies when sung together. The Camerata's study of Greek drama led to an appreciation for monody, a single melodic line supported by a simple accompaniment. Musical genres do not disappear overnight, however, especially ones as popular as the madrigal. Thus, although forward-looking composers such as Claudio Monteverdi adapted madrigal poetry to solo settings, he continued to set traditional madrigals, even employing them for choruses in his operas; one of his most dramatic uses of a madrigal chorus is “Non morir Seneca,” from L'incoronazione di Poppea. Monody gained in popularity in opera, oratorio, and cantata, however, as recitative and aria, both of which will be discussed in Chapter 2.

OPERA's PRECURSORS

Opera can be traced to several musical, theatrical, and literary genres of the Middle Ages and Renaissance:

• Intermedio
• Learned comedy (Commedia erudite)
• Italian folk comedy (Commedia dell'arte)
• Epic and pastoral poetry
• Church pageants (Rappresentazioni sacre)

THE INTERMEDIO

Comprising musical and dramatic elements, intermedi were presented between the acts of larger stage works or alone as special pieces for civic celebrations and court festivities such as weddings and birthdays. Intermedi did not necessarily have plots; rather, they often consisted of a series of tableaus that were metaphoric representations of noble patrons or of the locale of the court. Because these productions featured lavish sets and costumes as well as music composed and performed by the court musical establishment (cappella) or hired musicians, intermedi were as much displays of power and wealth as they were entertainment. By the end of the Renaissance, the Medici court in Florence had garnered an unbeatable reputation for intermedio productions. Initially, operas were offered as a novel alternative to intermedi, but, as surprising as it now may seem, the new genre was slow to gain popularity with audiences who resisted change in their entertainment fare.

LEARNED COMEDY (COMMEDIA ERUDITE)

Humanist intellectuals of Italian Renaissance courts cultivated an appreciation for the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Some of these literati even authored their own plays in the classical style. These works were offered regularly in the accademie, where members themselves often took part in the performances. Characters in these learned comedies, such as the bombastic soldier or miles gloriosus, became stereotypes that made the transition into early opera. Indeed, the miles gloriosus took to the stage again much later as Donizetti's Belcore in L'Elisir d'amore and Verdi's Falstaff.

ITALIAN FOLK COMEDY (COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE)

The popularity of the erudite encouraged troupes of touring players to develop a similar repertory; these professionals polished their portrayals of particular characters so well that they were able to extemporize dialogue within stereotypical skits. Adoption of local dialects helped regional audiences to embrace these stock characters as their own. Recognizable by distinctive masks and costumes, characters such as Arlecchino were presented in productions liberally mixed with song and dance. These characters made the transformation into opera and remained popular until the libretto reforms of the late Baroque temporarily excised comic elements. Commedia dell'arte influences were quickly reemployed, however, in time inspiring such memorable roles as Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni and the characters in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos.

EPIC AND PASTORAL POETRY

Literary genres that influenced opera include the epic poem and the pastorale. Although it was written nearly a century before the first operas were performed, Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem, “Orlando furioso” (published in 1516 and revised in 1521 and 1532), became the inspiration for numerous operatic settings. Its main characters offered the perfect dramatic situation: Orlando (or Roland) is driven mad when the beautiful Angelica spurns him for the Saracen Medoro. The tales of other characters such as Atlante, Ariodante, Ginevra, Ruggiero, Alcina, Bradamante, and Olimpia drawn from the poem's cantos also were chosen as subjects for operas. Among the composers who set plots from this epic are Jean-Baptiste Lully (Roland, 1685), Domenico Scarlatti (Orlando, ovvero La gelosia pazzia, 1711), Antonio Vivaldi (Orlando, 1727), Giovanni Paisiello (Olimpia, 1768), Josef Haydn (Orlando paladino, 1782), and Ambroise Thomas (Angélique et Médor, 1843). George Frideric Handel plumbed the poem for three different works: Orlando (1733), Alcina, and Ariodante (both 1735).

Humanist poets and scholars became fascinated with the notion of untouched Nature. Pastoral poetry, dramatic in tone and lyric in rhythm, became the written vehicle to portray this world. Although the sources of the pastorale lay in classical works such as Virgil, significant examples of it were creations of the Renaissance, in particular the dramatic poems Aminta by Torquato Tasso (1581) and Il pastor fido by Battista Guarini (1585). These two works yielded myriad musical versions, some as madrigal settings and others as intermedi and operas. Their stories and characters inspired composers and librettists through the twentieth century.

A brief sampling of operas based on pastoral works includes Armide (1686) by Lully; Aminta (1703) and Il trionfo di Armida (1726) by Albinoni; Rinaldo (1711) and Il pastor fido (1712) by Handel; Armide al campo d'Egitto (1718) by Vivaldi; Armide (1771) and Il pastor fido (1789) by Antonio Salieri; Armide (1777) by Christoph Willibald Gluck; Armida (1784) by Haydn; Tancredi (1813) and Armida (1817) by Gioachino Rossini; and Armida (1904) by Antonīn Dvořák.

CHURCH PAGEANTS (RAPPRESENTAZIONI SACRE)

Since the early Middle Ages, certain portions of church ritual on feasts such as Easter included musical performances. These solos and unison choruses were chanted in the natural rhythms of speech, usually driven by the patterns of the local pronunciation of Latin. When portions of the performances became too secular, these displays were moved out of the churches; music as sacred dramatic expression, however, was not completely abandoned. Inspired by the missionary efforts of the Franciscans, the lauda or song of praise became a popular evangelical tool. These songs were eventually included in religious pageants illustrating scenes from the lives of Christ, Mary and the saints. This tradition contributed to another Baroque creation, the oratorio, which, al...