A Short History of Opera

Donald Grout, Hermine Weigel Williams

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780231507721
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música clásica

When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have.

The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre's beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day.

A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included.

With an extensive multilanguage bibliography, more than one hundred musical examples, and stage illustrations, this authoritative one-volume survey will be invaluable to students and serious opera buffs. New fans will also find it highly accessible and informative. Extremely thorough in its coverage, A Short History of Opera is now more than ever the book to turn to for anyone who wants to know about the history of this art form.

Part 1

Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century

Chapter 1

The Lyric Theater of the Greeks

IT IS INDISPENSABLE for a student of the history of opera to know something of the history, literature, and mythology of the ancient world, if only because so many opera subjects have been drawn from these sources. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been used for more than thirty operas, the story of Iphigenia (first dramatized by Euripides toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E.) for at least fifty, and the myth of Hercules for probably twice that number. Of the ninety-four operas by the eighteenth-century composer Johann Adolph Hasse, half are on classical themes. Berlioz’s masterpiece, Les Troyens, is an outstanding nineteenth-century example. Since then, there have been such works as Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1909), Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), Wellesz’s Alkestis (1924), Milhaud’s Médée (1939), Malipiero’s Ecuba (1941), Orff’s Antigonae (1948), Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (1985), and Turnage’s Greek (1988),¹ though on the whole the preference for classical subjects was much less pronounced in the twentieth century than in former times.²

Greek drama, however, is of particular interest to us because it was the model on which the creators of modern opera at the end of the sixteenth century based their own works; it was the supposed music of Greek tragedy that they sought to revive in their “monodic style.” Unfortunately, they did not know (nor do we) just how this music sounded. There are a few surviving specimens of Greek dramatic music, including a very short mutilated fragment of unison melody from a chorus of Euripides’ Orestes (408 B.C.E.),³ but these were not known to the early Florentine opera composers.

That music did play an important part in Greek tragedy we may learn from Aristotle’s definitions in the Poetics, written about a century later than the works of Sophocles and Euripides, which still served as models:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of some action that is important, entire, and of a proper magnitude—by language, embellished and rendered pleasurable, but by different means in different parts….

By pleasurable language, I mean language that has the embellishments of rhythm, melody, and metre. And I add, by different means in different parts, because in some parts metre alone is employed, in others, melody.⁴

The last sentence of this passage would seem to indicate that the tragedies were not sung in their entirety, as has sometimes been stated. It is believed, however, that some kind of musical declamation was employed for at least part of the dialogue, and the fact that the plays were given in large open-air theaters makes this probable on acoustical grounds, if for no other reason. Such declamation may have been a kind of sustained, semi-musical speech, perhaps like the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire or Berg’s Wozzeck, but moving within a more limited range of pitch. It is also probable that regular melodic settings were used in certain places.

Whatever may have been the manner of performing the dialogue, there can be no doubt that the choruses were really sung, not merely musically declaimed. When Greek drama developed out of the earlier ceremonies of Bacchus worship, it took over from them the choral group (dithyrambs) and solemn figured choral dances that have such an important place in the tragedies.⁵ The role of the chorus in these works is largely that of the “articulate spectator,” voicing the audience’s response to the events portrayed in the action, remonstrating, warning, or sympathizing with the hero. Formally, the choruses are generally so placed as to divide the action into parts, similar to the division of a modern play into acts or scenes, resulting in an alternation of drama with the comparatively static or reflective choral portions. It is significant that this same formal arrangement is characteristic of opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its clear distinction between the dramatic action (recitative or spoken dialogue) and the lyrical or decorative scenes (arias, choruses, ballets) to which the action gives rise. The typical use of the chorus in Greek drama is best seen in the tragedies of Sophocles (495–406 B.C.E.) and Euripides (484–407 B.C.E.), the choruses of the latter’s Iphigenia in Tauris being particularly beautiful examples. In Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.E.) the choruses are more numerous and sometimes serve to narrate preceding events (Agamemnon) or take a direct part in the action (Eumenides).

All the actors in Greek tragedy were men, and the chorus was no exception. Although in later ages it numbered no more than twelve or fifteen singers, in Periclean times it was undoubtedly larger; the chorus of Furies in Aeschylus’ Eumenides numbered fifty, and their singing and dancing were said to have had such a terrifying effect that children in the audience were thrown into convulsions from fright.⁶ The leader of the chorus (choregos, choryphaios) was chosen from among the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of the community. The position was regarded as a distinction, but since the leader had to train and equip the chorus at his own expense he sometimes found himself ruined by the honor, which the satirist listed among the possible calamities of life, like lawsuits and taxes.⁷

The choral songs were unison melodies (like all Greek music), one note to a syllable, with accompaniment of instruments of the kithara or aulos type. The kithara was an instrument like the lyre, the strings being plucked either with the fingers or with a plectrum. The aulos was a reed-blown instrument, the tone of which probably resembled that of the oboe but with a more piercing character. These instruments may have played short introductions and interludes to the choral songs. The “accompaniments” either doubled the voices at the unison or embellished the vocal melody, a practice known as heterophony. Theorists prescribed certain modes or types of melody as appropriate for certain kinds of scenes, the Dorian being generally favored for majestic verses and the Mixolydian for lamentations in dialogue between the chorus and a soloist. Such dialogues are quite frequent. There are also dialogues between the choregos and one of the actors; occasionally (as in the Alcestis of Euripides), various members of the chorus have short solo parts. In some cases the choruses have a refrain, a passage recurring several times in “ritornello” fashion (as in the Eumenides of Aeschylus).

No composers are named, but poets are sometimes mentioned as having composed the music for their own plays. This does not mean as much as it would in the present day, for it is probable that the declamatory solo portions of the drama were for the most part improvised, only slight general indications of the rise and fall of the voice being given by the poet. The choruses may possibly have employed certain standard melodies (nomoi), though on occasion new melodies might have been composed.

The Greek comedy assigned to music a much less important role than did the tragedy, although Aristophanes (c. 448–385 B.C.E.) had choruses of Clouds, Wasps, Birds, and Frogs. In keeping with the general satirical spirit of the comedies, the chorus was dressed in fantastic costumes and indulged in imitation of animal and bird sounds. There was probably very little if any solo singing in the comedies.

By the second century B.C.E., the chorus had disappeared from Greek drama altogether. As early as the fourth century, Aristotle had spoken of its decline and complained that the poets of that day introduced choral songs that “have no more connection with their subject, than with that of any Tragedy: and hence, they are now become detached pieces, inserted at pleasure.”⁸ Solo singing remained a feature of the Roman drama, as we learn from a passage in Lucian’s dialogue “On the Dance,” written about 165 C.E., describing an actor in a tragedy “bawling out, bending forward and backward, sometimes actually singing his lines, and (what is surely the height of unseemliness) melodising his calamities…. To be sure, as long as he is an Andromache or a Hecuba, his singing can be tolerated; but when he enters as Hercules in person and warbles a ditty … a man in his right mind may properly term the thing a solecism.”⁹

There are still many unanswered questions about the way in which Greek drama was performed, but we may be certain that, although it was not precisely like a modern opera, neither was it entirely in spoken dialogue like a modern play. The function of music was that of an embellishment, though a very important one.¹⁰ It was this conception that Gluck expressed as his theory of the relation of music to drama, namely, that its purpose should be to “animate the figures without altering their contours.”

1. Mark Anthony Turnage’s (b. 1960) two-act opera is based on Steven Berkoff’s play Greek. The libretto and play represent a reworking of the Oedipus myth, situating it in the East End of London during the late twentieth century.

2. See Zinar, “The Use of Greek Tragedy in the History of Opera.”

3. A reproduction of this papyrus fragment (A/Wn: G 2315), which dates from about 200 B.C.E., is in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (1980), 6:295. A transcription of the melody is in Sachs, Die Musik der Antike, 17–18. See also Mountford, “Greek Music in the Papyri”; Richter, “Das Musikfragment”; Mathiesen, “New Fragments of Ancient Greek Music.” A fragment from a late tragedy of Euripides was discovered in 1973 and may constitute the earliest specimen among some forty extant examples of Greek music.

4. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b20.

5. See Webster, The Greek Chorus.

6. Cf. Hamilton, “The Greek Chorus.”

7. The Latin word choragus, derived from the Greek choregos, usually referred to a person associated with a theatrical troupe whose job it was to oversee the props and costumes. The Italian derivative noun corago was used to describe the director or impresario of a theatrical performance. For more about the role of the cora...