Opera

A Beginner's Guide

Alexandra Wilson

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780741727
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica lirica

Opera is often dismissed as outdated and excessive, and perceived to be characterised by excessive passions, sumptuous costumes, and ill-mannered divas. In reality, however, operas address the most fundamental and universal of human concerns - love, death, jealousy, greed, and power. Revealing the diverse reasons behind opera's lasting appeal, opera champion and expert Alexandra Wilson provides a lucid and engaging introduction to the agendas that have governed its composition, production and reception over the last four centuries, and explains the reasons behind its enduring appeal.

1

A brief history of opera

As explained in the Introduction, this book is intended to be not so much a narrative history of opera as an introduction to the varied critical debates that surround the art-form today. However, in order to understand these debates, it is important to have some knowledge of the factors that shaped opera’s birth, dissemination, development and (arguable) decline. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to introduce you to these events, while highlighted textboxes introduce you to key operatic concepts and important terminology. To tell the story of over four hundred years of operatic history in a matter of pages is a challenging prospect: indeed, whole books have been devoted to individual periods of operatic history. So it is inevitable that this chapter is something of a ‘whistle-stop tour’, focusing upon selected key moments in the history of the art-form. For a more detailed coverage of the history of opera in specific countries or centuries, or the oeuvre of individual composers, I suggest that you consult the further reading that I have recommended at the end of the book.

Operatic beginnings

Opera was born in Italy over four hundred years ago, and its roots can be traced specifically to late sixteenth-century Florence, a city buzzing with ideas and creativity at that time. Over the previous century an astonishing outpouring of art, architecture, literature and scientific investigation had thrived in Florence under the patronage of wealthy rulers such as the Medici family, but there was a feeling that music had not kept up with the modernizing spirit of the times. So, in the 1570s a group of intellectuals, musicians and poets who have come to be known as ‘The Florentine Camerata’ began to meet regularly to discuss the state of music and how it might be reformed. Like many artists and thinkers of their day, the members of the Camerata believed that the way to move forwards was to look backwards and take inspiration from the Ancient World. They proposed Greek drama – which they believed to have been sung rather than spoken (although they had no firm evidence) – as a model for the future of Italian music.

Much of the music of the sixteenth century was polyphonic music, in which different vocal lines worked independently, overlapping with one another in ways that meant the text was often difficult to make out. The members of the Camerata believed that words ought to take precedence over music, and discussed new approaches to text setting in which the words might be expressed more clearly and dictate the rhythms of the music. They advocated the use of a style of music known as ‘monody’, in which a single vocal line was supported by a simple accompaniment, making the words easy to hear. Over the next fifteen years, the Camerata debated ways of combining this new approach to vocal music with drama in order to create a form of entertainment that they believed would replicate what the ancient Greeks experienced. However, the early operas were also influenced by more recent forms of theatre, such as the sixteenth-century court intermedi – musical entertainments that were performed between the acts of a play, providing light relief from the main dramatic fare on offer.

The Camerata’s ideas were developed further in the 1590s by the most important Florentine patron of music of the day, Jacopo Corsi. He encouraged the composer Jacopo Peri and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini to put the Camerata’s ideas into practice, and in around 1597 the pair collaborated to produce the first complete staged work in the new style, a work called Dafne, based on the Greek legend of Apollo and his unrequited love for the nymph Daphne. At the turn of a new century, opera was born.

AN INTRODUCTION TO RECITATIVE AND ARIA

Relatively early in the history of opera, the basic ‘building blocks’ of opera – recitative and arias – were established. Recitative is a cross between singing and speaking. It allows a lot of text to be transmitted rapidly and is used when composer and librettist need to impart a lot of information and move the plot along. By the eighteenth century, two different types of recitative had developed – accompanied recitative (with light orchestral accompaniment) and secco (literally ‘dry’) recitative, accompanied only by occasional chords, usually played on a harpsichord and perhaps a few bass stringed instruments. (This type would later die out in the nineteenth century.)

Put simply, whereas recitative conveys action, arias are more reflective: the action halts as a singer reflects upon what has just happened, upon a piece of information he or she has received, or upon his or her own personal state of mind. Arias are essentially the ‘tuneful’ parts of an opera. An aria is sung by a soloist but there are of course also scenes in which several characters sing together. Duets, trios, quartets and larger ensembles work in the same way, dramatically speaking, as arias – they allow for a moment of repose and reflection.

Unfortunately, the music for Dafne has been lost, but the first opera to have survived is another work by Peri and Rinuccini called Euridice, written in 1600 to celebrate the marriage of the Florentine noblewoman Maria de Medici to King Henri IV of France. The Medicis used the opportunity as a way of impressing not only their French visitors but their political rivals from neighbouring Italian states. (Italy was at this time not a united country but a collection of small dukedoms and princedoms.) The new form of entertainment must have delighted and captivated all those who attended. Other noblemen, equally keen to show off, began to commission operas to celebrate weddings, coronations, funerals, births, birthdays and military victories, and generally to demonstrate the wealth of their courts. One such nobleman was Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, who had been impressed by the lavish spectacle he had witnessed in Florence. The composer he employed in his court was one destined to live on far more successfully in the history books than Peri – Claudio Monteverdi.

Monteverdi’s first opera for the Mantua court, Orfeo (1607), written with the poet Alessandro Striggio, was based on the same source as Peri’s Euridice – the legend of Orpheus, the musician with such powers that he could bring his lover Euridice back from the dead. Not only was this an appropriate subject for musical treatment, but the subject matter of such works allowed composers to flatter their patrons by likening them to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greek myth. Orfeo was a more ambitious work than Peri’s Euridice and its score more harmonically complex and melodically engaging. Alongside mixing solo and ensemble numbers, choruses and dances, Monteverdi exploited the rich instrumental resources available to him at the Mantua court, using trombones, bass viols and cornetts to bring the underworld to life. (Monteverdi was unusually precise for his time in specifying which instruments he wanted to be used.) All of these features, when combined with extravagant costumes, sets and stage machinery, created a work that was unprecedented in musical and dramatic expressiveness, guaranteed to impress Duke Gonzaga’s political rivals.

So, the earliest operas were performed in front of small elite groups of spectators (and created by composers and poets who were effectively court servants), but opera was soon to reach out to a larger audience. Monteverdi’s career clearly illustrates this shift from private to public opera. When Duke Vincenzo died, Monteverdi left the Gonzaga court and moved to Venice, where he took up the post of ‘Maestro di Capella’ at St Mark’s Cathedral in 1613. Although much of his time was occupied with writing sacred works, as time went on he acquired the freedom to branch out into writing secular music, including opera. But opera in Venice was different. Venice was a Republic, and without a single ruling family there was no place for court opera along the lines Monteverdi had experienced in Mantua. However, the city was an important commercial centre, which welcomed many foreign merchants, businessmen, dignitaries and aristocrats on the ‘Grand Tour’, and the demand for entertainment was high, particularly during the carnival, which took place each February. After a touring company brought an opera to Venice for the first time during the carnival season of 1637 (Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Manelli’s Andromeda), some enterprising Venetian impresarios came up with the idea of setting up opera houses and charging the public for the hire of boxes on a subscription system. However, it would be an over-exaggeration to depict seventeenth-century Venetian opera as opera ‘for the masses’ – the opera houses were owned by noble families, opera-goers were still from privileged backgrounds and ticket prices were high.

Operas ceased to be one-off events and became regular occurrences, often playing for an entire season, and with opera now a commercial enterprise, box office appeal became crucial. Although the earliest Venetian operas continued to be based on classical mythology, composers increasingly turned towards historical subjects with more recognizably human characters. (The priority for a composer was no longer to appeal to the vanity of a ruler; indeed, the new type of opera sometimes even depicted rulers as corrupt and greedy.) They also had to be more economical than the early court operas – commercially run theatres could not afford the sort of lavish sets that were used in the courts. Large-scale permanent orchestras were also too expensive for most theatres, meaning that composers had to scale back the orchestration that they called for. However, a benefit of using a smaller instrumental group was that the voices were shown off to greater effect, and as the seventeenth century progressed composers began to include more and more arias in their opera scores.

Monteverdi embraced these new trends in his opera L’incoronazione di Poppea (‘The Coronation of Poppea’, 1642–3), which told the story of the love affair between the Roman emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea. This work was very different to Monteverdi’s earlier court opera Orfeo. It was a story full of lust and violence: obeying Poppea’s commands, Nero divorces his wife, exiles Poppea’s husband and condemns the philosopher Seneca to death. The opera’s score represents another change in the new operatic style, towards greater lyricism, straightforward harmonies, strong rhythms and vivid musical characterization. These characteristics are summed up particularly well in the sensuous closing love duet between Nero and his triumphant mistress, although historians have suggested that this duet was added after the first performance and was probably not actually written by Monteverdi. Although this might sound surprising, it was relatively common for operas of this period to be written by teams of composers; such a composite work was known as a pasticcio.

A ‘star system’ for singers soon emerged in Venice that prefigured modern notions of celebrity – one of the most successful and celebrated singers of the era was the soprano Anna Renzi. The success of an opera depended increasingly upon the virtuoso qualities of the lead performers: parts were written to show off the strengths of an individual’s voice, and the most successful singers acquired the power to dictate not only their role but how long their scenes should be and even which other singers should appear in the production. The most successful singers were typically paid more than the composers whose works they performed, often several times more, and their names appeared more prominently on publicity materials than those of composers or librettists. Opera during the seventeenth century was a genuinely collaborative art, a partnership between composer, poet, scenographer, performers, theatre owner and impresario. However, the partnership was by no means an equal one – there was a clear hierarchy, with singers at the top. As we shall see, the dynamics of this relationship between different creative agents was to change at various times during opera’s history.

Exporting opera abroad

The seasons for commercial opera in Italy were short and in the intervening periods, opera companies would go on tour. It would not be long before opera would extend its influence beyond the Italian peninsula. By the mid seventeenth century opera was not only spreading throughout the Italian states but was also beginning to be exported to northern Europe: in particular, Italian composers began to establish themselves in German courts. However, Italian opera was not welcomed everywhere. When works by Cavalli, Sacrati and Rossi were taken to Paris in the 1640s, they were greeted with hostility. France had its own indigenous forms of theatrical entertainment and many aspects of Italian opera ran counter to French tastes. French composers, led by Jean-Baptiste Lully (who had actually been born in Italy but who spent his adult life in France), developed their own musico-dramatic genres such as the Tragédie en musique, leading to heated debates in contemporary pamphlets about the merits of the two national styles.

French opera developed its own particular characteristics and structure: a French opera was usually in five acts (preceded by an overture and allegorical prologue) and broken up by a number of divertissements – dances, choral songs or instrumental ‘symphonies’ – which were performed between the acts. The idea of glorifying a ruler, which the Italians were to some extent abandoning, remained an important feature of French operatic culture. Lully based his Tragédies en musique on classical mythology or medieval romance, with the hero often serving as an allegory for his employer Louis XIV, the Sun King. Indeed, the King took a very active involvement in shaping the operas that were performed at his court, intervening in the choice of subjects Lully set. Furthermore, Louis’s enjoyment of dancing led to the distinctive French tradition of including lavish ballets, in which he himself would perform. The voices used in French opera were different too – French composers shunned the castrato so beloved of Italian opera composers and audiences (a topic to which I shall return presently), preferring to use a distinctive high tenor voice known as an haute contre.

Another country to develop its own distinctive forms of musico-dramatic entertainment was England. The English ‘semi opera’ developed by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries in the second half of the seventeenth century drew upon influences such as the masque (a genre of courtly entertainment that blended dance, spectacle and an element of narrative) as well as a variety of French and Italian musical styles. Purcell’s best known work in this style is Dido and Aeneas, set to a libretto by Nahum Tate and based upon an episode recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Prince Aeneas is tricked by a sorceress into abandoning his lover, Queen Dido of Carthage. The opera is full of lively and picturesque choruses of witches and sailors (many in a simple homophonic, or chordal, style), but it also features expressive arias, most notably Dido’s famous ‘lament’, set over a ground bass (a bass-line that is repeated time after time). Home-grown opera did not develop to any great extent in England, however, and it would not be until the twentieth century that English opera really took off. That said, foreign operas were performed in Britain with great success, as we shall see in the next section.

THE OPERA OVERTURE

An overture is a piece of orchestral music that the audience hears before the curtain rises. Its purpose is to whet the audience’s appetite for what will follow, or – more prosaically – to act as a call to attention, giving the audience time to settle down before the action starts. Initially, overtures were independent instrumental works, distinct from the operas that they preceded – this was true of works by Purcell and Handel, for example. They were often structured in contrasting sections (often drawn from traditional dance forms), rather like an instrumental suite. Later on, overtures became more intimately connected to their respective operas, either setting an appropriate mood (or range of contrasting moods) or including melodies that the audience would hear later on. This approach was taken to extremes in the operetta genre, notably in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, in which the overtures are potpourris of all the main themes the audience will hear later on. By the early twentieth century, the overture was starting to become less important. Most of Puccini’s works, for example, throw us straight into the action: the curtain rises immediately, the characters can be seen bustling around the stage, and within just a few bars of music they will start to sing.

Serious opera in the eighteenth century

Despite the gradual development of different national schools of opera, Italian opera continued to extend its influence. By the eighteenth century, Italian opera had become the predominant form of aristocratic entertainment all over Europe, gaining a foothold in countries as far flung as England and Russia. The genre of opera that dominated the courts and large civic theatres of the day was opera seria – a form of serious opera the conventions of which were developed around the year 1700 and that enjoyed its heyday between the 1720s and the 1780s. Opera seria developed in response to widespread calls for the literary reform of earlier Italian opera, which was widely believed to be becoming corrupt, with its excessively complicated plots, supernatural characters and emphasis upon visual spectacle. The poet Apostolo Zeno developed a new type of libretto, based upon historical subjects, with condensed casts and logically unfolding plots. Yet more reforms were carried out by Pietro Metastasio, a librettist who worked closely with composers in producing texts that lent themselves well to musical setting in such a way as to make the most of dramatic climaxes. He codified a number of archetypal narrative scenarios and his libretti were set hundreds of times during the eighteenth century, both by Italian composers and by foreign composers writing in the Italian style. It’s interesting to note that in the eighteenth century, libretti were endlessly recycled by different composers, whereas in later periods a libretto would be written for a specific composer and used just once.

Many of the most famous Italian opera seria composers of the eighteenth century have names that have long been lost to the mists of the time – opportunities are rare these days to see an opera by Leo, Vinci, Jommelli or Traetta, for instance. Interestingly, the operas in this style that have survived tend to be those that were composed by non-Italian composers. The fact that Italian opera was becoming a truly international art by the eighteenth century is something that is illustrated particularly well by what may strike you as the rather curious career of George Frideric Handel, a German composer who travelled to Italy during his youth and who subsequently spent much of his career in London. While living there, he wrote operas in the Italian style (with a few ‘French’ elements) and with Italian dialogue for the entertainment of an English-speaking audience. Handel’s first opera for London was Rinaldo, premiered in 1711, and he would write another forty operas for the city over the following three decades, many based upon episodes from Greek and Roman history.

LIBRETTO

The text for an opera is called a libretto (Italian for ‘little book’). Although a few composers, such as Wagner, have written their own libretti, most have worked in conjunction with one or more professional librettists. In recent centuries it has been common practice for the librettist to supply the words before the composer starts to write the music, although this was not always the case for early...