EVOLUTION OF OPERA
Compiled by M.Tevfik Dorak
The
immediate predecessors of the opera were early semi-dramatic forms as the late sixteenth-century
madrigals, madrigal cycles (madrigal comedies), the pastoral, the masque, and
the intermedii all of which usually featured
pastoral scenes and subjects. The very first opera Dafne
(now lost, except the prologue and one aria) was written in 1597-8 by Peri and in 1600, he composed Euridice
(some parts by Caccini). The first opera that is
still performed, however, belongs to Claudio Monteverdi: La favola d'Orfeo, first staged
at Mantua in 1607. These early operas had only (half sung) recitatives
and the only instrumental pieces were the ritornellos, which were not
refrains but non-recurrent instrumental interludes. Thus, the early operas can
be described as a collection of recitatives separated by occasional
orchestral interludes and the aim was to revive Greek drama.
The
earliest move towards opera was the solo-singing style called recitative. This
literary-musical texture was intermediate between spoken recitation (dialogue)
and singing. Solo vocal lines of one melody at a time with instrumental
accompaniment (monody), as opposed to polyphony, was thought to be the correct
way to set words as it would enhance the natural speech inflections but music
was subservient to the words. Jacopo Peri, Giulio Caccini and Emilio del Cavaliere in the Florentine
Camerata were the pioneers of the new style of solo singing. It started
heightened speech with continuo accompaniment. In 1602, Caccini
published first collection short vocal pieces with thorough-bass accompaniment
in monodic style: Le nuove
musiche. The dominance of recitatives (monody) in
early opera was in contrast with the prevailing vocal forms of the time
(choral, contrapuntal, polyphonic), and assured comprehensibility of the words.
In dramatic monody, a simple melody follows the rhythms and intonations of
speech, accompanied by simple chords. Opera as we know it, however, would
eventually bring together almost every art form: painting, poetry, drama, dance
and music.
Opera took
root in Rome in the 1620s. In the music of Roman operas the separation of solo
singing into two clearly defined types, recitative and aria, became more marked
than ever. The recitative, dissonance and new musical effects created a more
expressive, melodious vocal line often with regular phrases and triple meter (bel canto). Music started to become more
important than the words and some melodic sections with recognizable melodic
form (aria) evolved from the recitative. In the early Baroque operas, the
recitative and aria were not separated to the extent common in the late Baroque
(Italian) works.
Venice was
to follow Rome in the opera tradition. Monteverdi's last two operas (The
Return of Ulysses and L'incoronazione di Poppea-the Coronation of Poppea) and his
student Cavalli's operas were written for Venice. The
first commercial opera house was opened in Venice in 1637 (Teatro
di San Cassiano) which
would be run by Monteverdi’s pupil Francesco Cavalli after 1639 and this
fractured the prevailing principle that opera was only for the enjoyment of the
musical elite. The music in Venetian operas consists of recitative punctuated
by self-contained close forms such as arias and duets. Whereas there is no
choral ensemble yet, in the Ulysses and Poppea, there are trios.
In the Poppea, there is also a lament (“Addio
Roma” by Octavio). Beginning with Poppea,
historical subjects (as opposed to myths) were used in opera librettos. In
these last two operas of Monteverdi, there is another innovation, which would
become common in later operas: closing the opera with a love duet. The second
phase of Venetian operatic history is dominated by Cavalli (Giasone), Pietro Antonio Cesti (Il pomo d'oro), and Giovanni Legrenzi
(Il Giustino). Later, however, Naples would
become the centre of opera in Italy. Meanwhile, opera was spreading from Italy
to other parts of Europe. By 1700, Vienna, Paris, Hamburg and London were also
operatic centres.
The late
Baroque opera emphasized virtuosity in vocal singing. The brief da capo aria soon superseded the strophic
variation and was established as a vocal form. At least equally important was
the bipartite aria, which consisted of only A and B or their variations. In
contrast with the late Baroque opera and its rigid alternation of recitative
and aria, the middle Baroque opera retained great formal flexibility. During
the progress of opera from its primitive forms, the words started to lose their
importance and the music was dominating over words again.
The
beginnings of French opera go back to Lully (1632-1687). When he was the court composer
to Louis XIV, he wrote tragedie-lyriques using
Greek mythological subjects in which the vocal lines do not obscure the text,
but rather support it. Recitatives and arias merge into one another. He
shortened long complex arias to simple airs. Ballets played a major part in
French opera. His recitatives are not harmonically rich. Lully also established
a form of opera prelude (French overture) consisting of a slow introduction in
dotted rhythm followed by a fast fugal-allegro section (also used by composers
outside France like Purcell, Dido & Aeneas and Handel Messiah
and Xerxes). His greatest successor was J.P. Rameau who used more
sophisticated orchestral effects in balletic operas.
Although
Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) had studied in Venice
with G. Gabrieli and later with Monteverdi, and even
staged his opera Daphne (in German) at Torgau
in 1627 for a royal wedding, the structure of German society and the religious
outlook in the country provided poor soil for opera and it was slow to
flourish. In 1678, an opera company was started in Hamburg where Reinhard Keiser was the leading composer of opera in
German. Handel was influenced by his operas during his visit in 1703. German
opera had to wait till the time of Beethoven and Weber to gain international
fame.
Handel's
forty or so operas written in the first half of the eighteenth century are
almost exclusively in Italian. They are often criticized for the strictly da capo structure of their arias whose long
repeats arrest the progress of the drama. In Xerxes (written in 1738),
Handel had to abandon the stiff opera serie
style in response to the success of the Beggar's Opera in 1728 and the
collapse of his opera company the Royal Academy of Music as well as its rival
the Opera of the Nobility in 1737. The rigid conventions of a character's exit
after singing an aria, and the dominance of da
capo arias were abandoned in Xerxes. Most arias were now in strophic
form as in ballad opera. Handel's contemporaries were Rameau in France and
Alessandro Scarlatti (the father of Domenico
Scarlatti) in Italy. Scarlatti first developed the distinction between recitativo secco
for ordinary dialogue and recitativo accompagnato to awaken emotions. He also realized the
importance of the aria for conveying poetic-operatic emotions. His many operas
were full of virtuoso arias with negligible emphasis to drama. The
‘Neapolitan’ opera became a series of arias connected by recitative
passages. The recitatives had changed their character from those of Monteverdi.
In such late Baroque operas, they serve the purpose of telling the story
quickly. In other words, the action took place during recitatives and arias
were merely an opportunity to reflect upon the events. In the operas of
Scarlatti and Handel, the story is not that important and there is a little
action. What is paramount now is the singer and the show pieces personally
tailored for those highly trained virtuoso singers.
Opera
overture and orchestral accompaniment followed the evolution of the vocal part.
A. Scarlatti established sinfonia (Italian
overture) in fast-slow-fast pattern as an orchestral introduction to his operas
at the turn of the century. This genre is the forerunner of the symphony
emerged later in the Classical era. At the end of the seventeenth century, certain
poets, under the influence of the French drama, advocated that opera librettos
be purified: divested of comic scenes and supernatural or other implausible
elements in the plot. This reform -opera seria-
is popularised by the two Neapolitan librettists: Apostolo
Zeno (1668–1750) and Pietro Trapassi,
better known as Metastasio (1698–1782). The texts tended to exalt certain
virtues and to be concerned with the triumph of these virtues (such as loyalty
and patriotism) over obstacles and problems. The arias and recitatives were
sharply separated; aria gained importance while the use of chorus declined. The
arias were in the closed da capo aria
form, which inhibited the dramatic flow. From Handel to Mozart, many composers
used librettos written by Zeno or Metastasio in their opera serie in the eighteenth century. Adolf
Hasse was acknowledged as possibly the most eminent
composer of the Metastasian kind of opera seria. By the time of high Classicism, following Gluck's operatic reforms, opera seria
died out. Opera buffa and rescue opera took
over (discussed below). Some of the last examples of opera seria belong to Mozart: Idomeneo, rè di Creta
and La clemenza di
Tito.
At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, opera comique (or opera buffa as opposed to opera seria)
was created in Naples. It became extremely popular and successful in the early
years of the eighteenth century via the works of such composers as Pergolesi.
His intermezzo La Serva padrona
(1733) achieved enormous popularity and affected the subsequent history of
opera. Opera buffa was characterized by a
vigour, exuberance, spontaneity, directness and
charming fluency. Intermezzi and opera buffa
differed from opera seria in that they showed
awareness of changing trends in drama and literature, and considered those in
their use of subject matter. Many of the plots became more down-to-earth. The da capo aria was disregarded in favour of
less closed forms. Altogether, the dramatic nature of the opera was becoming
more apparent. The later and more mature examples of opera buffa are Il barbiere di Siviglia
and Le nozze di Figaro.
Christoph Willibald Gluck
(1714-1787) and his followers upgraded the instrumental preludes in the opera.
The overture had been a neutral piece without any link to the following opera
(except some of Rameau's overtures). It now assumed a programmatic character,
anticipating the mood of the first scene or even the whole drama that was going
to unfold. In the operas of the later Neapolitan School (Leo, Vinci, Jommelli), the use of virtuoso aria was so extended that
the whole consisted of arias specially written to exhibit vocal virtuoso. This
abuse was the main point of attack for reformists. Gluck's
operatic reform by purifying it of extraneous action and musical virtuosity resulted
in a simple and classical style. He created a new, more vital, intensely
expressive drama in which the music and the words were more closely allied than
ever before. Gluck revived the serious approach to
the arts, interest in classical -especially Greek- antiquity and a new feeling
for nature and the natural. He portrays the emotions more simply, more
truthfully, and in a manner more meaningful to the person of feeling and
sensibility. In his first Viennese operas Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and Alceste (1767), there was
already a radical break both in form and style. As Copland summarizes 'Gluck made the dramatic idea (not the singer) supreme and
wrote music that served the purposes of the text (not the singer).' Gluck's operatic reforms were:
1. Use of overture to prefigure the coming
action,
2. Exclusive use of recitative accompanied by the
orchestra (recitativo accompagnato
as opposed to recitativo secco). The continuous sequence of linked numbers
always had the orchestral support avoiding the unnaturalness of the change of
texture when recitative had only harpsichord accompaniment,
3. Drastic shortening of most arias,
4. Suppression of vocal ornamentation,
5. Extensive use of ensembles and choruses
stressing the collective nature of human emotion,
6. Flexibility of musical forms: recitative,
aria, chorus and instrumental sections can be freely intermingled whenever the
dramatic situation requires. (Orfeo has no da
capo arias with elaborate writing for the voice; instead there are arias of
unusually varied lengths whose scale and design are dictated only by the needs
of the situation.)
Gluck is the first composer where music is fully
representative of the classic style of the late eighteenth century with classic
elegance and restraint (Iphigénie en Tauride is an example). Gluck's
reforms influenced Spontini, Cherubini, and Mozart,
but until Berlioz (Les Troyens) and Wagner, he
did not have a true successor. Most people think of Mozart as the great
symphonic writer, or the composer of beautiful piano concertos but he was a
truly operatic composer. His 22 operas include Idomeneo, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi
fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflote.
He was not a reformist but a natural opera composer. His main contribution to
the form was the operatic finale. In his operas, the final scene usually
consists of all main characters singing altogether (not necessarily the same
thing) leading to a grand climax. The grand finale replaced the old Baroque tradition
of closing with a love duet. This was so effective that almost all composers
use it since then; Fidelio, Aida (Act II) and Turandot,
for example, have such finales. Mozart was also the first to compose a comedy
set in the German language. Die Entfuhrung aus dem Seraglio was the
beginning of a German operatic tradition.
At the
turn of the century, because of the violent events of the French revolution and
growing Romantic spirit, the public interest changed from the Gluckian type serious opera to rescue operas and heroic
operas (Cherubini's Medee
[1797], Mehul's Joseph [1807] and Spontini's La Vestale
[1807]). The rescue opera became popular during the war and distress in Europe
between the French revolution and the eventual fall of Napoleon (1789-1815). It
was a subdivision of opera-comique. Early examples were Les Rigueurs du Cloitre
by Berton (1790), and Lodoiska
by Cherubini (1791). The first rescue opera staged in Vienna was Lodoiska in 1802. Cherubini's
Les Deux Journees
(1800), and Pierre Gaveaux's Leonore,
ou l'Amour conjugal
(1798) provided examples for the classic rescue opera Fidelio (1805) by
Beethoven. In rescue operas, the principal character is in prison as a
result of a political act. The rescue should be achieved by ordinary human characters
in a realistic way. Themes deal with survival rather than death. The rescue
opera is classified as a Romantic operatic genre rather than Classical. Carl
Maria von Weber (1786-1826) is usually credited with having been the father of
Romantic opera in Germany. In his best-known operas Der
Freischutz (1821) and Oberon (1826), the
music is lyrical, rich in tone, and descriptive; themes describe certain
characters (predecessor of Wagner's leitmotives);
and music is fused with words and action (rather than being a series of arias).
The
following trend was the Grand Opera, which was initiated by Spontini
in Paris (La Vestale, 1807). Meyerbeer
(1791-1864) maintained the grand opera tradition of Spontini.
He was the most successful composer of this type (Les Huguenots, L'Africane, etc.). This tradition was somehow
restricted to Paris perhaps because the visual spectacle was so important in
French opera but not so prominent in Italy.
The
equivalents of opera buffa (or opera comique)
were singspiel in Germany and ballad opera in England. The nineteenth
century Romantic opera was a result of cross-influence between Italian and
French styles, intermixing of serious and comic genre characteristics and the
absorption of traits from contemporary symphonic music. The main sources of
Romantic opera lay in the comic opera traditions. Romantic opera was based more
on stereotyped musico-dramatic conventions, popular
material and subjects drawn from contemporary life or recent history. Italian
opera in the nineteenth century remained a 'number opera', and division of the
drama into clear-cut smaller forms continued. Choral and orchestral
contribution, however, gained importance. The French grand opera used plots
mainly from recent European history. It was a stage spectacle, with music
involving large ensemble-choral scene complexes and stunning ballets.
Conventionally, it is cast in five acts. In the dramatic unit ‑tableau-
of the grand opera, there is no alternation of action and repose, as in
traditional recitative-da capo
aria structure, but rather a steady intensification of the dramatic pace
leading up to a climax. Perfect cadences with structural importance occur only
at the end of each tableau not to interrupt the build-up. As a result of
French operatic ballet tradition, the orchestration is more colourful than its
Italian counterpart.
An
artistic development emerged in Italy towards the end of the nineteenth century
in Italy. This realistic opera movement was called verismo
(verita means truth in Italian). It concluded a
century that had seen Rossini’s comedies, the bel
canto era, the grand operas and Verdi’s spectaculars. The verismo operas were re-enactment of real life with unsentimentalised characters and events. They did not deal
with Greek mythology characters, legends, superpowers or heroism, but real life
characters. The examples include Cavalleria
Rusticana (Mascagni), Pagliacci
(Leoncavallo), Adriana Lecouvreur (Cilea) and Andrea Chenier
(Giordano).
Although the
aria, as a discrete unit, remained in favour with opera composers throughout
the first half of the nineteenth century, Wagner discarded it more or less
completely while Verdi continued to use it except in his last two operas (Otello and Falstaff). In such operas, it is
hard to separate an aria from the music, as the whole act is the unit of
continuous drama. Richard Wagner, the last great reformist in opera history,
visualized the form as a union of arts: poetry, drama, music, and staging. He
renamed the opera as music drama. The uncompromising continuity brought realism
in the dramatic form. He is also the creator of leitmotif, which brings
cohesion to the opera by associating a musical motif with a character, idea or
event. In Wagner's operas, the orchestra became part of the whole drama. It is
said that Wagner brought the symphony orchestra to the opera house. Although
Wagner emphasized the equality of the arts in his operas, it is the music that
is supreme.
A composer
with operatic ideas contrasting very much with those of Wagner was Claude
Debussy. Similar to Beethoven’s, his eminent place in opera history is
established by a single opera: Pelleas et Melisande
(first performance in 1902). Often considered as the first modern opera, Pelleas
is an example of dominance of words over music. Debussy used almost exact words
of a medieval play by Maeterlinck, and not a libretto. This poignant piece of
‘understatement’ is Debussy’s answer to complex works of
Wagner. Debussy did not complete another opera and nobody else attempted to use
the Pelleas model. While Pelleas et
Melisande remains unrepeatable, the twentieth century did produce many more
original, daring, and forward-looking operas most of which have found a
permanent place in operatic repertory. The operas of Strauss, Berg and Britten, for example, are enjoyed by modern audiences no
less than some other ‘classic’ operas.
Resources used in this compilation:
- Copland A. What to Listen for in Music. Mentor
Books, 1985 (Chapter 15: Opera and Music Drama)
- Encyclopaedia
Britannica: Opera (subscription required)
- Grout DJ & Palisca
CV. A History of Western Music. 4th Ed, Paris: ADAGP,
1988
- NAXOS A to Z of Opera
- Orrey L. Opera: A
Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996
- Plotkin F. Opera 101. New York: Hyperion, 1994
- Sadie S (Ed). The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 1980
- Schumann K. The History of
Opera. In Opera Magic. Philips Classics
Productions, 1993
- The Open University A314 Course Team. From
Baroque to Romantic: Studies in Tonal Music. Milton Keynes (UK): Open
University Press, 1996 (A314; Units 1,2,12,28,29)
- A number of opera guides by the Royal Opera
(UK), English National
Opera and Welsh
National Opera.
How to Listen to and Understand Opera: A Course on Video
(US)
M.Tevfik Dorak, B.A. (Hons)
Last edited on 6 June 2006