Dancing Through the History of Opera 1594-1791
Jan 17 '06 (Updated Feb 14 '06)
The Bottom Line I struggled to find a thread through this, so in vain settled upon choreography.
Mambo with Monteverdi
In Florence in 1580, a bunch of poncy artistic types were sitting round talking about Ancient Greeks arts and sodomy. Their idea was to revive the Greek idea of musical dramas, but had no fragments of any of the Ancient Greek music despite having all the scripts.
One of these chappies was a man named Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) who wrote what is generally considered the first 'opera', Dafne of 1594. Not much of it has survived the ages and several Italian floods, but if we popped up to the Gonzaga Ducal Palace in Mantua in 1607 we would've been present at the premiere of L'orfeo by a fellow named Monteverdi (1567-1643). Because this is still performed, we generally consider this to be the birth of opera proper. Bad luck Peri, but dem's da breaks. It'd take thirty years until Venice opened the first public opera house in 1637, but even then opera would remain the province of the nobility for a good century yet. After a banquet lasting several hours, the court would troop off to the regal theatre for an opera or two and other diversions from the rigours of nobility. Both private and the handful of public theatres thrived on spectacle over musicality with all sorts of scenic oddities on a scale that wouldn't be seen again for over a hundred years. Going to the opera was as much a social activity as it is today- you went to see and be seen, and whatever happened up onstage was more or less irrelevant. This meant a lot of the singers were ill-prepared and poorly rehearsed, but the castrati were beginning to pop up (where I mention voice types, I suggest you visit the link below).
Much of the opera of this time seems just as strange to modern opera go-ers as the works of Herr Webern or Mr Birtwhistle. Compared to what was yet to come, the works are extraordinarily static, usually more a sequence of tableaux towards a resolution. Characters rarely changed- they were good or bad with nothing in between. The orchestra was whatever was available at the time- literally dozens of 'authentic versions' of Monteverdi's scores are floating around Europe to this day.
England also produced their last successful opera composer until the twentieth century in the form of Purcell, and Lully and Charpentier were the opera grandfathers in France, but opera was still almost exclusively the domain of the Italians, and in particular up north near Venice and the Po.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
L'orfeo, obviously, to see where it all began.
Dido and Aeneas for the only English contribution to opera for some 200 years.
But personally, I prefer The Coronation of Poppea, also by Monteverdi, where Poppea schemes her way to Nero's bed and Empress of Rome by killing and climbing over anyone in her way. It is the most baroque of all of Monteverdi's operas (it was his last) with more recognisable arias and operatic conventions, along with one of opera's most endearing anti-heroines (you can't help but cheer when pompous Seneca, who stands in her way, poisons himself). It also contains the first sublime love duet in all of opera- Pur ti miro, sung by Nero and Poppea at the very end. Its significance has largely been lost however, as when it was first performed in 1643 few members of the audience would have been unaware that Nero would soon kick a pregnant Poppea to her messy death.
Habanera with Handel
When Monteverdi upped his clogs, a little too convienantly for music students, opera started moving in new and exciting directions with the development of opera seria. We were also entering the Age of the Singer, where superstars (often castrati) could name their fee and were wined and dined by royals around Europe, often notching up an impressive cirriculum vitae of lovers along the way. This was the Age of Farinelli.
Opera seria involved itself with noble causes like heroism and tragedy, largely cloaked in Greek or Roman mythology. However the story itself was more or less irrelevant for composers- the leading librettist of the day was Metastasio (1698-1782) who wrote about fifty operas, over half of which were adapted at least thirty times and one of which was picked up by over ninety different composers. This is probably just as well for the audiences, as the only way they could have any clue what on earth was going on was if they already intimately knew the story- plots were often unbelieveably complex with more Serverus, Viniseverus and Caesar than you can poke a stick at.
These complicated plots moved along through recitative- the character would declaim things to notated rhythm and pitch (mimicking natural speech) to a very basic accompaniment (nearly always harpsichord). Every now and again everything would stop for an aria, about three and a half minutes of a character expanding upon what they were feeling right at this point in time. The main point however of an aria in opera seria was for the singer in question to show off their vocal gymnastics, and in some examples of the genre the arias are more or less interchangeable (and indeed often were in practice too, depending on what the singer felt like singing that night).
Catering to the singers' whims was big business- they were what was packing the theatre night after night. A composer may be told that for his next production there was a prima donna (first lady) and a primo uomo (first man- still usually a castrato) who would each require at least two showy arias per act and Signora has a wonderful top B, and would like each aria to finish on this note. There is also a seconda donna and secondo uomo who get one aria each act. And so on, down to the rising star who would get a 'sorbet aria'- a pretty little filler which was generally when the audience would leave the theatre for a quick refreshment before the primo uomo came back onstage for another go.
And despite the advances in scenic wizardry, they did quite literally just come back on stage. Singers were there to sing, not act, and would have the same facial expression and hand gestures regardless of whatever mood they were singing about. They would come onstage, stand in the middle, stick their tits out to the audience and belt. Then they would walk offstage.
Despite the gradually growing rise in opera for the public, it was still very much the domain of the royal courts who vied to have a great chef and a great music director. The musicians were little more than servants, and the third violin would often spend his days doing the silver. Operas were comissioned in a specific model that would continue right up until the death of Mozart- the Lord Chamberlain would contact a composer with a list of specifics- who was to sing, how many violins, how long but also quite often where it was to be set (to honour a visiting Ambassador perhaps) and in the style it was to be written. Whether they were asked or not, composers nearly always chucked in a licenza- a piece of operatic flattery for the monarch- to stay in the good books. That Julius Caesar suddenly starts praising King George III may create a dramaturgical dilemma was not considered. Opera seria was nearly always deadly serious, as lighthearted comic romps were considered the domain of the peasantry, not the nobility, but there were some exceptions by an Italian named Pergolesi (1710-1736) who died before his true influence on comic writing could be gauged. It was also when the first opera parody came into performance- John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728 in London.
London was unique in this period for its large public, and therefore commercial, opera scene. Into this vibrant fray came a German, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) who is considered the leading opera seria composer, despite some competition from across the Channel by Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683-1764). It is a testament to Handel's skill that his works alone are the only ones from this period still performed with any regularity (in the Anglo-world anyway, Rameau is still top of the pops in France).
Some Stuff to Listen To:
The two great Rameau works- Platee and Dardanus are increasingly popular on CD and in performance. However Handel still holds the crown. Giulio Cesare is a Herculean four hour effort, but its arias are some of the most exquisite in the repertoire, especially when his heroine Cleopatra is feeling heartbroken and/or sulky. Rinaldo, Agrippina and Serse are also all very highly-regarded, and his one surviving light-hearted opera Semele is also entering the performance rounds again.
Merengue with Mozart
With opera seria about as far as it can go, we enter the Age of the Reformation where several important things were to happen, led by two composers in particular- Gluck and Mozart.
Gluck (1714-1787) is most associated for his time in Paris from 1770 where he would pretty much begin to get in motion the developments that Mozart would use to shortly turn opera as it was known on its head. One of the first things Gluck did was demand his choice of librettist, as opposed to being assigned one by whoever was commissioning him- a vital step in opera development. He also began to fuse the elements of opera- such as dance, drama and choruses- into a more seamless whole. He also began to develop recitative into something more.
But it would take Mozart (1756-1791) to really perform wonders that would transform the world of opera and ensure Mozart would forever be known as one of the top three key figures of the genre (who are the other two? read on to find out! OH the suspense!). He tried his hand at opera seria in Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, the dying gasps of the old regime, but where he entered extraordinary new ground was with his Big 4- The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute- all of which are in the Top 20 operas in terms of annual performances. Comedy was at last acceptable on opera stages after all that heavy-handed gloom and disaster of opera seria, but Mozart's contribution to opera was more than elevating comedy to the sublime and humane.
Operas still followed a traditional recitative-aria-recitative-aria format, but Mozart gave his recitative a dramatic depth previously unseen and related to them to other musical material surrounding. His arias explored multiple moods and his characters, more than any other composer before (and arguably since) were so completely and thoroughly human and he achieved this through music alone (despite the cleverness of his favourite librettist Da Ponte)- a director can set the Countess from Marriage of Figaro in any costume or century he likes but her music tells all and sundry of her tragic nature and no amount of shoulder pads, corsets or mini-skirts will change that. Speaking of the Countess, her two arias in Figaro are turning points in opera history- not only does Mozart inflict real pathos into a comic opera but the arias, in particular the meltingly gorgeous Dove sono, show a range of human depth unknown on the operatic stage, not to mention a hitherto unseen level of connection between recitative and aria. Mozart also brought ensembles into their own- until now whilst duets were fairly common, trios were still quite rare- but then Mozart out-foxed them all by writing these marvellous ensembles that pepper his operas where each character is expressing their own perspective on a situation, but all these threads manage to successfully combine musically (one of the ultimate composition balancing acts). None more so than in Figaro (there it is AGAIN!) with the Sua madre sextet and Act II finale. This finale in itself is important as one of the earliest examples of the 'confusion finale' where everyone stands around and sings about how jolly confusing everything has got in Act I and II and golly how on earth are we to get out of this unholy mess?
For the first time, the biggest developments in opera had skipped Italy and were instead happening in Paris (Gluck) and in Germany (Mozart and his maligned contemporary Salieri). King Joseph II however felt that Germany needed its own operatic sound, safe from the vile influences of those dirty wops over the Alps, so he encouraged a form called singspiel, where the recitative is replaced with text, with heavy subsidy and more or less forced German composers to write in this dramatically troublesome style (such as The Magic Flute). This format of performance was common elsewhere in Europe, but only Germany took it seriously enough to give it a special name.
Three more things started happening: Castrato started to die out (baritones were getting their brief moment in the sun as the opera hero), Gluck tried to force singers to at least change their facial expression and act goddammit and the level of ability needed amongst the orchestral players was getting higher with exposed woodwind solos, formalised orchestra sizes and more moments for the orchestra to shine. This also meant that someone had to be invented to keep orchestra and singers all going at the same time.
Some Stuff to Listen To:
Gluck's two best operas are Orfeo ed Euridice, now better known for its ballet music and Iphigenie en Tauride which to modern minds has a strange seam of homoeroticism within it.
As to Mozart- how long have you got? They're all wonderful (and this being the 250th anniversary of his death means you're gonna be damn sick of them by the time December 31 rolls round). The Don and Cosi are both sublime, but if you're new to all of this hit up The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute.
Italy had temporarily lost its opera stardom on the stages of Europe, but it was about to reclaim the spotlight in a big, big way.
Some Dancing Partners
Voice Types are all explained here
Where, oh where, will this exciting tale go next?
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
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Munkus now lives in America. He is the size of a house.
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