Opera

I

Introduction

Opera, drama in which all or part of the dialogue is sung, and which contains instrumental overtures, interludes, and accompaniments. Types of musical theatre closely related to opera include musical comedy and operetta.

II

Origins

Opera began in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Among its precedents were many Italian madrigals of the time, in which scenes involving dialogue, but no stage action, were set to music. Other precursors were masques, ballets de cour, intermedi, intermezzi, and other Renaissance court spectacles of pageantry, music, and dance. Opera itself was developed by a group of musicians and scholars based in Florence who called themselves the Camerata (Italian for “salon”). The Camerata had two chief goals: to revive the musical style used in ancient Greek drama and to develop an alternative to the highly contrapuntal style of most late-Renaissance music. Specifically, they wanted composers to pay close attention to the texts on which their music was based, to set these texts in a simple manner, and to make the music reflect, phrase by phrase, the meaning of the text. These goals were probably characteristic of ancient Greek music, although detailed information about Greek music was not available to the Camerata (nor is it today).

The Camerata developed a style of vocal music called monody (Greek for “solo song”). It consisted of simple melodic lines with contours and rhythms that followed the spoken inflections and rhythms of the text. The melody was accompanied by basso continuo—that is, a series of chords on a harpsichord or other instrument—supported by a bass melody instrument. Two members of the Camerata, Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri, realized that monody could be used for soliloquies and dialogues in a staged drama. In 1597 Peri made use of this insight by writing the first opera, Dafne. In 1600 an opera called Euridice was performed in Florence, incorporating music by both Peri and Caccini.

The first composer of genius to apply himself to opera was the Italian Claudio Monteverdi. His operas (beginning with Orfeo, 1607, the earliest opera still regularly performed today) made use not only of the word-centred monodic style but also of songs, duets, choruses, and instrumental sections. The nonmonodic pieces had a coherent shape based on purely musical relationships. Monteverdi thus demonstrated that a wide variety of musical procedures and styles could be used in opera to enhance the drama.

Opera spread quickly throughout Italy. The principal Italian opera centre during the middle and late 17th century was Venice. The next most important was Rome, where a clear differentiation was made for the first time between the singing styles of aria (used for emotional reflection) and recitative (derived from monody and used for plot information and dialogue). Monody died out as a genre, although its principle remained influential. The chief Roman composers were Stefano Landi and Luigi Rossi. Venetian audiences liked lavish stage settings and spectacular visual effects, such as storms and descents of the gods from heaven. The leading early composers in Venice were Monteverdi, Pier Francesco Cavalli, and Marc'Antonio Cesti.

III

Neapolitan Style

Alessandro Scarlatti developed a new kind of opera in Naples in the late 17th century. Neapolitan audiences liked solo singing, and Neapolitan composers began to differentiate further between various kinds of singing. They developed two kinds of recitative: recitativo secco (Italian for “dry recitative”), which was accompanied only by basso continuo, and recitativo accompagnato (“accompanied recitative”), which was used for tense situations and accompanied by the orchestra. They also introduced arioso, a style that combined aria-like melodic contours with the conversational rhythms of a recitative.

By the beginning of the 18th century, the Neapolitan style, with its emphasis on tuneful, entertaining music, had been established in most parts of Europe. The only country where this shift in emphasis did not happen was France. There, an Italian-born composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, founded a French school of opera. Lully's patron was Louis XIV, King of France, and the pomp and splendour of the French court found echoes in the massive, slow-moving choral and instrumental episodes of Lully's operas. Ballet was more prominent in Lully's French operas than in Italian operas. His texts, or librettos, were based on classical French tragedy, their melodic lines following the distinctive inflections and rhythms of the French language. Another of Lully's contributions was the establishment of the first standardized overture type, known as the French overture.

IV

Wide Popularity

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the infant German style of opera was overwhelmed by Italian opera. The most important German operatic centre was Hamburg, where an opera house was opened in 1678. Reinhard Keiser composed more than 100 works there. After Keiser's death Italian composers and singers dominated all the opera houses in Germany.

Italian opera was extremely popular in England. Nevertheless, two operas written before 1700 by English composers were frequently performed there: Venus and Adonis by John Blow and Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. These works were an outgrowth of the English courtly stage spectacle, the masque. They incorporated French and Italian elements, particularly the instrumental writing of Lully and the emotional recitatives and arias of the Italians. The German-born composer George Frideric Handel had his greatest successes in England. He wrote 40 operas in the Italian style for London theatres during the 1720s and 1730s, after which he gave up opera and turned to the oratorio.

By the 18th century, opera had moved away from the ideals of the Camerata and adopted a large number of artificialities. Many Italian boys, for instance, were castrated so that their voices would not change but would remain in a high range. The combination of the voice of a boy and the chest development of a man resulted in a piercing quality and agile technique that was extremely popular. Singers of this type, who played the roles of women, were called castrati. They, along with all other singers, were valued more for their beautiful voices and virtuoso singing than for their acting. Operas came to consist of little more than a series of spectacular arias. The arias themselves followed a single formal scheme, A-B-A, called da capo (Italian for “from the beginning”) form; it featured variations that were improvised by the singer when the A section was repeated.