VII. Western Europe 1650-1760
VIIf. Ballet and Opera
Opera in Rome in the mid-Seventeenth
Century
The generous Roman patrons who fostered
the cantata left also an important mark on the history of
opera. The musical theater's principal supporters after its
beginnings in Florence were the Barberini. With the fortunes of
this one powerful family waxed and waned those of opera in
Rome. Maffeo Barberini (1568-1644) enjoyed as Pope Urban VIII
one of the longest reigns--21 years, having been elected in
1623. His nephews, Don Taddeo, Lleutenant-General of the
Church, later Prefect of Rome, and Cardinals Antonio and
Francesco, were all patrons of music. The two cardinals built
the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane, which seated more than 3,000
persons and whose stage gave scope to the brilliant machinery
and magical scenic effects of the architect Gian Lorenzo
Bernini.
The theater opened in 1632 with the opera
Sant' Alessio
(Saint Alexis; first performed in 1631 ), composed by Stefano
Landi on a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (1600-1669), a
protegé of the Pope (and himself elected Pope Clement IX
in 1667). Another of Rospigliosi's opera librettos,
Erminia sul Giordano
(Erminia at the Jordan), based on Tasso's
Jerusalem Delivered
,was produced with music by Michelangelo Rossi under the
sponsorship of Taddeo Barberini in 1633. Among Rospigliosi's
later librettos are the first two comic operas:
Chi soffre speri
(Let Him Who Suffers Hope), 1639 (first version 1637), and
Dal male il bene
(From Evil comes Good), 1653. Other composers of opera
patronized by the Barberini are Marco Marazzoli, Loreto Vittori
(c.1590-1670), and
Luigi Rossi
. The latter's
Palazzo incantato d'Atlante
(The Enchanted Palace of Atlantis), another of Rospigliosi's
librettos, closed the first period of the Barberini theater in
1642. At this time the Papacy's disastrous war with the Duke of
Parma and the enmity of Pope Urban's successor, Innocent X,
caused the family to seek refuge in France. During this exile
the Barberini and their musical entourage exerted a strong
influence on the musical theater in Paris, particularly through
the production of Luigi Rossi's
Orfeo
in 1647.
Through the Roman experience the
Florentine pastoral matured-into the full-blown spectacle that
is opera.
Opera in Venice
An oligarchy, Venice lacked the ruling
families that sponsored grand court entertainments. Instead,
patrician families that had acquired their wealth through trade
were the principal patrons. Musical productions tended to be,
more than elsewhere, cooperative enterprises. Religious
confraternities called
scuole,
forexample, sponsored concerted music on certain church
holidays or to celebrate patron saints. The opera-theaters,
built and sometimes partly subsidized by individual families,
were maintained through the leasing of boxes to other families
and the sale of admissions. Although the audiences were as
aristocratic as they were elsewhere, the repertory did not
reflect the taste of a prince, nor was opera any longer an
occasional entertainment put on for a wedding, an important
visitor, or other state reception by a host for his guests. A
manager of a traveling or resident company contracted to supply
performances during a season, and it was his responsibility to
satisfy the public. This system worked so well that by 1700
there were 16 such theaters, and 388 operas had been produced.
For the first time composers, librettists, designers, and stage
managers were assured opportunities to repeat a work many times
and to try out ever new approaches.
The first opera theater opened in 1637.
Named San Cassiano after the parish in which it was situated,
it had previously been used for spoken plays and rebuilt that
year by the Tron family. The inaugural opera was
Andromeda,
produced by the poet, composer, and theorbo-player Benedetto Ferrari and the singer and composer Francesco
Manelli (1595-1667). Manelli and his wife both sang in it. The
troupe had set out from Rome and played in Padua the year
before. It consisted of six singers and an orchestra of two
harpsichords, two trumpets, and twelve other instruments. Much
labor was lavished on the scenic effects. The first scene was a
seascape in which Dawn, dressed in silver, appeared in a cloud.
Later Juno came out in a golden chariot drawn by peacocks, and
Mercury leaped from the sky in an invisible machine. Then
suddenly the scene changed to a wooded pasture with snowy
mountains in the background, and shortly after back to the
maritime scene. Here Neptune entered in a silver seashell drawn
by four sea-horses. The first act ended with a madrigal for
several voices concerted with instruments, and by way of an
intermezzo there followed a dance by three cupids. The other
acts -disclosed similar marvels. Nothing survives of the music,
but in other respects this production set the pace for the
succeeding ones.
Monteverdi
contributed four operas to the Venetian theaters:
Adone
(1639),
Le Nozze d'Enea con Lavinia
(1641),
Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
(The Return of Ulysses to his Country, 1641), and
L'Incoronazione di Poppea
(The Coronation of Poppea, 1642). Only the music of the last
two has survived.
Poppea
is Monteverdi's masterpiece for the stage. It is outstanding
among the early Venetian works that survive for the excellence
of its libretto by Francesco Busenello as well as the
music.
After
Orfeo
Monteverdi had written
Arianna
(1608), numerous ballets and dramatic scenes, and at least one
other opera. The style of writing in
Poppea
comes out of this experience and the concertato madrigals. But
it was not unaffected by trends in dramatic music. The chorus
has all-but disappeared; and arias and arioso passages,
madrigal-like duets, and comic ariettes share a large
proportion of the vocal music with the recitative. In other
ways Monteverdi asserted his independence, particularly in
avoiding the closed structures of the Roman cantata composers.
In his choice of librettos he showed that he was not interested
in purely decorative spectacles but insisted upon dramas of
passion.
A synthesis of Roman and Venetian opera:
Cesti
From his very first opera,
Orontea,
Cesti drew together with remarkable skill the new musical
resources of his age for the enhancement of a new kind of music
drama. Though he was undoubtedly acquainted with the work for
the Venetian theaters of his immediate predecessors, he reveals
even more his kinship with the composers of Roman opera and
cantata, in whose orbit he was trained.
Orontea
was first performed with great success at the Teatro Santissimi
Apostoli in Venice during its first carnival season of 1649. It
was repeated during the next forty years with minor adaptations
to current and local taste in Lucca, Rome, Naples, Innsbruck,
Florence, Genoa, Turin, Milan, Macerata, Bologna, Chantilly,
and other places. Its exceptional durability for this age
proves the timeliness and validity of Cesti's solution to the
problem of uniting poetry, music, and drama. It is the solution
that in its essence dominated the next half-century. Briefly
stated, it is to set narrations, dialogue, and the truly
dramatic exchanges among the characters in recitative style,
while generalized expressions of emotion or point of view and
comic positions are set as arias. This obviously required close
collaboration between Cesti and the librettist, Giacinto Andrea
Cicognini, for this formalization is evident in the text as
well as the music.
Orontea
is a completely realistic opera. The action is plausible and
devoid of supernatural interventions, which were not altogether
dispensed with even in
Poppea.
Although it deals with historical personages, and Orontea is a
serious, dignified heroine, the play is a comedy.
Opera in France and Italy from Lully to
Scarlatti
French opera was shaped by the magnetic
forces of attraction and repulsion exerted by Italian music. As
drama, Italian opera could hardly measure up to the vital
theater of Corneille and Racine. Its excesses of passion and
fantastic flights of imagery and virtuosity offended a French
public exhorted to reason, moderation, and decorum by Boileau
and the classic critics. Pierre Perrin summed up the inadequacy
of Italian opera as a model for French composers in a preface
to the text of his musical pastoral, performed in Issy in 1659
and hence known as the
Pastorale d'Issy,
with music by Robert Cambert (1628 - c.1677). Italian operas,
Perrin said, are too long and the recitatives monotonous; the
poetry is too arty, archaic in its language, and forced in Its
metaphors, one cannot hear the words being sung, so there is no
appeal to the mind; the male sopranos and altos--the
castrati--horrify women and make men snicker. But perhaps the
most important reason the French would not imitate Italian
opera Perrin did not mention. The dance was central to the
French musical stage, and, though the ballet was originally
imported from Italy, its share in Italian productions was by
now minimal.
On the other hand there were aspects of
Italian opera that French audiences could not resist. The
beautiful spectacles conjured up by architects and machinists
like Giacomo Torelli da Fano satisfied the hunger of Parisians
for things extravagant and marvelous. How to express the
passions, even if they had to be gently tamed, was a lesson
that could be learned from Italian music.
Jean-Baptiste Lully
No one was in a better position to steer
between the positive and negative poles of the French attitude
toward Italian opera than
Jean-Baptiste
Lully
. A native of Florence who went to France as a musician-page at
14, he participated in the performance in Paris of two operas
of Cavalli,
Serse
(1660) and
Ercole Amante
(1662). He furnished music for the dances added to cater to the
French taste. As composer of instrumental music for King Louis
XIV from 1653 and a member of the
24 violons du Roy
before he led his own
petits violons,
Lully assimilated the rich French heritage of orchestral music.
Moreover he appeared as a dancer as early as the Ballet des
Bienvenus in 1655. Between this date and 1661 he composed music
for numerous
ballets de cour,
including not only overtures and dances but also airs and
récits to the poetry of Benserade. From 1664 to 1671 he
collaborated with Molière and Corneille in a series of
ballet-comedies and one ballet-tragedy. For these he wrote in
both the French and Italian styles. Thus Lully united in his
experience the best of both the French and Italian musical,
dance, and literary traditions.
The operas of Lully enjoyed a longevity
unparalleled for his age. They continued to be staged and
printed for a hundred years. The Lullian opera became such a
national institution that a composer who defied its conventions
imperiled his reputation. Lully's immediate successors, such as
André Campra
and André-Cardinal Destouches (1672-1749), departed
little from his formula. Campra acceded to the renewed taste
for the ballet spectacle by reviving the type of work, usually
called opera-ballet, represented by Lully's
Le Triomphe de l'Amour
(1681). Campra's first opera-ballet
L'Europe galante
(1697) consists of a prologue and four loosely connected
ballets or entrées. More significant is his
Les Fetes vénitiennes
(1710). Though similarly organized, it gives evidence of fresh
receptivity to Italian music after the death of Lully, whose
dictatorial control of the Academy of Music had excluded it.
Les Fêtes vénitiennes
contains three cantatas in a modified Italian style. These
include motto arias with da capo, designated ariettes, a term
that remained attached to these French adaptations of the
Italian aria.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
By the 1730's the French style of opera
was in danger of being submerged permanently. Suddenly the
Hippolyte et Aricie
(1733) of
Jean-Philippe Rameau
brought the tradition back to life. So vigorous and enduring
was Rameau's recreation of it that
Hippolyte
was performed 123 times by 1767. Far from being overwhelmed by
Italian opera seria or buffa, his French opera stirred up a
wave that was eventually to sweep into its fold two principal
composers of Italian-style opera,
Gluck
and
Piccinni
.
Opera in Italy: Alessandro Scarlatti
Hardening of the categories, that disease
of operatic ripeness, overtook Italian opera in the second half
of the seventeenth century. The fluid mixture of recitative,
arioso, ritornels, and arias out of which Cesti and
Cavalli
built their scenes gradually gives way to formalized schemes.
Recitative and aria acquire separate functions and discrete
boundaries, while the arioso grows up to be a kind of aria.
These changes parallel the career of
Alessandro
Scarlatti
. His early operas, intended for private palaces in Rome, are
of small dimensions. Comic episodes relieve the serious action
or the reverse. From 1684 to 1702, while Scarlatti was Director
of the Royal Chapel of the Viceroy of Naples, he wrote about
two operas a year for the royal palace or the royal theater of
San Bartolomeo. These are large-scale works with complicated
intrigue plots, using elaborate scenic designs and effects. The
primary characters are usually involved in love relationships,
while on a secondary plane are various companions, adventurers,
and statesmen. On the fringes are the grotesque antics of two
comic characters, who often close an act with a lively
duet.
It is during this period that expansive
arias assume the main burden of the musical and emotional
content. This concentration of the lyric content was made
possible by a happy meeting of esthetic aims and technical
resources. On the esthetic side was the recognition that the
chief purpose of music in the artistic complex that is opera
theater is the expression of the affections. Scarlatti
confessed to his patron Prince Ferdinand de Medici that the
style of
Il Gran Tamerlano
(1706, music lost) was compounded of three simple elements:
"naturalness and beauty, together with the expression of the
passion with which the characters speak." And this last, he
said, "is the very most principal consideration and
circumstance for moving and leading the mind of the listener to
the diversity of sentiments that the various incidents of the
plot of the drama unfold." Since an affection was understood as
a state of mind that could occupy a character's thoughts and
sentiments over a period of time until he was moved by dialogue
or action to another state, the problem for the composer was to
sustain a single mood in a way convincing as music and as
affection.
It is to this problem that the technical
resources accumulated during the century offered a solution.
The sonatas and concertos of the 1670's and 80's advanced the
art of organizing chordal and key relationships around a single
center and of developing expansive periods out of the motivic
germs of a single subject. Vocal composers, by drawing upon
this experience, could exceed the modest limits of the earlier
arias without recourse to ostinati, strophic variations, or
rondo forms. The modulatory and thematic contrast afforded by
episodes in fugal movements and by soli in concertos could be
achieved in the aria through a middle section in a foreign key.
Concerto-like contrast could be gained also by the alternation
of instrumental ritornelli and voice, and during vocal sections
through the interplay between the voice and orchestra.
Dramatic Music in England
Most of the conditions that delayed the
rooting of opera in France worked against it also in England. A
strong theatrical tradition relegated music to a decorative and
occasional function. The court and private masque, which was
the English counterpart of the
ballet de cour,
emphasized spectacle and dance at the expense of dramatic vocal
music. There was no Mazarin to promote Italian operas, and the
first of them did not begin to trickle in until the eighteenth
century. Beside these artistic factors stands the fact that
during the civil war and Commonwealth (1649-1660) theater
practically ceased to exist for about twenty years.
Ben Jonson had made a promising beginning
in the Jacobean era with masques magnificently staged by Inigo
Jones, set to music partly in recitative style by
Nicholas Lanier
and later by
William
and
Henry Lawes
. The Poet Laureate Sir William Davenant obtained in 1639 a
theater patent from Charles I with the intention of
establishing a program of extravaganzas using music, drama, and
dancing, but the civil upheaval prompted the Lords and Commons
to issue an order on September 2, 1642 to close the theaters.
Davenant finally succeeded in 1656 in staging ten performances
of a "Representation by the Art of Prospective in Scenes, and
the Story Sung in Recitative Music" called
The Siege of Rhodes.
The music, by some of the most eminent English composers of the
day, is lost. However, a private masque organized three years
earlier by Duke Channell in honor of the Portuguese ambassador
gives a good sampling of the styles of music then practiced on
the stage. This was
Cupid and Death
by the poet James Shirley and composers
Christopher
Gibbons
and
Matthew Locke
.
The music consists of entry pieces, dance
pieces, pleasant songs that are mainly independent of the
action, and recitative passages. Locke's recitative is modeled
on an Italian manner long out of fashion in Italy, very
unstable tonally and full of arioso outbursts. It is
self-contained, not being preparative to arias. The rhythmic
freedom, the many cross-relations, and free dissonances found
here pass into the recitative of
John Blow
and
Henry Purcell
.
Henry Purcell
The main deterrent to progress toward a
native opera was the absence of a composer of sufficient talent
and versatility to cope with its myriad problems. When such a
man--Henry Purcell--arrived upon the scene, the moment of
opportunity had passed. A peculiarly English compromise which
did not dilute the strength of its dramatic poetry and
preserved the visual and musical feast of the masque had
preempted the stage-the heroic play with music. Although such
plays were sometimes advertised as "operas" or "dramatic
operas," the musical element was confined to scenes not unlike
the divertissements of the French ballet comedies and operas.
The first such play for which Purcell wrote music is John
Dryden's
King Arthur
(1691). An inventory of its scenes with music makes plain how
accessory to drama were the composer's functions: a sacrifice
scene (I, ii), a battle scene (I, ii), spirit scenes (II, iii),
a pastoral scene (II), a frost scene (III), forest scenes and
triumphs in honor of Britain (V). It must be acknowledged, on
the other hand, that the main excuse for such a play was the
music.
Two years earlier Purcell had shown in
Dido and Aeneas
(1689) that his powers as a composer were equal to situations
of high emotional intensity. Though a miniature opera written
for performance by a girls' school, it has a grand sweep,
tragic nobility, and swiftness of action that promised a new
kind of music drama. It is true to the English stage tradition
while drawing freely upon French and Italian musical practices.
An unmistakable French flavor pervades the instrumental music,
particularly the Triumphing Dance, the Sailors' Dance, the
Overture, the Prelude for the Witches, and the Echo Dance of
the Furies. Even the arrangement of scenes and the prominence
of supernatural happenings seem to be indebted to the French
opera. But actually these are masque-like episodes of a sort
long cherished by the English too.
The points of contact with Italian opera
are more significant. Prominent among the arias are those on
ground-basses: "Ah, Ah, Belinda," "Oft she visits," and the
final lament "When I am laid in earth." These suggest that the
Italian influence came to Purcell through cantatas and operas
of the middle of the century, the heyday of the ground-bass in
Italy.
The choruses of
Dido
are mainly in a native English style Purcell learned in the
syllabic setting of sacred texts. Some of them, though, such as
"Fear no danger to ensue, remind one of Lully; and the
contemplative choruses "Great minds against themselves
conspire" and "With drooping wings ye Cupids come" belong to
the Italian madrigal tradition. The models were probably Blow's
lamenting choruses in
Venus and Adonis
(1683). Blow's obvious antecedents, in turn, are the lamenting
choruses of the Florentine and Roman operas.
Purcell was obviously attracted to the
musical qualities and expressive force of the Italian aria
styles. Unfortunately he lacked a proper context to make the
most of them. The weak texts Purcell had to set, only too
painfully audible because of his careful declamation, dispel
most of the illusion of feeling his music achieves. The English
stage demanded too little of music. It asked that it paint a
little atmosphere, disport the spectator with a few songs,
accompany dances, and occasionally set a sad or tender mood or
a gay and trifling one. But the task of arousing deep emotions
or unfolding a dramatic situation was the prerogative of the
poet. Under the circumstances the English Restoration stage got
better music than it deserved in the work of Purcell. A born
opera composer in search of an opera-house, he might have found
one had he not died so young.
Georg Frideric Handel
When Handel produced his first London
opera--
Rinaldo,
in 1711--the English public was already acquainted with
Italian-style operatic music not only from Purcell but from
various imitations and importations. An Italian libretto
translated into English,
Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus,
was produced in 1705 at the Drury Lane theater with music
mainly by Thomas Clayton, who had studied in Italy, and by two
others: Nicola Haym, an Italian-born German; and
Charles Dieupart, a French musician. Clayton later
collaborated in
Rosamond
in 1707 with Joseph Addison, who, after this failed, turned to
writing acid essays against Italian opera. There were also
adaptations of Italian operas,
Antonio Maria
Bononcini
's
Camilla
in English in 1706,
Alessandro
Scarlatti
's
Pirro e Demetrio
(Naples, 1694), partly in English, partly in Italian in 1708.
The first completely Italian opera was
Giovanni Bononcini
's
Almabide
in 1710, though it too was garnished with some English
intermezzi.
To London Handel was an Italian composer,
but actually he had begun his theatrical career in Hamburg. His
first opera produced there in 1705 was a mixture of German
recitatives and airs with Italian arias. Bilingual opera was
normal to this melting-pot of musical styles. Johann Sigismund
Kusser (1660-1727), one of the first director-composers of
Hamburg's public lyric theater, had spent eight years in Paris
and brought in many French practices. French-style overtures
and choral and ballet scenes thus found their way into
Almira
and other Handel operas. The main exponent of the Italian style
in the Hamburg repertory was Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), the
court music director at Hanover, whom Handel replaced in 1710
for a short time. What Handel knew of Italian opera at this
time he must have learned from Steffani's example. The Italian
style in
Almira
naturally dominates the arias in Italian, but it invades most
of the German airs too. One of the best examples of this is the
furious aria with da capo, "Der Himmel wird strafen dein
falsches Gemüth" (The Heavens will punish your false
heart, II, xii). However, the orchestra is the richer and
busier German ensemble. A distinctly German church-cantata
uniformity and stiffness characterizes the recitatives. Some of
the German airs in
Almira
have the form and flavor of the seventeenth-century German
Lied, simple in melody and hewing closely to the poetic form.
These German traits bear the stamp of the theater's director
Reinhard Keiser
, whose operas Handel regarded highly.
Four years in Italy (1706-1710) converted
Handel almost completely to the melodious Italian manner,
although his predilection for counterpoint, choral writing, and
elaborate instrumentation never left him. Handel wrote about
forty operas for London by 1741.
The Composers
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