Opera

Opera refers to an European art form consisting of a dramatic stage performance set to music. Comparable art forms from other parts of the world are usually prefaced with an adjective indicating the region; examples include Chinese opera and Beijing opera.

History

Origins

The word opera means simply "works" in Latin, the plural of opus suggesting that it combines the arts of solo & choral singing, declamation, and dancing in a staged spectacle. The earliest work considered an opera in the currently used sense of the word dates from around 1597. It is Dafne, (now lost) written by Jacopo Peri largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the "Camerata". Significantly Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the Renaissance. In this case, members of the Camerata felt certain that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas had been originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. A later work by Peri, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day.

Related Topics:
Latin - Jacopo Peri - Florentine - Humanist - Camerata - Greek drama - Renaissance - Euridice

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing practise of performing polyphonic madrigals with one singer accompanied by an instrumental rendition of the other parts, as well as the rising popularity of more popular, more homophonic vocal genres such as the frottola and the villanella. In these latter two genres, the increasing tendency was toward a more homophonic texture, with the top part featuring an elaborate, active melody, and the lower ones (usually these was three-part compositions, as opposed to the four-or-more-part madrigal) a less active supporting structure. From this, it was only a small step to fully-fledged monody. All such works tended to set humanist poetry of a type that attempted to imitate Petrarch and his Trecento followers, another element of the period's tendency toward a desire for restoration of principles it associated with a mixed-up notion of antiquity.

Related Topics:
Monody - Polyphonic - Madrigals - Frottola - Villanella - Homophonic - Petrarch - Trecento

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The solo madrigal, frottola, villanella and their kin featured prominently in semi-dramatic spectacles that were funded in the last seventy years of the 16th century by the opulent and increasingly secular courts of Italy's city-states. Such spectacles, called intermedi, were usually staged to commemorate significant state events; weddings, military victories, and the like, and alternated in performance with the acts of plays. Like the later opera, an intermedi featured the aforementioned solo singing, but also madrigals performed in their typical multi-voice texture, and dancing accompanied by the present instrumentalists. The intermedi tended not to tell a story as such, although they occasionally did, but nearly always focused on some particular element of of human emotion or experience, expressed through mythological allegory.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Another popular court entertainment at this time was the "madrigal drama," later also called "madrigal opera" by musicologists familiar with the later genre. This, as can probably be guessed, consisted of a series of madrigals strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In addition to opera in Italy, developing concurrently in the late 16th-early 17th centuries were the English masque and the French ballet au court, which were similar to the Italian intermedi in many respects. In both cases, the main difference apart from local musical style was a greater degree of audience (at this time, of course, the audience consisted only of invited nobles and courtiers) participation in the form of staged or processional dances. The English masque also featured a culminating "revel," in which the performers drifted into and cavorted with the audience. Opera was imported into both countries before the middle of the 17th century, where it fused with the local incipient genres. This led to the dominance of ballet in opera of the French tradition, while the thriving English tradition of incidental music, as well as the totalitarian Cromwell regime at mid-century, made it difficult for Italian-style opera to take hold there.

Related Topics:
Masque - Ballet au court

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In earlier times, music had been part of medieval mystery plays, with the composer of these best-known to modern audiences being Hildegard of Bingen. Whether these are to be regarded as possible progenitors of opera is highly debatable. At the time of their original performance, they were easily regarded as liturgical accretions. Such accretions to the generally prescribed system of chants were quite common, and the liturgical ceremony was itself dramatic to a degree, often featuring elaborate processions, to which the actions associated with liturgical drama may have been considered merely a minor addition. A new, 17th century form of religious drama, the oratorio did arise shortly after the advent of opera, though it owes at least as much to the (originally secular) non-dramatic recititive-aria form of the cantata.

Related Topics:
Mystery play - Hildegard of Bingen - Oratorio - Cantata

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Baroque opera

Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long; in 1637 the idea of a "season" (Carnival) of publicly-attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged in Venice. Influential 17th century composers of opera included Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi whose Orfeo (1607) is the earliest opera still performed today. Monteverdi's later Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) is also seen as a very important work of early opera. In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements, sponsored by Venice's Arcadian Academy (not a physical school, but rather a group of like-minded aristocrats and pedants), but which came to be associated with the poet Pietro Trapassi, called Metastasio, whose librettos helped crystallize so-called opera seria's moralizing tone. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa. Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many librettos had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an "opera-within-an-opera." One reason for this was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still less cultured than the nobility, to the public opera houses. These separate plots were almost immediately resurrected in a separately developing tradition that partly derived from the commedia dell'arte, (as indeed, such plots had always been) a long-flourishing improvisitory stage tradition of Italy. Just as intermedi had once been performed in-between the acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of "intermezzi", which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and '20s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria. They became so popular, however, that they were soon being offered as separate productions.

Related Topics:
Carnival - Francesco Cavalli - Claudio Monteverdi - Orfeo - Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria - Early Baroque operas - Metastasio - Opera seria - Opera buffa - Commedia dell'arte

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like Handel found himself writing for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in the operas of Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century's close.

Related Topics:
Libretti - Handel - Classical - Mozart

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Bel canto and Italian nationalism

The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and is exemplified by the operas of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Literally "beautiful singing", bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control.

Related Topics:
Bel canto - Rossini - Bellini - Donizetti

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera Nabucco. Verdi's writing demanded vocal endurance and strength more than the agility required in bel canto; his works were also more demanding dramatically. Verdi's operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the nationalist movement (although his own politics were perhaps not quite so radical).

Related Topics:
Giuseppe Verdi - Nabucco - Napoleon

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

French opera

In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition, sung in the French, was founded by Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully arrived at court as a dancer and companion for young Louis XIV, that he might practice his Latin by conversing with a native speaker. Despite his foreign origin, he established an Academy of Music and monopolized French opera from 1672; this is rendered ironic by the later struggle for supremecy between the French and Italian operatic styles that raged in the former country's press for over a century. Lully's overtures, fluid and disciplined recitatives, danced interludes, divertissements and orchestral entr'actes between scenes, set a pattern that Gluck struggled to "reform" almost a century later. The text was as important as the music: royal propaganda was expressed in elaborate allegories, generally with affirmatory endings. Opera in France has continued to include ballet interludes and feature elaborate scenic machinery.

Related Topics:
French - Jean-Baptiste Lully - Ballet

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Baroque French opera, elaborated by Rameau, (though Rameau was opposed by many French critics of his own day for altering any of Lully's practises; others, on the other hand, saw him as a champion of French sensibilities against the rising popularity of Italian opera in the country) was in some sense simplified by the reforms associated with Gluck (Alceste and Orfee) in the 1760s. Gluck composed arias and choruses that moved the plot forward, rather than being nearly irrelevant as had by this time become common. Choruses, indeed, were only just now coming back into opera of any style after a long hiatus. While the methods of Gluck were partially derived from those of the more progressive Italians (particularly in comic operas such as Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, which had been influential in France since its performance there in 1752), he also desired to strip opera from some Italian characteristics he considered superfluous and confusing. In this effort, he took many of his cues from such French tendencies as more syllabic text-setting, use of the chorus (which the French had at least kept tepidly alive while it had been almost completely dropped in Italy) and less adherence to the standard da capo aria form. Because Gluck combined Italian and French methods of undermining opera seria, his "reform" can be seen as a (to some degree conscious) uniting of those styles, his response to an ever-continuing controversy. Later in the century and early in the first half of the 18th, French opera was influenced by the bel canto of Rossini and other Italians (though sung in French). This international synthesis of styles leads directly into 19th century French "Grand Opera," the most sophisticated operatic genre of the 19th century until Wagner.

Related Topics:
Rameau - Gluck - Bel canto - Rossini

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Other Comic Styles

French opera with spoken dialogue is referred to as opéra comique, irrespective of its subject matter. German opera of this type is called singspiel. Depending on the weight of its subject matter, opera comique shades into operetta, which arose as a wildly popular form of entertainment in the second half of the 19th century. Along with the music-hall potpourri called vaudeville, this gave rise to the 20th century genre of musical comedy, perfected in New York and London between the wars.

Related Topics:
Opéra comique - Singspiel - Operetta - Vaudeville - Musical comedy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Romantic opera and French grand opera

The synthesis of elements that is French grand opéra first appeared in Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829) and Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831). Grand opera is usually in five acts and includes dance interludes for complete ballet company. While this genre reached its apotheosis in Hector Berlioz's masterpiece Les Troyens, the most famous opera in the French grand opera tradition may be Gounod's Faust, particularly in the United States where it was a favorite at the Met for the better half of the 20th century. By mid-century, opera practically meant Grand Opera; the works of Verdi, supposedly a quintessential Italian composer, owe much to this genre, as do those of Wagner, who was both influenced and made acceptable by the sheer extravagance of scale involved in such productions. The similarly extravagant production, including ballet set pieces, of such Russian works as Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin can probably be traced back to the grand opera tradition as well.

Related Topics:
Grand opéra - Rossini - Meyerbeer - Gounod - Faust - Met - Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

German opera

Before the late 18th century, German opera was largely a copy of the Italian, although in early-century works of such composers as Reinhard Keiser, the Germans achieved a seriousness of tone and grandeur of scale rarely approached in Italy. The above-mentioned singspiel also flourished at this time, being descended from the school dramas with interpolated songs that the students in Lutheren church-schools often produced.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Mozart's German singspiel The Magic Flute (1791) stands at the head of a German opera tradition that was developed in the 19th century by Beethoven (who wrote only one, which actually stands more in the French Revolutionary "rescue opera" tradition of Balfe and Gretry), Heinrich Marschner, Weber (composer of the great Der Freischütz, containing elements of both singspiel and melodrama, and a major influence on several Romantic composers) and eventually Wagner.

Related Topics:
Singspiel - German opera - Beethoven - Heinrich Marschner - Weber - Wagner

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Before Wagner, there had been little all-sung German language opera of any account for several decades. Though very much inspired by the works of Weber, Wagner pioneered a through-composed style, in which recitative and aria blend into one another and are constantly accompanied by the orchestra; this results in a sort of endless melody, which is perpetuated by the avoidance of any clear cadence until moments of great articulation. Wagner also made copious use of the leitmotif (Weber had used a similar device earlier, and was hardly the first to do so; Wagner's, however, are a main building-block of his scores, rather than mere recurring motives), a dramatic device which associates a musical line with each character or idea in the story.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Other national operas

Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one in the 17th century, and another beginning in the mid-19th century. During the 18th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form.

Related Topics:
Spain - Zarzuela

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Just as it was in Spain, Italian opera was highly popular in Russia. In the 19th century, Russian composers also began to write important operas based on nationalist themes, national literature, and folk tales, beginning with Mikhail Glinka (e.g. Ruslan and Lyudmila) and followed by Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor), Modest Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Sadko), and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin). These developments mirrored the growth of Russian nationalism across the artistic spectrum, in part as a function of the more general Slavophilism movement.

Related Topics:
Mikhail Glinka - Ruslan and Lyudmila - Alexander Borodin - Prince Igor - Modest Mussorgsky - Boris Godunov - Khovanshchina - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Sadko - Pyotr Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin - Slavophilism

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century. Antonín Dvořák, most famous for Rusalka, wrote 13 operas; Bedřich Smetana wrote eight (The Bartered Bride being the most famous); and Leoš Janáček wrote ten, including Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Katyá Kabanová.

Related Topics:
Antonín Dvořák - Rusalka - Bedřich Smetana - The Bartered Bride - Leoš Janáček - Jenůfa - The Cunning Little Vixen - Katyá Kabanová

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was Ferenc Erkel, mostly dealing with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are Hunyadi László and Bánk bán.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After Wagner: verismo and modernism

After Wagner, all opera for many decades laboured in his gigantic shadow. Nearly all composers felt they must react or respond to him in some way, and opera in the early 20th century took several paths. One fairly short-lived path was manifested in the sentimental "realistic" melodramas of verismo operas, a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci and such popular operas of Giacomo Puccini as La Boheme and Tosca. Another reaction to Wagner's mythic medievalizing can be seen in the psychological intensity and social commentary of Richard Strauss (e.g. Salome, Elektra).

Related Topics:
Verismo opera - Pietro Mascagni - Cavalleria Rusticana - Ruggiero Leoncavallo - Giacomo Puccini - Richard Strauss - Salome - Elektra

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, opera has enjoyed tremendous appeal and has been performed around the world. Despite this, seemingly but a handful of modern operas have joined the standard repertory: Berg's Wozzeck, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, Glass's Einstein on the Beach and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites are among these.

Related Topics:
Repertory - Berg - Wozzeck - Prokofiev - Love for Three Oranges - Stravinsky - The Rake's Progress - Benjamin Britten - Peter Grimes - Glass - Einstein on the Beach - Poulenc - Dialogues of the Carmelites

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Contemporary trends