A Short History of Opera [4 ed.] 0231507720, 9780231507721

Citation preview

hen first published in 7, A Short History of immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have. The fourth edition incorporates new scholarship that traces the most important developments in the evolution of musical drama. After surveying anticipations of the operatic form in the lyric theater of the Greeks, medieval dramatic music, and other forerunners, the book reveals the genre’s beginnings in the seventeenth century and follows its progress to the present day. A Short History of Opera examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre’s development. Its expanded scope investigates opera from Eastern European countries and Finland. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national oper¬ atic traditions, including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States that incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical opera and popular musical theater. A separate section on Chinese opera is also included. continued on the back flap

A Short History of Opera

Donald Jay Orout

8c

Hermlne Weigel Will lams

-.3T

A Skort History of

Columbia University Press

/

New

Columbia University Fress Publishers Since i8gj

New York

Chichester, West Sussex

© 2003 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grout, Donald Jay. A short history of opera / Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams.—4th ed. p. cm. t Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-231-11958-0(alk.paper) 1. Opera. I. Williams, Hermine Weigel, II.Tide.

ML1700.G83 2003 782. T09—dc2i 2002041470

© Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7

In memory of Donald Jay Grout and AAargaret Dunn

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface to the Fourth Edition xi

Introduction i

PART i

AAusic and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century

1

The Lyric Theater of the Greeks 9

2

Medieval Dramatic Music 13

3

The Immediate Forerunners of Opera 21

PART 2

The Seventeenth Century

4

The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua 41

5

Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome 60

6

Italian Opera in the Later Seventeenth Century in Italy 83

7

Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands 107 Early German Opera 121

9

10

PART

3

Opera in France from Lully to Charpentier 132 Opera in England 147

The Eisht eenth Century

11

Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century 165

12

Opera Seria: General Characteristics 203

13

Opera Seria: The Composers 225

14

The Operas of Gluck 253

viii

Contents

15

The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century 272

16

The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries 305

PART 4

The Nineteenth Century

17

The Turn of the Century 335

18

Grand Opera 353

19

Opera Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera 369

20

Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocento: Rossini, Donizetti,Verdi, and Their Contemporaries 383

21

The Romantic Opera in Germany 417

22

The Operas of Wagner 436

23

The Later Nineteenth Century: Lrance, Italy, Germany, and Austria 473

PART 5

Oth er National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeenth to the Efarly Twentieth Centuries

24

PART 6

National Traditions of Opera 507

The Twentieth Century

25

Introduction / Opera in France and Italy 577

26

Opera in the German-Speaking Countries 611

27

National Opera in Russia and Neighboring Countries; Central and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America 662

28

Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand 708

29

Opera in the United States 729

Appendix: Chinese Opera (Xiqu) 787

List of Abbreviations 795 Bibliography 797 Sources and Translations of Musical Examples 897 Index 911

Illustrations

Scene from Sant’Alessio 65 Scene from Ilfuoco eterno 112 Scene from II trionfo dell’onore 167 Scene from Tamerlano 196 Teatro San Bartolomeo, Naples 226 Scene from The Beggar’s Opera 294 Scene from Love in a Village 295 Riot protesting increased prices for Artaxerxes 297 Stage mechanism for L’Africaine 360 Scene from Macbeth 405 Two scene designs for Die Walkure 448—49 Scene from The Golden Cockerel 523 Scene from Francesca da Rimini 602 Two scene sketches for Wozzeck 635-36 Scene from Kullervo 700 Scene from The Mother of Us All 736 Scene from Lizzie Borden 759 Scene from Of Mice and Men 763 Scene from Central Park: Strawberry Fields 779 Scene from Europeras 1 & 2 783

Ireface to tke K?urtk Ebdition

early in the 1940S, Donald Grout recognized the need for a book that had “for its purpose to offer a comprehensive report on the present state of our knowledge about the history of opera.”’ He filled that need with the 1947 publication of A Short History of Opera. A second, revised and expanded, edition was published in 1965.1 2 After retiring from Cornell University as Given Foundation Professor of Musicology Emeritus, Grout prepared several more editions of his History of Western Music and edited for publication a representative sample of Alessandro Scarlatti’s operas. He also kept alive a deep desire to bring forth a third edi¬ tion of his opera history. Unfortunately ill health prevented him from un¬ dertaking that project, and although his name appears along with mine as a signature to the preface of the third edition of the opera history, the respon¬ sibility for the writing of that 1988 edition was mine alone. Grout did not live to see the third edition in print; he died in March 1987. The present volume has been greatly revised and expanded in light of scholarly research of the past fifteen years. PartVI has been reorganized to con¬ form to the pattern established for the other sections of the book, with its five chapters devoted to particular geographical regions as viewed from a perspec¬ tive of the entire twentieth century. Greater emphasis has been placed on ma¬ terial related to national traditions other than those of France, Germany, and Italy, and an entire chapter is devoted to opera in the United States.The section on Chinese opera previously included in PartV is now in the appendix. To preserve a degree of continuity between the third and fourth editions,

1. Grout, “Preface to the First Edition,” reprinted in A Short History of Opera (1988 edition), xvii. 2. The 1947 and 1965 editions were issued in both a two-volume format with illustrations and a one-volume format without illustrations. They also appeared in several foreign language editions.

xii

Preface to the fourth Petition

musical examples of the former have, for the most part, been retained; sever¬ al new examples have also been added. Dates of operas refer to first perfor¬ mances unless otherwise specified. Places of performances are indicated spar¬ ingly. With few exceptions, translations of French, Italian, and German opera titles have been omitted from the text; they now appear only in the index. Opera titles in other languages, however, are translated in the text and are in¬ cluded in the index as well.3 The bibliography is limited to works mentioned in the footnotes. Books that cover more than one chronological period are listed in the general sec¬ tion of the bibliography and in the section where they are cited in the notes. I am indebted to friends and colleagues for help at various stages in the preparation of this edition. Particular thanks are due to Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, president of G. Henle Verlag; Ilkka Kalliomaa and the Finnish Consulate in New York City for information about operas by Finnish composers; Mirja Kiiveri of the Savonlinna Opera Festival and Hanna Fontana of the Finnish National Opera for photographs; Michael Willis of Glimmerglass Opera for providing several photographs of twentieth-century opera productions; Wendy Hillhouse for a photograph of a 1982 production of Scarlatti’s The Tri¬ umph of Honor; Joan Wolek and the staff of the Hamilton College Library for securing interlibrary materials; Anne R. Gibbons for her careful editing of the manuscript; members of the editorial staff at Columbia University Press for their guidance and encouragement; and my husband, Jay, for his unfailing support of my musicological endeavors. Permission to print music examples is acknowledged in the section “Sources and Translations of Musical Examples.” Special acknowledgment, however, is made here to the following publishers for permission to use copyrighted material for new examples in this edition: G. Henle Verlag, Mu¬ nich (Ex. 16.1), Warner Bros. Publications (Ex. 20.2), and European American Music Distributors LLC (Ex. 26.8a). Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the following for permission to use copyrighted material for the illustra¬ tions: Ron Scherl; George Mott and Glimmerglass Opera; Mara Eggert and the John Cage Trust; Kari Hakli and the Finnish National Opera; and Kuvasuomi Ky Matti Kolho and the Savonlinna Opera Festival.

Hermine Weigel Williams Clinton, New York January 2002

3. There are, however, a number of tides for which a suitable translation could not be provided, giv¬ en the idiomatic nature of the original.

That day the sky was cloudless; the wind blew softly where we sat. Above us stretched in its hugeness the vault and compass of the World; around us crowded in green newness the myriad tribes of Spring. Here chimed around us every music that can soothe the ear; was spread before us every color that can delight the eye.Yet we were sad. For it is so with all men: a little while (some by the fireside talking of homely matters with their friends, others by wild ecstasies of mystic thought swept far beyond the boundaries of carnal life) they may be easy and forget their doom. But soon their fancy strays; they grow dull and listless, for they are fallen to thinking that all these things which so mightily pleased them will in the space of a nod be old things of yesterday. WANG XI-CHI

(353

C.E.)

A Skort History of Opera

Introduction

the custom of using music

in connection with dramatic presentations

is universal. It is found throughout the history of all cultures. This is per¬ haps because the desire to add music to drama is really part of the dra¬ matic instinct itself and may have as its end either edification or entertain¬ ment. An opera, briefly defined, is a drama in music: a dramatic action, performed on a stage with scenery by actors in costume, the words conveyed entirely or for the most part by singing, and the whole sustained and amplified by or¬ chestral music. It is conditioned poetically, musically, scenically, and to the last details by the ideas and desires of those upon whom it depends, and this to a degree and in a manner not true of any other musical form. The opera is the visible and audible projection of the power, wealth, and taste of the society that supports it. Thus, study of its history is of value for the light it sheds on the history of culture in general. One of the earliest examples of the term opera used as a descriptive sub¬ title for a “drama in music” can be found in the first volume of Raccolta de’ drammi, a collection of Venetian librettos that includes Malatesta Leonetti’s La Deianira, subtitled Opera recitativa in musica (1635)- Another example can be found in both the libretto and scenario of Orazio Persiani s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639).2 In the mid-seventeenth century, Blount’s Glossographia in¬ cluded the term opera and defined it as “a Tragedy, a Tragi-Comedy or Pas-

1. Leonetti’s dedication for La Deianira is dated September 8,1631, but the printed libretto, intended for a production in Venice, is dated 1635. The Raccolta de’ drammi is a collection of 1,286 opera li¬ brettos held by the University of California, Los Angeles. See Pirrotta, Music and Culture in Italy, 317. 2. Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947 ed.), 3 -This libretto was set to music by Francesco Cavalli.

Z

Introduction

toral which ... is not acted in a vulgar manner, but performed by Voyces in that way, which the Itahans term Recitative, being likewise adorned with Scenes by Perspective and extraordinary advantages by Musick.”3 From that time forward, the term came into general use in England, and in the next century was adopted by France and Germany. Its use in Italy, especially in the period prior to the nineteenth century, remained relatively infrequent be¬ cause descriptive subtitles such as favola in musica, favolapastorale, dramma per musica,feste teatrale, tragedia, tragicommedia, and the like were preferred. Even though the term opera was not readily adopted in seventeenth-cen¬ tury Italy as a subtitle for dramatic works with music, it nevertheless seems to have been used there in common parlance during that era. Evidence for this comes from two entries in a diary kept by John Evelyn during his travels in Italy. When he was in Siena, he wrote the following on October 13, 1644: “There is in this Senate-house a very faire hall, where they sometimes recre¬ ate the People with publique Shews and Operas, as they call them.”4 A month later during a visit to Rome, his entry for November 19 reads: “The Worke of Cavahero Bernini, A Florentine Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet: who a little before my Comming to the Citty, gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind).”5 Opera is an art form laden with certain conventions, which people agree to accept while at the same time acknowledging them to be unnatural or even ridiculous. Take, for example, the practice of singing, instead of talking. Nothing could be more “unnatural,” yet it is accepted as a matter of course, just as the equally “unnatural” blank verse is accepted as the form of speech in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Not only are there such timeless conventions in opera, but every age has a set of them peculiar to itself, which the second or third generation following begins to find old-fashioned and the generation after that finds insupportable. It is not that the music of these operas is inferi¬ or; rather, it is bound up with a hundred details that interfere with our un¬ derstanding of it—operatic conventions that, passing out of knowledge, all too often carry the music with them to oblivion. All of this points to the necessity for approaching the study of an opera, particularly one of a past period, with especial care. An opera score must be studied with imagination as well as attention. It will not do merely to read the music as if it were a symphony or a series of songs accompanied by an or¬ chestra. One must also imagine the work as it appeared in performance, with the stage action, the costumes, and the scenery. One also must be aware of the operatic conventions by which librettist and composer were governed, so as not to judge them according to the conventions of a different period, com-

3. [Blount], Glossographia (1656). 4. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn [first published in 1818], 2:202. 5. Ibid., 261. For other entries where Evelyn uses the word opera, see 2:229, 449, 503.

Introduction

3

mitting the absurdity, for example, of condemning an opera of Lully or Han¬ del merely because it is not like an opera ofVerdi or Wagner. There is an essential difference between a good opera libretto, as the words of the action are called, and the script of a good play. A play centers about characters and a plot; it may contain episodes that could be omitted without damaging its unity or continuity, but if this is the case, it is, strictly speaking, a defect in the structure. An opera libretto, however, may almost be said to center about the episodes; at the very least, it admits and even requires many portions that contribute little or nothing to characterization or to develop¬ ment of the action, such as dances, choruses, instrumental or vocal ensembles, and spectacular stage effects. Even the solo songs (arias) are often, from the dramatic point of view, mere lyrical interruptions of the plot; they corre¬ spond, in a way, to soliloquies in spoken drama. All these things, which (on a comparable scale) would be out of place in a spoken drama, are the very lifeblood of opera. Composers may accept them frankly as episodes or may try to make them contribute in a greater or lesser degree to the depiction of character or the development of the dramatic idea, but they are so much a part of opera that it is difficult to find an example that does not include them to some extent, even among the so-called realistic operas of the late nine¬ teenth and twentieth centuries. Plot and characterization in an opera libretto are likely to be sketched in broad outline rather than in detail. The action is usually simpler than in a play, with fewer events and less complex interconnections among them. Subtle characterization, if it exists at all, is accomplished by means of music rather than dialogue. Most important of all, the entire dramatic tempo is slower, so as to allow time for the necessary episodic scenes and especially for the de¬ ployment and development of the musical ideas. There is another kind of difference between a play and a libretto, one which has to do with the poetic idiom employed, the choice of words and images. It is a commonplace that not all poetry is suitable for music; it would require a composer of genius equal to Shakespeare’s to add music to such lines as

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, hke this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.

But consider the following: When I am laid in earth, [may] my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.

4

Introduction

Judged merely as poetry, this passage from Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas could hardly merit high praise.Yet it is excellent poetry for music. It suggests in simple terms the image of a woman desolated by an emotion that the words by themselves cannot completely convey, an emotion so overpowering that only with the aid of music can it be given full expression. Moreover, the passage has a maximum of the appropriate dark vowel sounds and hquid con¬ sonants, with few sibilants. The important words (laid, earth, wrongs, trouble, remember, fate) not only are well adapted for singing but also are full of emo¬ tional suggestion. The very imperfections of the passage considered purely as poetry are its great merit for singing, so strongly do they invite completion by means of music. Making due allowance for the special requirements of the form, an opera libretto will usually reflect the prevailing ideas of its time with regard to dra¬ ma. Similarly, opera music will be, in general, very much like other music of the same period. It must be remembered that in an opera, music is only one of several factors. It is necessarily always a kind of program music, in that it must (even if only to a shght degree) adapt itself to the dramatic and scenic requirements instead of developing in accordance with purely musical prin¬ ciples. As a rule, it is somewhat simpler, more popular in style than contem¬ porary larger forms of nondramatic music, more tuneful, more obvious in its rhythms, less contrapuntal in texture—though there are some exceptions to this, notably the music dramas of Wagner. On the other hand, an opera score is apt to be more varied and original in instrumental color, partly because an opera is so long that more variety is needed, and partly in consequence of the composer’s constant search after new dramatic effects by means of instru¬ mentation.Thus trombones had been used in opera two hundred years before they were admitted to symphonic combinations; the devices of string tremo¬ lo and pizzicato were first used in dramatic music; and Wagner introduced a whole new group of instruments, the so-called Wagner tubas, in his Ring. Neither the poetry nor the music of an opera is to be judged as if it exist¬ ed by itself. The music is good not if it happens to make a successful concert piece but primarily if it is appropriate and adequate to the particular situation in the opera where it occurs, and if it contributes something which the oth¬ er elements cannot supply. If it sounds well in concert form, so much the bet¬ ter, but this is not essential. Similarly, the poetry is good not because it reads well by itself but primarily if, while embodying a sound dramatic idea, it fur¬ nishes opportunity for effective musical and scenic treatment. Both poetry and music are to be understood only in combination with each other and with the other elements of the work. True, they may be considered separate¬ ly, but only for purposes of analysis. In actuality they are united as the ele¬ ments of hydrogen and oxygen are united in water. “It is not simply the com¬ bination of elements that gives opera its peculiar fascination; it is the fusion

Introduction

5

produced by the mutual analogy of words and music—a union further en¬ riched and clarified by the visual action.”6 Throughout the history of opera, in all its many varieties, two fundamen¬ tal types may be distinguished: that in which the music is the main issue, and that in which there is more or less parity between the music and the other factors. The former kind is sometimes called singer’s opera, a term to which some undeserved opprobrium is attached. Examples of this type are the op¬ eras of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, and indeed of most Italian composers. Mozart’s Die Zauberfidte also is a singer’s opera, in which a complicated, inconsistent, and fantastic libretto is redeemed by some of the most beautiful music ever written. The latter kind, represented by operas such as those of Lully, Ra¬ meau, and Gluck, not to mention the music dramas of Wagner, depend for their effect on a balance of interest among many different factors of which music is only one, albeit the most important. Theoretically, it would seem that there should be a third kind of opera, one in which the music is definitely subordinated to the other features. As a matter of fact, the very earliest operas were of this kind, but it was found that their appeal was limited and that it was necessary to admit a fuller participa¬ tion of music in order to establish the form on a sound basis. Consequently, an opera is not only a drama but also a type of musical composition, and this holds even for those works that include spoken dialogue. The exact point at which such a work ceases to be an opera and becomes a play with musical interludes is sometimes difficult to determine. No rule can be given except to say that if the omission of the music makes it impossible to perform the work at all, or alters its fundamental character, then it must be regarded as an opera. Throughout its career, opera has been both praised and censured in the strongest terms. It was lauded by its creators as “the delight of princes,” “the noblest spectacle ever devised by man.”7 In contrast, Saint-Evremond, a French critic of the late seventeenth century, defined an opera as “a bizarre affair made up of poetry and music, in which the poet and the musician, each equally obstructed by the other, give themselves no end of trouble to produce a wretched work.”8 Opera has been criticized on moral as well as on aesthet¬ ic grounds; the respectable Hugh Haweis in 1872 regarded it “musically, philosophically, and ethically, as an almost unmixed evil.”9 Despite both ene¬ mies and friends, however, it has continued to flourish and indeed shows

6. Cone, “Music: A View from Delft,” 447. On this whole subject, see also the introductory chapter in Kerman, Opera as Drama. 7. Marco da Gagliano, preface to Dafne, in Solerti, comp, and ed., Le origini del melodramma, 82. 8. Saint-Evremond, CEuvres meslees, 3:249. 9. Haweis, Music and Morals, 423.

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76

The Seventeenth Century

Fhc First Comic Operas Italian popular comedy at this period was represented by the cornmedia dell’arte, which found its musical counterpart in the madrigal comedies of Vecchi and Banchieri. It is in the Italian pastorales that comic episodes be¬ gin to appear. The scenes in Landis La morte d’Orfeo, for example, are of the sort common to other Italian pastorales. Sant’Alessio, one of the first operas to be written about the inner life of a human character, is not without its com¬ ic episodes, most notably a duet of ridicule sung by the pages. Here the pages and the nurse represent more realistic comic characters, obviously patterned after the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte. The creation of comic opera, the foundation of the long Italian opera buffa tradition that was to culminate in Mozart and Rossini, was the work of Giulio Rospigliosi. In addition to his opera poems already cited (Sant’Alessio, Upalazzo incantato, Erminia sul Giordano), Rospigliosi wrote several others, in¬ cluding comic intermedi and two highly successful comedies: Chi soffre speri and Dal male il beneC Chi soffre speri (also known as L’Egisto) was performed at the Palazzo Barberini in 1637 and again in 1639 in a revised version.32 It is generally agreed that the second version (the only one of which the music is now known) represents the musical collaboration ofVirgilio Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzoli. Although the extent of that collaboration is open to ques¬ tion, Marazzoli usually is credited at the very least with the composition of Lafiera di Fa fa, the intermedio for Act II.33 Chi soffre speri is based on a story by Boccaccio. It has a romantic plot, with scenes featuring character types of the commedia dell’arte and similar figures from the common walks of Italian life, in the manner established by Michelan¬ gelo Buonarroti with his comedies La Tancia (1612) and La Fiera (1618) and already used by Rospigliosi in his own poem Sant’Alessio. The use of dialect by the comic characters may have been patterned after an earlier opera by An¬ gelo Cecchini (1619-39) that was produced in Rome in 1635.34The dialogue of Chi soffre speri is conveyed in a kind of recitative that differs essentially from

31. Rospigliosi wrote the libretto for San Bonifatio (1638), an opera by Virgilio Mazzocchi that in¬ cluded comic scenes. Little of the text survives and even less of the music, with the only extant por¬ tion limited to Mazzocchi’s music for the intermedio, La civetta. This opera was well received and had additional performances in Rome, including four during Carnival of 1639.The composer took one of the singing roles. 32. A visitor who wanted to attend an operatic production in Rome usually was given an invitation, as was John Milton, who was among the invited guests for the 1639 production of Chi soffre speri. See Hammond, Music & Spectacle in Baroque Rome, 202. 33. See Reiner, “Collaboration in Chi soffre speri,” and “Mazzocchi,V.” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 34. This opera was Primavera urhana col trionfo d’Amor pudico (Rome, 1635).The score is lost, but the libretto by Ottaviano Castelli survives.

Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas

77

the quasi-melodic monody of the Florentines; it is the style that later came to be called recitativo semplice or recitativo secco: a quick-moving, narrow-ranged, sharply accented, irregularly punctuated, semi-musical speech, with many re¬ peated notes sustained only by occasional chords—a style for which the Ital¬ ian language alone is perfectly adapted and that has always been a familiar feature of Italian opera.35 Although tendencies toward this type of recitative were manifest in earher Roman works, the necessity of finding a musical set¬ ting for realistic comic dialogue led to its fuller development, as seen in exam¬ ple 5.7. Apart from the recitative and one lively ensemble scene in an intermedio (depicting the bustle of a fair), the score of Chi soffre speri is surpassed in qual¬ ity of both libretto and songs by Dal male il bene. This comic opera, with mu¬ sic by Antonio Maria Abbatini (c. 1609-79) and Marco Marazzoli, was per¬ formed in 1653 to mark the return of the Barber ini to Rome and the subsequent reopening of the Palazzo Barberini theater.36 It also marked the celebration of Maffeo Barberini’s marriage to Olimpia Giustinani. Rospigliosi, who had served as papal legate in Madrid from 1646 to 1653, showed in the construction of his libretto some influence of the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600—1681), especially the latter’s La dama duende (1629). Dal male il bene is a romantic comedy in which, after complications and misunderstandings, two pairs of lovers are happily united. The servant characters are evidently drawn from life, except for one of them, the comic servant Tabacco, who is obviously taken over from the commedia dell’arte masks. Incidentally, this character type appears again and again in operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Leporello in Mozart s Don Giovan¬ ni is probably the most familiar example. The music of Dal male il bene is no¬ table for the skill of the recitatives and for another feature that later became characteristic of the opera buffa—namely the solo ensembles, especially the trio at the end of Act I and the sextet, which forms the finale of the opera. Tabacco s aria “In che da?” from Act I shows a well-developed tonal and for¬ mal scheme, together with a good sense of comic style (example 5.8). Mozart s Don Giovanni was also foreshadowed by a production at Rome of L’empio punito (1669), the earliest known operatic portrayal of the myth of Don Giovanni.37This opera, with libretto by Filippo Acciaiuoli and music by Alessandro Melani (1639—1703), was staged at a semipublic theater and spon-

35. For a discussion of the terms recitativo semplice and recitativo secco, see Monson, “Semplice 0 secco: Continuo Declamation in Early 18th-Century Italian Recitative.” 36. The exact contribution of each composer is not entirely clear; usually Acts I and III are attrib¬ uted to Abbatini and Act II, to Marazzoli. Cf. Witzenmann, “Die romische Barockoper,” and Holmes, “Comedy—Opera—Comic Opera.” 37. For an informative study relating to the Don Giovanni myth and its impact on the history of opera, see Pirrotta, Don Giovanni’s Progress.

78 example

The Seventeenth Century

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sored by Queen Christina of Sweden during her sojourn in Rome.38 The plot contains many of the same components found in Da Ponte’s version of the myth: the two pairs of lovers; a host of female acquaintances who are the object of Acrimante’s amorous escapades; the comic servant Bibi, who faith¬ fully accompanies his master; the exchange of clothing that causes mistaken identities (Bibi asks to borrow Acrimante’s cloak so he will present a more dapper image before the servant Delfa); Acrimante’s mocking ofTidemo’s

38.The opening of Rome’s first public theater, the Teatro Tordinona, did not occur until 1671.

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-vel-Io per in- ten-der quel che

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que- sto

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4 83

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< '" diquel-lo

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(15 more measures, followed by the Rilornello and a ”2a parte” = last 20 measures of part one)

so

The Seventeenth Century

statue, after having killed him in a duel; an invitation issued to the statue to attend a banquet; and the demise of Acrimante, as he gives his hand to Tidemo and is ferried away to the underworld by Charon in his barque. Alessandro’s position as a church musician in Rome reveals itself in this opera, for here there are brief choral passages inteijected into the flow of recitatives and arias. These choral interjections, considered somewhat unusu¬ al for operas of this period, include the chorus of stable boys in Act I and the chorus of demons that appears to Acrimante in a dream.39 Although the bas¬ so continuo accompaniment predominates throughout the score, there are nevertheless a substantial number of arias that are accompanied by a threepart string ensemble—two violins and continuo (chitarrone and harpsichord). At the time Melani composed L’empio punito, he and his older brother, Ja¬ copo Melani (1623—76), were living in Rome, having moved there in 1667. The following year Jacopo achieved considerable success with his comic opera II Girello (1668), which has a prologue by Alessandro Stradella.This po¬ litical satire was instrumental in launching a new phase of comic opera pro¬ duction in Rome. Prior to his arrival in Rome, Jacopo had been acclaimed for his comic operas produced at Florence between 1657 and 1662 by the Accademia degli Immobile, a dramaturgical society made up of aristocratic per¬ sonages. Of these operas, only one survives; it is It podesta di Colognole (1657), with libretto by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia.40The performance of this excel¬ lent work is noteworthy because it makes clear that comic opera produc¬ tions were no longer exclusively associated with Rome.41 In fact, almost all Moniglia’s comic librettos were written for a Florentine audience. II podesta contains many more arias in proportion to recitatives than did earher comic works, and it is possible to observe some of the standardized forms into which the aria, in both serious and comic opera, was settling down during the latter half of the seventeenth century.These forms divide themselves, with few exceptions, into three groups:

1. Strophic songs. The solo part may be either literally repeated for each stanza or more or less varied. The style in many of these is light and simple, frequently showing traces of popular song-types or dance me¬ ters. Others are more serious in mood. There is usually an orchestral ritornello or a short section of recitative between the stanzas (example: Tancia’s “S’io miro ll volto,” Act I, scene ix).42 2. Through-composed arias. These occur in a wide variety of types, both

39. See Pirrotta,

Don Giovanni’s Progress,

40. Also known as

31.

La Tancia, overo il podesta di Colognole.

41. See Weaver, “Florentine Comic Operas.” 42. Goldschmidt,

Studien,

1:357.

Otk er E-arly Seventeentli-Oentury Italian Gourt Operas

81

serious and comic, but all have a broader formal pattern and are less regular in melodic and rhythmic structure than the strophic songs. They consist of a number of sections, each ending with a full cadence in the tonic or a related key, and separated by orchestral ritornellos (ex¬ amples: Isabella’s “Son le piume acuti strali,” Act I, scene i; Leandro’s “Sovra il banco di speranza,” Act I, scene viii).43The basic form of these arias is two-part, without marked contrast of thematic material. Some¬ times, however, the second section may be more contrasting, followed by a repetition of the first, resulting in a three-part form (example: Lisa’s “Se d’amore un cor legato,” Act I, scene i).44 Arias of this second group represent the main channel of develop¬ ment of operatic style in the later seventeenth century. In the course of time, the formal scheme is expanded, the orchestra enters into the ac¬ companiment proper as well as at the ritornellos, concertizing instru¬ ments appear, a fully developed da capo form gradually replaces the simple two-part structure, and eventually a number of stereotypes de¬ velop—arias of definite categories, each distinguished by certain stylis¬ tic procedures and appearing in the opera in a more or less rigidly fixed order of succession. This final degree of stylization, however, is not achieved until the early part of the eighteenth century. 3. Arias over an ostinato bass. Most arias of this group are serious in mood and belong to a recognized type known as the lament (example: Isabel¬ la’s “Lungi la vostra sfera,” Act I, scene xx).45 They are most often in triple meter, with slow tempo, and the usual bass figure is the passacaglia theme consisting of a diatonic or chromatic stepwise descent of a fourth from the tonic to the dominant, or some variant of this.46

By the middle of the seventeenth century, opera had come a long way from its beginnings as a pastoral play with monodic singing based on a sup¬ posed imitation of ancient Greek drama. Extensive ensemble numbers, typi¬ cal of the earliest operas, survived after 1650 only in works destined for spe¬ cial aristocratic or state occasions. More significant historically, therefore, were the steps taken in the early seventeenth century toward establishing the main outlines of the structure of opera as a whole, founded on the separation of recitative from aria and the working out of musical forms for the latter, with distinct tonal relationships. Along with this formal progress went the

43. Ibid., 1:349. 35544. Ibid., 1:352. 45. Ibid., 1:360 46. A familiar example of this kind of aria is Dido’s lament, “When I am laid in earth,” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

82

The Seventeenth Century

discovery of new types of expression: the comic opera began its career with its recitativo semplice and solo ensemble numbers; serious opera explored the possibility of successful musical treatment of subject matter other than the conventional pastorale, as demonstrated by Rospigliosi and Landi. Finally, the modern orchestra, centering around violin instruments and continuo, was established, and an important type of overture originated. Changes already begun in the first few decades were accelerated as opera moved out of the shelter of aristocratic salons onto the stage of public theaters.

6 Italian Opera in tke L^ater Seventeentk Century in Italy

although

the

beginning

of opera is commonly reckoned

from the Florentine performances of 1600, it would be almost more appro¬ priate to date it from the opening of the first public opera house in Venice in 1637. Itinerant troupes of singers, rivaling the troupes of the commedia dell’arte and borrowing from them many features of both libretto and music, had be¬ gun to circulate in Italy before this date. But the destined center of the new kind of musical drama, based on a combination of broad popular support and prestige appeal to the upper social classes, was Venice.1 Court operas of the early seventeenth century had always kept a certain reserve, a refinement, al¬ most a preciosity of form and content. After 1640, as opera became increas¬ ingly a pubhc spectacle and tickets were sold for performances, changes were inevitable. The popularity of the new form of entertainment at Venice was amazing. Between 1637 and the end of the century, more than 350 operas were produced in the new theaters in Venice itself and probably at least as many more by Venetian composers in other cities. No fewer than nine opera houses were opened in Venice during this period; after 1650, never fewer than four were in operation at once, and for the last two decades of the century this city of 125,000 people supported six opera troupes continuously, the usu-

1. On Venetian opera, see Mercure galant (Paris, 1672-74, 1677-1714); Bonlini, Le glorie della poesie; Groppo, Catalogo di tutti i drammi; Wiel, I codici; Wolff, Die venezianische Oper; idem, Oper: Szene und Darstellung; Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera; Pirrotta, “Early Venetian Libretti at Los Angeles”; Muraro, ed., Venezia e il melodramma nel seicento; Bianconi, II Seicento (trans. as Music in the Seventeenth Century); Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (with 200 pages devoted to musical examples).

The Seventeenth Century

81

al seasons filling from twelve to thirty weeks of the year.2 Sustaining this rise in commercial opera were the aristocratic families ofVenice who rented loges by the season and the general public, including foreigners visiting dur¬ ing Carnival, who gained admission by purchasing tickets. The transformation that took place in the character of both libretto and music is attributable in part to these new circumstances; yet signs of the change had already become apparent in Rome, and the whole movement was part and parcel of the changing literary and musical tastes of the time. The genuine Renaissance interest in antiquity being exhausted, only the shell of classical subject matter remained, and even this was frequently abandoned in favor of episodes from medieval romances, especially as embodied in the epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Moreover, the outlines of history or legend were overlaid with so-called accidenti verissimi—incidents invented and added by the poets—to the point of being no longer recognizable. In these operas, Perseus, Hercules, Medea, Alcestis, Scipio, Leonidas,Tancred, Clorinda, Rinaldo, and Armida were not so much human (or superhuman) persons as mere personified passions, moving through the drama with the stiff, unreal air of abstract figures (despite the vehemence with which their emotions were ex¬ pressed), preoccupied with little more than their eternal pohtical or amorous intrigues and caricatured in comic episodes that might take up half the opera. Mistaken identity—a device rendered somewhat less implausible by the pres¬ ence of castrati in male roles—was a dramatic stock in trade. The Aristotelian unities gave way before a bewildering succession of scenes, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty in a single act, full of strong feehng and suspense, abounding in sharp contrast and effects of all kinds. Lavish scenic back¬ grounds added to the spectacle. Pastoral idylls, dreams, oracles, incantations, spectral apparitions, descents of gods, shipwrecks, sieges, and battles filled the stage. In particular, the machines—ingenious mechanical contrivances for the production of sudden miraculous changes and supernatural appearances—at¬ tained a degree of development never surpassed. Heritage of the medieval mysteries, beloved adjunct of the Renaissance intermedi and the seventeenthcentury court spectacles, the machines formed an indispensable part of opera in this period, though their magnificence declined before the end of the century.3

2. For a contemporary account of the impresarial organization of Venetian theaters from 1637 to 1681, see Cristofor Ivanovich’s “Le memorie teatrali di Venezia” (1681), excerpts of which are reprinted (in English) in Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 302—10. 3. Of the relatively few stage designs of seventeenth-century Venetian opera productions that were published, see those illustrated in Bjurstrom, Giacomo Torelli and Baroque Stage Design; Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera; Zorzi et al., eds., I teatri pubblici di Venezia; Leclerc, Venise et Vavenement de l’opera public d I’dge baroque. See also Theatrical Designs from the Baroque through NeoClassicism.

Ital ian Opera in Italy

85

A striking feature of the scores after about 1645 is the virtual disappear¬ ance of the chorus. There are a few choruses in operas from around this time, and occasional indications that more were planned but apparently never composed. The mystery of these trussing choruses has not yet been satisfacto¬ rily solved, but it is possible that they were replaced by ballets, the music of which was written by some other composer(s) and consequently not includ¬ ed in the regular score. At any rate, the absence of a chorus was primarily a matter of aesthetic propriety, for the stately, antique choral group of the Flo¬ rentine pastorales had no place in the lusty melodrama of later seventeenthcentury opera. Moreover, the public cared little for choral singing on the stage, preferring to hear soloists. Giovanni Andrea Angelini-Bontempi (1624— 1705), in the preface to his opera II Paride (Dresden, 1662), stated bluntly that the chorus belonged in the oratorio, and managers soon found that the mon¬ ey it cost to maintain such a large body of singers could be more advanta¬ geously spent for other purposes.4 Only in the festa teatrale or Jest a musicale, for which extraordinary sums of money were available, did the chorus remain.5 Its place was taken by ensemble solo voices, particularly in the prologues and epilogues, where divinities and allegorical figures of all kinds came forward to sing greetings to distinguished spectators or make general moral observations and topical allusions to events of the day. The decline of the chorus was fol¬ lowed by the rise of a typical operatic phenomenon, the virtuoso soloist, for whose sake numerous songs having no connection with the drama were in¬ terpolated in the score. Along with these external changes, the music of Italian opera in the course of the seventeenth century developed some fundamentally new fea¬ tures of style. The works of the Florentines and early Romans were essential¬ ly chamber operas, which were relatively short, with a limited range of musi¬ cal effects, sophisticated in feeling and declamation, calculated to appeal to invited guests of aristocratic tastes and education. Many of the later operas, on the other hand, were destined for performance in public theaters before a mixed audience who had paid admission. Box office appeal was essential. Broad effects by simple means, direct and vivid musical characterization, con¬ tinual sharp contrasts of mood were required. Tuneful melodies, unmistakable major-minor harmonies, a solid but uncomplicated texture, strong rhythms in easily grasped patterns, above all clear formal structure founded on the se¬ quential repetition of basic motifs—these became the elements of a new op¬ eratic style.

4. Kretzschmar, “Die venetianische Oper,” 22. 5. Many of these festival-type operas were written to celebrate a patrons birthday or name day. See, in particular, operas written for the Habsburg court in Vienna.

86

The Seventeenth Century

cfi\4 onteverdi In the summer of 1612, Claudio Monteverdi was asked to leave the Mantuan court for reasons as yet unknown. He returned for a brief time to his native Cremona before being named maestro di cappella at St. Marks Cathedral at Venice in August 1613, a position he held for the rest of his life. His duties at St. Mark’s required him, among other things, to recruit and train members of the choir and to compose music for the major feasts. Since noth¬ ing in his contract prevented him from also writing secular dramatic music, he accepted commissions from the courts of Mantua and Padua for several such works between 1627 and 1630. The first of these was a commission to compose music for Giulio Strozzi’s libretto, La finta pazza Licori (1627), a comic opera in which the title character, Licori (soprano), disguised first as a man and then as a woman, has to feign madness. Monteverdi was particularly enthusiastic about this libretto; he described it in a letter (July 24,1627) to Alessandro Striggio at Mantua as a “very beautiful and unusual play,” having “a thousand comical situations.”6 In this same letter Monteverdi mentions that he has completed almost all of the first act. Whether he completed the full score before Striggio rejected the opera is not known, for the score no longer survives.7 What has survived are the letters Monteverdi wrote to Strig¬ gio from May through July 1627, which contain specific suggestions for Strozzi concerning the structure of“mad” scenes. So effective were these sug¬ gestions that they became a guide for other librettists who wanted to include this type of scene in their librettos, as did Giovanni Francesco Busenello (Didone) and Giovanni Faustini (Egisto). They similarly guided Strozzi in his writing of La finta pazza for Venice. Monteverdi also composed dramatic works for noble families, academies, and eventually for public opera houses in Venice. The dramatic cantata II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) and the opera Proserpina rapita (1630), for example, were written for Count Girolamo Mocenigo and performed in his Venetian palace. II combattimento may be briefly mentioned here because of its significance in the development of a new type of musical expression and because of its use of two new devices of instrumental technique. In the pref¬ ace to his Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (the collection in which II combattimen¬ to was first published in 1638), Monteverdi explains that music hitherto has not developed a technique for the expression of anger or excitement and that he has supplied this need by the invention of the stile concitato (agitated style),

6. For an English translation of this letter, see Stevens, “Selected Letters of Monteverdi,” 68. 7. The scores of La finta pazza Licori, Arianna, and Armida that Monteverdi presented to the Gonzaga court to fulfill his commissions were destroyed in 1630 when Mantua was under siege by the im¬ perial troops. For an informative article with details concerning the creation of La finta pazza Licori, see Tomlinson, “Twice Bitten,Thrice Shy: Monteverdi’s ‘finta'finta pazza!’

Italian Opera in Italy

87

based on the meter of the pyrrhic foot (two short syllables.) This is a typical Renaissance theory to justify the use of rapidly reiterated sixteenth notes on one tone. Monteverdi claims credit for the discovery of this device, as well as for the pizzicato, which he likewise uses in this work to depict the clashing of weapons in combat. The orchestra of II combattimento consists of only strings and continuo, an instance of the trend during the early seventeenth century toward reducing the number and variety of instrumental groups and center¬ ing interest on the strings. The birth of commercial opera in Venice came during the 1637 Carnival season, when Francesco Manelli’s (c. 1596—c. 1667) Andromeda was performed at the Teatro San Cassiano by his traveling troupe.8 The success of this initial enterprise initiated additional operatic performances at the Teatro San Cas¬ siano and subsequently at other theaters as soon as they were either renovat¬ ed (Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Teatro San Moise) or newly constructed (Teatro Novissimo) to accommodate this type of entertainment. Within the first three Carnival seasons, four more new operas were brought to the stage: Manelli’s La maga fulminata (1638) and Francesco Cavalli’s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639) at the Teatro San Cassiano; Manelli’s Delia (1639) and Ferrari’s Armida (1639) at the Teatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo.9 None of Monteverdi’s dramatic works can be found among the earliest of¬ ferings, a fact noted with surprise by some of his contemporaries.10 In fact, not until 1640 did Monteverdi participate in the Venetian experiment: Arianna was revived as the inaugural production for the redesigned Teatro San Moise;11 II ritorno di Ulisse in patria, an entirely new opera based on a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro, was presented during the 1640 Carnival at the Teatro San Cassiano, then had a revival there the following year, and subsequently was performed outside ofVenice. Over the course of the next several years,

8. Manelli’s opera scores do not survive. Opera performances in Venice during this period were con¬ fined to the Carnival season, which meant that members of the various opera companies had to seek additional employment opportunities for the remaining months of the year. This was not a problem for many of the Venetians, some of whom were employed as members of the capella at St. Mark’s. Those associated with itinerant troupes, however, had to look for work elsewhere; usually they took their productions to other cities and courts, such as Bologna, Naples, and Milan. 9. Benedetto Ferrari (c. 1603-81)—poet, theorbist, impresario, and composer—wrote the librettos for Andromeda and La maga fulminata and created both text and music for Armida, H pastor regio (1640), La ninfa avara (1641), and II principe giardiniere (1644). None of the music for his operas sur¬ vives. 10. Giacomo Badoaro decided to entice Monteverdi into creating a work for the Venetian public by writing a libretto, which he hoped the composer would want to set to music. Badoaro reveals this in a note addressed to Monteverdi, which appears in the preface to II ritorno di Ulisse in patria. For the original Italian and an English translation of this note, see Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 17 and 408. 11 .Arianna was revised to suit the taste of Venetian audiences. For example, the word tragedia was re¬ moved from the title and many of the choruses were eliminated.

The Seventeenth Century

88

Monteverdi composed at least two more operas for the Venetian stage: Le nozze d’Enea in Lavinia (1641), a tragedia di lieto fine based upon a Trojan-Ro¬ man subject, and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643), both produced at theTeatro SS. Giovanni e Paolo.12 Although Monteverdis operas were well received by the Venetian public, they nevertheless encountered stiff competition from some of the other works that were staged between 1637 and 1643. One of the most successful of these productions was La finta pazza, an opera that had its premiere in 1641 as the inaugural event for theTeatro Novissimo.13The libretto was by Giulio Strozzi, the scene designs by Giacomo Torelli, and the score by Francesco Sacrati (1605-50).14 The theme of the madwoman, already developed by Strozzi in his La finta pazza Licori, was so new to opera that it attracted con¬ siderable attention and was soon imitated by other librettists. Strozzi s use of disguise was also a rather novel idea and, judging from the number of opera librettos thereafter that incorporated disguise into their plots, it would appear that La finta pazza initiated interest in this feature as well. Sacrati mirrors the wide ranging emotions of the principal protagonist, Deidamia, with vocal lines that span a wide ambitus, and references in the text to the army are un¬ derscored by martial rhythms and repeated notes simulating trumpet fanfares. The basso continuo provides most of the accompaniment for the singers, with the strings (upper two parts and continuo) reserved for special dramatic mo¬ ments such as those found in scene x of Act II.13 So popular was La finta pazza with the Venetian public, all performances during its first season were sold out. But the Venetians were not the only ones who could take delight in this opera. Traveling troupes, such as the Febiarmonici, seized the opportunity to perform La finta pazza in a number of oth¬ er cities in Italy between 1644 and 1652, including Piacenza, Florence, Bolo-

12. Two additional libretto manuscripts for Poppea were discovered in the late 1980s, one in Warsaw and the other in Udine. The Udine libretto is entided La coronatione di Poppea, and since this manu¬ script seems to be very closely related to the Scenario that was printed in conjunction with the pre¬ miere, it is conceivable that the original title of the opera was indeed La coronatione di Poppea, not L’incoronazione di Poppea. See Fabbri, “New Sources for PoppeaP The traditional date of Carnival 1642 for the premiere of Poppea should perhaps be read according to the Venetian calendar (more veneto) as Carnival 1643, particularly in light of the fact that the published Scenario is dated 1643. In other words, the opera was produced during the 1642—43 season. See Fabbri, Monteverdi (1994), 3ion. 193. 13. This theater, the fourth to open for public opera performances in Venice, was newly constructed by a group of noblemen who were members of the Accademia degli Incogniti. This was in sharp contrast to the first three theaters to open, for they were privately owned by families. 14. A score related to the 1641 production of La finta pazza was uncovered in 1984 by Lorenzo Bianconi. See the preface to his and Thomas Walker’s forthcoming edition of Sacrati’s La finta paz¬ za. Prior to 1984 only a 1644 version of La finta pazza was thought to be extant. For a discussion of this important Venetian opera, illustrated with musical examples, see Rosand, Opera in SeventeenthCentury Venice, chap. 4. 15. See Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, example 70, 597—604.

Italian Opera in Italy

89

gna, Genoa, Reggio Emilia, Turin, Naples, and Milan.16 Parisian audiences also had an opportunity to see the Torelli-Balbi traveling production of the opera in 1645, the first Italian opera staged in France. A glance at the scores of the two full-length Venetian operas by Mon¬ teverdi that have been preserved, Tl ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, shows what striking changes had taken place in the generation since his Orfeo.17 The recitative in Ulisse is no mere rhapsodic declamation of the text, with dramatic high points underlined by startling shifts of harmony; it is constantly organized into patterns, with sequences and canonic imitation between the solo voice and the bass. Sections of free parlando on a single note alternate with melodic phrases at the cadences. The recitative frequently gives way to short arias, mostly in triple meter and strophic form. There are sever¬ al arias on a ground bass. The parts of the gods and goddesses are filled with elaborate coloraturas. Ensembles, particularly duets, are abundant. Conven¬ tional word painting is evident—long-held notes over a moving bass for words like “costanza,” melismatic runs on “lieto,” long coloratura phrases on “aria,” and the like. Serious, comic, and spectacular scenes follow one anoth¬ er closely. Every possible occasion for emotional effect is exploited. From be¬ ginning to end, one senses the effort to be immediately understood, along with an almost nervous dread of monotony, of that tedio del recitativo, which had been so severely criticized in the early Florentine operas. There is little instrumental music: a few sinfonias that recur in the same fashion as the ritornellos in Orfeo, and one sinfonia da guerra to depict the combat between Ulysses and the suitors at the end of Act II. The high points of the opera are undoubtedly the monologue of Penelope in the first scene of Act I (reminis¬ cent of the famous lament in Arianna) and the opening solo of Ulysses in the seventh scene of this same act. At the beginning of Act III there is a comic lament, a clever parody of this favorite type of scene. Some of the little strophic songs in popular style, such as Minerva’s “Cara, cara e lieta” (Act I, scene viii), are very attractive. On the whole, however, Ulisse is not to be compared with Monteverdi’s next (and last) opera, Poppea, a masterpiece of the composer’s old age.18 The libretto of this work, by Busenello, deals with the love of the Roman emper¬ or Nero for Poppea, the wife of Nero’s general Ottone. Nero banishes Ottone and divorces his own wife, Ottavia, in order to make Poppea his em-

16. Febiarmonici was the name of both an academy and a traveling troupe. See Bianconi and Walk¬ er, “Dalla Finta pazza alia Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici.” 17. In the first chapter of his Opera and Politics, Bokina discusses all three of Monteverdi’s extant op¬ eras in the context of their political stance. He notes, for example, that in Ulisse, a new historical perspective is manifest in the way the principal protagonist is portrayed, namely, as a human being who cannot escape the vicissitudes of the mundane world. 18. For a recent study of this opera, see Fenlon and Miller, Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea.

90

TThe Seventeenth Century

example 6.1 Poppea, Act I, scene ix

Monteverdi

j A jvero: ^2 k wsiia1 Y\J tW ^ p « *

Tu

S

f

rri t

v 7

tu

tu

f

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j W.

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7

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r

sfor-zi al-lo

1 7

1 1

i * 1,sn LLILl_U_L_M_L

m T ^'

sde-gno mi

v

1

u_m

sfor-zial-lo

sde-gno,

7

r

It

it

It

p p p (I p p p-g-M PPM' P a al - lo

sde-gno al - lo

sde-gno al - lo

sde-gno al - Io

.w^-*-w-w-w-w-r-w-w-*

==

w-*

sde- gno

w9-■ --

* :

press.This rather sordid subject is handled by the poet with consistency, good taste, and dramatic insight. Monteverdi altered many details of the libretto in the course of composition, for the sake of more effective musical treatment. The music is not spectacular; there are no display scenes and few ensembles except duets. The composer s greatness lies in his power of interpreting hu¬ man character and passions—a power that ranks him among the foremost musical dramatists of all times. One example is the dialogue between Nero and Seneca in Act I, scene ix, where the grave admonitions of the philoso¬ pher contrast with the petulant outburst of the willful young emperor (ex¬ ample 6.1). The delineation of comic characters is delightful.19 The song of the calletto or page boy (example 6.2) has a naivete comparable to Mozart’s music for

19. The roles of the two nurses may have been patterned after the comic governess, a male role, in La magafulminata.

Italian Opera in Italy

91

6.2 Poppea, Act II, scene v

example

m n

r —?—«14 * Af-1r-r1-1-— ...

vi

-

vo

-17-

lat

-

1

sem-pre aspir

te

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-p

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Cherubino. Not less remarkable is the power of pathetic expression, as in the profound grief of Ottavia’s lament “Disprezzata regina” (Act II, scene v), or the noble resignation of Ottone’s “E pur io torno” (Act I, scene i), the char¬ acteristic motif of which is deliberately recalled in Act I, scene xii and again in Act II, scene xi. Monteverdi has long been credited with the music for Poppea, but it should be noted that this attribution did not arise until many years after the composer’s death. Evidence that a performance of an opera with this title took place in Venice rests solely on the printed Scenario, which listed neither composer nor librettist. Two different printings of the librettos were made in the 1650s, but neither lists a composer. Curiously, Poppea is not even men¬ tioned by Matteo Caberloti Piovan, who wrote about Monteverdi’s final years in Venice.20 Not until 1681, when Cristoforo Ivanovich published an

20. Matteo Caberloti Piovan di San Thoma wrote about Monteverdi’s final years in his Laconismo delle alte qualita di Claudio Monteverde (1644). For a discussion of this source, see Curtis, “La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music to L’Incoronazione (1643)?”

pZ

The Seventeenth Century

opera catalog in connection with his Minerva al tavolino, did Monteverdi’s name appear in print as the composer of this opera. Interestingly, the validity of Ivanovich’s attribution was not challenged until the 1950s.21 Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, on the basis of investigations of the surviving manuscripts of Poppea and research into operas by other Venetian composers, scholars have concluded that Monteverdi did not com¬ pose the entire final scene containing the famous duet “Pur ti miro—Put ti godo.”They also have questioned whether he composed the music for some of the other parts of the opera, such as the prologue, several scenes in Act II, the final sinfonia, and portions of Ottone’s role. Of all the sections ques¬ tioned, the most important is the final duet, for prior to the 1980s, this num¬ ber was considered to be not only the most beautiful of Monteverdi’s duets but also a model that was replicated by other composers in the latter part of the seventeenth century.22 If not Monteverdi, then to whom might this duet be attributed? Filiberto Laurenzi, Cavalli, Sacrati, and Ferrari are other com¬ posers whose names have been suggested. Discovering who was responsible for the final duet (written in da capo form over a passacaglia bass), however, is far less important than acknowledging that the opera concludes with an es¬ pecially poignant number in which the frankly sensuous passion of Nero and Poppea is matched by voluptuous, incandescent music: what is dramatically important about this duet “is that this piece at this very moment of this drama is nothing short of a true coup de theatre.”23 No operatic score of the seventeenth century is more worthy of study and revival than Poppea, as recent modern performances have amply shown. In it, Monteverdi applied the full resources of a mature technique to a dramatical¬ ly valid subject, creating in a great variety of musical forms and effects a uni¬ fied, moving whole. The perfect balance between drama and music here

21. Cavalli, in his own hand, had written “Monteverdi” on the title page of a score of Poppea that he owned. It was from this source that Ivanovich derived the attribution that appears in his opera cat¬ alog. As early as the 1950s, questions began to be raised concerning whether or not Monteverdi was the sole composer of Poppea in the form in which the opera has been preserved, namely two man¬ uscript copies that are not linked with the initial performance and may date from the 1650s. Begin¬ ning with Osthoff’s articles, “Die venezianische und neapolitanische Fassung von Monteverdis Incoronazione di Poppea" and “Neue Beobachtungen zu Quellen und Geschichte von Monteverdis Incorotiazione di Poppea,” the debate over the provenance and composition of Poppea has continued to the present day. For example, Bianconi and Walker have concluded that two sections of the pro¬ logue to Sacrati’s La finta pazza reappear in Monteverdi’s Poppea. Consider also the findings of Chiarelli, “L’incoronazione de Poppea o II Nerone, problemi di filologia testuale”; Curtis, “La Poppea Impasticciata”; Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, 22, 256m 18; and Fabbri, Monteverdi (1994), 260. 22. For example, the beauty and significance of this duet was acclaimed in studies by Schrade, Mon¬ teverdi, Creator of Modern Music, and Stevens, Monteverdi: Sacred, Secular, and Occasional Music, among others. 23. Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, 195-96.

achieved was soon to be upset by a trend toward musical elaboration at the expense of dramatic truth and consistency.Yet the influence of the work was far-reaching. Just as Orfeo marked the climax of the old-style pastorale, so Poppea marked a definitive step (foreshadowed ten years earlier in Landi’s Sant’Alessio) in the establishment of modern opera, centering about the per¬ sonalities and emotions of human characters instead of the artificial figures of an ideal world.

Cava Hi The leading figure in the first period of opera at Venice was Mon¬ teverdi’s pupil Pier Francesco Caletti-Bruni (1602-76), who (following a common practice of the time) took the name of his patron, Cavalli.24 About thirty of his operas appeared in the Venetian theaters between 1639 and 1669.23 Cavafli’s fame during his lifetime is attested to by the fact that many of his works were performed in other cities, including Paris. His best-known opera was Giasone (1649), based on the legend of Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece. In the works of Cavalli and later Venetian composers, a standard type of overture developed, consisting of a solemn, pompous, chordal opening move¬ ment followed by one or more movements in contrasting tempo, which oc¬ casionally introduced themes that would reappear in the prologue or else¬ where in the opera.26 In addition to the overtures and a few descriptive sinfonias, the orchestra accompanied some of the songs or played short ritornellos between sections of them. Solo arias were, of course, a regular feature of opera by this time, and they grew constantly more numerous in proportion to the whole as the century went on. At first, arias were given mainly to secondary personages; they were usually quite short, easily singable, mostly in triple meter with rhythmic pat¬ terns characteristic of popular dances or songs. Some were elegiac, minor in tone, with gently curving melodic lines, as in the beautiful “Delizie contente” from the first act of Cavalli’s Giasone. Others were livelier, sometimes introducing trumpet-like motifs for an expression of rejoicing (example 6.3). Many arias of these and other types were strophic in form, with orchestral ritornellos. Another favorite form was the lament on a ground bass, in which the

24. On Cavalli, see in particular Goldschmidt, “Cavalli als dramatischer Komponist”; Glover, Francesco Cavalli; and Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice. 25. For a list of Cavalli s operas, see appendix I of Glover, Francesco Cavalli. See also Jeffrey, “The Au¬ tograph Manuscripts.” 26. Cf. Heuss, Die Instrumental-Stiicke . . . die venetianischen Opern-Sinjonien; Wolff, Die venezianische Oper, appendix no. 67;Worsthorne, Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera, io6ff.

example 6.3 Aria from Egisto (1643), Act III, scene vii

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(Allegro)

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JJJ)

p6

The Seventeenth Century

example 6.4 Aria from Egisto, Act II, scene vi

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contrast of passionate expression with one of the most rigid of musical forms gave rise to a typically Baroque species of tension.27 Each of Cavalli’s twenty-seven surviving operas has at least one lament located near the finale where it can create the greatest possible contrast with the lieto fine. Of par¬ ticular interest is Climene’s lament in Cavalli’s Egisto (1643), its ground bass built on a descending chromatic tetrachord, treated in a strict ostinato man¬ ner with cadential extensions (example 6.4).The lament became an increas¬ ingly prevalent feature of Cavalli’s operas—Statira (1656), for example, has four—that found favor with many other composers of his generation. Most of Cavalli’s laments are in strophic form, in triple meter, employ a ground bass based on either a strict ostinato or a more flexible pattern, and are ac¬ companied by strings. Certain traits of style peculiar to Cavalli may be especially mentioned. His

27. See, in particular, Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, which has an entire chapter devoted to the lament, and Glover, Francesco Cavalli, 77, 87—88.

Ital ian Opera in Italy

example

97

6.5 Qiasone, Act I, scene xiv

Cavalli

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comic scenes are marked by robustness, even crudity. Quite unlike the badi¬ nage of Monteverdi’s page boy and maid-in-waiting is the scene in Giasone between Orestes and Demo, who is a stutterer—a typical farce figure, one of many such characters that were always welcome on the Venetian stage. Cavalli’s characteristic way of establishing a mood is to reiterate one striking figure, as in the conjuration scene in Giasone, where the motif comprising four quarter notes is repeated twenty-one times with hardly a break, using (except at cadences) only the chords of E minor and C major (example 6.5). This scene remained famous for a long time; it was parodied at Venice as late as 1677 in Legrenzi’s Totila.2S

28. A parody of the incantation scene from Giasone can also be found among the ensembles to II podesta by Melani (cited in chapter five).

The Seventeenth Century

98

Despite the presence of well-marked arias and distinct sections of recita¬ tive, especially evident in Giasone, the formal separation of the styles is by no means complete in the operas of Cavalli. Most of the scenes are a mixture, or rather a free alternation of the two, as in Monteverdi, except that the arias in Cavalli form a somewhat larger proportion of the whole than is the case with the older composer.The method is not fixed; the form arises in each case out of the dramatic requirements. A typical example is the scene from Ormindo (1644), which consists of (1) a dialogue in recitative, C minor, eighteen mea¬ sures; (2) an eight-measure solo recitative, ending in G minor; (3) a lament on a ground bass, in E-flat major, fifty-six measures; and (4) a closing solo recita¬ tive in G minor, thirteen measures.29 The constant use of scene-complexes of this sort (that is, scenes made up of different musical elements freely assem¬ bled) shows that opera in Cavalli’s time had not yet altogether sacrificed dra¬ matic values to the demands of abstract, symmetrical musical form. Cavalli, while not critical of details, showed sound judgment in choosing dramatical¬ ly effective librettos by Busenello, Faustini, and Cicognini. He was not an artist of Monteverdi’s caliber, but his music has virility and a kind of elemen¬ tal directness in dramatic expression comparable to Musorgsky—qualities that justify his position in history as the first great popular composer of opera.

Cesti an JOtA er Italian

Gomposers

The most celebrated composer of opera after Cavalli was Pietro Antonio Cesti (1623—69), whose dozen or so extant operas were written principally for Venice, Innsbruck, and Vienna between 1649 and 1669.30 His music is more facile than Cavalli s, less vigorous, more feminine; his melodies are clearly defined and graceful; his harmony is more conventional than Cav¬ alli’s—that is, it sounds less bold and experimental, more like the style of the eighteenth century; and his rhythmic patterns are more regular, sometimes almost stereotyped. In his operas, the already growing fissure between recita¬ tive and aria is noticeably widened; the center of musical interest moves away from the former, and the chief attention of composer and audience shifts to¬ ward the lyrical songs. The latter achieve larger proportions and clearer out¬ lines, blossoming forth in an unprecedented variety of forms and types, offer¬ ing frequent opportunities for vocal display. Thus the outline of the future “singer’s opera” begins to come into focus in the works of Cesti. This step, involving as it did a complete reorientation of operatic ideals,

29. Reprinted in SB, no. 200; a similar scene is in HAM, no. 206. 30. The operas he composed for Innsbruck and Vienna will be discussed in chapter seven. See C. Schmidt, “The Operas of Antonio Cesti.”

Italian Opera in Italy

99

was of capital importance for the evolution of opera. The doctrines of the camerata had emphasized poetic values at the expense of music. Monteverdi, by means of organizing the recitative, deepening its content, and introducing arioso or aria forms at critical points in the action, had made the music an equal partner with the text. But by the middle of the century, composers were becoming more familiar with the new musical idiom; their interest in problems of form began to outweigh their concern for dramatic propriety. It must be said in their defense that the type of libretto the poets supplied justi¬ fied this attitude in some measure. As audiences demanded more and more music, they cared less and less about the poetry. The trend was hastened, moreover, by another influence, that of the cantata, a genre in which both Cesti and his teacher, Carissimi, excelled. The cantata, although semi-dramat¬ ic in form and employing recitatives and arias like the opera, was not theater music.31 Designed for performance before a small audience, the cantata was a vehicle for fine singing rather than for dramatic expression. Its virtues were those appropriate to the chamber: symmetrical forms, correctly balanced phrases, pleasing melodies, unadventurous harmonies; logic, clarity, elegance, and moderation. It was a musical style founded on these ideals, a style that Cesti introduced into the opera and for which the widespread popularity of the cantata had already prepared composers and audiences. With him may be said to begin the reign of the composer over the dramatist, and of the virtu¬ oso singer over both, which was to characterize Italian opera for the next hundred years. A number of the Italian opera composers of the seventeenth century were ordained priests or monks, including Cesti. He was born in Arezzo, took vows as a Franciscan monk, and briefly held positions as organist and maestro di cappella at cathedrals in Volterra and Florence. As early as 1647 he began to sing leading roles in operas, and within a few years he had also gained fame as a composer of theatrical entertainments.32 When serious conflicts of interest developed between his lifestyle as a life-professed member of a religious or¬ der and that as an actor-singer and composer, he petitioned to be released from his vows. His request was granted in 1659. There has been considerable debate concerning the composer responsible for the Orontea opera performed at Venice in 1649 at theTeatro di SS. Apostoli. Some continue to believe it was composed by Cesti; others attribute the opera to Francesco Lucio.33 That Cesti did compose at least one version of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Orontea, namely that which was performed dur-

31. “Eine Cantata sieht aus, wie ein Stiick aus einer Opera.” [Hunold], Die allerneuesteArt (1707), 285. 32. For example, it is entirely possible that he sang in the initial production of Cavalli’s Giasone. 3 3. The misattribution of the 1649 Orontea to Cesti was argued convincingly by Bianconi and Walk¬ er in “Dalla Finta pazza alia Veremonda: Storie di Febiarmonici.”

100

The

eventeentk Century

ing the 1656 Carnival in Innsbruck, has not been called into question, and it was this version that was later revived in Venice in 1666, with four arias added from his opera Argia (Innsbruck, 1655).34 Among Cesti’s extant operas, three were written for Venice: Alessandro vincitore di se stesso (1651) and II Cesare amante (c. 1652) were composed before Cesti accepted a position at the court in Innsbruck (1652-57); II Tito (1666) was produced the same year he moved toVienna.35 Among other leading composers in the second half of the century who worked principally at Venice were Antonio Sartorio (1630-80), Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-90), Pietro Andrea Ziani (c. 1616-84), Giovanni Domenico Freschi (c. 1630-1710), and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo (1653-1723). Sartorio was not a resident ofVemce until 1676, the year when he became assistant maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s. Nevertheless, he composed a number of op¬ eras between 1661 and 1676 for one of that city’s principal theaters, the Teatro Vendramino a San Salvatore, where he was the “house composer.” Prior to 1676 Sartorio was maestro di cappella at the court in Hanover, and one of the reasons he could spend so much time in Venice was that his patron, the Duke of Braunschweig, also delighted in regularly attending theatrical entertain¬ ments there. Chief among Sartorio’s offerings were Adelaide (1672), with its well-wrought arias incorporating the trumpet(s) as an obbligato instrument; Oifeo (1672), the first time an opera on this mythological hero was introduced in a Venetian theater; and Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1676). Similar to many oth¬ er librettos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that drew upon the life of Julius Caesar, that by Francesco Bussani for Sartorio’s Giulio Cesare centered on episodes having to do with Caesar’s journey to Egypt and his amorous encounter with Cleopatra.36 Here comic and serious characters in¬ teract freely and there is much use of travesty and disguise. The characters portrayed on stage may even have been designed to conjure up images of contemporary historical figures, thereby adding a veiled political agenda to the production.37 Legrenzi excelled in the genre of the “heroic-comic” opera, which inter¬ mingled serious and comic scenes; he was also noted for the unusual care he gave to the orchestra, both in independent instrumental numbers and in ac¬ companiments. His principal operas were Totila (1677) and Giustino (1683).At

34. Cesti’s La Dori (Innsbruck, 1657) also had a revival in Venice in 1667. 35. C. B. Schmidt,“An Episode in the History of Venetian Opera: The Tito Commission (1665-66).” JAMS 31 (1978), 442-66. 36. Bussani’s libretto was later adapted by Nicola Haym for Handel, whose Giulio Cesare was per¬ formed in London in 1724. 37. For an interesting discussion of how Venetian operas may have been put to political use, see Bianconi and Walker, “Production, Consumption, and Political Function in Seventeenth-Century Opera.”

Italt an Opera in Italy

lol

the hands of these later composers the trend was toward comedy or parody, with lightening of the musical texture, lessening musical importance of the recitative, increasing dominance of the aria, and larger use of the orchestra for accompaniments. As arias came more and more frequently to be assigned to principal characters in the drama, the three-part da capo form became more common, and many arias were written in a difficult virtuoso style.38 The songs of the earliest operas usually had been accompanied only by continuo instruments improvising in a more or less elaborate texture over a figured bass. Orchestral ritornellos, first used on an extensive scale by Mon¬ teverdi in Orfeo, were eventually brought into close relation with the vocal part by the simple device of using the same thematic material in both.39 A further step was taken when the orchestral instruments, instead of being con¬ fined to the pauses between sections or stanzas of the aria, played with the voice, either as a continuous supporting accompaniment or constantly alter¬ nating with the vocal phrases in echoes or imitations.40 During the latter part of the seventeenth century the simple continuo accompaniment of arias de¬ clined in favor, with the number varying according to circumstances. For ex¬ ample, in Cavalli’s Giasone (1649), only nine out of twenty-seven arias were accompanied by the orchestra. A later generation of Venetian composers, es¬ pecially Pollarolo, introduced the orchestra more frequently, while Handel in his Agrippina (Venice, 1709) provided thirty-one of the forty arias with or¬ chestral accompaniment. By the next decade many composers, such as Alessandro Scarlatti in Telemaco (Rome, 1718), dispensed with the continuoaccompanied arias altogether.41 After 1650, when many other Italian cities opened public opera theaters, the style developed by Cavalli, Cesti, and their followers at Venice came to be experienced as a national, and even an international, possession.42 Operas by the Venetian composers were given performances in other cities—Freschi’s, for example, at Bologna; Cavalli’s Giasone in at least fourteen other Italian cities within eighteen years; Cesti’s Argia (Innsbruck, 1655) at Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, Siena, Genoa, Reggio Emilia, and Udine. When Cesti’s Argia was performed at Venice in 1670, it was provided with

38. One can observe the steady increase in the number and length of arias and the corresponding decrease in the recitatives by studying the various revisions of Cavalli’s Giasone that were undertak¬ en during the revivals this opera had until the end of the seventeenth century. 39. Examples can be found in Landi’s Sant’Alessio (see Goldschmidt, Studien, 1:211); Rossis Oifeo (see Goldschmidt, Studien, 1:301); Monteverdi’s Ulisse (finale of Act III) and Poppea (see Wellesz, “Cavalli und der Stil,” 32). 40. An example of continuous supporting accompaniment is found in Oronte’s aria “Renditimi il mio bene,” in Act I of Cesti’s La Dori. See Eitner, ed., Publikationen, 12:129. 41. Mattheson, in his Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele, 162, written in 1744, laments the passing of the continuo arias, which he says had long since gone out of fashion. 42. For a list of the local histories that discuss these theaters, see Bustico, Bibliografia delle storie.

102

The Seventeenth Century

an unusual prologue. The scene is the interior of a library; the five characters are seen browsing through the collection. Each, in turn, selects a volume of music from the shelves and sings an aria from it. Among the arias sung are two by Antonio Draghi (c. 1634—1700), taken from his opera U ratto delle Sabine, presumably written for a Venetian production in 1670 but not staged until 1674 in Vienna. In addition to the composers already named, others in this period had ei¬ ther limited connection or none at all with Venice. Carlo Pallavicino (c. 1640-88) began at Venice, where he was “house composer.” Twenty of his operas were staged in that city, including his Vespasiano (1678), which inaugu¬ rated the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. Later he worked principally at Dresden.43 At the Teatro San Bartolomeo, the first public opera house in Naples, the repertoire included a number of Venetian works along with those written by two Neapolitan composers of importance, Francesco Cirillo (1623-c. 1667) and Francesco Provenzale (c. 1626-1704). Cirillo, whose Orontea regina d’Egitto (1654) and II ratto d’Elena (1655) were among the first operas performed at the new theater,44 was actively involved with Venetian opera as a singer and member of the Febiarmonici and also as a director, arranger, and producer of the Venetian repertoire.45 In contrast, Provenzale seems to have had little con¬ nection with Venice. Although only two of his operas are extant, the music from them shows a fine quality of expressiveness and a subtle use of chromat¬ ic harmony comparable to the best Italian style of the period (example 6.6).46 Another notable late seventeenth-century composer was Alessandro Stradella (1639-82), whose roving and adventurous life, spent

mainly

in Rome

and Genoa, has furnished the subject of operas by Flotow (1844) and others. His stage works, as well as some 250 cantatas, show a facility and sensuous grace of melodic invention that justify his position in history as an important predecessor of Scarlatti and an influential link to Italian opera of the eigh¬ teenth century.

Stradellas best-known stage works are Ea forza dell’amorpa-

terno (Genoa, 1678) and II Trespolo tutore, his only comic opera. II Trespolo tutore was first performed in Genoa in 1679, then revised and expanded for what is believed to have been a production in Modena in 1686. A manuscript related to this later version survives, providing the sole source from which to derive

43. For further discussion of Pallavicino, see chapter seven. 44. For a study of the role of the “Warrior Amazon” in Venetian opera, see Freeman, “Warrior Queens in Venetian Baroque Opera,” which includes a list of “Warrior Queen” productions in Venetian opera theaters c. 1650-1730. 45. See Bianconi and Walker, “Dalla Finta pazza alia Veremonda.” 46. A facsimile edition of Provenzale s II schiavo is in Brown, ed„ Italian Opera, 1640-i77o, vol. 7. 47- See Giazotto, Vita di Alessandro Stradella; Gianturco, Alessandro Stradella: His Life and Music; addi¬ tional studies by Gianturco, Della Corte, Hess, Jander, and Roncaglia.

lo3

Italian Opera in Italy

example 6.6

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information about the score. One of the more unusual features of this opera is Stradella’s casting of a buffo bass in the leading role. The composer sustains the comedy by introducing many repeated notes into the vocal line. This is evident not only in the recitatives, which are declaimed in a “patter’ style, but also in some of the arias (see example 6.7). Sinfonias and ritornellos that con¬ clude the continuo-accompanied arias are scored for the full instrumental ensemble, which in this case is hmited to two violins and basso continuo; this same instrumental ensemble also accompanies eight arias.

example

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Italian Opera in Italy

loS

Stradella’s sole connection with Venice appears to have been limited to the new prologues and intermezzos he composed for revivals ofVenetian operas staged in cities other than Venice. Among these were Cavalli’s Giasone, Freschi’s Helena, J. Melani’s II Girello, and Cesti’s La Dori.48 although Venice by no means

had a monopoly on opera in the second

half of the seventeenth century, it was preeminent among Italian cities and al¬ ways had a certain glamour for foreign visitors interested in this form of en¬ tertainment. Some of their observations are worth noting, such as those of John Evelyn, who recorded his experiences at aVenetian theater in 1645: This night, having . . . taken our places, we went to the Opera, where comedies and other plays are represented in recitative music, by the most excellent musicians, vocal and instrumental, with variety of scenes painted and contrived with no less art of perspective, and machines for flying in the air, and other wonderful motions; taken together, it is one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent. The his¬ tory was, Hercules in Lydia; the scenes changed thirteen times.49 In 1680 the French traveler Limojon de St. Didier reported as follows: At Venice they Act in several Opera’s at a time:The Theaters are Large and Stately, the Decorations Noble, and the Alterations of them good: But they are very badly Illuminated: The Machines are sometimes passable and as often ridiculous. . . . These Opera’s are long, yet they would divert the Four Hours which they last, if they were composed by better Poets, that were a little more conversant with the Rules of the Theater. . . . The Ballets or Dancings between the Acts are generally so pittiful, that they would be much better omitted; for one would imagine these Dancers wore Lead in their Shoes, yet the Assembly bestow their Applauses on them, which is meerly for want of having seen better. The Charms of their Voices do make amends for all imperfections: These Men without Beards [that is, the castrati] have delicate Voices (des voix argentines) besides which they are admirably suitable to the greatness of the Theater. They commonly have the best Women Singers of all Italy. . Their Airs are languishing and touching; the whole composition is mingl’d with agreeable songs (chansonettes) that raise the Attention, the Symphony [orchestra] is mean[,j inspiring rather Melancholy than Gaiety:

48. Jander,“The Prologues and Intermezzos ofAIessandro Stradella.” 49. Evelyn, Diary, 1:202. The opera referred to was presumably Ercole in Lidia (Venice, 1645), with music by Giovanni Rovetta (c. 1596-1668).

106

The Seventeenth Century

It is compos’d of Lutes, Theorbos and Harpsichords, yet they keep time to the Voices with the greatest exactness imaginable. They that compose the Musick of the Opera, endeavor to conclude the Scenes of the Principal Actors with Airs that Charm and Elevate, that so they may acquire the Applause of the Audience, which succeeds so well to their intentions, that one hears nothing but a Thousand Benissimo’s togeth¬ er; yet nothing is so remarkable as the pleasant Benedictions and the Ridiculous Wishes of the Gondoliers in the Pit to the Women-Singers . . . for those impudent Fellows (canailles) say whatever they please, as being as¬ sured to make the Assembly rather Laugh than Angry.50

Ten years later, Maximilien Misson, obviously no enthusiastic devotee, had this to say about the Venetian opera:

The Habits are poor, there are no Dances, and commonly no fine Ma¬ chines, nor any fine Illuminations; only some Candles here and there, which deserve not to be mentioned . . . they have most excellent Ayres . . . but I cannot forbear telling you, that I find a certain Confusion and Unpleasantness in several Parts of their Singing in those Operas: They dwell many times longer on one Quavering, than in singing Four whole Lines; and oftentimes they run so fast, that ‘tis hard to tell whether they sing or Speak, or whether they do neither of the Two and both together. . . . The Symphony is much smaller than at Paris; but perhaps, it is never the worse for that. There is also one Thing which charms them, which I believe would not please you; I mean those unhappy Men who basely suf¬ fer themselves to be maimed, that they may have the finer Voices. The sil¬ ly Figure! which, in my Opinion, such a mutilated Fellow makes, who sometimes acts the Bully, and sometimes the Passionate Lover, with his Ef¬ feminate Voice, and wither’d Chin[,] is such a thing to be endured? . There are at present Seven several Opera’s at Venice, which Strangers, as we are, are in a manner oblig d to frequent, knowing not, some times, how to spend an Evening any where else.51

50. [Limojon de St. Didier], The City and Republick of Venice, part 3, pp. 61-63 (a 1699 translation of his 1680 book). 51. Misson, A New Voyage to Italy, 1:269—70.

Ckapter

7

Seventeentk-Gentury Italian Opera in German-Speaking L,ands

THE COURTS IN GERMAN-SPEAKING LANDS

were not slow to im¬

port Italian opera. As early as 1614, performances are recorded at Salzburg; performances at Vienna and Prague soon followed in 1625 and 1627, respec¬ tively. Cesti’s works were performed at Innsbruck beginning in 1655, and there was Italian opera at Regensburg and Munich from 1653. Cesti served as Kapellmeister at the court of Archduke Ferdinand Carl in Innsbruck from 1652 until i657> during which time he composed three of his most successful operas: Argia (1655), Orontea (1656), and ha Dori (1657). Argia was commissioned for festivities related to Queen Christina’s sojourn there on her way from Sweden to Rome. After the opening prologue in which the queen’s virtues are glorified, the opera, ripe with mistaken identities and hu¬ morous episodes, unfolds without any regard for verisimilitude.” The court poet Giovanni Apollini, who provided the libretto for Argia, was also called upon to adapt Cicogmni’s Orontea for a production by Cesti the following year.This version of Orontea proved to be one of the most pop¬ ular of seventeenth-century operas. Contributing to this popularity were the antics of the two principal comic characters: the perpetually drunken servant, Gelano (bass), and the old nurse, Aristea (alto). Gelanos role is of particular interest, for it is fully integrated into the main plot, thereby allowing Gelano to participate in the action of the drama.1 2 3 The stature of Gelano was elevated

1. In 1654 Cesti’s La Cleopatra inaugurated the Komodienhaus, a building erected by the archduke to enhance his theatrical entertainments. La Cleopatra represents a reworking of Cesti’s II Cesare amante to suit the tastes of the Innsbruck court; it was given a new prologue and each act concludes with a ballet. 2. When this opera was revived in Venice, the prologue and choral numbers were omitted. 3. This is one of the earhest known instances in which a comic character is placed on the same lev¬ el as the serious characters in an Italian music drama.

108

The Seventeenth Century

example 7. i La Dori, Act I, scene ix

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even further by giving him several solo scenes (which incidentally have noth¬ ing to do with the main plot) and providing him with some of the opera’s finest arias.4 La Dori has been described as a “masterpiece of mistaken identities.”5 No doubt its complicated plot and comic intrigues contributed to its popularity, with revivals continuing well into the 1680s. Cesti may have sung one of the roles in the 1661 revival of this opera at Florence, for in that same year he sang the title role in the Florentine production of Jacopo Melani’s Ercole in Tebe. The favorite ensemble in seventeenth-century Italian opera was the duet. With Monteverdi and (to a lesser degree) Cavalli, the duet, when not merely a recitative dialogue, showed, by its imitative style, the derivation from the older madrigal. In Cesti, the contrapuntal feature is less favored, often being only suggested in the opening phrase and then giving way to melismatic pas¬ sages in thirds or sixths. The opening measures of“Se perfido re” from La Dori are typical of this graceful, amiable style (example 7.1). The arias are not of large dimensions, but they show a remarkable variety of types and much care in planning the order in which these occur. There are serene, long-breathed, noble Handelian melodies, and playful airs with grace¬ ful and piquant rhythms. One such example is Arsetes “Non scherzi con

4. On Orontea, see Holmes, “Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s and Antonio Cesti’s Orontea (1649).” 5. This phrase appears in Carl Schmidt’s article on Cesti in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera.

Italian Opera in German-Speaking L,ands

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amore” from La Dori, which has a complete da capo form with the ritornel lo repeated between the first and second parts and again at the end of the aria. The traditional strophic air is also represented in Cesti’s operas; the char¬ acteristic form of each strophe in these airs is two-part, frequently with the second part repeated (a—b—b).Arias on a ground bass are also used, and there are a considerable number of complete da capo arias. Yet the forms are not stereotyped; subtleties of detail abound. One feature of Cesti’s melody, found typically in slow-moving airs of an elegiac character, is the melodic interval of the diminished third at cadences—or, harmonically expressed, the Neapol¬ itan sixth followed by the dominant (example 7.2 ) In 1666 Cesti accepted the post of “honorary chaplain and director of the¬ atrical music” at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Upon arrival he found him¬ self in the company of some of the musicians who had produced his operas in Innsbruck, for when the last of the Tyrolese Habsburg archdukes died in 1665, the entire musical establishment relocated to the imperial city. Vienna, by this date, was the chief center where Italian operas, both revivals and com¬ missioned works, were being presented.6 7 Cesti wrote five operas for the Habsburg court. They include Nettuno e Flora festeggiante (1666), with its musical tour deforce for the bass role; Le disgrazie d’Amore (1667); and H pomo d’oro, one of the most famous examples of a Baroque court opera in the grand style.

Francesco Sbarra s libretto for II

pomo d’oro was commissioned by Emperor Leopold I of Austria to celebrate his forthcoming marriage to Margherita, Infanta of Spain. The wedding was

6. See Kochel, Die kaiserliche Hofmusikkapelle in Wien; Weilen, Zur Wiener Theatergeschichte; idem, Geschichte des Wiener Theateruresens; Haas, Die Wiener Oper; Adler, “Die Kaiser . . . als Tonsetzer”; Wellesz, Essays on Opera, nos. 2-5; Seifert, Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhofim ly.Jahrhundert. 7. A less well known but equally magnificent festival opera of the same period was Angelim-Bontempi’s II Paride. See Brigand, Gio. Andrea Angelini-Bontempi.

110

7he

Seventeenth Century

planned for December 1666. Although Cesti began work on the score in the summer of 1666 and presumably completed it by the end of that year, II pomo d’oro was not performed in connection with the wedding festivities. The first known performance of II pomo d’oro occurred in July 1668 to honor Empress Margherita on her birthday. The division of the production into two days was necessitated by the length of the opera.8 According to con¬ temporary documents, Cesti’s opera was presented in a new theater designed specifically for this production, and it was staged with a magnificence appro¬ priate to an imperial court desirous of not being outdone by the royal festi¬ vals of Louis XIV at Versailles.9 The five acts included sixty-six scenes, in the course of which more than twenty different stage sets were required, some of them involving exceedingly elaborate machines.10 There were several ballets in each act and a grand triple ballet at the end. Ballets, a regular feature of Italian opera, were of course staged with especial magnificence in court spec¬ tacles. Often the music for them was written by a different composer.* 11 The story of II pomo d’oro was based on the myth of Paris and the golden apple; in the licenza (epilogue), the god Jupiter presents this prize of beauty to the new empress, as being more worthy of it than the goddesses whose con¬ tention for it had brought about the Trojan War. In addition to the chorus there were forty-eight roles, though not necessarily this number of singers, since doubhng was customary. The gods of Olympus, as well as a host of he¬ roes and other legendary personages, were represented in the cast. All the parts were sung by men, with the quaint consequence that some of the male characters in the opera have higher voices than the female ones—a situation not uncommon in Italian seventeenth-century opera even when there were women singers, for the composers favored the woman’s alto voice and com¬ monly reserved the soprano roles for castrati. The orchestra consisted of six violins, twelve viols (alto, tenor, and bass), two flutes (for pastoral scenes), trumpets in two parts (used chiefly in sinfonias and choruses), a gravicembalo (harpsichord), which was occasionally replaced by a graviorgano (a theater or¬ gan—probably a positiv or one-manual organ with wooden pipes), and other continuo instruments (lutes, theorbo). There was also a special group of in¬ struments for infernal scenes, consisting of two cornetts, three trombones, a bassoon, and a regale. The prologue and each act are opened by stately instrumental “sonatas,”

8. Although no complete score of this opera is available, it is estimated that the production lasted eight hours. In addition to the extant prologue and Acts I, II, and IV, an important manuscript col¬ lection has come to light that contains some of the musical material from Acts III and V. For a dis¬ cussion of this manuscript, see C. B. Schmidt, “Antonio Cesti s II pomo d’orol’ 9. See Wellesz, Essays on Opera, 54-81; Hadamowsky, Barocktheater am Wiener Kaiserhof. 10. For a complete set of these engravings, see DTOe III2 and IV2. 11. For some of the ballets in the Vienna court operas, see DTOe XXVIII2.

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lar scenes.15 Comic episodes are less conspicuous than in most contemporary operas, and each of the three acts ends with a ballet. Despite its melodic in¬ ventiveness and surety of style, the music tends to give an overall impression of monotony. With the exception of two duets, everything is for solo voice. The sixty-six arias are for the most part very short and preponderantly in da capo form; the orchestral ritornello, played either at the beginning or end, is based on a motif from the aria itself. Certain mannerisms obtrude: phrases are constantly repeated in echo style, whether or not the text justifies such a pro¬ cedure (example 7.4) and the device of sequence is ever present. There are numerous passages of brilliant coloratura, especially in the larger arias accom¬ panied by the full orchestra. Some of the smaller arias are in simple, popular style, including examples of the barcarole and siciliano types. In them, the formal balance is always clear; the middle sections of the da capo arias are shorter than the first part and usually offer contrast of key, material, phrase structure, and general design (example 7-5 )There are three accompanied recitatives and two ostinato bass arias. One of the latter (Act I, scene i), in genuine passacaglia style, is nevertheless in a-b-a form, the third and last variation being a literal repetition of the first— a striking instance of the imposition of the da capo idea on the older form. One feature of the instrumental music in Pallavicino’s operas is the fre¬ quent repetition of phrases. Sometimes this is merely the echo effect com¬ mon in the arias, but the repetition may also involve a contrast of instrumen¬ tation. The second movement of the overture, for example, consists only of five two-measure phrases, each of which is first played by the continuo in¬ struments alone and then immediately repeated by the full orchestra. Similar places are found in many of the ritornellos: usually (as in the overture) a mere

15. See Hermann Abert’s introduction to the edition of this work in DdT, vol. 50.

example

7.5 Gerusalemme liberata, Act II, scene iii

Italian Opera in German -Speaking Lands

115

antiphony of short phrases between different instrumental groups, but occa¬ sionally a more freely developed concerto-like structure in miniature.16 Es¬ sentially, this procedure amounts to no more than taking over into the instru¬ mental field a practice already established in the orchestrally accompanied arias, with their interplay of solo voice and orchestra. Yet it is worth noting that the appearance of the concerto principle in the instrumental music of opera at this time coincides with the earliest independent compositions for string orchestra in concerto style.The trumpet concerto, a favorite of a slight¬ ly earlier period, is represented in the overture to Pallavicino’s Diocletiano (Venice, 1675) and in a sinfonia from the first act of Sartorio’s Adelaide (Venice, 1672).17 One of the leading Italian composers in the German-speaking lands was Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), whose eighteen operas were written between 1681 and 1709. Steffani was at Munich from 1667 until 1672 and again from 1674 to 1688, with an occasional sojourn in such cities as Rome and Paris. Af¬ ter this he went to Hanover to serve Duke Ernst August as a musician and as a diplomat. In this fifteen-year period (1688-1703), he composed six operas that were performed in Hanover’s newest theater, built in 1688 for the bene¬ fit of a resident Italian opera company.18 During the same period he became increasingly involved with affairs of state, to the extent that his diplomatic missions ultimately brought about a change in the direction of his career. One manifestation of this change was his move to Diisseldorf, where his du¬ ties were primarily of a diplomatic and administrative nature. Although his musical activities continued, as evidenced by the production of Arminio (1707), which is a pasticcio of his own works, and II Tassilone (1709), the major¬ ity of his compositions were written before 1703, including the excellent chamber duets and the sacred works. He was the principal intermediary be¬ tween the Italian opera of the late seventeenth century and the German op¬ eras of Keiser and Handel, so that, even apart from his own achievements as a composer, his historical position is an important one.19 The librettos of Steffani s operas differ from Pallavicino’s and other con¬ temporary Italian composers’ only in their use of subjects drawn from Ger¬ man history and a diminished emphasis on mythological and spectacular ele-

16. See also the overture to L’amazone corsarn (1688) in Heuss, Die Instrumental-Stiicke, 121. 17. Sartorio also used the trumpet in a solo capacity in several arias in later operas. 18. All six of these operas were presented in German translation at the Hamburg opera house be¬ tween 1695 and 1699. 19. On Steffani, see studies by Baxter and Maries. See also Chrysander, G. F. Hiindel, 1:309-73; Fisch¬ er, Musik in Hannover; Werner, “Agostino Steffanis Operntheater”; Keppler, “Agostino Steffani’s Hannover Operas”; Hammer, Oper in Hannover; Timms, “The Dissemination of Steffani’s Operas”; Croll, “Musik und Politik: Steffani-Opern in Munchen, Hannover und Diisseldorf.”

116

The Seventeenth Century

ments.The musical form shows the usual regular alternation of recitative and aria, relieved only by an occasional accompanied recitative or duet. But the contrapuntal texture of the music marks a profound break with the prevailing tendencies in Italy, which were toward the homophonic style. Steffani s bass¬ es in the continuo arias are independently moving contrapuntal lines. In the orchestrally accompanied arias, the voice is treated as one instrument among several, yet without ever sacrificing its position as “chief among equals” or taking on any nonvocal traits. Concertizing instruments (solo flutes, oboes, violins, bassoon, or trumpet) weave strands of melody about the vocal part, while the full orchestra joins in at the cadences. The characteristic arias are lyrical rather than dramatic, noble and serious in expression, and have longbreathed, leisurely melodies, effortlessly flowing. This type of aria is exempli¬ fied in “Deh stancati” from Steffani’s opera that was originally titled La liberta contenta and composed for Hanover in 1693, then presented in German trans¬ lation at Hamburg in 1697 as Der in seine Freyheit vergniigte Alcibiades (example 7.6). Attention must be called in example 7.6 to the way in which the voice makes a false start, beginning the first phrase of the aria only to abandon it during a short instrumental interlude, after which the phrase is begun again and continues normally. This peculiarity—called by German writers Devise and often rendered in English as the

motto beginning”—first came promi¬

nently into operatic music with Legrenzi: twenty-six of the arias in his Eteocle e Polinice (Venice, 1675) begin in this way. Instances may be found also in Cesti and earlier; it was very commonly used by Pallavicino and P. A. Ziani and by the end of the century had become an almost unconscious manner¬ ism of style, constantly present in the arias of Steffani, Handel, Fux, and oth¬ er composers. In many of Scarlatti’s arias, the first word or phrase of the text will be repeated but with different music—the first statement being like a mere prelude or announcement, whereas the second is the real beginning of the aria. The fundamental simplicity of Steffani s arias does not exclude mehsmatic passages, many of which have no particular justification in the text but seem to well forth as the natural completion of the musical idea (example 7.7). The bravura aria is less characteristic of Steffani, though it was a favorite of Cesti, PA. Ziani, Sartorio, and other Itahan composers.20 Written for texts of stirring or martial character, these airs abounded in virtuoso passage work. Trumpet-like figures in the melody or the addition of a trumpet obbligato rendered the effect even more brilliant (example 7.8). Steffani s arias are nearly all in da capo form. In keeping with the contra-

20. Cf. Biicken, Der heroische Stil.

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119

Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands

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puntal character of his music, there is an unusually high proportion of arias on a ground bass, which sometimes itself determines the form but more of¬ ten is simply incorporated in the da capo pattern. In many instances, the ostinato principle is modified, leaving a bass consisting of a steady movement in quarter or eighth notes (walking bass), or of a characteristic rhythmic motif constantly repeated.21 The accompanied recitatives, with their flexible struc¬ ture and free mingling of declamatory and arioso phrases, recall the old Monteverdi-Cavalli ideal of purely dramatic song. His overtures are obviously modeled on those of Lully, with whose music he had become acquainted on a visit to Paris in 1678-79. In them, one finds trio sections introduced into the fast movement—short interludes for solo instruments, contrasting with the tutti in the manner of the concerto grosso.22 Steffani stands at one of the culminating points of operatic style at the end of the seventeenth century. He was a spontaneous genius on the order of Mozart or Schubert rather than a dramatist like Cavalli or Handel, and his works represent in perfection the goal of musical opera toward which the whole century had been moving. In his music at last is achieved the reconcil¬ iation of the monodic principle with the contrapuntal tradition. Steffani’s op¬ eras, like the (contemporary) trio sonatas of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), exemplify that balanced classical style of the late Baroque that led the way in the next generation to the monumental achievements of Bach and Handel. The aristocratic, dignified, musically serious style of Steffani found successors in the early eighteenth century only in the works of a few exceptional north¬ ern composers—for example, Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716) at Munich

21. Cf. Riemann, “Basso continuo und Basso quasi ostinato.” 22. Steffani is credited with being the first to inteqect these trio sections into the fast movement.

120

The Seventeenth Century

example 7.8 II Tassilone, Act IV, scene viii

Trumpet

Steffani

and Bonn, and more notably in the works of Keiser and Handel. In Italy it was a stranger, there the demand for simplicity and melody, always immanent in the Italian temperament as well as in the nature of opera itself as a large public spectacle, led ineluctably to the galanteries of the eighteenth century.

Ckapter 8 Early G erman

the early history of opera

in Germany is not one of a com¬

paratively unified development, as in France or England, or even of the evo¬ lution of a comparatively consistent musical style, as in Italy. The numerous political subdivisions of Germany in the seventeenth century, the many dif¬ ferent cultural traditions, the conflicting elements in both the dramatic and the musical background, and the extremely strong infusion of foreign styles (chiefly Italian, but some French) to different degrees in different parts of the country—all combine to produce a complicated task for the historian. Abstractly speaking, a purely “German” opera is one written for perfor¬ mance by German artists for German audiences, with an original libretto in the German language and on a German (or, at least, not a typically foreign) subject, composed by a German, and with music in a German (or, at least, not predominantly foreign) style. In actuality, there are few, if any, operas of the early period that correspond to this admittedly narrow definition. What we find are foreign conductors and singers performing before German courts whose tastes are often formed on Italian and French models; librettos in Ital¬ ian or in German translations or paraphrases of Italian or French texts; Italian composers, or German composers aping the Italian manner; and all possible permutations and combinations of these elements. Add to these conditions the fact that many composers were active in different places; that frequently the same opera poem appeared under different names, and different poems under the same name; that composers habitually used music from their own earlier works or inserted in their scores music from other sources; and finally that the scores themselves, a study of which alone could resolve many of the problems, are in the great majority of cases utterly lost or survive only in fragments—and it will be readily seen that a complete history of German opera

1ZZ

The ^Seventeenth Century

in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is, if not quite impossible, at least far beyond the scope of the present work. It has seemed best, therefore, to begin this chapter with a brief survey of the political and social conditions under which German opera was composed and of the dramatic and musical factors that entered into it, to indicate some of the principal developments at important centers, and then to concentrate on the most distinctive of the many local schools, that of Hamburg.1 In the seventeenth century, Germany was not a nation but a loose confed¬ eration of some seventeen hundred more or less independent states. Most of these were petty “knights’ dominions,” but there were also fifty-one free im¬ perial cities (of which the chief were Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, and Strassburg), sixty-three ecclesiastical hold¬ ings, and nearly two hundred secular principalities and counties, a few of which were of considerable size and importance. The semblance of unity arising from an ill-defined allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire was dis¬ rupted by the Thirty Years War (1618-48), a calamity that left the country economically prostrated and bereft of almost all pride in its national heritage. Like a body weakened by illness, German culture was invaded by foreign el¬ ements. The language became filled with French and Spanish words; French became the common tongue of polite society; the little local courts, narrow, paternahstic, and extravagant, aspired to imitate the glories ofVersailles.2 3 Ital¬ ian opera thus made its appearance as a courtly show, particularly in southern Germany, where we have already seen some of its manifestations at Vienna, Dresden, Munich, Hanover, and Diisseldorf. The German equivalent of the term opera was Singspiel, a literal translation of the Italian dramma per musica? Ayrer’s comedies on popular song-tunes at Nuremberg (from 1598) bear the designation singets Spil; the first operas at Hamburg were called Sing-Spiele. The term was applied in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries both to works sung in their entirety and to

1. The conditions of early German opera are reflected in the fact that the majority of studies in this field are in the form of local or regional histories, embodying chronicles and statistics. References to this extensive literature will be found in the three general surveys of the period: Kretzschmar, “Das erste Jahrhundert der deutschen Oper,” in his Geschichte der Oper, 133-57; Moser, Geschichte der deutschen Musik, 2:bk. 2, chap. 3; and Schiedermair, Die deutsche Oper, part 1. See also Bolte, Die Singspiele der englischen Komodianten; Haas, “Die Oper in Deutschland bis 1750”; G. F. Schmidt, “Zur Geschichte, Dramaturgic und Statistik”; Brockpahler, Handbuch zur Geschichte der Barockoper in Deutschland. A bibliography of local and regional histories of German music will be found in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, s.v. “Deutschland” and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Contempo¬ rary biographical profiles of many composers are to be found in Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte (1740). 2. A proverb at the Brunswick court in the latter part of the seventeenth century ran: “Wer nicht franzosisch kann, Der kommt bei Hof nicht an.” Hartmann, Seeks Bucher, 85. 3. Cf. [Hunold:] “Eine Opera oder ein Sing-Spiel ist gewiss das galanteste Stuck der Poesie, so man heut zutage aestimieren pfleget,”in his Die allerneueste Art (1707), 394.

Early G erman Opera

123

those having some spoken dialogue. In the second half of the eighteenth cen¬ tury, its meaning was restricted to works of the latter type. (It may be added that, in the absence of scores, it is not always possible to ascertain in the case of some seventeenth-century German operas whether the recitatives were sung or spoken.) The word opera does not often occur in German scores be¬ fore 1720.4 Many courts tried at first to encourage German talent. For example, the “first German opera,” Dafne, was created and performed inTorgau in 1627 to celebrate the marriage of Princess Luise of Saxony and Landgraf Georg von Hessen-Darmstadt.This work was the old Dafne of Rinuccini, translated and adapted by the leading German poet of the time, Martin Opitz, with music by Heinrich Schiitz (1585-1672). The score has not survived. In Vienna, the early Italian operas occasionally had German songs inserted. Dresden also staged a few works in German before the establishment of the Italian opera company in the 1680s.5 One of these, another Dafne (1671), with music by Giovanni Angelini-Bontempi and Marco Peranda (1625—75), is the earliest German opera for which the full score is extant.6 New theaters that could accommodate opera productions were opened in a number of German cities during the second half of the seventeenth centu¬ ry, including Innsbruck (1654), Dresden (1667), Breslau (1677), and Diisseldorf (1695). In Munich, an opera house fashioned from an abandoned grana¬ ry was inaugurated in 1657 with a production of Johann Caspar Kerll’s (1627-93) Orontea. Three opera houses, all with free admission, were opened in Hanover between 1678 and 1690. At Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel the court opera employed native poets, sub¬ jects, and composers (Erlebach, Krieger, Bronner, Kusser, Keiser), but with the opening of a public theater in 1690, the demand for foreign goods be¬ came so strong that French and Itahan works had to be added to the reper¬ toire. A temporary revival of native opera in the early eighteenth century was led by Georg Caspar Schiirmann (c. 1672-1751), one of the most significant of the German composers, whose dignified, serious musical style has much in common with that of Keiser, Handel, and J. S. Bach. Between 1700 and 1730, he composed about forty operas, including Endimione (1700), the sacred op¬ eras Salomon (1701) and David (1701), and Ludwig der Fromme (1726), consid¬ ered to be Schiirmann’s chief work in this genre.7 Few of his opera scores have been preserved.

4. See G. F. Schmidt, Die fruhdeutsche Oper, 2:45-54. 5. Among them were four other operatic works by Schiitz for which only the librettos survive. For a listing of Baroque opera in Germany, see Brockpahler, Handbuch. 6. Englander, “Zur Frage der Dafne." 7. G. F. Schmidt, Die fruhdeutsche Oper.

1ZF

The Seventeenth Century

At Leipzig, an opera house was founded by Nikolaus Adam Strungk (1640—1700), opening in 1693 with a performance of his Alceste. Here, where operas were played during the Fair season from 1693 to 1720, the texts were mostly translations ofVenetian librettos. Poets and composers, players and singers were largely recruited from the students of the school of St. Thomas’s church, and so successfully that Johann Kuhnau (1660—1722) in 1709 com¬ plained that church music suffered from the competition.8 The general en¬ thusiasm for opera at Leipzig was such that even J. S. Bach did not altogether escape its influence.9 Another center of German opera was Weissenfels; here the leading composer was Johann Philipp Krieger (1649-1725), whose opera songs were in the tradition of the simple German lieder. The subject matter of the Weissenfels operas, however, was not distinctively German; the reper¬ toire shows a strong preponderance of mythological dramas and ballets. A similarly ambiguous picture is presented at many of the lesser courts—Ger¬ man elements struggling against a rising tide of Italian opera, which by the fourth decade of the eighteenth century had won the field everywhere. The most likely German forerunner of opera was the school drama, a play in Latin or German, usually of a moral or religious nature, didactic in aim, performed by the students of a school or seminary. Many of these dramas in the sixteenth century included instrumental dances, solo odes, and choral pieces.10 In the early seventeenth century, the musical portions became more extensive. Although the Thirty Years War put an end to the most flourishing era of the school drama, its influence may be seen in the earliest German opera whose music has been preserved: Seelewig, a “spiritual pastorale” by Georg Philipp Harsdorffer, set to music by Sigmund Theophil Staden (160755), and published at Nuremberg in 1644 in a family periodical.* 11 As with the first Hamburg opera, nearly thirty-five years later, the subject matter of this singular extant example for Nuremberg is religious. The form is allegorical: Seelewig is the Soul; the villain of the piece is Trugewalt, who attempts to en¬ snare Seelewig with the help of other characters representing Art, the Senses, and so on, while Wisdom and Conscience act as Seelwig’s defenders. The fi-

8. Spitta Johann Sebastian Bach, 2:854. 9. The most obviously dramatic work of Bach is Phoebus und Pan (composed for the Leipzig Col¬ legium Musicum in 1731), which one contemporary called a “Gesprachspiel” (Spitta, Bach. 2:740). Several of the so-called secular cantatas actually bear the designation “Drama” or “Drama per Musica,” and others (e.g., the “Coffee Cantata”) are semi-dramatic—not to mention the Passions and or¬ atorios, in which the influence of dramatic forms is clearly evident. 10. See Flemming, Geschichte des Jesuitentheaters; Liliencron, “Die Chorgesange des lateinischendeutschen Schuldramas ; Schiinemann, Geschichte der deutschen Schulmusik, 67ff., 137; Culley, Jesuits and Music. 11. Cf. Keller, Die Oper Seelewig; Harris, Handel and the Pastoral Tradition, chap. 3. The music appears in Harsdorffer’s Frauenzimmer Gesprdchspiele, 4:31-165, 489-622. For more on this periodical, see Narciss, Studien zu den Frauenzimmergesprdchspielen, 93—96.

125

Early G erman Opera

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nal triumph of virtue is celebrated by an invisible chorus of angels. This high¬ ly moral drama is placed in a fashionable pastoral setting: the sylvan scenes are described in poetry filled with moral symbohsm, and Seelewig’s companions are nymphs and shepherds, while Trugewalt is portrayed as a satyr. Each of the three acts is introduced by a sinfonia, and there are a few other short instru¬ mental pieces, together with the composer’s direction that more may be added if necessary in order to avoid pauses during the changing of the scenery. The second and third acts conclude with a choral movement, a fea¬ ture characteristic of the German pastorale. The solo songs, which constitute most of the music, have short melodies, and nearly all are in strophic form. Perhaps the best of these songs is Seelewig’s outburst of thanksgiving in the closing scene (example 8.i). Seelewig was not the only effort of Harsdorffer along operatic lines. If in that work he showed himself a follower of the Italian pastorale, in Die Tugendsterne he sought to turn to moral purposes another favorite genre, the ballet

1Z6

The Seventeenth Century

with machines.12 Still another play, Von derWelt Eitelkeit, consists of four alle¬ gorical scenes, each representing a worldly Vanity, with an epilogue sung by Death.13 No doubt such works are exceptional, in that they were designed primarily for reading rather than performance, but they show what kind of stage spectacles presumably interested the citizens of Nuremberg at this peri¬ od. A later Nuremberg composer, Johann Lohner (1645—1705), is represented for us by some surviving arias but no complete scores. With the increase of Italian opera everywhere in the south, the native school found a home not in one of the courts but in the free imperial north German city of Hamburg. Here for sixty years (1678—1738) flourished with varying fortunes a public opera house, the first in Europe outside Italy, where German composers were able for a time to combine contributions from Ital¬ ian and French sources with their own genius to make an original, truly na¬ tional form.14 The earliest Hamburg operas show the influence of the school drama. The initial work performed in the new opera house presented the story of Adam and Eve, under the title Der erschaffene, gefallene und wieder aufgerichtete Mensch (1678), with music by Schiitz’s pupil Johann Theile (1646—1724).15 Many sim¬ ilar titles appeared in the next few years. Such material was not only tradi¬ tional but also useful in retaining the good will of the Lutheran church au¬ thorities and providing a defense of the opera against frequent attacks on the ground of its worldly and immoral character. Despite sporadic opposition, secular operas soon gained the ascendancy. Composers and poets began to in¬ troduce subjects from the Italian and French stages—chiefly translations or adaptations from Venetian librettists (especially Minato),but also occasionally from Corneille (Andromeda und Perseus, 1679), from Quinault (Alceste, 1680), and from Italian comedies. In addition, a few foreign operas were performed in French (Lully’s Ads et Galatee, 1689, and Colasse s Achille et Polyxene, 1692), or in Italian (Cesti’s La schiava fortunata, 1693,16 and Pallavicino’s Gerusalemme liberata, 1693, among others). Many of Steffani’s works were presented in Ger¬ man translation, and a number of German composers chiefly associated with

12. The title may be translated as “The Stars of Virtue”; the music was by Staden. See Frauenzimmer Gespriichspiele, 5:280-310, and Haar,“Astral Music in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg.” 13. Fmuenzimnmer Gespriichspiele, 3:170-242. A nearly complete reprint, with the music, appears in Schmitz,“Zur musikgeschichtlichen Bedeutung,” 264-75. 14. See Wolff, Die Barockoper in Hamburg (the second volume consists entirely of musical examples); Schulze, Die Quellen der Hamburger Oper (1678-1738); Marx,”Geschichte der Hamburger Barock Oper”; Marx and Schroder, Die Hamburger Gansemarkt-Oper; Zelm, “Die Sanger der Hamburger Gansemarkt-Oper”; Kleefeld, “Das Orchester der Hamburger Oper”; Braun, Vom Remter zum Gdnsemarkt. 15. Zelle, Johann Theile und Nikolaus Adam Strungk. 16. Prior to this production, La schiava fortunata had been adapted from Cesti’s La Semirami (Vienna, 1667) for Modena (1674) and Venice (1674/76), the latter with additional music by M. A. Ziani.

Early G erman Opera

127

other cities or courts were also represented in the Hamburg repertoire, no¬ tably Schiirmann, Strungk, and Krieger. As in Venice, the stage machinery played a conspicuous role. So far as their literary quality is concerned, the Hamburg librettos were on the average neither worse nor better than those of contemporary Italian opera, on which they were modeled. The most active librettists were Chris¬ tian Heinrich Postel, Friedrich Christian Bressand (also active at Brunswick), Lucas von Bostel, and Barthold Feind, who took the lead in cultivating cari¬ cature and parody. No doubt Feind introduced these elements to prevent his librettos from spawning operas that audiences would find “boring and te¬ dious.”17 Among those who composed the music for the Hamburg stage were Johann Wolfgang Franck (1644-c. 1710), Johann Philipp Fortsch (16521732), Johann Georg Conradi (d. 1699), and Johann Sigismund Kusser (16601727).18 Franck’s earliest operas were composed for Ansbach, but between 1679 and 1686 he composed more than twenty operas for Hamburg.19 His music is serious in tone and shows a fine feeling for long-breathed, expressive lines as well as for melodies in a lighter, more popular vein, as representative exam¬ ples (8.2 and 8.3) from Cara Mustapha (1686) and Die drey Tochter des Cecrops (1680; revised, 1686) demonstrate.20 He writes arias in a variety of musical forms, including the da capo. He uses a wide range of keys and—exceptional for this time—his scores seem to show evidence of consciously designed tonal architecture. Franck’s recitative is more melodic, slower in tempo, and altogether of more musical significance than that of contemporary Italian opera; its style rather resembles the recitative of German seventeenth-centu¬ ry church composers, half declamation and half arioso, measured and digni¬ fied in tone, composed with great care for both the rhythm and the expres¬ sive content of the text. Altogether, Francks is a full-textured, stiff-rhythmed

j-y These words appear in Feind’s writings on opera, which are set forth in his Deutsche Gedichte . Gedancken von der Opern (1708), excerpts of which are reprinted (in English) in Biancom, Mu¬ sic in the Seventeenth Century, 311—26. Also included in these same excerpts are Feind s remarks that “half the world” has accepted operas as being neither “edifying” nor “reprehensible”—remarks meant to counter Protestant opposition to operatic productions in Hamburg. 18. Kusser’s name is sometimes spelled Cousser or Cusser. See Scholz,Johann Sigismund Kusser, and Samuel, “John Sigismond Kusser in London and Dublin. 19. See Squire,“J.W. Franck in England”; G. F. Schmidt,“Johann Wolfgang Francks Smgspiel Die drey Tochter des CecropsGunther Schmidt, Die Musik am Hofe der Markgrafen von Brandenburg-Ansbach; Klages, “Johann Wolfgang Franck”; Buelow, “Hamburg Opera during Buxtehudes Lifetime: The Works of Johann Wolfgang Franck.” 20. Of the operas Franck composed for Hamburg, only one survives in a complete state, Die drei Tochter des Cecrops. This score, however, does not represent the Hamburg production, but rather an expanded version related to what is believed to have been a 1686 revival in Ansbach. See Braun, “Die drey Tochter des Cecrops: Zur Datierung und Lokahsierung von Johann Wolfgang Francks Oper.”

example

8.2 Aria from Cara Mustapha

J. W. Franck

129

Early G erman Opera

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Baroque music, unmistakably Italian in inspiration but tinged with the seri¬ ous, heavy formality of Lutheran Germany. Although the number of operas written by German composers for Ham¬ burg’s Gansemarkt theater from the time of its inauguration in 1678 was con¬ siderable, many of these works have since disappeared. This is the case with the twelve operas Fortsch composed from 1684 to 1690, and therefore the importance of his contribution to the Hamburg repertoire cannot be fully ascertained.21 Remarkably, the earliest surviving work composed for a Ham¬ burg production dates from as late as 1691: Die schone undgetreue Ariadne, with a libretto by Postel and music by Conradi.22 In Ariadne one can find a mix¬ ture of styles—Venetian, German, and French—but it is the French style that is the predominant influence in the arias and instrumental music. When

21. See Wiedemann, Leben und Wirken des Johann Philipp Fortsch, 1652-1732. 22. See Buelow, “Die schone und getreue Ariadne (Hamburg, i69i):A Lost Opera byj. G. Conradi Re¬ discovered.”

130

The Seventeenth Century

example 8.3 Die drey Tochter des Cecrops, ActV, scene iv

Conradi was at the court in Ansbach in the 1680s, he came to know that style through performances of Lully’s operas there and subsequently incorporated the French style into the nine operas he composed for Hamburg, of which number only Ariadne survives. Kusser had also acquired a taste for French music from his studies under Lully during a sojourn of eight years in Paris. Kusser s operas, which exhibit a more cosmopolitan style, were performed at Brunswick and Stuttgart as well as at Hamburg, where he worked from 1694 to 1696. His Erindo (1694) is a pastorale on the model of Guarini’s II pastor jido—a choice of libretto attrib¬ utable perhaps to the composer’s French background, since pastorales were uncommon in Italian opera at this period. Kusser’s music, as far as can be judged from the extant materials of Erindo, is distinguished by attractive cantabile melodies, clear formal and tonal schemes, skillful use of concertizing instruments, and numerous little songs in French dance rhythms, such as the

131

Early G erman Opera

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passepied (example 8.4), minuet, and gavotte.23 His importance for the histo¬ ry of German opera is apparently due less to his standing as a composer than to his influence as a conductor and impresario. By making the German pub¬ lic better acquainted with French and Italian music, he was instrumental in preparing the way for the international style of Mattheson, Keiser, and Han¬ del, the leading composers of opera at Hamburg during the early part of the eighteenth century.

23. Notably lacking from the extant items are many of the choral numbers. For a discussion of Erindo, see Harris, Handel and the Pastoral Tradition, 75—80.

Ckapter 9 Opera in France from Lyutiy to Okarpentier

french opera as A continuous institution began only in 1671. This late date is surprising if we reflect that throughout the first part of the seventeenth century (that is, during the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII, and the minority of Louis XIV, who assumed power on the death of Mazarin in 1661), close political and cultural relations existed between Italy and the French court. But opera was not congenial to the Gallic spirit, with its rationalistic bias and its quick awareness of absurdities. Furthermore, the French for many years held that their language was not suited to recitative, which is the foundation of musical drama. They preferred their drama unadulterated and regarded music in the theater as only an auxiliary to danc¬ ing and spectacle. Having their tragedy and their ballet, each the best of its kind in the world, they were of no mind to risk spoihng both by trying to combine them in the form of opera.Yet once launched, the French opera was the only national school in Europe able to maintain itself unbroken through the eighteenth century in the face of Italian competition.1 The explanation for this is to be found partly in political circumstances but chiefly in the extraordinary personality of the founder of the French school, Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87).2 Italian by birth, Lully came to Paris at

1. General works on French opera of this period include nineteenth studies by Blaze, Chouquet, and Campardon; Valias, Un Siecle de musique et de theatre a Lyon; Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King; La Gorce, L'Opera d Paris; Anthony, French Baroque Music (1997 ed.), with an extensive bibliography of works published before 1995. 2. See Lully et l’opera franfais; Rolland, “Notes sur Lully”; Beaussant, Lully ou le musicien du Soleil; Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully; Howard, “The Operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully”; Newman, Jean-Baptiste de Lully and His Tragedies lyriques; Heyer, ed. Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque; La Gorce, ed. Jean-Baptiste Lully. See also Brook, ed., French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-

the age of fourteen. Having been trained as a ballet dancer and violinist, he rapidly developed into a skillful conductor and composer. A combination of musical talent, ruthlessness, commercial shrewdness, and obsequious manners assured him a brilliant career under the patronage of Louis XIV. In establish¬ ing the fundamental pattern of French opera, Lully created a type that incor¬ porated elements from every musical and dramatic form that had already proved itself in France. Those forms were the French classical tragedy as ex¬ emplified by the works of Corneille and Racine, the pastorale, the Italian opera, and the French ballet.* * 3 Lully’s librettist, Philippe Quinault, had begun his career as a playwright.4 In general form and dramatic framework, his operas are similar to French tragedies of the time. The subject matter is, for the most part, derived from mythology or legends of chivalry; three works—Roland (1686), Amadis (1684), and Armide (1686)—are derived from romantic sources.The pastorale genre, which had remained popular in France long after its decline in Italy and which Lully had used with success in some of his early works, came into his operas, especially in the prologues, although in Isis (1677) and Roland there are long pastoral scenes in the body of the opera as well. Italian opera was known in France from a half-dozen works performed by visiting troupes at Paris between 1645 and 1662. The first Italian opera to be presented publicly in France was Francesco Sacrati’s La Jinta pazza (Decem¬ ber 1645). It was followed by several other Italian opera productions, among them Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo and Cavalli’s Egisto, Serse, and Ercole amante.5 The last-named work showed evidence of Cavalli’s efforts to adapt his music to French taste both in the style of the melodies and recitatives, and in the in¬ clusion of many ballet scenes, for which the music was furnished by Lully and other French composers. Italian opera, however, was not a success in France. Undoubtedly audiences were intrigued by the discovery that an entire drama could be set to music, and they enjoyed the ballets, but their real enthusiasm was for the stage machines invented by Giacomo Torelli, the like of which had not been seen on such a scale in France since the sixteenth century.6 The influence of Italian opera was therefore indirect: it stimulated the French to

tunes, which will contain facsimile editions of seven works by Lully, including four operas. Les Festes de VAmour et de Bacchus, Atys, Persee, and Armide; two ballets de corn: Ballet de Flore and Le Triomphe de VAmour; and one comedie- ballet: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. 3. See Schletterer, Vorgeschichte . . . der franzosischen Oper; Grout, “Some Forerunners of the Lully Opera”; Zaslaw,“The First Opera in Paris”; Anthony, French Baroque Music. 4. See Gros, Philippe Quinault. 5. See Prunieres, L’Opera italien en France. For a discussion of these operas by Rossi and Cavalli, see chapters five and six, respectively. 6. See Bjurstrom, Giacomo Torelli. The stage sets that Torelli designed for La Jinta pazza survive as en¬ gravings.

134-

The Seventeenth Century

emulate the Italians by trying to create an opera of their own, and it probably led them to favor a large proportion of machine scenes. The determining factor in the background of French opera, however, was the ballet, which had flourished in France steadily since the famous 1581 pro¬ duction of the Ballet comique de la reine.7 The accession of the young Louis XIV stimulated a revival of the ballet under Benserade and Lully from 1653 to 1668.7 8 It also ushered in a series of comedies-ballets that Lully wrote in col¬ laboration with Moliere (including Georges Dandin in 1668, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac in 1669, Les Amants magnifiques and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in 1670) and Psyche, which he wrote with Moliere, Quinault, and Corneille in 1671. These comic ballets also constituted a French commercial success, for they enjoyed substantial “runs” at the Palais-Royal where they were performed for the general public. During these years, Lully perfected all the elements of his mature style; indeed, some of the later ballets and comedy ballets had such elaborate musical and scenic interludes as to be little short of full operas, lacking only a continuous dramatic action developed musically, that is, in recitative. The official existence of French opera dates from the founding of the Academie Royale de Musique in 1669, under the direction of Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert.They staged two operas, or rather pastorales, with mu¬ sic by Cambert (c. 1628—77): Pomone, the first French opera presented in Paris on a public stage, was performed on March 3, 1671, and it enjoyed an eightmonth run.9 Their second opera, Les Peines et les plasirs de Vamour, was staged in 1672. A few months after this second production, the king revoked the privilege granted to Perrin and Cambert to perform operas, forcing the com¬ poser to seek his hvelihood abroad. Lully, who had hitherto loudly main¬ tained that opera in French was impossible, changed his opinion when his fa¬ vor with the king enabled him to seize control of the academy and establish a monopoly of operatic performances in France.10 From 1673 until his death, he produced an opera nearly every year. These works, all perfectly consistent in form and style, established a type of French national opera destined to en-

7- See Prumeres, Le Bullet de cow, Menestrier, Des Bullets anciens et modernes. See also references cited in chapter three, n. 2. 8. On Benserade, see Silin, Benserade and His Ballets de Corn. See also Harris-Warrick, “Magnificence in Motion: Stage Musicians in Lully’s Ballets and Operas.” 9. Ariane, ou le manage de Bacchus (1669) was the first opera Cambert composed to a French text. It was commissioned to celebrate the peace between Spain and France that had been secured by the marriage of Louis XIV to the Infanta, Maria Theresa, but the scheduled performance did not take place. Pomone was substituted for Ariane. For more on Ariane, see chapter ten. 10. According to Prunieres, Pougin in Les Vrais Createurs de l’opera franfais makes Lully seem more of a scoundrel than he really was in this matter. Nevertheless, the monopoly Lully held over theatrical productions throughout the whole of France is not to be minimized.

Opera in fiance

135

dure for a hundred years, essentially unchanged by Rameau and hardly de¬ throned even by Gluck. The nature of opera as conceived by Lully is expressed in his designation of the form as a tragedie en musique—that is, a tragedy first and foremost, which is then set to music. Interest in the poem of an opera, and insistence that it be of respectable dramatic quality, were among the basic differences between the French and Italian viewpoints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and indeed (though perhaps to a lesser degree) ever since. Contem¬ porary French criticism was directed fully as much to Quinault’s texts as to Lully’s music. The operas, divided into five acts, always had a prologue devot¬ ed to the glorification of Louis XIV, with allusions to important recent events of his reign. The action, unrolling with majestic indifference to realism, pre¬ sented a series of personages discoursing lengthily on V amour or lagloire in the intervals of all kinds of improbable adventures. There were no comic figures, except in Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and Alceste (1674); everything was state¬ ly, formal, and detached from ordinary life—the kingly opera par excellence, designed not for a general public as in Venice, not even for an aristocracy as in Rome and Florence, but for a single individual who was conceived to em¬ body the perfection of national artistic taste and whose approbation alone was sufficient to guarantee success: what Louis approved, few dared to con¬ demn. The music was in keeping with this ideal. Its fundamental character may be described by the word conventional: aspiring not to be new or different, but to create the accepted effects supremely well. There were no startling inter¬ vals, chords, or modulations; everything was kept within moderate bounds, avoiding violence or passion. At its best, therefore, early French opera was im¬ pressive, noble, rich, and dignified; at its worst, barren, stereotyped, pale, and thin. Considered solely as music, it is likely to be less appealing to modern ears than contemporary Italian scores; but considered as opera, and in its proper setting, the French school stands comparison with the Italian very well. One of Lully’s achievements was the creation of musical recitative suited to the French language. FIis model for the recitative is said to have been the declamation employed in tragedies at the Comedie Fran^aise.

Almost strict¬

ly syllabic, it often falls into a monotony of rhythmic and melodic patterns; yet where the feehng of the text permits, the recitative may display extraordi¬ nary variety and naturalness, necessitating for its notation continual changes of time signature. The relatively complex notation of French recitative has sometimes led to an exaggerated view of the contrast between it and the Ital¬ ian recitative. To a considerable degree, this is a matter of notation rather than

n. [Le Cerf de laVieviUe], Comparaison de la musique, 3:188.

136

ihe

yfeventeenth

Century

of actual sound, although naturally the differences in accent and tempo of the two languages determine the characteristics of the recitative in each case. Modern singers need to be cautioned against taking Lully’s recitative too slowly and songfully, forgetting the composers dictum, “Mon recitatif n’est fait que pour parler.”12 Occasionally, at points where the emotion expressed by the words is more lofty or concentrated, the recitative gives way to a melodic phrase, which may recur several times in rondo fashion—a procedure analogous to that of Mon¬ teverdi or Cavalli, welding recitative and arioso into a unified and expressive whole. A beautiful example of this is the lament in Persee (1682), in which the recurring vocal phrase is first announced in the orchestral introduction (ex¬ ample 9.1).13 The vocal airs in Lully’s operas differ considerably from Italian arias. As a rule, they are not strongly set apart as separate numbers, but are continually interspersed in a scene along with recitatives, duets, choruses, and dances. For the most part these airs are short, narrow in range, and subject to piquant ir¬ regularities of phrasing. They do not use coloratura, except for conventional short passages on such picture words as lancer, briller, and the like, although the vocal line is ornamented by a multitude of agrements (short trills, grace notes, passing tones, and so on).These are seldom indicated in the score, unless by a little t or cross above the note affected, which signifies only that some kind of agrement is expected without specifying which one. Their choice and placing were largely a matter of custom and taste, both for singers and for instrumen¬ talists.14 Thus for the French singer less technical vocal cultivation was re¬ quired than for the Italian, but a clearer enunciation and a more intelligent grasp of the text. A favorite type of air composed by Lully, derived in part from the French popular chanson and in part from instrumental dance music, is illustrated in example 9.2 from Atys (1676). Example 9.2a is from the edition in full score

12. “My recitative is made only for speaking.” Quoted in [Le Cerf de laVieville], Comparison, 3:188. 13. A word is necessary on the interpretation of the time signatures in Lully. The signs 2 (=2/2) and (p are two-beat measures, in which theoretically the beat is half as fast as in C (a four-beat measure). Thus, where the signatures alternate in the same piece, changing from 2 or (p to C, two quarter notes in the latter would have the same value as one half note in the former. The same holds true if the change is from 2 or (p to 3 (= 3/4), or from 3/2 to 3 or C. In other words, the duration of a quarter note is theoretically the same whether the measure is divided into two beats or four, the dif¬ ferent signatures being indications of different meters rather than different tempos. Nevertheless, the signatures do serve in some degree as tempo indications, especially in instrumental pieces. (See Muffat, Florilequim secundum, part. 2, introduction.) In example 9.1, the half notes after 2/2 should not be quite twice as long as the preceding quarters; the change of signature is a way of indicating an allargando effect at the cadence rather than an abrupt shift to a slower tempo. 14. See Aldrich, “The Principal Agrements”; Goldschmidt, Die Lehre von der vokalen Ornamentik. For a broader discussion of this topic, see Brown and Sadie, eds., Performance Practice. Music after 1600 and relevant articles in Peformance Practice R.eview and Historical Peformance.

o,pera in Trance example

9.1 Persee, ActV, scene

137

i

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of 1689; 9.2b shows the same air as notated in an edition of 1720. It will be seen that the latter, besides giving fuller directions for realization of the bass and correcting what is probably an error in measure eight, is careful to indi¬ cate precisely the notes to which the agrements are to be applied. This tune was one of many from Lully’s operas that passed into the repertoire of popu¬ lar chansons and remained familiar to the public for many years.15 Dance rhythms are common in Lully’s airs, as is the rondo-like recurrence of the opening phrase in the middle and again at the end of the song. A more serious type of air goes back to the French air de com, cultivated in the early and middle seventeenth century by such composers as Antoine Boesset (1586-1643) and Michel Lambert (c. 1610-96).16 The well-known “Bois epais” from Amadis (example 9.3) and the equally famous “Plus /ob¬ serve ces lieux” from Armide, both occurring in pastoral scenes, show this style at its best. Lully’s operas are filled with long scenes having nothing to do with fur¬ thering the action but existing solely to furnish pleasure to eye and ear—pas¬ toral episodes, sacrifices, combats, descents of gods, infernal scenes, funeral and triumphal processions. These pompous displays are the heritage of the seventeenth-century ballet, and the generic French term divertissement well describes their place in the scheme of the opera. They give occasion for most of the choruses, instrumental numbers, and dances that are so prominent in Lully’s scores. The choruses are generally homophonic and massive; those sung to accompany dancing are characterized by strongly marked rhythms.17

15. Compare with the vaudeville airs from the Theatre de la Foire, excerpts of which are in example 15.3. 16. Gerold, L’Art du chant en France au XVlIe siecle. 17. Choral parts are frequently subdivided into a petit choeur (two sopranos and a countertenor) and a grand choeur (soprano, countertenor, tenor, and bass). See Diderot and D’Alembert, eds.. Encyclopedic

(1753), 3:362.

EXAMPLE 9.2a Atys, Act I

( Sanearide)

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140

The Seventeenth Century

example

9.3 Amadis, Act II, scene iv

Lully

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Purcell’s other works there are isolated examples of recitative phrases, includ¬ ing one from The Indian Queen (example io,6) that Charles Burney called “the best piece of recitative in our language.”26 The overtures to Purcell’s operas are in the same general form as the French overtures of Lully; one of the finest examples is found in Dioclesian.27 Other instrumental music includes “act tunes” (that is, interludes or introduc¬ tions), and there are some interesting examples of the canzona and other forms.28 There are dance pieces of all kinds, including the hornpipe, paspe (French passepied), canaries, and special descriptive dances as in Lully; a favor¬ ite type (also common in French opera) is the chaconne or ground, which is often placed for climax toward the end of a scene and in which dancing is

26. Burney, H General History of Music, 2:392. It should be noted that Henry Purcells younger broth¬ er, Daniel, was called upon to compose the final masque of The Indian Queen. 27. Dioclesian is a semi-opera in five acts, based on a Thomas Betterton play. Of particular interest is the finale of the opera, which is a self-contained masque. 28. Indian Queen. Acts II and III; Fairy Queen. Act IV; King Arthur, ActV.

158

ke Seventeenth Century

combined with solo and choral singing as well as with instrumental accom¬ paniment.29 Descriptive symphonies occur, such as the introduction to the song “Ye blustering bretheren” in ActV of King Arthur or the famous “Cold” symphony and chorus “See, see, we assemble” in Act III—a scene perhaps suggested by the chorus of trembleurs in Lully’s Isis. The choruses in Purcell’s operas contain some of his best music. Such numbers as “Sing Io’s” in Act II of Dioclesian, with stately vigorous rhythms, brilliant voice groupings, orchestral interludes, and passages of harmony con¬ trasting with contrapuntal sections, foreshadow the broad, sonorous choral movements in Handel’s oratorios. Other choruses in Purcell are more like those of Lully, in strict chordal style with piquant rhythms; still others show the influences of the English madrigal tradition.30 Finally, there are the cho¬ ruses of lamentation, such as “With drooping wings” in Dido and Aeneas, which (like many other features of this opera) has a worthy predecessor in the closing number of Blow’s Venus and Adonis. Except for Dido and Aeneas, where the chorus has a part in the action, Purcell’s choral numbers usually occur in scenes devoted to spectacle or entertainment, corresponding to the ceremonies, ballets, and the like in French opera. There are scenes of this kind in Bonduca (Act III), King Arthur (Acts I and III), and The Indian Queen (Act V). The masques, of which examples may be found particularly in Timon of Athens and The Fairy Queen, also contain many choruses and dances; for par¬ allels to these masques, with their fantastic settings and characters, we must look not only to the French operas but also to the contemporary popular plays ol the Theatre Itahen at Paris, which contain many scenes of a similar nature.31 On the whole, it is difficult to accept Romain Rolland’s estimate of Pur¬ cell s genius as frail

or incomplete.”'1-The composer of the closing scenes

of Dido and Aeneas could surely have created a true national opera in England if he had not been frustrated by the lack of an adequate librettist and by his apparently inescapable servitude to an undeveloped public taste.33 As it was, however, Purcell’s death in 1695 put an end to any hope for the development of English musical drama in the foreseeable future. London was even then full of Italian musicians; audiences became fascinated with Italian opera, and, with few exceptions, English composers did little to counter this trend. For exam¬ ple,Thomas Clayton’s (1673-1725) Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus, which was staged

29. Examples in King Arthur, Act III, and Dioclesian, Act III (in canon form). 30. For an example in the chordal style, see “’Tis love that hath warmed us” in King Arthur, Act III, and for one in the madrigal tradition, see “In these delightful pleasant groves,” in The Libertine. 31. Gherardi, comp., Le Thedtre italien. 32. Rolland in Lavignac, Encyclopedie, 3:1894. 33. See Purcells preface to The Fairy Queen.

by Christopher Rich at Drury Lane in 1705, was sung in English but com¬ posed in an Italian manner. What is unique about Arsinoe, however, is that it was sung throughout, with recitatives used in place of spoken dialogue—the first such opera to come to the London stage. Arsinoe was exceptionally suc¬ cessful, enjoying numerous performances for two consecutive seasons.34 A year after the premiere of Arsinoe, George Granville’s The British En¬ chanters35 enjoyed a dozen or more performances at the Haymarket Theater beginning in February 1706, but not even works such as this could prevent Italian opera from dominating English opera.36 The successful production, in English, of II trionfo di Camilla, regina de’Volsci by Giovanni Bononcini (1670— 1747) at the Drury Lane Theater in March 1706 marked the capitulation, and the fashion was completely established by the time of Handel’s arrival and the performance of his Rinaldo in 1711.37 There was at least one Englishman who viewed this state of operatic affairs with regret. Joseph Addison in The Spectator frequently alluded to the absurd¬ ities of Italian opera in England, and in one issue he wrote a long essay in criticism of Italian recitative, with acute observations on the relation of lan¬ guage to national style in music and an exhortation to English composers to emulate Lully by inventing a recitative proper to their own language: “I would allow the Italian Opera to lend our English Musick as much as may grace and soften it, but never entirely to annihilate and destroy it.”3b That this was a faint hope, Addison had virtually admitted in an earlier letter, which so well and so wittily sums up the situation of opera in England at the begin¬ ning of the eighteenth century that it deserves to be quoted at length:

It is my Design in this Paper to deliver down to Posterity a faithful Ac¬ count of the Italian Opera, and of the gradual Progress which it has made upon the English Stage: For there is no Question but our great Grand¬ children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an Audience of Foreigners in their own Country,

34. The text of Arsinoe was a translation from the Italian. See Burney, History, 2:655. 35. Music by John Eccles (1668-1735) and Wilham Corbett (1680-1748). 36. With the enactment of the Order of Separation (1707), which decreed that Drury Lane was lim¬ ited to productions of plays without music whereas the Haymarket could stage any kind of opera, the government further added to the ease with which Italian opera could dominate the English stage. The order was relaxed a few years later, thereby allowing English semi-operas to once again entertain Londoners. 37. II trionfo di Camilla, composed for Naples in 1696, received no less than sixty-four performances in London between 1706 and 1709. For more on the attribution of this opera to Giovanni Bononci¬ ni, see Lindgren, “The Three Great Noises.” See also chapter thirteen. 38. The Spectator, no. 29, April 3,1711.

160

The Seventeenth Century

and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand. Arsinoe was the first Opera that gave us a Taste of Italian Musick. The great Success which this Opera met with, produced some Attempts of forming Pieces upon Italian Plans, that should give a more natural and reasonable Entertainment than what can be met with in the elaborate Tri¬ fles of that Nation. This alarm’d the Poetasters and Fiddlers of the Town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary Kind of Ware; and therefore laid down as an established Rule, which is receiv’d as such to this very day, That nothing is capable of being well set to Musick, that is not Nonsense. This Maxim was no sooner receiv’d, but we immediately fell to translat¬ ing the Italian Operas; and as there was no great Danger of hurting the Sense of those extraordinary Pieces, our Authors would often make Words of their own, that were entirely foreign to the Meaning of the Passages which they pretended to translate. [Here Addison gives some instances of inept translations, and then he continues.] By this Means the soft Notes that were adapted to Pity in the Italian, fell upon the Word Rage in the English; and the angry Sounds that were turn’d to Rage in the Original, were made to express Pity in the Translation. It oftentimes happen’d like¬ wise, that the finest Notes in the Air fell upon the most insignificant Words in the Sentence. I have known the word And pursu’d through the whole Gamut, have been entertain’d with many a melodious The, and have heard the most beautiful Graces, Quavers and Divisions bestow’d upon Then, For, and From; to the eternal Honour of our English Particles. The next Step to our Refinement, was the introducing of Itahan Actors into our Opera; who sung their Parts in their own Language, at the same Time that our Countrymen perform’d theirs in our native Tongue. The King or Hero of the Play generally spoke in Italian, and his Slaves answer’d him in English: The Lover frequently made his Court, and gain’d the Heart of his Princess in a Language which she did not understand. One would have thought it very difficult to have carry’d on Dialogues after this Manner, without an Interpreter between the Persons that convers’d to¬ gether; but this was the State of the English Stage for about three Years. At length the Audience grew tir’d of understanding Half the Opera, and therefore to ease themselves entirely of the Fatigue of Thinking, have so order’d it at Present that the whole Opera is perform’d in an unknown Tongue. We no longer understand the Language of our own Stage. It does not want any great Measure of Sense to see the Ridicule of this monstrous Practice; but what makes it the more astonishing, it is not the Taste of the Rabble, but of Persons of the greatest Politeness, which has es¬ tablish’d it. . . .

Opera tn Emsland

161

At present, our Notions of Musick are so very uncertain, that we do not know what it is we like, only, in general, we are transported with anything that is not English: so if it be of a foreign Growth, let it be Italian, French, or High-Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English Musick is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead.39

39. The Spectator, no. 18, March 21,1711. See also two essays from The Spectator in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 511-17, and the accounts quoted in Lowens, “The Touch-Stone (1728): A Ne¬ glected View of London Opera.” For a study of the influence Italian opera had upon the produc¬ tions staged at the Drury Lane and Haymarket theaters from 1704 to 1710, see Price, Music in the Restoration Theatre.

fart 3 The Eight eentk Century

Chapter

11

/Masters of tke Early Edgkteentk Century

during the early part

of the eighteenth century, the younger

librettists and composers in Italy were gradually evolving a new type of serious opera that was to dominate the scene for more than a hundred years.This new Italian opera seria will be the subject of the next chapter. The present one is concerned with certain composers of the first half of the century who in the main kept to types of opera already long established and whose works include some of the best dramatic music of the period.The principal composers of this group are Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy, Reinhard Reiser in Germany, George Frideric Handel in England, and Jean-Philippe Rameau in France.

■ifcarlatti Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) once figured in the history of opera as the founder of the so-called Neapolitan school of the eighteenth century. Investigations of the last half century, however, have shown that his importance in this connection was considerably less than had been supposed and that he is probably better to be understood as one of the last masters of an older tradition than as the initiator of a new movement. Scarlatti was in Naples from 1685 to 1702 and again for shorter periods after 1709; he wrote operas not only for Naples but also for Rome (including some of his most important works), Venice, and Florence. It is not known exactly how many operas he produced; about eighty-five are traceable, of which number less than half are extant, some incompletely.

1. See Colloquium Alessandro Scarlatti; Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti; Lorenz, Alessandro Scarlattis Jugendoper; Grout, Alessandro Scarlatti; and studies by Bianconi, D’Accone, Pagano, Holmes, Pagano and Bianchi, and Jones. See also the introductory material for each of the nine volumes in Grout, ed., The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti.

166

The JHi3kt eenth Century

Scarlatti began work in the style of Legrenzi and Stradella; their influence is apparent in his first operas performed at Rome before 1684. The small forms, the free mixture of recitative and aria passages, and the use of the ground-bass are all characteristic of this period. Gli equivoci in sembiante, Scar¬ latti’s first opera, had its premiere in Rome in 1679 and was an outstanding success, not only in the papal city but in many other cities as well.2 Perfor¬ mances were given in Bologna, Naples, Siena, Ravenna, Vienna (1681) and Venice (1690; 1691). Gli equivoci has but four characters: two male (represent¬ ing twin brothers) and two female (sung by castrati). This opera was initially staged in a small theater in a private residence, and then, at the request of Christina, former Queen of Sweden, was immediately thereafter presented at one of Rome’s seminaries (Clementino) where there was a larger stage. In¬ terest in this second production caused a near riot; people were so anxious to gain access to the theater, they stormed the gates of the seminary. During his first stay in Naples, Scarlatti began to develop more individual characteristics. Comic roles occur in his librettos with considerable regulari¬ ty and form an integral part of the plot. The comic characters are usually cast as servants and portrayed by a bass and a soprano. They also have scenes for themselves—comic scenes that are a clear contrast in musical style with the rest of the opera.3 The number and placement of these scenes within the opera vary. In La caduta de’ decemviri (1697), for example, there are two comic scenes in each of the first two acts and one in the third act. In the later op¬ eras, it was Scarlatti’s custom to end each of the first two acts with a comic duet in lively style, clearly the ancestor of the later opera buffa finale.4 Even in his comic opera II trionfo dell’onore (1718), Scarlatti retained the servant roles, creating for them farcical situations that contrast with the more subdued comedy of the main plot.5 By 1700 Scarlatti had definitely established the new Italian overture, with its quick opening movement, short slow interlude, and closing movement in two-part form with marked dance rhythms. During this period, a growing differentiation between Scarlatti’s cantata and opera styles is also evident. La Rosaura (1690) has many details that suggest the cantata. Most of the arias are of small dimensions, and the harmonies are often intricate and subtle. The recitatives, carefully composed, are far from mere stereotypes, and there are many scenes in which recitative, arioso, and aria passages are freely intermin¬ gled. The music shows to perfection sensuous effect, which is such a strong

2. In response to a claim that this is not Scarlatti’s first opera, see D’Accone,“Confronting a Problem of Attribution, ossia Which of the Two is Scarlatti’s First Opera?” 3. See Grout, Alessandro Scarlatti; Troy, The Comic Intermezzo; R. Hunter,“Comic Scenes.” 4. See Tigrane, in Grout, ed., The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, vol. 8. 5. San Francisco Opera commissioned (from H. Williams) the first modern edition of the complete opera for a 1982 production.

/Masters of tkc E/arly E/igkteentk Century

167

Scene from H trionfo dell'onore by Alessandro Scarlatti, in a 1982 production by the San Francisco Opera.

(photo,

© 1982

ron scherl)

characteristic of the Italian composers. The moods range from tender melan¬ choly to charming playfulness, occasionally touching vehement grief on the one hand or outright broad comedy on the other.The whole is suffused with an aristocratic elegance, avoidance of excess, and perfect understanding of the powers of the solo voice for dramatic expression. In contrast to La Rosaura, La Statira (performed at Rome in the same year) is “a very fine example of the grand manner.”6 Some of the arias are on a

6. Dent, Scarlatti, 63. For a study of La Statira, see Holmes.

168

The Eighteenth Century

broad scale, impressive in their rhythms, showy and effective in a masterful way, with copious use of coloratura passages after an opening phrase in long notes with wide melodic intervals. This eminently theatrical style is further exemplified in Eraclea (1700), La principessa fedele (Naples, 1710), and Tigrane (Naples, 1715). In contrast to this popularizing tendency is Mitridate Eupatore, a tragedia per musica in five acts, composed for Venice in 1707. This work, with its dignified, deeply expressive music, reveals Scarlatti to be a worthy repre¬ sentative of the serious Italian opera in a late Baroque style, as shown by the aria“Patrii Numi” (example n.i).The recitative “O Mitridate mio” from Act IV is a remarkable example of passionate declamation, supported by skillful chromatic harmonies with sudden, though always appropriate, modulations (example n.2).The aria “Cara tomba” (in B minor) that follows is marked by many suspensions between the voice and the concertizing solo violin; in its mood of mingled pathos and resignation it is similar to many of the lyrical ef¬ fusions of Steffani and equally beautiful.7 The popular or folk element in Scarlatti is represented by the realistic dialogue and the occasional use of local dialect in the comic scenes of his se¬ rious works. In addition, there are many tunes, which in their strongly char¬ acteristic rhythms and melodic turns, are clearly of popular derivation. Per¬ haps the most common of these are the rather insinuating, languid, minor melodies in 12/8 meter to which the word siciliano is generally applied, though it is notable that Scarlatti himself restricts the term to those arias in which the flatted supertonic is a prominent feature.8 This note and its har¬ monization by means of the Neapolitan sixth are not confined to the siciliano-type airs but form a conspicuous mannerism of Scarlatti’s style.9 The later operas show an increasing emphasis on vocal ensembles (espe¬ cially Griselda, 1721) and growth in the size and importance of the orches¬ tra.10 In Tigrane, horns are introduced for the first time. The orchestra of Telemaco (1718) is large, and in this work there is not a single aria with simple continuo accompaniment. The beginning of the overture to Griselda shows evidence not only of a homophonic style in orchestral writing but also of the typical later classical division between strings and winds according to func¬ tion—the strings having arpeggios and tremolandos while oboes and trumpets reinforce with chords on the strong beats.11 An even more significant devel-

7. Both recitative and aria are reprinted (incomplete) in Dent, Scarlatti, 109-12. 8. This type of melody is not original with Scarlatti. Early examples occur in Monteverdis Orfeo and in P. A. Ziani’s Galatea (1660). Examples may also be found in the slower barcarole arias in 3/2 me¬ ter typical of Steffani and Pallavicino (see DdT, 55:ix). 9. Dent, Scarlatti, 146—47. 10. This trend had already been established in Scarlattis serenatas, in which greater emphasis was placed upon vocal ensembles and upon imaginative orchestral scoring for the arias. See Griffin, “The Late Baroque Serenata in Rome and Naples.” 11. For a modern edition of Griselda. see Grout, ed., The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, vol. 3.

example ii.i Mitridate Eupatore, Act II, scene i

A. Scarlatti

Adagio

Eupatore

i

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example ii.i

(continued)

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example 11.8b Giulio Cesare,

Act II, scene

viii

(Largo) 7iolin /, II

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■t

_____

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A/lasters of tke Early Etgkteentk Century

example ii.8b

195

(continued)

eras and oratorios inVienna from 1714 to 1724, with one of his most celebrat¬ ed being the title character in Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena (1719). For that role, as well as for several others, Conti accommodated the exceptional range of Borosini s part by notating the vocal line in both the tenor and bass clefs. In Tamerlano, Borosini’s part spans two octaves (A to a').70

70. For more about Francesco Borosini’s career, see Williams, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti. Cf. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. “Borosini.’

Tamerlano by George Frederic Handel (David Daniels—Glimmerglass Opera, 1995). (© 1995 GEORGE MOTT. COURTESY, GLIMMERGLASS OPERA)

AAasters of the Early Eisht eenth Century

197

It must be emphasized that in every case the realization not only of mood but also of personality comes from the music. Caesar in Haym s libretto is a stage hero in the manner of the early eighteenth century; only through Han¬ del’s music does his character receive those qualities that make him a truly dramatic figure. Caesar and Cleopatra, Radamisto and Zenobia, Bajazet and others of Handel’s dramatic creations are universal, ideal types of humanity, moving and thinking on a vast scale, the analogue in opera of the great trag¬ ic personages of Corneille. This quality is more than the reflection of a cer¬ tain musical style or a consummate technique; it is the direct emanation of Handel’s own spirit, expressed in music with an immediacy that has no paral¬ lel outside Beethoven. It is the incarnation of a great soul. If his characters suffer, the music gives full, eloquent expression to their sorrows—but it nev¬ er whines; there is not a note in it of self-pity. We are moved by the spectacle of suffering, but our compassion is mingled with admiration at suffering so nobly endured, with pride that we ourselves belong to a species capable of such heroism.

Aa/neaw Conditions in France were not favorable for serious musical dra¬ ma in the early eighteenth century. The tendency was toward the non-dramatic entertainment spectacle of the opera-ballet. A glance at the statistics of new works staged at the Paris Opera shows this: from 1700 to 1715 there were twenty-seven new tragedies lyriques and ten new ballets; from 1716 to 1740 there were twenty-one new tragedies lyriques and forty-one new ballets of var¬ ious kinds.71 The ballet pieces were not only becoming numerous; they were always more popular as well. Among the hits of the early eighteenth century were Les Fetes de Thalie (1714), an opera-ballet with music by Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682-1738), which enjoyed revivals until 1764 and was often paro¬ died, and a ballet heroique, Les Fetes grecques et romaines (1723) by Colin de Blamont (1690—1760), which was popular until 1770.72 The only opera of this period that approached such popularity was Jephte (1732), a biblical subject with music by Michel Pignolet de Monteclair (1667-1737). Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was already known as an organist, the¬ orist, and composer of keyboard music before he presented his Hippolyte et

71. Chouquet, Histone de la musique dramatique, 327-42. 72. Ballet heroique,pastorale heroique, comedie lyrique, comedie ballet, and similar designations were used in France at this time for works partaking of the character of both opera and ballet. To avoid unneces¬ sary complexity, we shall refer to such works under the generic name opera-ballet. For the distinc¬ tions, see Anthony, “The French Opera-Ballet.”

ip8

The JLight eenth Century

Aricie, a tragedie lyrique, in 1733.73 More than twenty other works for the the¬ ater followed, the most important of which were the operas Castor et Pollux (1737; revived 1754), Dardanus (1739), and Zoroastre (1749); the operas-ballets Les Fetes d’Hebe (1739) and Za'is (1748); and the “lyrique comedy” Platee (1745). In general, these works do not depart from the fundamental outlines established by Lully and Quinault: mythological or legendary subject matter, frequent large display scenes with choruses and ballets, and carefully notated recitative intermingled with short airs. Nevertheless, Rameau’s operas imme¬ diately raised a storm of controversy. He was hailed by progressives as the sav¬ ior of French opera and condemned by conservatives as a hopeless pedant, a distillateur d’accords baroques, whose capitulation to Italian style was tantamount to musical treason. The reasons for this criticism are not to be sought in the outward aspects of his operas but rather in the music itself, which represents the late Baroque style in France, as Bach represented it in Germany and Han¬ del in England. Tonalities are absolutely clear, often being emphasized by Rameau’s predilection for outlining triads in the melody; large-scale forms are common, supported by definite modulatory schemes with systematic use of secondary sevenths (a particularly fine example is the great chaconne in the finale of Castor et Pollux).The whole style is more contrapuntal than Lul¬ ly s, though not so much so as that of Bach. Some of Rameau’s longer airs are formally set apart from the recitative, and the Italian-inspired ariettes in par¬ ticular make use of coloratura passages.74 Other large arias occasionally fore¬ shadow the profound, serious moods of Gluck (example 11.9). The contrast between Lully and Rameau is particularly evident in the choruses, which are more numerous and varied in the latter and often ex¬ tremely brilliant, recalling the style of Handel (see, for example, “Brillant soleil

in Les Indes galantes, II, v). In his use of the chorus for dramatic pur¬

poses (as in the impressive opening of Act I of Castor et Pollux), Rameau showed the way for developments that were to culminate in the later operas of Gluck and Traetta.75 Above all, Rameau is distinguished for the instrumental music in his op¬ eras. The Paris opera orchestra in 1756 numbered forty-seven players, com¬ prising two flutes, four oboes, five bassoons, one trumpet, and percussion, in addition to the strings and continuo instruments.7^ Extra players were hired

73- See GirdlestoneJean-Philippe Rameau; La Laurencie, “La musique franfaise,” in Lavignac, Ency¬

clopedic, 3:1362-1562; Masson, L’Opera de Rameau: Leclerc, “Les Indes galantes”: Anthony, French Baroque Music; Cyr,“Rameau’s Les Fites d’HM";Wolf,“Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Comedie Lyrique”; Bouissou,Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les Boreades ou La Tragedie ouhliee. 74. See examples in the closing scenes of Hippolyte et Aricie and Castor et Pollux. 75- Cf. the opening of Act I, a tableau of mourning, with similar scenes in Glucks Orfeo ed Euridice

(1762) andTraettas Ifigenia in Tauride (1763). 76. Masson, L’Opira de Rameau, 513.

example

11.9

Dardanus,

Act IV, scene 1

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