Opera

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OPERA

from the french revolution to italian and german unification
from unification to world war i
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Opera as an art form emerged between roughly 1590 and 1610, created by composers, writers, and courtiers in Florence and Mantua who sought to revive the union of drama and music they thought characteristic of the ancient Greek theater. Outside of France, which developed its own form of musical theater after 1669 (founding of the Royal Academy of Music, or Opùra), Italian opera seria or serious opera, built around an alternation of bass-accompanied (or secco) recitative and three-part da capo arias, remained dominant across Europe down to the French Revolution, although the less prestigious opera buffa or comic opera was also spreading across the Continent during the second half of the eighteenth century. Opera seria owed its success principally to the extraordinary popularity of its star singers, both female sopranos and castrati (castrated males with soprano or alto voices). As in other areas of life, the tremendous transformation that engulfed the west after 1789 brought substantial and lasting changes to the world of opera as well.

from the french revolution to italian and german unification

The decades between the French Revolution and the Restoration of 1815 have been called a period of transition in Italian musical life. While the reform operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) may initially have had little impact in the homeland of the art form, the less rigid opera buffa with its natural voices (no castrati), greater use of ensembles, and extended dramatic finales proved a source of renewal for the classic opera seria, still at the center of theatrical life up and down the peninsula. A synthesis of the two genres can be found in the opere semiserie (sentimental operas with happy endings) by Ferdinando Paër (1771–1839), Camilla (Vienna, 1799) and Leonora (Dresden, 1804), and in Lodoïska (Venice, 1796) and Le due giornate (Milan, 1801; The two days) by Johann Simon Mayr (Giovanni Simone Mayr; 1763–1845). All of these works were also inspired by French models and are examples of "rescue operas," a popular category of the time to which Beethoven's far more famous Fidelio (1805–1806, 1814) also belongs. Significantly, Paër was an Italian who spent much time in Germany and Mayr a German who found fame in Italy, and both incorporated into their stage works advances in orchestration and harmony inspired by German chamber and orchestral music. The staging of Gluck's Paris operas and other French works in Naples during the rulership there of Napoleon's general Joachim Murat (1808–1815) was another avenue by which inspiration from abroad reached the peninsula.

Rossini and his heirs

The composer who drew on all of these influences and on his own native genius to renew both comic and serious opera in Italy was Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792–1868). Between 1813 and 1817 Rossini wrote four opere buffe that remain classics of the genre—L'italiana in Algeri (Venice, 1813; The Italian girl in Algiers), Il turco in Italia (Milan, 1814; The Turk in Italy), Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rome, 1816; The barber of Seville), and La cenerentola (Rome, 1817; Cinderella). Despite Rossini's best efforts, however, opera buffa was dying. Only three Italian comic operas written after 1819—Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (1832; The elixir of love) and Don Pasquale (1843) and Verdi's Falstaff (1893)—all quite different from the classic opera buffa, have entered the repertory.

It was hence in the area of serious opera that Rossini's innovations had the more lasting impact. By applying structural features drawn from comic opera as well other changes already reflected in the works of contemporaries such as Mayr, Rossini formalized an organizational model for serious opera built around the extended, four-part scena or scene (rather than the combination secco recitative–da capo aria) consisting of an orchestral or choral introduction; a slow, lyrical aria or ensemble (cantabile); a bridging passage (tempo di mezzo); and a fast aria or ensemble (cabaletta or stretto). This "code Rossini" provided a revitalized basic framework for serious opera that Italian composers would draw on until the 1850s and beyond. Such a framework was a necessary component of an opera industry that demanded large numbers of new works every year—342 alone between the years 1838 and 1845, according to one contemporary estimate. Rossini first presented this framework in Tancredi (Venice, 1813), developed it further in the operas written for Naples between 1815 and 1822 such as Otello (1816), Mosè in Egitto (1818; Moses in Egypt), La donna del lago (1819; The lady of the lake), and Maometto II (1820), and perfected it in Semiramide (Venice, 1823), his last commission for Italy. While Rossini's serious works are less well known than his comic operas, the former can now be seen every summer at the festival held in the composer's home town of Pesaro.

Rossini's foremost heirs within Italy were the Sicilian Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) and the Lombard Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848). While both adopted the new framework as a starting point, Bellini's ten and Donizetti's sixty-five stage works exhibit several significant differences when compared to those of Rossini. Thus while some of the latter's serious operas (Ermione, Maometto II) dispense with the happy ending typical of eighteenth-century opera seria, tragedy is the norm for his successors. Furthermore, while Rossini did set texts inspired by William Shakespeare (1564–1616; [Otello]) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832; [La donna del lago]), he was more attracted to classical subjects and sentiments, whereas the operas of Bellini and Donizetti are Romantic in sensibility. Bellini's masterpieces Norma (1831) and I puritani (1835), such as Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and countless other works of Donizetti, all center around the theme of love thwarted by adverse social or historical circumstances, and emotions are expressed with an almost overpowering immediacy. In part, both composers achieved this effect by employing more natural voices: the hero is usually a tenor (rather than the female contralto en travesti still sometimes preferred by Rossini) playing opposite a soprano leading lady and a villainous baritone. Both also made use of simpler melodies and removed from the vocal line the abundant ornamentation or fioritura preferred by Rossini. The one exception is the famous mad scenes so closely identified with both composers' works and first found in Bellini's Il pirata (1827). In these scenes, unhappiness in love has driven the heroine insane and this state is marked by her abundant use of vocal ornamentation, in contrast to the much plainer singing style of the other characters. Despite this difference in vocal writing between Rossini on the one hand and Bellini and Donizetti on the other, all three—along with their lesser-known contemporaries Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870) and Giovanni Pacini (1796–1867)—came to be seen in the late 1800s as exponents of bel canto. This was the fine art of singing taught during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that stressed even tone production, exceptional breath control, agile technique, beautiful timbre, and clear articulation—a style that would be increasingly lost with the rise in the last decade of the nineteenth century of verismo opera (seebelow) with its stress on pure vocal power and emotive delivery.

Rossini and Paris

It was not only on the future course of Italian opera that Rossini exercised a decisive influence. In 1824, having achieved everything he could in his native land, he settled in Paris and took over the directorship of the Théâtre Italien, where he assembled a top-flight company of singers and staged performances of his own works and those of his countrymen. At the same time, after writing Il viaggio a Reims (1825), a pièce d'occasion for the coronation of Charles X (r. 1824–1830), Rossini accepted the new challenge of composing for the Opèra. In 1826 he reworked Maometto II and presented it as Le siège de Corinthe (The siege of Corinth) and a year later adapted Moisè in Egitto as Moïse et Pharaon (Moses and Pharaoh). These pieces, together with the older Fernand Cortez (1809) of Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (1774–1851), an earlier Italian arrival in Paris, provided the inspiration for a new genre, the French "grand opera," first fully realized in La muette de Portici (1828; The dumb girl of Portici) of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782–1871) and in Rossini's own Guillaume Tell (William Tell) of 1829. Such works, mounted only at the Opéra, were generally five acts long with an extended ballet in act 3. The setting was a historical one in which the conflict of two groups or peoples (Neapolitans vs. Spanish, Swiss vs. Austrians, French Catholics vs. Huguenots) serves as the backdrop for one or more love stories. Above all, grand operas presented spectacular stage effects (e.g., the eruption of Vesuvius) combined with frequent crowd scenes for mass chorus.

The great master of this genre was Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), a German-born composer who had moved to Italy at age twenty-five and written six operas in a style inspired by Rossini, who became his lifelong friend and supporter. After Rossini mounted Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, 1824; The crusade in Egypt) at the Theéâtre Italien, the latter moved to Paris and in 1831 presented his Robert le diable (Robert the devil) at the Opéra. It was greeted with wild success. This was followed by Les huguenots (1836; The Huguenots), Le prophète (1849; The prophet), and L'africaine (1865; The african woman), all box office triumphs. The positive experiences of Rossini and Meyerbeer in the French capital soon brought Bellini and Donizetti there as well. Bellini premiered his I puritani at the Théâtre Italien in January 1835, just eight months before his untimely death outside Paris at age thirty-four, and

Donizetti wrote his Don Pasquale (1843) for the same theater. While his grand opera La favorite (1840; The favorite) eventually made its way into the repertory, neither Les martyrs (also 1840; The martyrs) or Dom Sébastien (1843), Donizetti's penultimate complete work, was well received. Indeed, aside from La muette de Portici, and La favorite only one other grand opera achieved the impact of Meyerbeer's works: La juive (1835; The Jewish woman) of Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy (1799–1862). By the early 1850s, the genre had passed the peak of its popularity and for the next two decades a smaller opera house, the financially embattled Thùâtre Lyrique, would be the true home of artistic innovation in the French capital, specializing in works such as Faust (1859) and Romùo et Juliette (1867) by Charles-François Gounod (1818–1893), characterized by a more human scale and greater emotional directness than the typical grand opera. After 1855, the Bouffes Parisiens theater of Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) offered serious competition to all four Parisian opera houses (the Opùra, the Opùra-Comique, the Thùâtre Italien, and the Thùâtre Lyrique) with its steady stream of sparkling, witty operettas.

Verdi

Meanwhile, in Italy a worthy successor to Bellini and Donizetti as leader of the Italian opera school had presented himself: Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi, born in 1813 in Le Roncole north of Parma. From 1839, when his first opera (Oberto) appeared at La Scala, until 1850 he operated under the constraints imposed by the opera industry in Italy, producing sixteen works in little more than a decade. Verdi would later famously describe this period as his "galley years." During them, he established his reputation throughout the peninsula with a number of historical operas such as I lombardi alla prima crociata (Milan, 1843; The Lombards on the first crusade), La battaglia di Legnano (Rome, 1849; The battle of Legnano) and above all Nabucco (Milan, 1842). These works with their powerful choruses (Nabucco's "Va pensiero" being the most famous) indirectly evoked the plight of an Italian people divided and suffering under Austrian hegemony and appealed strongly to liberals of all classes seeking unification. Verdi's most innovative opera from this epoch, however, was probably his setting of his beloved Shakespeare's Macbeth (1847; revised 1865).

Between 1851 and 1853, Verdi then presented three operas that within a few years had made him both world famous and wealthy—Rigoletto (Venice, 1851), Il trovatore (Rome, 1853; The troubadour), and La traviata (Venice, 1853; The fallen woman). While all three still honor the "code Rossini" broadly conceived, they move forward with a propulsive force and concision never before seen in the theaters of Italy. What is also striking about these operas compared to those of Bellini and Donizetti is both the relative paucity of vocal embellishments and the central role played by the duet, whether of confrontation or of love. With the money earned from these works, Verdi was able to free himself from the necessity of producing something new every year, as Donizetti had been forced to do throughout this career. Like his successful Italian predecessors before him, Verdi responded to his good fortune by moving for a time to Paris, where he took up the challenge of writing for the Opéra. Yet neither Les vêpres siciliennes (1855; The Sicilian vespers) nor Don Carlos (1867) established themselves in their French, grand opera versions. Rather, it was Un ballo in maschera (Rome, 1859; A masked ball), a thoroughly Italian treatment of the subject matter of an older grand opera, Auber's Gustave III; ou, Le bal masqueé (Opéra, 1833; Gustav III; or, The masked ball) that proved to be Verdi's most fully realized work of this period.

It was during the age of Rossini, Bellini, and Verdi that the German-speaking lands finally joined Italy and France as a great home of indigenous operas. Although a German-language variant of the Italian opera seria, exemplified by the works of Reinhard Keiser (1674–1739) and Johann Mattheson (1681–1764), had emerged in Hamburg following the opening there of the Oper am Gänsemarkt in 1678, it had disappeared with that theater's closure in 1738. For the rest of the century, Germany's numerous court theaters were content for the most part to commission Italian or French operas from internationally recognized composers such as Gluck or Niccolò Jommelli (1714–1774), or to import such works from abroad and present them either in the original or in German translation. In 1776, however, Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790), dissatisfied with this situation, opened the doors of the venerable Burgtheater in Vienna to a form of German musical theater known as the Singspiel, which, like the French opéra comique, consisted of spoken dialogue with interposed musical numbers. The next decade and a half brought forth two masterpieces in this genre, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782; The abduction from the Seraglio) and Die Zauberflöte (1791; The magic flute), both by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Mozart died prematurely only a few months after the premiere of Die Zauberflöte, thereby depriving German opera of its great hope for the future. Instead, Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France's growing military hegemony brought a flood of French works, mainly opéras comiques—though often quite serious ones—by composers such as André-Ernest-Modeste Grétr (1741–1813), François-Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834), Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817), and above all Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842). The one great German-language work of this period, Fidelio (1805/1806/1814) of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), employed a libretto derived from the opéra comique Leonore; ou, L'amour conjugale (1798; Leonore; or, Married love) by the otherwise forgotten Pierre Gaveaux (1760–1825). It was also very much inspired by Cherubini's Les deux journées (1800; The two days), the score of which Beethoven is said to have kept on his desk. The true turning point in the development of German opera came, however, with the premiere at the Berlin Court Theater in 1821 of Der Freischütz (The free shooter) by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Though heavily influenced by French works, especially those of Méhul, Der Freischütz quickly gained worldwide fame as the prototype of the Romantic, national opera. As such it inspired such composers as the Czech Bed?ich Smetana (1824–1884), composer of Prodaná Nev?sta (Prague, 1866; The bartered bride), and the Pole Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819–1872), who were seeking to establish an operatic tradition in their own languages. In contrast, the father of Russian opera, Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857), was far more influenced by the music of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, with which he had become acquainted during a three-year sojourn in Italy (1830–1833), when he came to write his A Life for the Tsar (St. Petersburg, 1836). It was left to his successor Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) in

Boris Godunov (first version 1868–1869) to forge an operatic style that was distinctly Russian.

The long-standing goal of many of Weber's contemporaries, the creation of a truly German grand opera free from the spoken dialogue of the opéra comique and the Singspiel, was only achieved by Richard Wagner (1813–1883) beginning with his Rienzi (1842), modeled directly on the works of Meyerbeer and on Auber's Muette de Portici. Thereafter Wagner sought to revitalize the entire genre with his Greek-inspired ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk or stage work combining music, drama, sets, and lighting on an equal footing, an ideal most fully realized in his Tristan und Isolde (1865; Tristan and Isolde) and in the four operas of his Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853–1874, premiered 1876; The ring of the Nibelung)—Das Rheingold (The Rhine gold), Die Walküre (The valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the gods).

from unification to world war i

Wagner was undoubtedly the opera world's most influential figure from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. Though by 1874 he had completed all of his thirteen operas save one (Parsifal, premiered 1882), it was during this period, in the wake of the inauguration of the Bayreuth Festival with performances of the complete Ring in 1876, that his fame spread to every corner of Europe and to the wider world. Wagner's reception focused in general on five features of the composer's work: his conception of the music drama as an equal union of words and music; his consequent rejection of the old division between recitative and musical "numbers" in favor of fully through-composed operas; the central role of "leitmotifs" or musical phrases associated with particular characters, emotions, or key events that, through modification and repetition by a greatly expanded orchestra, serve to intensify the drama independent of the vocal line; the use of an advanced, often chromatic harmonic language, especially in Tristan and Parsifal; and finally a preference for grand mythical or medieval subject matter treated at great length. In all opera-producing countries, the last decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by this reception of Wagner's music and of his theoretical writings.

Nowhere was this more true than in Germany's great rival France. Though the performance of his Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1861 had been a disaster, Wagner enjoyed strong support from many French intellectuals associated with the avant-garde, most notably the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). At the same time, Wagner's own outspoken German nationalism raised the ire of many French patriots in the wake of their country's devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Indeed, public pressure in 1886 forced the director Léon Carvalho to cancel his plans to mount Lohengrin at the Opéra-Comique, and when the work was finally presented at the Opéra in 1891, a large demonstration that quickly turned into a riot occurred in front of the theater. Despite this atmosphere, many progressive composers found Wagner's influence hard to resist. Beginning in the mid-1880s, they produced a number of noteworthy operas inspired directly by both Wagner's subject matter and his musical methods: Sigurd (Brussels, 1884) of Ernest Reyer (1823–1909), Gwendoline (Brussels, 1886) of Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894), Le roi d'Ys (Opéra-Comique, 1888; The king of Ys) of É douard Lalo (1822–1893), Fervaal (Brussels, 1897) of Vincent d'Indy (1851–1931), and Le roi Arthus (Brussels, 1903; King Arthur) of Ernest Chausson (1855–1899). Ultimately more successful than these composers were those who made judicious use of Wagner, combining some elements of his innovative musical language with subject matter and a style firmly rooted in the French drame lyrique of Gounod, Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896), and of course Georges Bizet (1838–1875), whose Carmen (Opéra-Comique 1875) Friedrich Nietzsche famously praised as the antithesis of Wagner's music dramas. Thus Samson et Dalilah (Weimar, 1877) of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), a good friend of Gounod, combined substantial symphonic development in the orchestra with still clearly identifiable musical numbers. This kind of synthesis was just as apparent in the work of Jules-Émile-Frédéric Massenet (1842–1912), a student of Ambroise Thomas and the most popular French opera composer of this period at the box office. In Manon (Opéra-Comique, 1884) and Werther (premiered at Vienna in 1892 after a fire had destroyed the Opéra-Comique) numbers are present, but so are leitmotifs and chromaticism, and the distinction between recitative and aria or duet has been more or less eliminated thanks to Massenet's ability to set conversation to music in an intensely lyric manner. Yet the greatest of all French operas of this period, Pelléas et Mélisande (Opéra-Comique, 1902) by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) achieved its effect neither by imitating Wagner nor by borrowing selectively from him, but rather by going beyond him. Through-composition is Debussy's starting point, but his brilliant orchestration ensures that Maurice Maeterlinck's enigmatic text remains far more comprehensible than is the case in Wagner's works. Furthermore, Debussy makes extensive use of the pentatonic and whole-tone scales to create an atmosphere of ambiguity and claustrophobia that is the perfect complement to the drama.

The problem of Wagner's influence was naturally even more acute in his native Germany than in France. He spawned many imitators, including August Bungert (1845–1915), who planned a nine-opera cycle—four of which he completed—based on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The most famous imitator was Wagner's son Siegfried (1869–1930), who inherited the genius of neither his father nor his grandfather Franz Liszt (1811–1886). One neo-Wagnerian work did, however, enter the permanent repertory: Hänsel und Gretel (Weimar, 1893; Hansel and Gretel) of Siegfried's student Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921). As in France, the most successful opera composer in Germany in this period was the one capable of employing Wagner as a starting point but then moving off in an original direction: Richard Strauss (1864–1949). In his Elektra (Dresden, 1909), composed to a libretto by the famous Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Strauss used a massive orchestra and a harmonic

language on the very edge of tonality to bring to life a brutal drama of revenge. Opera was now on the verge, propelled forward by works such as Tristan and Elektra, of abandoning the tonal harmony that had always been at its core. Yet aside from one passage in Elektra (illustrating, appropriately, a bad dream), Strauss himself was unwilling to make this break. This was left to Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) in his Erwartung (composed 1909; Anticipation), and to his student Alban Berg (1885–1935) in Wozzeck (Berlin, 1925), one of the twentieth century's seminal works. Instead, Strauss turned in his next opera Der Rosenkavalier (Dresden, 1911; The cavalier of the rose; also to a von Hofmannsthal text) to a musically sophisticated, neo-Mozartian pastiche that, in addition to achieving lasting popularity, anticipated the neoclassicism of the interwar period and even the post-modernism of the early twenty-first century.

Italy's artists had long been in the forefront of those working for their country's unification, but the completion of the unification process with the conquest of Rome in 1870 brought with it a period of intellectual anxiety and uncertainty in the new nation. No longer a fragmented collection of provincial states, Italy now had to compare itself with mighty neighbors such as France and Germany. This situation rendered the country both more open to the latest trends in those nations, especially in the area of music, but also raised doubts about its own ability to compete despite its glorious cultural heritage. It was under these circumstances that the now fifty-seven-year-old Giuseppe Verdi took up the task of defending what he saw as the defining features of Italian opera, the centrality of the voice and of melody, against influences from abroad. Yet in his last three works, Aida (Cairo, 1871), Otello (Milan, 1887), and Falstaff (Milan, 1893), Verdi's style developed in a direction also found in French and German opera of the time. Thus while voice and melody still may be primary, in Aida Verdi moved away from traditional aria form, and in Otello the recitative/aria distinction has begun to blur, only to disappear altogether in Falstaff, which is almost numberless. There is also a brilliance of orchestration and a harmonic complexity in these last works not present in the middle-period operas. While Verdi publicly avowed his admiration for Wagner, whose compositions began to be performed in Italy in the 1870s, it would probably be wrong to attribute these changes in the late Verdi to Wagnerian or any other influence. Rather, they seem to flow from Verdi's own artistic growth—which of course involved his study of the works of other contemporaries—once freed by financial success from the constraints of the old Italian opera industry with its pressures to produce one or more new pieces per year.

From the 1880s the publishers who increasingly dominated theatrical life in Italy searched for a successor to the aging Verdi. In the early 1890s it seemed as if they had found two contenders in the persons of Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945), the composer of the wildly popular short opera Cavalleria rusticana (Rome, 1890; Rustic chivalry), and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1858–1919), whose I pagliacci (Milan, 1892; The clowns) was equally successful. While these two works, eternally yoked together, have never left the repertory, none of Mascagni or Leoncavallo's other operas made a lasting impression. The long-sought heir to the three-centuries-old Italian opera tradition turned out to be Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), as the publisher Giulio Ricordi correctly realized. After his breakthrough with Manon Lescaut (Turin, 1893), Puccini next wrote three operas that have never lost their box office appeal: La Bohème (Turin, 1896; Bohemian life), Tosca (Rome, 1900) and Madama Butterfly (Milan, 1904). The works of all three composers are often characterized as examples of verismo (naturalism or realism) in music because of their gritty depiction of everyday life, but a more convincing common denominator is the emotionally overwrought atmosphere in all of them. Puccini developed further Massenet's techniques of expressing conversation lyrically, but his endless melody is punctuated by powerful, passionate outbursts in the form of loosely structured arias and duets. Puccini also employed a Wagner-sized orchestra to turn up the emotional volume yet further by the theatrically timed reiteration of snatches from numbers heard earlier in the work. His self-avowed goal was to produce a direct and immediate effect on the audience, and he does so by drawing on all of the tools available to a turn-of-the-century composer. This primacy of effect was in a certain sense necessary both because opera audiences were becoming less elite and because musical theater was forced increasingly to compete with other leisure time activities that demanded lower levels of concentration. Yet as the fate of opera during the interwar period across Europe would show, this art form would never be able to compete with the cinema on its own terms, despite Puccini's best efforts.

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