Encyclopedia
Opera is a
dramatic art form, originating in
Italy, in which the emotional content or primary entertainment is conveyed to the audience as much through music, both vocal and instrumental, as it is through the lyrics. From the beginning of the form , there has been contention whether the music is paramount, or the words, a theme that
Richard Strauss took up in his final opera,
Capriccio . Also, dramatic speech in opera is often sung in recitative. By contrast, in
musical theatre, dialogue is spoken and an actor's dramatic performance is generally more important than in opera.
Comparable art forms from various parts of the world, many of them quite ancient in origin, exist and are also sometimes called "opera" by analogy, usually prefaced with an adjective indicating the region. However, other than superficial similarities, these other art forms developed independently from and are completely unrelated to opera but are art forms in their own right rather than mere derivatives of opera.
The drama is presented using the primary elements of
theatre such as scenery,
costumes, and acting. However, the words of the opera, or
libretto, are customarily sung rather than spoken. The
singers are accompanied by a musical ensemble ranging from a small instrumental ensemble to a full symphonic
orchestra.
Besides words and music, opera draws from many other art forms. The visual arts, such as
painting, scenery and
sculpture, are employed to create the visual spectacle on the stage; in the
Baroque "English opera" or
Restoration spectacular, visual arts are especially important, even predominant. Finally,
dancing is often part of an opera performance, particularly in
France. Generally, however, opera is distinguished from other dramatic forms by the importance of song.
History
Origins
The word
opera means "works" in
Italian suggesting that it combines the arts of solo and choral singing, declamation, acting and dancing in a staged spectacle. "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. It was written around 1597, largely under the inspiration of an elite circle of literate
Florentine humanists who gathered as the "Camerata". Significantly,
Dafne was an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, part of the wider revival of antiquity characteristic of the
Renaissance. The members of the Camerata considered that the "chorus" parts of Greek dramas were originally sung, and possibly even the entire text of all roles; opera was thus conceived as a way of "restoring" this situation. "Dafne" is unfortunately lost. A later work by Peri,
Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day.
Italian baroque opera
Opera did not remain confined to court audiences for long; in 1637 the idea of a "season" of publicly-attended operas supported by ticket sales emerged in Venice. Influential 17th century opera composers included Francesco Cavalli and
Claudio Monteverdi whose
Orfeo is the earliest opera still performed today. Monteverdi's later
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is also seen as a very important work of early opera. In these
early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements, sponsored by Venice's Arcadian Academy , but which came to be associated with the poet Pietro Trapassi, called
Metastasio, whose librettos helped crystallize so-called opera seria's moralizing tone. Once the Metastasian ideal had been firmly established, comedy in Baroque-era opera was reserved for what came to be called opera buffa. Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many librettos had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an "opera-within-an-opera." One reason for this was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still less cultured than the nobility, to the public opera houses. These separate plots were almost immediately resurrected in a separately developing tradition that partly derived from the
commedia dell'arte, a long-flourishing improvisitory stage tradition of Italy. Just as intermedi had once been performed in-between the acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of "intermezzi", which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and '20s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria. They became so popular, however, that they were soon being offered as separate productions.
Italian opera set the Baroque standard. Italian
libretti were the norm, even when a German composer like
Handel found himself writing for London audiences. Italian libretti remained dominant in the classical period as well, for example in the operas of
Mozart, who wrote in Vienna near the century's close.
Reform: Gluck, the attack on the Metastasian ideal, and Mozart
Opera seria had its weaknesses and critics, and the taste for embellishment on behalf of the superbly trained singers, and the use of spectacle as a replacement for dramatic purity and unity drew attacks. Francesco Algarotti's
Essay on the Opera proved to be an inspiration for
Christoph Willibald Gluck's reforms. He advocated that
opera seria had to return to basics and that all the various elements -- music , ballet, and staging -- must be subservient to the overriding drama. Several composers of the period, including
Niccolň Jommelli and
Tommaso Traetta, attempted to put these ideals into practice. The first to really succeed and to leave a permanent imprint upon the history of opera, however, was Gluck, who became the first composer whose operas have, throughout the years, retained a permanent place in the standard repertoire. Gluck tried to achieve a "beautiful simplicity". This is illustrated in the first of his "reform" operas,
Orfeo ed Euridice, where vocal lines lacking in the virtuosity of Handel's works are supported by simple harmonies and a notably richer-than-usual orchestral presence throughout.
Gluck's reforms have had resonance throughout operatic history. Weber, Mozart and Wagner, in particular, were influenced by his ideals. Mozart, in many ways Gluck's successor, combined a superb sense of drama, harmony, melody, and counterpoint to write a series of comedies, notably
Cosě fan tutte,
The Marriage of Figaro, and
Don Giovanni which remain among the most-loved, popular and well-known operas today. But Mozart's contribution to
opera seria was more mixed; by his time it was dying away, and in spite of such fine works as
Idomeneo and
La Clemenza di Tito, he would not succeed in bringing the art form back to life again.
Bel canto and Italian patriotism
The bel canto opera movement flourished in the early 19th century and is exemplified by the operas of
Rossini,
Bellini,
Donizetti, Pacini,
Mercadante and many others. Literally "beautiful singing",
bel canto opera derives from the Italian stylistic singing school of the same name. Bel canto lines are typically florid and intricate, requiring supreme agility and pitch control.
This style grew out of earlier florid singing of which numerous examples can be found as early as
Monteverdi. It continued, through contact with composers from the north, up to and beyond the music of
Bach, right through
Mozart and up to
Spohr, whose Faust was performed in England by the Italian Opera company in London as late as 1852.
Following the bel canto era, a more direct, forceful style was rapidly popularized by
Giuseppe Verdi, beginning with his biblical opera
Nabucco. Verdi's writing demanded vocal endurance and strength more than the agility required in bel canto ; his works were also more demanding dramatically, and many listeners prefer to hear his work sung by voices with great expressive quality, even at the sacrifice of beautiful tone. Verdi's operas resonated with the growing spirit of Italian nationalism in the post-
Napoleonic era, and he quickly became an icon of the patriotic movement .
French opera
In rivalry with imported Italian opera productions, a separate French tradition, sung in the
French, was founded by Italian
Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully arrived at court as a dancer and companion for young Louis XIV, that he might practice his Latin by conversing with a native speaker. Despite his foreign origin, he established an Academy of Music and monopolized French opera from 1672; and thus an Italian championed the French style in the struggle for supremacy between the French and Italian operatic styles, which raged in the French press for over a century. Lully's overtures, fluid and disciplined recitatives, danced interludes,
divertissements and orchestral
entr'actes between scenes, set a pattern that Gluck struggled to "reform" almost a century later. The text was as important as the music: royal propaganda was expressed in elaborate allegories, generally with affirmatory endings. Opera in France has continued to include
ballet interludes and feature elaborate scenic machinery, such as in the genre of Grand Opera that helped to define French opera of the Romantic period.
German-language opera
Before the late 18th century, German-language opera was largely a copy of the Italian, although in early-century works of such composers as Reinhard Keiser, the German-speakers achieved a seriousness of tone and grandeur of scale rarely approached in Italy. The above-mentioned
singspiel also flourished at this time, being descended from the school dramas with interpolated songs that the students in Lutheran church-schools often produced.
Mozart's German
Singspiel Die Zauberflöte stands at the head of a German opera tradition that was developed in the 19th century by
Beethoven , Heinrich Marschner,
Weber and eventually
Wagner.
Before Wagner, there had been little all-sung German language opera of any account for several decades. Though very much inspired by the works of Weber, Wagner pioneered a through-composed style, in which recitative and aria blend into one another and are constantly accompanied by the orchestra; this results in a sort of endless melody, which is perpetuated by the avoidance of any clear cadence until moments of great articulation. Wagner also made copious use of the leitmotif, a dramatic device which associates a musical line with each character or idea in the story. Weber had used a similar device earlier, and was hardly the first to do so; in Wagner's work, however, leitmotifs are a main building-block of his scores, rather than mere recurring motifs.
English opera
England's first notable composer working in operatic formats was
John Blow, the composer of
Venus and Adonis, often thought of as the first true English-language opera. Blow's immediate successor was the far more well-known
Henry Purcell. Despite the success of his masterwork
Dido and Aeneas is an opera [i] by the English [i] Baroque [i] composer Henry Purcell [i] ...
, in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, much of Purcell's best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera but instead he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and
masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play. The main characters of the play tend not to be involved in the musical scenes, which means that Purcell was rarely able to develop his characters through song. Despite these hindrances, his aim was to establish serious opera in England, but these hopes ended with Purcell's early death at the age of 36.
Following Purcell, for many years Great Britain was essentially an outpost of Italianate opera. Handel's
opera serias dominated the London operatic stages for decades, and even home-grown composers such as
Thomas Arne wrote using Italian models. This situation continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including
Michael Balfe, except for late
Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas. However, in the 20th century, English opera began to assert more independence with works of
Ralph Vaughn Williams and in particular
Benjamin Britten, who in a series of fine works that remain in standard repertory today revealed an excellent flair for the dramatic and superb musicality. Today composers such as Thomas Adčs continue to export English opera abroad.
Russian opera
Opera was brought to
Russia in the 1730s by the Italian operatic
troupes and soon it became an important part of entertainment for the Russian
Imperial Court and aristocracy. Many foreign composers such as
Baldassare Galuppi,
Giovanni Paisiello,
Giuseppe Sarti, and
Domenico Cimarosa were invited to Russia to compose new operas, mostly in the
Italian language. Simultaneously some domestic musicians like Maksym Berezovsky and
Dmytro Bortniansky were sent abroad to learn to write operas. The first opera written in
Russian was
Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer
Francesco Araja . The development of Russian-language opera was supported by the Russian composers
Vasily Pashkevich,
Yevstigney Fomin and
Alexey Verstovsky.
However, the real birth of
Russian opera came with
Mikhail Glinka and his two great operas
A Life for the Tsar is a "patriotic-heroic tragic opera [i]" in five acts with an epilogue by Mikhail Glinka [i] ...
, and
Ruslan and Lyudmila is a 1820 poem by Aleksandr Pushkin [i] and an opera [i] in five acts based on t ...
. After him in the
19th century in Russia there were written such operatic masterpieces as
Rusalka and
The Stone Guest by
Alexander Dargomyzhsky,
Boris Godunov and
Khovanshchina by
Modest Mussorgsky,
Prince Igor is an opera [i] in four acts with a prologue by Alexander Borodin [i]. ...
by
Alexander Borodin,
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse [i] written by Aleksandr Pushkin [i]. ...
and
The Queen of Spades by
Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and
The Snow Maiden and
Sadko by
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov . These developments mirrored the growth of Russian
nationalism across the artistic spectrum, as part of the more general Slavophilism movement.
In the
20th century the traditions of Russian opera were developed by many composers including
Sergei Rachmaninov in his works
The Miserly Knight and
Franchesca da Rimini,
Igor Stravinsky in
Le rossignol,
Mavra,
Oedipus rex, and
The Rake's Progress,
Sergei Prokofiev in
The Gambler,
The Love for Three Oranges,
The Fiery Angel,
Betrothal in a Monastery, and
War and Peace is an epic novel [i] by Leo Tolstoy [i], first published from 1865 [i] to 1869 [i] in ...
; as well as
Dmitri Shostakovich in
The Nose and
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,
Edison Denisov in
L'écume des jours, and
Alfred Schnittke in
Life With an Idiot, and
Historia von D. Johann Fausten .
Other national operas
Spain also produced its own distinctive form of opera, known as zarzuela, which had two separate flowerings: one in the 17th century, and another beginning in the mid-19th century. During the 18th century, Italian opera was immensely popular in Spain, supplanting the native form.
Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century.
Antonín Dvorák, most famous for Rusalka, wrote 13 operas;
Bedrich Smetana wrote eight ; and
Leo Janácek wrote ten, including Jenufa, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Káta Kabanová.
The key figure of Hungarian national opera in the 19th century was Ferenc Erkel, mostly dealing with historical themes. Among his most often performed operas are
Hunyadi László and
Bánk bán.
Verismo and after
After Wagner, all opera for many decades laboured in his gigantic shadow. Nearly all composers felt they must react or respond to him in some way, and opera in the early 20th century took several paths. One path was the sentimental "realistic" melodramas of verismo operas, a style introduced by
Pietro Mascagni's
Cavalleria Rusticana and
Ruggiero Leoncavallo's
Pagliacci that came virtually to dominate the world's opera stages with such popular operas of
Giacomo Puccini as
La Boheme and
Tosca. Another reaction to Wagner's mythic medievalizing can be seen in the psychological intensity and social commentary of
Richard Strauss .
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, opera has enjoyed tremendous appeal and has been performed around the world. But only a few twentieth-century operas premičred after the first performance of Puccini's
Turandot in 1926 are regularly performed: Strauss's
Arabella and
Capriccio, Berg's
Lulu,
Stravinsky's
The Rake's Progress,
Britten's
Peter Grimes and
Billy Budd and Poulenc's
Dialogues of the Carmelites are among these.
History of operatic styles
Early models and general overview
Traditional opera consists of two modes of singing: recitative, the dialogue and plot-driving passages often sung in a non-melodic style characteristic of opera, and aria, during which the movement of the plot often pauses, with the music becoming more melodic in character and the singer focusing on one or more topics or emotional affects. Short melodic or semi-melodic passages occurring in the midst of what is otherwise recitative are also referred to as
arioso. In the late 19th century, many composers abolished much of the distinction between recitative and aria, writing opera that is essentially presented in a restlessly melodic arioso style throughout. All types of singing in opera are accompanied by musical instruments, though until the late 17th century generally, and persisting until even later in some regions, recitative was accompanied by only the continuo group . During the period 1680 to roughly 1750, when composers often used both methods of recitative accompaniment in the same opera, the continuo-only practice was referred to as "secco" recitative, while orchestral-accompanied recitative was called "accompagnato" or "stromentato." The complexity of orchestral accompaniment to recitative continually tended to become more complex until, in the late 18th century, composers began to write recitativo obbligato at dramatic junctures of opera seria, in which the orchestra has independent passages of a violent or pathetic character, sometimes reflecting musical motifs or the melodies of important arias.
Contemporary, recent, and Modernist trends
Modernism
Perhaps the most obvious stylistic manifestation of modernism in opera is the development of atonality. The move away from traditional tonality in opera had begun with
Wagner, and in particular the
Tristan chord, but after his death no further innovations in style were introduced for a considerable length of time. Composers such as
Richard Strauss,
Puccini, Paul Hindemith and Hans Pfitzner adapted and worked within Wagnerian parameters but did not go very far beyond them.
Operatic Modernism truly began in the operas of two Viennese composers,
Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg, both composers and advocates of atonality and its later development ,
dodecaphony. Schoenberg's early musico-dramatic works, Erwartung and
Die Gluckliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used
Sprechstimme, which he described as: "The voice rising and falling relative to the indicated intervals, and everything being bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where a pause is indicated".
The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu share many of the same characteristics as described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature which perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots. Schoenberg's theories have influenced significant numbers of opera composers ever since, even if they themselves did not compose using his techniques. Composers thus influenced include the Englishman
Benjamin Britten, the German Hans Werner Henze, and the Russian
Dmitri Shostakovich.
However, operatic modernism's use of dodecaphony sparked a backlash among several leading composers. Prominent among the vanguard of these was the Russian
Igor Stravinsky. After composing obviously Modernist music for the
Diaghilev-produced ballets
Petrushka and
The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky turned away from these trends to produce small-scale works that do not fullly qualify as opera, yet certainly contain many operatic elements, including Renard and The Soldier's Tale . In the latter, the actors declaim portions of speech to a specified rhythm over instrumental accompaniment, peculiarly similar to the older German genre of
Melodrama. In the 1920s Stravinsky turned to
Neoclassicism, culminating in his opera-oratorio
Oedipus Rex. When he did compose a full-length opera that was without doubt an opera, in the The Rake's Progress he continued to ignore serialist techniques and wrote an 18th century-style "number" opera, using diatonicism. His resistance to serialism proved to be an inspiration for many other composers.
Other trends
A common trend throughout the 20th Century, in both opera and general orchestral repertoire, is the downsizing of orchestral forces. As patronage of the arts decreases, new works are commissioned and performed with smaller budgets, very often resulting in chamber-sized works, and one act operas. Many of
Benjamin Britten's operas are scored for as few as 13 instrumentalists; Mark Adamo's two-act realization of Little Women is scored for 18 instrumentalists.
Another feature of 20th Century opera is the emergence of contemporary historical operas. The Death of Klinghoffer and Nixon in China by John Adams, and Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie exemplify the dramatisation on stage of events in recent living memory, where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance. Earlier models of opera stuck to more distant history, re-telling contemporary fictional stories , or mythical/legendary stories.
The Metropolitan Opera reports that the average age of its patrons is now 60. Many opera companies, have experienced a similar trend, and opera company websites are replete with attempts to attract a younger audience. This trend is part of the larger trend of greying audiences for classical music since the last decades of the 20th century.
From musicals back towards opera
Also by the late 1930s, some
musicals began to be written with a more operatic structure. These works included complex polyphonic ensembles and reflected musical developments of their times.
Porgy and Bess is an opera [i] with music by George Gershwin [i], libretto [i] by DuBose Heyward [i] ...
, influenced by jazz styles, and
Candide, with its sweeping, lyrical passages and farcical parodies of opera, both opened on Broadway but became accepted as part of the opera repertory.
Show Boat,
West Side Story,
Brigadoon,
Sweeney Todd,
Evita is a musical [i] by Andrew Lloyd Webber [i] and Tim Rice [i]. ...
and others tell dramatic stories through complex music and are now sometimes seen in opera houses. Some rock musicals, beginning with
Tommy and
Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock [i] musical [i] by Andrew Lloyd Webber [i] ...
, have been written with recitative instead of dialogue, or instrumental underscoring, telling their emotional stories predominantly through the music, and are styled
rock operas. Some of these begin with a "concept" album and are later produced on stage and as films.
Development of the idea of "opera repertory"
During the lifetimes of composers up to
Meyerbeer there was no "repertory" of operas. Composers like Bellini and Donizetti were expected to come up with fresh material, season after season, even if they had to cannibalize their own works for material that had not been offered to that city's audience . One common strategy was to imitate the work of other composers, especially when such work had achieved considerable success. The idea of an opera repertory originated with
Richard Wagner, in his
Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
The list of important operas is a guide to current operatic repertory, and also includes works that were ground-breaking in their day.
Operatic voices
Singers and the roles they play are initially classified according to their vocal ranges. Male singers are classified by vocal range as bass,
bass-baritone,
baritone,
tenor and countertenor. Female singers are classified by vocal range as
contralto,
mezzo-soprano and
soprano. Additionally, singers' voices are loosely identified by characteristics other than range, such as timbre or color, vocal quality, agility, power, and tessitura. Thus a soprano may be termed a lyric soprano, coloratura,
soubrette,
spinto, or dramatic soprano; these terms, although not fully describing a singing voice, associate the singer's voice with the roles most suitable to the singer's vocal characteristics. The German Fach system is an especially organized system of classification. A particular singer's voice may change drastically over his or her lifetime, rarely reaching vocal maturity until the third decade, and sometimes not until middle age.
Histories
The following is only intended as a brief overview. For the main articles, see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.
The soprano voice has typically been used throughout operatic history as the voice of choice for the female protagonist of the opera in question. The current emphasis on a wide vocal range was primarily an invention of the Classical period. Before that, the vocal virtuosity, not range, was the priority, with soprano parts rarely extending above a high A , though the castrato
Farinelli was alleged to possess a top F. The contralto register enjoys a only a limited operatic repertoire; hence the saying that contraltos only sing "Witches, bitches, and britches", and in recent years many of the trouser roles from the Baroque era have been assigned to countertenors.
The tenor voice, from the Classical era onwards, has traditionally been assigned the role of male protagonist. Many of the most challenging tenor roles in the repertory were written during the
bel canto era, such as
Donizetti's sequence of 9 Cs above middle C during La fille du régiment. With Wagner came an emphasis on vocal weight for his protagonist roles, the vocal category of which is described by the term
heldentenor. Bass roles have a long history in opera, having been used in
opera seria for comic relief . The bass repertoire is wide and varied, stretching from the
buffo comedy of Leporello in Don Giovanni to the nobility of Wotan in
Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Notes
References
- The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie , 5,448 pages, is the best, and by far the largest, general reference in the English language. ISBN 0-333-73432-7 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5
- The Viking Opera Guide , 1,328 pages, ISBN 0-670812927
- The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and Ewan West , 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5
- Opera, the Rough Guide, by Matthew Boyden et al. , 672 pages, ISBN 1-85828-138-5
- Opera: A Concise History, by Leslie Orrey and Rodney Milne, World of Art, Thames & Hudson
Further reading
- Andersen, H. C., Opera and Evil Kings
- DiGaetani, John Louis, An Invitation to the Opera
- Simon, Henry W. . A Treasury of Grand Opera. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY.
See also
- Fach, the classification of singers, by the range, weight, and color of their voices
- Vocal range
External links
- Articles on ageing audiences
- Season Schedule of Performances at U.S. and Canadian companies provided by Opera America
