Italian opera is both the
art of opera in Italy
and opera in
the Italian language. Opera
was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has
continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until
the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by
foreign composers, including
Handel,
Gluck and
Mozart. Works by
native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such
as
Rossini,
Bellini,
Donizetti,
Verdi and
Puccini, are amongst the most famous operas ever
written and today are performed in opera houses across the
world.
Origins
The 17th century
Florence and Mantua
The music of
Dafne is now lost.
The first opera for
which music has survived was performed in 1600 at the wedding of
Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici at the Pitti Palace in
Florence
. The
opera,
Euridice, with a
libretto
by Rinuccini, set to music by Peri and
Giulio Caccini, recounted the story of
Orpheus and Eurydice. The style of singing favored by Peri and
Caccini was a heightened form of natural speech, dramatic
recitative supported by instrumental string music. Recitative thus
preceded the development of arias, though it soon became the custom
to include separate songs and instrumental interludes during
periods when voices were silent. Both
Dafne and
Euridice also included choruses commenting on the action
at the end of each act in the manner of Greek tragedy.
The theme of Orpheus,
the demi-god of music, was understandably popular and attracted
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643)
who wrote his first opera, La Favola
d'Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus), in 1607 for the court of
Mantua
.
Monteverdi insisted on a strong relationship between the words and
music.
When Orfeo was performed in Mantua, an
orchestra of 38 instruments, numerous choruses and recitatives were
used to make a lively drama. It was a far more ambitious
version than those previously performed — more opulent, more varied
in recitatives, more exotic in scenery — with stronger musical
climaxes which allowed the full scope for the virtuosity of the
singers. Opera had revealed its first stage of maturity in the
hands of Monteverdi.
Opera in Rome
Within a few decades opera had spread throughout Italy.
In
Rome
, it found an advocate in the prelate and librettist
Giulio Rospigliosi (later Pope
Clement IX). Rospigliosi's patrons were the Barberini.
Venice: commercial opera
Opera took
an important new direction when it reached the republic of Venice
. It
was here that the first public opera house, the Teatro di San
Cassiano, was opened in 1637 by Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco
Manelli. Its success moved opera away from aristocratic patronage
and into the commercial world. In Venice, musical drama was no
longer aimed at an elite of aristocrats and intellectuals and
acquired the character of entertainment. Soon many other opera
houses had sprung up in the city, performing works for a paying
public during the
Carnival
season. The opera houses employed a very small orchestra to save
money. A large part of their budget was spent on attracting the
star singers of the day; this was the beginning of the reign of the
castrato and the
prima donna (leading lady).
The chief composer of Venetian opera was Monteverdi, who had moved
to the republic from Mantua in 1613. He wrote three works for the
public theatres:
Il
ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640),
Le nozze d'Enea con
Lavinia (1641, now lost) and, most famously,
L'incoronazione di Poppea
(1642). The subjects of the new operas by Monteverdi and others
were generally drawn from Roman history or legends about Troy, in
order to celebrate the heroic ideals and noble genealogy of the
Venetian state. However they did not lack for love interest or
comedy. Most of the operas consisted of three acts, unlike the
earlier operas which normally had five. The bulk of the
versification was still recitative, however at moments of great
dramatic tension there were often
arioso
passages known as
arie cavate. Under Monteverdi's
followers, the distinction between the recitative and the aria
became more marked and conventionalised. This is evident in the
style of the two most successful composers of the next generation:
Francesco Cavalli and
Antonio Cesti.
The spread of opera abroad
In
Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth a tradition of operatic production began in
Warsaw
in 1628, with a performance of Galatea
(composer uncertain), the first Italian opera produced outside
Italy. Shortly after this performance, the court produced
Francesca Caccini's opera
La liberazione di
Ruggiero dall'isola d’Alcina, which she had written for
Prince
Władysław Vasa
three years earlier when he was in Italy. Another first, this is
the earliest surviving opera written by a woman.
Gli amori di
Aci e Galatea by Santi Orlandi was also performed in 1628.
When Władysław was king (as Władysław IV) he oversaw the production
of at least ten operas during the late 1630s and 1640s, making
Warsaw a center of the art. The composers of these operas are not
known: they may have been Poles working under Marco Scacchi in the
royal chapel, or they may have been among the Italians imported by
Władysław. A
dramma per
musica (as serous Italian opera was known at the time)
entitled
Giuditta, based on the Biblical story of
Judith, was performed in 1635. The composer was
probably Virgilio Puccitelli.
Cavalli's operas were performed throughout Italy by touring
companies with tremendous success. In fact, his
Giasone was the most popular opera of the 17th
century, though some critics were appalled at its mixture of
tragedy and farce. Cavalli's fame spread throughout Europe. One of
his specialties was giving his heroines "ground bass laments".
These were mournful arias sung over a descending bass line and they
had a great influence on
Henry
Purcell, whose "When I am laid in earth" from
Dido and Aeneas is probably the most
celebrated example of the form. Cavalli's reputation caused
Cardinal Mazarin to invite him to
France in 1660 to compose an opera for
King Louis XIV's wedding to Maria Teresa of
Spain. Italian opera had already been performed in France in the
1640s to a mixed reception and Cavalli's foreign expedition ended
in disaster. French audiences did not respond well to the revival
of
Xerse (1660) and the specially composed
Ercole amante (1662), preferring the
ballets that had been inserted between the acts by a Florentine
composer,
Jean-Baptiste Lully,
and Cavalli swore never to compose another opera.
Cesti was
more fortunate when he was asked to write an opera for the Habsburg court in Vienna
in
1668. Il pomo d'oro
was so grandiose that the performance had to be spread over two
days. It was a tremendous success and marked the beginning of
Italian operatic dominance north of the Alps. In the late 17th
century, German and English composers tried to establish their own
native traditions but by the early 1700s they had given ground to
imported Italian opera, which became the international style in the
hands of composers such as
Handel. Only
France resisted (and her operatic tradition had been founded by the
Italian Lully). This set the pattern until well into the 19th
century: the Italian tradition was the international one and its
leading exponents (e.g. Handel, Gluck and Mozart) were often not
natives of Italy. Composers who wanted to develop their own
national forms of opera generally had to fight against Italian
opera. Thus, in the early 19th century, both
Carl Maria von Weber in Germany and
Hector Berlioz in France felt they
had to challenge the enormous influence of the Italian
Rossini.
The 18th century
Opera seria
By the end of the 17th century some critics believed that a new,
more elevated form of opera was necessary. Their ideas would give
birth to a genre,
opera seria (literally
"serious opera"), which would become dominant in Italy and much of
the rest of Europe until the late 1700s. The influence of this new
attitude can be seen in the works of the composers
Carlo Francesco Pollarolo and the
enormously prolific
Alessandro
Scarlatti.
During the eighteenth century artistic and cultural life in Italy
was heavily influenced by the aesthetic and poetic ideals of the
members of the
Accademia
dell'Arcadia. The Arcadian poets introduced many changes to
serious music drama in Italian, including:
- the simplification of the plot
- the removal of comic elements
- the reduction of the number of arias
- a predilection for plots drawn from ancient Classical or modern
French tragedy, in which the values of loyalty, friendship and
virtue were extolled and the absolute power of the sovereign was
celebrated
By far the most successful librettist of the era was
Pietro Metastasio and he maintained his
prestige well into the 19th century. He belonged to the Arcadian
Academy and was firmly in line with its theories. A libretto by
Metastasio was often set by twenty or thirty different composers
and audiences came to know the words of his dramas by heart.
Comic opera
In the 1600s comic operas were produced only occasionally and no
stable tradition was established.
Only in the early years of the 18th
century was the comic genre of opera
buffa born in Naples
and it began
to spread throughout Italy after 1730.
Opera buffa was distinguished from opera seria by numerous
characteristics:
- the importance given to stage action and the consequent need
for the music to follow the changes of the drama, emphasising the
expressiveness of the words
- the choice of singers who were also excellent actors able to
perform the drama convincingly
- a reduction in the use of scenery and stage machinery and in
the number of orchestral players
- the use of a small cast of characters (at least in the short
form of comic opera known as the intermezzo) and simple plots, a good example
being Pergolesi's
La serva padrona
- libretti inspired by commedia
dell'arte, with realistic subjects, colloquial language and
slang expressions
- as far as singing was concerned: the complete rejection of
vocal virtuosity; a tendency to an incorrect pronunciation of the
words; the frequent presence of rhythmic and melodic tics; the use
of onomatopoiea and interjections.
In the second half of the 18th century comic opera owed its success
to the collaboration between the playwright
Carlo Goldoni and the composer
Baldassare Galuppi. Thanks to Galuppi,
comic opera acquired much more dignity than it had during the days
of the intermezzo. Operas were now divided into two or three acts,
creating libretti for works of a substantially greater length,
which differed significantly from those of the early 18th century
in the complexity of their plots and the psychology of their
characters. These now included some serious figures instead of
exaggerated caricatures and the operas had plots which focussed on
the conflict between the social classes as well as including
self-referential ideas. Goldoni and Galuppi's most famous work
together is probably
Il
filosofo di campagna (1754).
The collaboration between Goldoni and another famous composer
Niccolò Piccinni produced
another new genre:
opera semiseria.
This had two
buffo characters, two nobles and two "in
between" characters.
The one-act
farsa had a significant influence
on the development of comic opera. This was a type of musical drama
initially considered as a condensed version of a longer comic
opera, but over time it became a genre in its own right. It was
characterised by: vocal virtuosity; a more refined use of the
orchestra; the great importance given to the production; the
presence of misunderstandings and surprises in the course of the
drama.
Gluck's reforms
Opera seria had its weaknesses and
critics; a 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 (1755) 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 (both instrumental
and vocal), ballet, and staging—must be subservient to the
overriding drama. Several composers of the period, including
Niccolò 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.
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 (say) 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
Così fan
tutte,
The Marriage
of Figaro, and
Don
Giovanni (in collaboration with
Lorenzo Da Ponte) 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.
Romantic period
Romantic opera, which placed emphasis on the imagination and the
emotions began to appear in the early 19th century, and because of
its arias and music, gave more dimension to the extreme emotions
which typified the theater of that era. In addition, it is said
that fine music often excused glaring faults in character drawing
and plot lines.
Gioacchino
Rossini (1792-1868) initiated the Romantic period. His first
success was an "opera buffa" (comic opera),
La Cambiale di
Matrimonio (1810). His reputation still survives today through
his
Barber of Seville, and
La Cenerentola. But he
also wrote serious opera,
Otello (1816) and
Guilliame
Tell (1829).
Rossini's successors in the Italian
bel canto were
Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35),
Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) and
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). It was
Verdi who transformed the whole nature of operatic writing during
the course of his long career. His first great successful opera,
Nabucco (1842), caught the public fancy because of the
driving vigour of its music and its great choruses.
Va,
pensiero, one of the chorus renditions, was interpreted and
gave advantageous meaning to the struggle for Italian independence
and to unify Italy.
After
Nabucco, Verdi based his operas on patriotic themes
and many of the standard romantic sources:
Victor Hugo (
Ernani, 1844);
Byron (
Il Duo
Foscari, 1844); and
Shakespeare
(
Macbeth, 1847). Verdi was experimenting with musical and
dramatic forms, attempting to discover things which only opera
could do. In 1877, he created
Otello which completely
replaced Rossini's opera, and which is described by critics as the
finest of Italian romantic operas with the traditional components:
the solo arias, the duets and the choruses fully integrated into
the melodic and dramatic flow.
Verdi's last opera,
Falstaff (1893), broke free of
conventional form altogether and finds music which follows quick
flowing simple words and because of its respect for the pattern of
ordinary speech, it created a threshold for a new operatic era in
which speech patterns are paramount.
Opera had become a marriage of the arts, a musical drama, full of
glorious song, costume, orchestral music and pageantry; sometimes,
without the aid of a plausible story. From its conception during
the baroque period to the maturity of the romantic period, it was
the medium through which tales and myths were revisited, history
was retold and imagination was stimulated. The strength of it fell
into a more violent era for opera:
verismo.
Contemporary period
Some of the greatest Italian operas of the twentieth century were
written by
Giacomo Puccini (1858 –
1924). These include
Manon
Lescaut,
La bohème,
Tosca, and
Madama Butterfly,
Turandot and
La
rondine, the last two being left unfinished. In 2002
Luciano Berio attempted a completion
of
Turandot, and in 1994
Lorenzo Ferrero completed the orchestration
of the third version of
La
rondine.
- : Rimbaud, ou le fils du soleil (1978) Quasi un
melodramma in three acts
- : Marilyn (1979) Scenes from the 1950s in two
acts
- : La figlia del mago (1981) Giocodramma melodioso in
two acts
- : Mare nostro (1985) Comic opera in two acts
- : Night (1985) Opera in one act
- : Salvatore Giuliano (1986) Opera in one act
- : Charlotte Corday (1989) Opera in three acts
- : Le bleu-blanc-rouge et le noir (1989) Marionette
opera
- : La nascita di Orfeo (1996) Musical action in one
act
- : La conquista (2005) Opera in two acts
- : Le piccole storie - ai margini delle guerre (2007)
Chamber opera in one act
- : Ulisse (1960 – 1968, Ulysses)
- : Il Prigioniero (1944 – 1948, The
Prisoner).
- Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947- ) wrote several operas, including
Luci mie traditrici
- Sylvano Bussotti (b. 1931- ) has a prolific work history
(Le Racine, pianobar pour Phèdre,
Nympheo, Bozzetto siciliano, et al.).
Sources
- The New Penguin Opera Guide, ed. Amanda Holden (2001),
1142 pages, ISBN 0-140-51475-9
- The Viking Opera Guide (1994), 1,328 pages, ISBN
0-670-81292-7
- The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger
Parker (1994)
- The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and
Ewan West (1992), 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5
- Opera, the Rough Guide, by Matthew Boyden et al.
(1997), 672 pages, ISBN 1-85828-138-5
- Opera: A Concise History, by Leslie Orrey and Rodney
Milne, World of Art, Thames & Hudson
- Dr. Anthony A. Abruzzese of the PIRANDELLO LYCEUM Institute of
Italian American Studies, Research and Cultural Dissemination.
See also
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