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France proved particularly welcoming, and the court of Louis XIV brokered a productive marriage between the new Italian ways and its own existing tradition of great, dance-based spectacles. Dance was the second language of the French, and, along with a general aggrandisement of scale, it became their chief gift to the operatic genre. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the Italian-born chief composer to Louis, filled his opera scores with ballets that look and sound delightful but do nothing for the sense of drama. So did his successor, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), who worked with Voltaire and specialised in absurdly extravagant sound-and-vision spectacles at Versailles and the Palais-Royale that no doubt played their part in the ultimate downfall of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the cultural reaction to these over-opulent indulgences was the development of opéra comique: lighter, shorter, simpler, with a spoken text to link the arias rather than sung recitative.
England was slower to seize on the Italians, and generally content with its own version of the French dance-spectacle – the courtly masque, whose storyline, usually allegorical, was no more than a vague excuse for ceremonially scenic splendour. But Charles II’s years in exile had exposed him to the magnificence of what was happening at Versailles and he was keen to have something of the sort back home, albeit more modestly funded. John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682) was a development of the masque tradition that came close to opera. But England had nothing that could be called the real thing until Henry Purcell (1659–95) wrote his French-influenced (with lots of dancing) Dido and Aeneas (1689) for a girl’s school in Chelsea. The strange thing is that having established this landmark, he took it no further and reverted to the form of writing known as semi-opera, spoken drama with musical interludes which, however substantial, is still essentially decorative and looks back to the old ways of the masque.
Germany, too, was slow to rise to the Italian bait. It imported Italian musicians who set up opera houses, but the basis of its indigenous music-making throughout the 17th century was religious and instrumental, with a new type of popular, comic speech and song mix known as Singspiel making an appearance around 1700. Thereafter, of course, the lure of Italy proved as strong in German-speaking countries as anywhere else; and it was to Italy that Georg Frideric Händel (1685–1759) travelled as a young man to learn his craft as a composer for the theatre.
The interesting thing is that he didn’t then go back to Germany to practice it (well, not for long). He moved to London where, in 1711, when he took the town by storm with Rinaldo, the otherwise thriving musical life of the capital had witnessed very little Italian opera. Handel effectively created his own market, and within a short space of time it was so buoyant that London could truly be described as one of Europe’s leading opera centres – a magnet for the greatest singers of the Baroque stage who came, conquered and ruled the whole process of opera production from start to finish.
THE STARS OF THE BAROQUE
It was in the 18th century that the phenomenon of star singers travelling throughout Europe in pursuit of massive fees first materialised. They tended to be Italian, ensuring that opera continued to be written and sung in their native language, even when it was being performed in England, Germany or Austria. And by now they included women in prominent roles, although the true superstars continued to be the castrati, whose abnormally high voices in roles that designated them great heroes or great lovers contributed to the pantomime-like gender anarchy of Baroque sung theatre. As men had once played women’s roles, now women frequently played men. And the element of the surreal in all this was heightened by the way that standard-form Baroque opera presented Classical subjects in a bizarre synthesis of ancient and modern dress. Puffed breeches, crinolines and breastplates, plus a lot of ostrich feathers, were the uniform. But although the genre was called opera seria – meaning ‘serious’ – and usually involved stories of chivalric duty and high moral tone, it had no choice but to make allowances for occasional elements of comedy.
THE CONVENTIONS OF OPERA SERIA
As the singers literally called the tune in Baroque opera, its ultimate function was to flatter them with vehicles for vocal display; and the vehicles were solo arias, strung together one after another in a way that turned the whole thing into a costumed concert. Each character (there were usually six) had a specified number of arias according to his status in the piece. Each aria was meant to illustrate a particular temperament – anger, sorrow, jealously, delirium – as a calling card for the singer’s sensitivity to that emotion. An aria came in three sections: part A, part B, and an embellished repeat da capo (‘from the top’) of part A. At the end of the aria the singer left the stage, to signify that his concert-in-miniature was over and to encourage rapturous applause. The tortuous absurdity and length of opera seria plots was largely caused by the requirement to accommodate these endless monologues-with-exit.
Otherwise, the conventions also took in freer arioso singing that was melodic but without the set-piece formal stature of an aria. The linking recitative came in two forms: secco (dry), with minimal accompaniment, and accompagnato, with more instruments and fuller texture. Ensembles and choruses were rarely used. For the most part, opera seria only gives you one voice at a time.
However, back in Italy not everything was seria. The ever-expanding lifelines of opera had spread from Venice to Naples, and in both cities a new kind of comic theatre emerged in the early 1700s in the form of intermezzi, which, like the old Florentine intermedi, were originally filler-pieces that played between the acts of larger works. Over time they had come to acquire an independent existence as artisan comedy (commedia dell’arte), featuring stock, low-life characters and situations. Refined into crafted opera by writers like Goldoni or composers like Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36), they established a looser kind of writing that wasn’t so focused on the virtuosity of individuals and accordingly took more interest in developing ensemble style. Because of its grounding in earthy humour, it became known as opera buffa, and in its genial way it was on the attack.
REFORM
In fact, the excesses of opera seria and the singers who performed it prompted counterattacks in many quarters. In England they came with ridicule, through parody pieces like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In German-speaking countries the response was more earnest: a considered call for reform. The most celebrated reformer was Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) who, with his librettist Calzabigi, published a manifesto for the cleaning up of operatic malpractice and propagandised the ideal of ‘beautiful simplicity’. No more over-decorated da capo arias. No more deadening rules to govern how a score must be constructed. Just a broad intention towards elegance and modesty.
Between them, Gluck and the Italian intermezzi shifted opera’s goalposts at a crucial time, because around the corner, ready to exploit the consequences, was a youthful genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–91)
Making an early start in opera, at the age of twelve, Mozart understandably began to write according to the conventions of opera seria, complete with all their formal requirements and high tone. But he soon broke free into a less prescribed world, coloured generally by comedy and infinitely more than an embellished string of arias. The list of everything he brought to opera would be long and headed, no doubt, by his matchless gift for melody. But of hardly less significance was a dramatic energy and intelligence that rarely failed him. He created characters who lived and breathed, whose actions were dictated not by artificial rules but by the natural consequences of their situation. They are truly human (for the most part) and they truly interact, with vocal lines that interweave and build into astonishing ensembles. It’s still ‘number’ opera, capable of analysis in terms of arias, recitatives, choruses and so on, but the numbers often merge, accumulating into long, near-seamless tracts of music like the massive finale to Act II of Le Nozze di Figaro, which begins about a third of the way into the Act and just rolls on – brilliantly – with barely a pause for breath.
The genius of Mozart is essentially comic, indebted to the tradition of Italian opera buffa, and most of his mature stage works explore some aspect of comedy, from the knockabout humour of Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the ideological pantomime of Die Zauberflöte. Even Don Giovanni is a comedy of sorts, described by the author as a ‘dramma giocosa’. But Mozartian high spirits marked an end rather than a beginning in the history of Austro-German opera, not to say the whole history of Europe, because Mozart’s death coincided with the French Revolution.
ROMANTIC IDEALISM
The French Revolution (1789–99) fed a new and very serious Romantic idealism into Western European consciousness. In the new France, opera was uncomfortably associated with the old order and had to reinvent itself in radical, politically high-moral terms to survive. Rescue operas involving the righting of wrongs and epic libertarian themes became the Paris fashion, championed by Cherubini and Spontini, and the fashion spread to Germany, where Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio, adopted a politically-driven rescue plot already set to music by the Frenchman Pierre Gaveau.
But by then, the centre of gravity in the opera world had shifted once again to Italy. The great Austro-German composers of the 19th century looked to the concert hall rather than the opera house, and those that did dream of operatic success, like Schubert, generally failed. The major exception was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), whose fireside horror-story Der Freischütz became the definitive statement of German Romanticism – and, like Fidelio, it was written to be sung in German.
The one supreme reason for Italy’s return to the top of the operatic pile in the early 19th century was Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), whose fame through Europe was so all-embracing that it left little room for any would-be German rivals to raise their heads. Rossini was not untouched by Romanticism, and much of his work sets grand, quasi-historical stories adapted from authors like Sir Walter Scott, whose novels had a fervent international following. But the Rossini operas that survive in repertory and are deemed his best are comedies; and they exemplify a kind of singing loosely called bel canto. What the term means is a matter of debate, but it implies the decorative virtuosity of coloratura singing, highly embellished with (in Rossini’s case) a steely glitter that tends to prize exquisite technique above spontaneous emotion.
Of Rossini’s two heirs and successors, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) is arguably the closest in spirit, with a brilliant light-comedic touch balanced by moments of pathos, most obviously the famous (and fashionable at the time) Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti set derangement so effectively that his own subsequent descent into madness was poetically appropriate.
But the master of bel canto emotion was the other heir, Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), whose truly passionate writing found a middle way between virtuosity and expressivity that would influence Verdi and Puccini decades later. In a short life he managed to produce a body of powerful work (no comedies) that climaxed in Norma, and their truncated potential for development make him one of the great what-ifs of music history. Had he only lived to fifty, Italian opera might have taken a very different direction.
GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813–1901)
As it was, the mantle passed to a composer who emerged as the supreme figure in Italian opera of the later 19th century and with no rival of quite such exalted stature anywhere in the world apart from Richard Wagner. He was Giuseppe Verdi. Unlike Wagner, Verdi was not a theorist, a proselytiser or a visionary. During the 1840s his operas were read as a call to battle for the unification of Italy, but beyond that he did not write to advance radical ideas or debate abstract issues. He was a practical, straightforward man of the theatre whose work was direct and assertive, accepting sometimes crudely improbable plots for the sake of the dramatic situations they set up, but otherwise emotionally true and with a predilection for certain themes that related to his own life and about which he spoke from the heart. One of them was father-child relationships, and it’s no coincidence that early in his life he lost two children and a wife in traumatically rapid succession.
The breadth and compass of Verdi’s work is so great that it resists summary, but in the broadest terms he introduced a new dimension to the catalogue of opera voices. Vivid, strong and sometimes as rough-edged as they are eloquent, his characters fill the ever-larger space that 19th-century opera came to expect as appropriate for its activities, following the irresistible lead of what was happening in Paris.
FRENCH OPERA
Nineteenth-century opera may have been dominated by Italian composers, but the Paris Opéra still somehow remained the Gold Standard venue from which universal trends and fashions flowed and to which everyone aspired. Wagner’s early failure to be taken up by Paris was a humiliation he never forgot, generating a lifelong grievance against the man who was the undisputed monarch of the city’s operatic life – Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Meyerbeer was an expatriate German who mastered the art of monumental spectacle beloved by Paris audiences and whose works, with their Cecil B. de Mille expansiveness and crowd-pleasing ballet sequences, defined the term ‘grand opera’. They set the tone, and the scale, of French stage music for decades to come, and they played their part in encouraging the massive enterprise that was Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz (1803–69), although Berlioz raised the artistic stakes of grand opera with elements of idealism and subtlety that were beyond Meyerbeer. Above all, Berlioz was a maverick, always his own man and never in thrall to fashion. When he wrote big, it was to please himself.
More fashion-conscious figures on the Paris circuit were Charles Gounod (1818–93), whose lighter, easier lyricism won him the fame and fortune that eluded Berlioz, and Jules Massenet (1842–1912), of whom much the same could be said. But the outstanding French opera composer of the later 19th century was Georges Bizet (1838–75) who only managed to produce one work of unarguable greatness during his brief life (another what-if?) but made it count. With a storyline of unadorned low-life realism, Carmen effectively invented verismo a decade-and-a-half before the Italians got there. In that sense it was innovative. But its opéra comique mix of arias and spoken dialogue was actually quite unsophisticated if you compare it with the truly epoch-making work that was emerging at the same time, across the German border.
RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83)
Born in the same year as Verdi, Wagner was the other supreme figure of 19th-century opera, and in many ways the magnitude of his achievement could be explained as a reaction against the two-and-a-half bad years he spent failing to establish himself as a young composer in Paris. French opera in general, and Meyerbeer in particular, became targets for attack, examples of the way opera had allowed itself to be debased from high art into entertainment. Wagner was to be a Messianic saviour, restoring the lyric stage to the status he imagined it once enjoyed as a temple of enlightenment – ennobling, spiritual, cleansed of all impurity – and by a stroke of luck it was during those bad years in Paris that he found solace in the German medieval myths that would prove the literary inspiration for his cultural campaign. Almost all the mature Wagner operas are based on these ancient legends, which Wagner advocated as ideal material for operatic treatment on the grounds of their timeless relevance and universality.
However ridiculous (and dangerous) some of his ideas turned out to be, Wagner was a truly revolutionary artist who changed not only the ideology of opera but its form and content. He once and for all got rid of the enduring operatic convention of ‘number’ opera, with the score broken down into units of aria, recitative, chorus and the like. Instead, his music was ‘through-composed’ in long, unbroken lines, with the vocal parts declaimed in a manner halfway between the decorative enlargement of aria and the direct narration of recitative. He set his own texts in a comparatively straightforward way, one note to a syllable. But his melodies were highly chromatic, weaving through myriad sharps and flats that undermine any clear sense of belonging to a specific key. He also set his singers the challenge of singing for long periods of time against a huge orchestra. And it’s in Wagner that the orchestra really comes into its own as a distinctive force to be reckoned among the diverse elements that feed into opera. In fact, it all but takes over, with the voices sometimes reduced to an accompaniment for what’s happening in the pit, rather than the more conventional reverse arrangement.
NATIONALISM
Thanks to Wagner, German was at last established as a major operatic language that could hold its own against Italian, and he spawned several generations of German disciples, starting with Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921), who developed and refined the process of writing stage works for their own native tongue.
But there were sporadic outbreaks of nationalistically-inspired anti-Italianism in other parts of 19th-century Europe. Spain was an example, where a tradition of folksy light opera saturated with local colour called zarzuela was gathering ground and would, at the turn of the century, prove influential on Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). But the most significant nationalist activity was taking place in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) and Antonin Dvořák (1841–1904) took the lead in establishing a distinctive, folk-generated style of writing for the stage. What they began found its ultimate expression in the later, 20th-century works of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose skeletal, spikily compressed approach to operatic story-telling has come to be recognised as one of the most significant contributions to the modern history of music.
The chief centre of 19th-century nationalism, though, was Russia, a land which had only recently begun to develop a distinctive musical culture after years of French and Italian domination. The father of Russian nationalism was Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), who set an enduring precedent for a grandly ceremonial kind of opera that mixed history with fairy tales but wasn’t terribly well crafted in terms of its structure. These were very early days for Russian music. Composition was a semi-amateur activity, and it remained so for the generation who came after Glinka, notably a group known as the ‘Mighty Handful’. The group’s leading member, Modest Musorgsky (1839–81), left mighty works of startling but rough-edged originality that his more craftsmanlike compatriot Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) subsequently tied up. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) completed the process through which Russian opera reached mature refinement, with works which tend to be considered more Western European than those of the ‘Mighty Handful’, although it would be more accurate merely to describe them as less inward-looking in their Russian-ness.
THE 20TH CENTURY
Summaries of 20th-century music are invariably messier than those of earlier periods, because composers fit less easily into territorial groups or ideological movements. They tend to make their claims as individuals and resist categorisation. But the century was ushered in by one conspicuously flourishing movement in Italy known as verismo, a school of low-life realism whose first champions, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), found instant fame with their respective mini-masterpieces Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, but were soon eclipsed in stature by a fellow Italian.
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) emerged as the next great Italian composer after Verdi. In the history of music he doesn’t stand as a notable innovator, and his appeal is far from intellectual, but the strength and passion of his melodies, the quality of his orchestral writing, and his sheer theatricality (in both the best and worst senses of the word) have guaranteed his domination of the modern opera repertoire. And if Puccini doesn’t always ‘feel’ like a 20th-century composer, remember that the majority of his mature scores, from Madama Butterfly onwards, came after 1900. However, the other dominant figure of early 20th-century opera was a German.
Not to be confused with the Viennese king of operetta (no relation), Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was the successor to Wagner in much the same way that Puccini was to Verdi, adopting the master’s language, adjusting its parameters and, in the process, lightening its intensity. A young radical who, in archetypal fashion, grew into a middle-aged conservative, Strauss’ early works set out to shock the bourgeoisie, his later ones to charm them. But the Wagnerian inheritance was constant in the prominence and weight he alotted to the orchestra, and in the declamatory, through-flowing style of his writing for the voice, which commonly requires the power and stamina of Wagner’s helden singers. Through Strauss, a style of writing was fixed whose consquences can be heard today in the sometimes tough, politically driven but also sometimes romantic operas of Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) and the massively neo-Wagnerian project of Karlheinz Stockhausen (born 1928) to write an apocalyptic cycle of seven music dramas – one for each day of the week.
The excesses of Wagner and Strauss, though, led to an inevitable reaction away from opulent, well-upholstered writing on a grand scale and towards smaller, leaner alternatives. A changing world made the economics of large-scale opera harder to sustain, and while some German figures like the young Erich Korngold (1897–1957) clung to large forces and traditional trappings, more forward-looking ones like Kurt Weill (1900–50) were scaling down and rethinking the way in which opera addresses its audience. Weill’s collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht pioneered a new kind of music theatre, designed to be popular (with cabaret-style numbers), stripped of the top Cs and tiaras glamour of the opera house. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) was also concerned with usefulness and, specifically, the relationship between the artist and society, although he gave operatic expression to it in a decidedly less radical manner than Weill and Brecht.
Meanwhile, the so-called Second Viennese School composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Alban Berg (1885–1935) had taken the Wagnerian message to its logical conclusions and beyond, with music that initially extended Wagner’s exotically free harmonies to a point where key signatures became almost irrelevant, and subsequently did away with any allegiance to a key centre altogether. The resulting serial or twelve-tone music proved more viable for instrumentalists than for singers, and it hasn’t found much of a following on the opera stage, even though Berg left two masterful scores of lasting importance in the modern history of the genre.
Before we leave the post-Wagnerian empire, mention has to be made of Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whose ethereally vague Pelléas et Mélisande is like Wagner in a whisper – perfumed, rich in symbolism, but without the bombast. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the one opera of Béla Bartók (1881–1945), is another heavily symbolic score in serious debt to the master of Bayreuth.
But the Wagnerian ascendency was finally (and ironically) ended by the intervention of one of the master’s most devoted admirers, Adolf Hitler, who single-handedly lost Germany its prime position in the mid-20th-century operatic league. The majority of the significant Austro-German composers went into exile as the Nazis came to power – usually with no choice in the matter – and their general direction was America, where Hindemith, Korngold, Weill and Schoenberg (among others) settled, assimilating with varying degrees of enthusiasm into the culture of their adoptive land and making their own contributions to the American musical melting-pot.