Opera

Opera as we know it has its origins in Renaissance Italy. Early composers tried to construct a music drama based on what they thought existed in classical Greece. The first opera was Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1597), which is now lost. The first operatic masterpiece was Monteverdi’s L`Orfeo (1607). Early opera consisted of mostly recitative and was usually based on classical subjects and its usual function was for ceremonial occasions. In the first century of its existence opera in its purest form was located mostly in Italy and its chief composers included Francesco Cavalli (1602 – 1676) and Alessandro Scarlatti (1660 – 1725). Operas composed in other countries tended to be adaptions of local styles of stage production such as the opera-ballets of France or the incidental music for plays as found in Restoration England. In France Lully was the dominant influence in his Alceste (1674) and Atys (1676). In England the opera flame briefly flickered with Boyce`s Venus and Adonis (1683) and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) before it was extinguished again. The eighteenth century saw the domination of Italian opera (although oddly its greatest practitioners were German). The greatest opera composer of the first fifty years was Handel, who unfortunately wrote his greatest stage works for a mostly indifferent audience, the English (they much preferred the oratorio as Handel was to find out). The florid dacapo aria, an integral part of opera seria, reached its apogee by mid century and was responsible in making stars of the likes of Farinelli, Seresino and Bordoni. Thereafter a reaction set in against this type of opera, initiated by the reforms of Gluck (1714 – 1787) who dispensed with the da capo aria and created a more linear pacing of the drama. Late 18th Century opera reached its apotheosis in the mature operas of Mozart, starting with Le nozze di Figaro (1786), they feature a more naturalistic approach to opera seria and they still remain among the most popular operas ever composed. Opera continued to flourish in the 19th Century, developing dual polarities with Italian bel canto opera of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini and the German proto-music dramas of Weber and Marschner. Rossini`s The Barber of Seville (1816) and Weber’s Der Freischutz (1821) clearly demonstrate the divergent national styles which would lead to the stylistically divergent sucesses of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. By the middle of the 19th Century it was Grand Opera which was the predominant operatic genre. It is associated with the grandiosity of the Paris Opera and incorporated casts of hundreds set against vast historical tableauxes, best exemplified in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (. It was partly against the inflated nature of these works that led to Richard Wagner’s development of his so called ‘music dramas’ beginning with Die fliegende Hollander ( and reached its peak with the Ring of the Nibelungen and Tristan und Isolde. Verdi was less interested in lofty concepts but his music was no less immediate, perhaps more so. He caught the popular Italian imagination with his unforgettable melodies and a series of masterpieces that ranged from proto-verismo (La traviata), grand opera (Aida, Don Carlos) to Verdi’s own version of music drama in his last two operas Otello and Falstaff. In the last decade of the century the successors to Wagner and Verdi emerged in the work of Richard Strauss and Puccini. The twentieth century was an uncertain time for opera. The first half was as rich as any of the preceding eras that included the late romantic operas of Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier), the verismo operas of Puccini (Madam Butterfly, Tosca), the impressionism of Debussy`s Pelleas et Melisande and finally the atonal Wozzeck of Alban Berg. However after the Second World War a change in social attitudes saw a dwindling interest in opera and it became viewed as an elitist form of entertainment. At the same time opera companies were forced to slash budgets in the harder economic times and reduce the number of works in their repertory. Newer operas had both to face public indifference and to compete with an overbearing legacy that stretched back over 300 years. Although opera is still being written today, particularly from those composers who are, or have been, associated with the minimalist genre (Philip Glass, John Adams, Gavin Bryars etc.) it still faces the problem that most audiences will rather see an opera composed over 100-200 years ago than anything more recent. Opera’s future as a continuing living, breathing art form is still very much open to question.