2
Opera’s first centennial
Can we encapsulate the nature of opera, suggesting that at every point in its history it had enduring, immutable qualities? That is a question both about history and about us – about our ways of understanding opera today. While all opera involves the exaggerations and suspensions of disbelief we described in the last chapter, there are periods in its history that will inevitably seem more alien or artificial, and hence more distant. One great dividing line between the distant and the accessible past, or so it seemed until quite recently, was represented by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91), in particular by his comic operas beginning with Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) in 1782. In opera histories during the last century, we find a story that constantly swirls around the figure of Mozart. At first he was, quite simply, an untouchable genius, the composer of the first operas whose qualities were so immediately apparent that they were canonized in Austria and Germany not long after they were written. Of course – it had to be admitted – the nineteenth century saw thin times for Mozart, particularly in places where native Italian opera set the standard. But his mature works were revived near the start of the twentieth century, and since then have never looked back. Nearer our own time, research about opera immediately before and during Mozart’s life established a richer musical and cultural context for his work, but this did not alter the consensus that his operas were exceptional: indeed, the more they were put into a general historical picture, the more incalculably different they seemed. Minor works from the period that were unearthed belonged to history. Mozart’s operas belonged to us.
OPERA’S BIRTH
To go back a further two centuries, and to talk about the origins of opera, is inevitably to refresh our preconceptions: about what we know as creatures formed by Mozart, by Verdi and Wagner, and by the other repertories and aesthetic points of reference that make up any modern-day understanding of operatic history. This is so because, in some senses, ways of recounting the birth of opera have been informed by prejudices similar to those that characterize accounts of the centrality of Mozart’s operas.
It once used to be customary to think of opera history as a kind of pantechnicon, which emerged via a majestic grand tour of famous Italian cities, evolving all the while towards our present view of what makes the best kind of operatic drama.1 It all started, we were told, in Florence, where a hotbed of Renaissance energy and invention saw various groups of scholars and musicians getting together around 1600, forming salons or ‘academies’ dedicated to imagining ways in which Greek musical drama might be revived. Already in the 1780s, the notion that opera had been born in Florence as a revival of the aims and effects of Greek drama was circulating widely in Europe, as evinced by Thomas Iriarte’s 1783 history of music in verse form, La musica, which dates the invention of opera to Ancient Greece, with its modern rebirth in 1600.2 In 1927, in Waldo Selden Pratt’s History of Music, we get a version of the story written for US schoolchildren:
About 1575 there began at Florence a movement that had important consequences. A wealthy and cultivated nobleman … drew about him a group of dilettanti in literature and art who were all inquiring after some method of dramatic expression of an intenser form than was then known. Their ambition was to restore the Greek drama in its entirety … the monodic style was at once applied in musical plays with plots and personages.3
Richard Wagner in Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, 1851) described this same Italianate miracle, c. 1600, albeit with scornful velocity (and typical obfuscation) as he speeds through the seventeenth century on his way to Gluck and Mozart:
With Aria, Dance-tune and Recitative, the whole apparatus of musical drama – unchanged in essence down to our very latest opera – was settled once for all. Further, the dramatic ground plans laid beneath this apparatus soon won a kindred stereotyped persistence. Mostly taken from an entirely misconstrued Greek mythology, they formed a theatric scaffolding from which all capability of rousing warmth of human interest was altogether absent, but which, on the other hand, possessed the merit of lending itself to the good pleasure of every composer in his turn.4
Not all Germans were so dismissive. One of the first nineteenth-century opera histories, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink’s Wesen und Geschichte der Oper (The Nature and History of Opera, 1839), is more Italy-friendly in tone:
In Florence … there arose a society that held regular meetings …; and since an affection for Greece above all had flourished for quite some time in Florence, so this society of amateurs soon hit upon the excellent idea of making the nature of Greek Tragedy the principal object of their researches … how many firsts have arisen in Italy, and how many inventors!5
Already in the early nineteenth century, as Fink exclaims, the story was more or less fixed. Opera was invented in or around Florence and the first operas date from somewhere between 1598 and 1600; and high-minded ideas about Greek theatre play a significant role. Opera’s first century or so was then punctuated by stopping-off points and longer stays in various picturesque Italian venues, the genre gradually spreading out over the peninsula and then beyond. Exported from Italy to France and England soon after mid-century, and to numerous central European courts, opera soon began to assume myriad local and national shapes, mutating under pressure from new political and economic conditions and from vernacular theatrical traditions in other languages and cultural domains.
Thus, according to the established historical account, was opera born and started its 400-year progress. But in the latter part of the twentieth century the picture was modified in significant details. Scholarly research gave rise to a more complex description, almost an historical anthropology of the phenomenon. Nowhere was this more evident than in accounts of opera’s first decades. The story still portrayed opera flowing from an important moment of change in Italy around 1600, but the details could take us aback: for instance, the very designation ‘opera’ was not consistently used until as late as the nineteenth century. An impressive list of genre terms used in opera libretti or scores at various historical periods in various centres or national traditions can be reconstructed, and these differences in terminology reflect important variations in the very nature of the works. One recent history of opera in seventeenth-century Venice lists around fifteen terms that circulated in the early decades, few of which include the word ‘opera’ and only some of which even make reference to music. It could be attione in musica or a festa teatrale, a dramma musicale or a favola regia, a tragedia musicale or an opera scenica; the sheer proliferation speaks of a genre in the making.6
In this second, more modern manner of telling opera’s history, the precursors and theories underpinning its emergence are now all over Italy in the sixteenth century. Opera mutated gradually out of these ancestors, most importantly out of the tradition of pastoral drama with music represented as far back as the late fifteenth century by the poet Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), whose Orfeo (Orpheus, 1480) had accompanying music (now lost). True, those academies of scholars and musicians trying to revive Greek drama in Florence and elsewhere were still important, but theirs was just one strand of a huge, centuries-old series of experiments devoted to combining drama, dance, song and instrumental music. One could even turn the matter on its head and ask whether, worldwide, there were many theatrical genres before 1600 that did not feature music in some important way. Certainly, within elite Western European traditions there were numerous forms of theatre with music before 1600: medieval liturgical plays (sung, and chanted); Renaissance pastoral plays with inserted incidental music and songs; and, immediately before 1600, so-called intermedi (instrumental music and songs played between the acts of spoken drama). Opera learned from them all.
In the years around 1600, the grandest of these musico-dramatic experiments were beyond extravagant. When the Medici family in 1589 wanted to celebrate a grand dynastic wedding in Florence, the festivities lasted three weeks and came to a climax with a succession of intermedi to a comic play called La pellegrina. These intermedi involved dance, solo song and even complicated madrigals, all played against elaborate stage pictures that insistently made visual connections between the venues of the gods, other mythological characters onstage and of the courtly audience attending. It is surely significant that their general theme was often music. The principal aim was to amaze and above all impress the audience with the profound effects of harmony (musical, poetic and scenic); the plot (such as it was – a vaguely related series of independent scenes might be more accurate) justified itself by referring explicitly to precisely that effect. These fabulous spectacles were fabulously expensive. What was their purpose? The latest technology (stage machines and magnificent painted scenery) joined hands with music and poetry to project an overwhelming sense of power that could impress supporters and put fear into the minds of opponents. Small wonder, then, that the intermedi were painstakingly recorded in manuscripts and printed books, allowing posterity (ourselves included) to wonder at their scope and ambition.
No single grand narrative can tie such experiments to each other or to the first operas, but they all offered a similar mix of stage action and music, and they continued through the first decades of the seventeenth century, never finding anything like a standard format. What is more, the reason why the academies and their philosophical and classicist aspirations became so important to historians probably had as much to do with later conceptions of opera, not to mention ideas about what opera should aspire to be, than it had with the messy variety of musical drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, establishing the minutiae of context and meticulously reconstructing the variety of genres from which the first operas grew should not change the sense that there was a minor earthquake – a moment when, quite suddenly, something new appeared and then prospered. And this earthquake did indeed occur in Florence, where a group of composers and poets loosely allied with one another began writing and publishing substantial, narrative theatrical works in which all the characters sang, and sang all the time.
The list of these works (some performed at the Florentine court, some perhaps written more as experiments in a new genre) is cited in most histories with a reverence that attends any tally of surviving ‘firsts’. The poet Ottavio Rinuccini wrote a libretto called Dafne, set to music in 1598 by two composers, Jacopo Peri and Jacopo Corsi. Then Rinuccini’s Euridice, twice set to music in 1600, first by Peri, then by Giulio Caccini. Caccini’s version was the first to be published and thus sometimes figures officially as ‘the first opera’, giving us 1600 as a tidy birth date. Peri’s Euridice, on the other hand, was also a landmark: he and Rinuccini developed in it what we now know as recitative, a kind of musical declamation (they called it, more poetically, recitar cantando) that followed closely the accentuation of the poetry; this was a style that enabled characters to converse in music, and would (as we saw in Chapter 1) be essential to opera for centuries to come. In the same year, Caccini and others composed music for a libretto called Il rapimento di Cefalo by the poet Gabriello Chiabrera. And then, seven years later in 1607, came a work that almost everyone agrees offered an entirely different order of artistic achievement: L’Orfeo, subtitled as a favola in musica or ‘musical fable’, written for the Gonzaga court in Mantua by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). It makes sense that this particular Orfeo is so special. Peri, Caccini and company were musicians of local standing. Monteverdi was already a famous composer by the time he came to opera. He had written much religious music and an innovative series of madrigals in which he had experimented with what he called a ‘second practice’ (seconda pratica) of music writing, a style that distanced itself from the usual sixteenth-century contrapuntal manner. He had, in other words, a great deal of musical experience to bring to the new genre.
In strictly operatic terms, Monteverdi nevertheless learned from Peri and the others: his ‘musical fable’ is sung throughout, and thus has a fair amount of recitar cantando (perhaps too much for modern taste). But, like the intermedi, it also contained an anarchic mix of dances, madrigals, solo songs and purely instrumental interludes or ‘sinfonias’. Again like many of the intermedi, it featured the idea of music’s power as an important element of the plot. We may be surprised, though, that initially there were few obvious concerns about verisimilitude. The first debates about the illogicality of conversing in song, or the surreal aspect of characters who conduct their business and express their feelings in music, came only later, around 1650, after opera had been around for a half-century. These debates will mark a critical moment in opera aesthetics, one to which we will need to return. Another disquieting surprise is that, while we now celebrate Monteverdi’s Orfeo as the earliest great opera, it remained almost completely unknown for the first 300 or so years of its existence. True, it was published in 1609, and again in 1615; but after a few revivals it passed into obscurity and was not performed again (or even much discussed) until the late nineteenth century. Its elevation soon after that, as the Ur-opera, the best from the Florentine crucible, tells us much about changing opera aesthetics over historical time.
Corsi, Peri, Caccini, Monteverdi. Why so many similar works all at once? One radical (and now very much out-of-fashion) explanation was offered by our opening chorus of historians: that opera was cobbled together out of odds and ends that included notions about classic Greek theatre, evolving Italian musical styles (most importantly, the idea of recitar cantando) and sheer inventive tenacity. This is a bizarre historical supposition: basically that opera emerged out of an intellectual conviction that such a thing should exist. Accounts along these lines point out that the philosophical grounds for the experiment followed on from debates that began as early as the 1550s in Florence, among academies (or looser groupings, without official statutes) peopled by aristocrats, intellectuals and musicians.7 The group always cited in this pre-history (although not officially an academy) was called the Camerata (1573–87), whose central figure and convener was Count Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534–1612). In the preface to his Euridice, Caccini cited the Camerata, and its association with the ‘birth of opera’ originated from that citation. Those connected with Bardi included the music theorist Vincenzo Galilei, whose work included acoustics, and whose famous son, Galileo Galilei, inherited his father’s fascination with the physics of sound transmission. Bardi, a polymath and classicist, wrote speculations about the nature of music in Greek tragedy, many examples of which he had translated into Italian, and channelled ideas that had circulated in earlier Florentine academies, including the Umidi – associated with the theorist Girolamo Mei, another passionate classicist. Debates about the nature of ancient song were also central to an academy known as the Alterati, founded in the 1560s.
In all these groups, working poets and musicians – the librettist Rinuccini, or Caccini, Corsi and Peri – were involved on the edges; and recent research has stressed that these edges were where theory turned into practice. As scholars over the last twenty or so years have delved further into the details of early opera creation, they again and again reveal that poets and musicians, being practical people, turned to concrete musical and literary materials, rather than to philosophy or theory, for the basis of their experiments. In light of all this research, we can now see that earlier accounts of the birth of opera lent excessive weight to philosophy and theory. But that in itself is significant. The fact that historians a hundred and more years ago returned to this particular strand says something about an idealization of opera – as a noble, prelapsarian form of expression – that has characterized so many accounts of it for so many centuries.
Why Greek tragedy or ‘ancient song’? The Florentine academicians invoked Aristotle, and specifically a passage in the Poetics about the emotions evoked by tragedy. The spectators, Aristotle tells us, feel for the characters to the point that they experience an intense emotion that he called ‘catharsis’ – a kind of purification brought on by understanding what the characters undergo. Count Bardi in particular was convinced that poetry alone could not have produced this powerful reaction, and his conviction led him to a leap of imagination: classical tragedy had achieved its effect because the words were sung, not spoken; music constituted a second continuum within the drama, one that created miraculous results. (This theory has often been challenged, but today’s scholars of Greek theatre seem to think that choruses may indeed have been intoned in musical fashion, and that perhaps even speeches were chanted.) Bardi and his circle then speculated about what would happen if they created a form of theatre that used words and music simultaneously. This would not be music between the acts, or songs or dances or madrigals thrown in as a diversion. It would have words, and a scenic backdrop and costumes; but it would make music carry the essential burden of the drama.
However, when they arrived at this point, the theorists reached an impasse. How could they attempt a modern re-creation of what they thought had been Greek musical drama? This was a blank slate: no music seemed to exist that could possibly bear the burden thus imagined. At the same time, though, the practising musicians who were privy to this philosophizing were experimenting with their own ideas. They had plenty of experience with existing musical forms: those songs and dances and madrigals that had featured in the intermedi. But the kernel of this new theatrical form – the miracle music, the second continuum, the bearer of the drama – was something different and initially very simple: it would be musical recitation, recitar cantando. The accompaniment would be rudimentary, as nothing should distract from tones whose sole aim was to heighten the emotional flux of the poetry. Play texts invented for this purpose came at first mostly from the tradition of pastoral; they were stories about nymphs, shepherds and half-gods, living in marvellous gardens or fantastic country paradises, characters so exceptional that they might plausibly be imagined to converse in music. As we can see from the titles of those Florentine ‘firsts’ around 1600, it was clear from the start that one particular plot would dominate: the plot of Orpheus and Eurydice.
ORPHEUS AS OPERA COMPOSER
It is certainly significant that Orpheus became the first (and most often-recurring) early operatic hero. Orpheus, son of Apollo and one of the legendary poets of antiquity, was a demigod whose magical powers of singing could even drown out the deadly music of the Sirens. On the death of his wife Eurydice, Orpheus’ songs were so sad that the nymphs and Gods allowed him to descend into Hell to rescue her, commanding only that he must not look back as he leads her out of the underworld. He descends with his lyre, moves Persephone and Hades by his singing, is reunited with Eurydice and starts to lead her back. But then, in anguish at her laments, he disobeys the Gods and looks back. Eurydice is lost for ever. Orpheus, desolated, forsakes the love of women, and because of this is murdered by the Maenads (frenzied female devotees of Dionysus) in a Bacchic orgy. He is dismembered, his head and lyre left to float down the river Hebrus. But even after death his voice continues, his dismembered head singing on, causing the stones, trees and rivers to resonate. From that time forth, and in a remarkable pre-technological presentiment about how musical sound can be amplified and transmitted, all nature sings in his place.
For the early makers of opera, the most important scene in this myth was a moment of performance: Orpheus appears before the rulers of the underworld in order to persuade them to release Eurydice, and he does so by singing. This moment clearly appealed because it was an allegorical representation: Orpheus’ power over the dark rulers, his ability to sway them through song, resonated with opera’s power over its audience; operatic music was meant to induce in listeners extremes of emotion, so much so that they would be lost, cast into a state in which reason gave way to the miraculous. For a composer, successful representation of this scene would be the ultimate challenge and the ultimate justification of the new art form.
What is significant, 400 years later, is that the scenes of actual music making in Monteverdi’s Orfeo – whether the shepherds’ pastoral songs or Orfeo’s improvisation of elaborate coloratura to impress the Gods – almost outweigh scenes in which music functions as a direct expression of the soul, the sort of thing fundamental to what was new in opera. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, music-within-the-opera (music required by the plot) often provides both temporary relief from the ever-impinging unreality of the medium, and can be the composer’s way of encouraging a particular reaction to his efforts: he can put on stage both a musical statement and the kind of listener-response he hopes for. But music-within-the-opera is not opera’s basic mode. In one sense it’s no different from music-within-the-play in spoken drama – the mad Ophelia singing about flowers, or Ariel singing his hymn to freedom. What we recognize as necessary for opera is not these self-conscious songs and dances, but passion given voice as singing. This second kind of singing thus becomes a more potent form of utterance, being music that exists outside or beyond the limits of the fiction.
Where does this mode appear in Orfeo? One classic instance is the long recitar cantando scene in Act 2, in which a Messenger (soprano) brings news to Orfeo (tenor) of Euridice’s death, and in which Orfeo then laments her fate and vows to descend to Hell to bring her back. This is essentially an elaborate recitative, accompanied by various instruments sustaining the harmonies. The words are sung in free, speech-based rhythm, and there is little obvious melody, little sense of periodic structure in the voice part. The vocal line in part traces the intonation of the words – as a kind of natural pitch – but also, and more significantly, it traces the symbolic meaning of certain words or the images they convey. There is very little music to spare: we are immersed in a rarefied world in which each small melodic and harmonic gesture stands out, earnestly soliciting a high degree of attentiveness and absorption. At the precise moment the Messenger recalls Euridice’s sudden pallor, there is an harmonic schism: alternating E-major and B-major chords are followed by an anomalous G minor; in harmonic terms we shift somewhere else entirely. Another example is the description of nymphs rushing around and of attempts to revive Euridice, which are paced much faster than any other text – the words pour out in a panicked tumble. The only time a word is repeated is when the Messenger imitates Euridice’s dying cry of ‘Orfeo, Orfeo’, higher the second time; and then there is a scripted silence following the evocation of her death, ‘spirò fra queste braccia’ (she expired in these arms). When Orfeo responds to the Messenger’s tale, his dismay causes him to repeat words as if he can’t understand them: ‘You are dead? dead? … you have left me? left me, and I remain here?’ At the end of his lament, following his decision to descend ‘into the abyss’ (his voice goes down to the lowest note in his vocal part), he bids farewell to earth, sky and sun in an ascending melodic line that traces the very upward arc he describes.
These are all moments in which we hear obvious musical translations of poetic content. They are like the tricks that classical rhetoric prescribed for skilled orators: repetition for emphasis; dropping the voice and raising it; changing the tempo of one’s words. But other moments in Orfeo are uniquely musical. One of the most magical is born from the way Monteverdi fashioned an acoustic image of the dying Euridice’s cry. We do not hear the original sound, but (he implies) it must have been terrible and it refuses to die. It re-resonates. First, there is the Messenger’s imitation and repetition of the cry. Then Orfeo repeats it in disguised forms, for instance in his repeated ‘No, No’, also rising in pitch. Again, as in oratorical effects, the reasons for such moments may be didactic. This is, after all, a depiction of a vocal sound that goes forth to touch those who hear; it is an encrypted image of opera’s power to move its listeners.
When this culminating achievement of opera’s brief first period of existence was unveiled in Mantua, the spectacle – both as an event and in its circumstances – bore little resemblance to what opera would become through most of its subsequent history. Orfeo was first seen not in a theatre but in a private room (and not a very spacious one) in the Duke of Mantua’s palace. The main part was probably sung by a tenor called Francesco Rasi, who was himself a composer; most or perhaps all of the female roles were taken by castrati, the most famous of them being Giovanni Gualberto Magli, a court singer who was on loan from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. It was enacted in front of a small audience placed very near the singers, and there was certainly no proscenium or mystic gulf between performers and spectators. According to a contemporary account, it was given again a week later. Even though the Duke had attended many rehearsals and the premiere, he ordered another showing for an audience including ‘all the ladies resident in the city’; Magli in particular had apparently ‘given immense pleasure to all who had have heard him sing, especially My Lady’.8 The intimacy of the venue provided an ideal opportunity for demonstrating opera’s capacity to wield music’s power over its audience: a restricted space, a small group of people, an architectural space and an acoustic that allowed every word to be understood, with listeners so close that they could not fail to notice each minute expression on the singers’ faces, each variation in their vocal delivery. The earliest operas flowed in part from lofty notions of theatrical catharsis and emotional directness, and in this case the venue greatly facilitated intensity of experience. To appreciate some of its message 400 years later – in, say, the 3800-seater Metropolitan Opera in New York – requires a prodigious leap of imagination and necessarily compromises some of the opera’s original mission.
It is no accident that many of the ideals we have underlined both in theories about early opera and in Orfeo would be rediscovered at later periods, in particular by poets or theorists who feared that the essentials of opera had in the interim been corrupted by musical excess or frivolity. One of these ideals was the symbiosis of music and poetry, which the Messenger’s narrative in Orfeo exemplifies with its extraordinary spare beauty. In surprisingly formulaic and repetitious ways, calls for the reunification of melody and word recur in several later reform polemics: it is the ground-note of writers as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, amongst even greater achievements, was one of the philosophers of the so-called Querelle des Bouffons (War of the Comedians), a mid-eighteenth-century French vs Italian opera polemic, and Richard Wagner (in his treatise Oper und Drama – Opera and Drama – of 1851). What Rousseau and Wagner shared was an abhorrence of music for its own sake, music lacking what they called an ‘organic’ connection to poetry and drama. More specifically they shared a distaste, often couched in terms of lost morality, for virtuosic singing: those flights of ornament and detonations of high notes in which the words fade away.
These complaints convinced many sober judges. But theorizing away audience tastes for beautiful singing, a listener’s fascination with vocalism and the flights it can take, has proved futile many times over in operatic history. One cautionary tale is the divergence between philosophical accounts of what is noblest in Orfeo and the persistent attractions of those episodes that involve virtuoso display. Obvious cases are Orfeo’s aria ‘Possente spirto’ in Act 3, in which the hero tries to influence the underworld Gods, or the final Orfeo–Apollo duet, which is also notable for its prolonged warbling. In so many accounts of early opera, we read that Orfeo tries unsuccessfully to impress the Gods with coloratura but only succeeds in winning a passage to the underworld when he resorts to more heartfelt singing, in which the words are clearly audible. But this description of the scene falters in several respects. One is that it misrepresents the plot, in the process saying much about the strength of the anti-virtuosity view. Orfeo doesn’t ‘charm’ Charon (bass) into ferrying him across the river Styx; far from it. His singing does nothing more heroic than bore Charon to sleep, thus offering a combination of comedy and high-mythic gravitas that can still seem alien today. More seriously, though: by what authority can we claim that the virtuosic parts of the aria are less moving or enticing than the simpler singing at the end? For which audience, at which performance, in which historical era?
The persuasive power of pure singing had a great deal to do with the evolution of opera. Around 1650 the genre bears so distant a resemblance to those first, post-Renaissance operas that some scholars have even argued for stripping the Dafnes, Euridices and Orfeos of the very name opera. The turn from noble recitar cantando to agile vocalism has much to do with that argument. But equally important to those who want to draw a new starting line were economic and social considerations: the earliest operas, with their strong links to pastoral and myth, were also the product of court environments and private commissions. Once public theatres began to commission and perform opera, the pressures of audience taste and business practice interacted to re-form operatic style. This time, Venice was the centre.
VENICE AND THE ASCENT OF SINGING
In 1637 Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano opened its doors to the public during the carnival season, for a performance of an opera called Andromeda. The libretto was written by Benedetto Ferrari (1603/4–81), who was part of a travelling company of musicians plying their trade in the city, and who also figured in the production as impresario and continuo player. The music, not mentioned on the title page of the libretto, was by Francesco Manelli (1595/7–1667). Within four years, three more Venetian theatres had opened. By mid-century over fifty operas had been performed in the city; twenty-five years later the total was 150. New works were constantly required, and were often fashioned to resemble previous hits and so make them more immediately understandable to the regular paying public (just like popular films or novels today). Monteverdi spanned the two worlds: in venerable old age he produced several operas for Venice, only two of which now survive (Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – The Return of Ulysses, 1640 – and L’incoronazione di Poppea – The Coronation of Poppea, 1643). A wave of opera composers working for Venetian theatres were formed by the new style. Francesco Cavalli (1602–76) and Antonio Cesti (1623–69) stand out in this new order: both were popular, prolific and – the new acid test – commanded the highest fees for new works (Cavalli was also significant for his sojourn, in 1660–62, at the court of Louis XIV, where he played a role in the export of Italian opera to France). In the opera theatres of Venice, though, composers were by no means the most important people employed in the new industry. Impresarios, engaged by theatre owners and usually bearing some of the financial risk, were responsible for arranging the season: hiring a roster of singers and a small army of scene painters, machinists and musicians; trying (sometimes vainly) to make the books balance at the end of a run. In 1681, Cristoforo Ivanovich – whose writings on opera in Venice are a fabulous cornucopia of practical detail – described the finances of opera production, saying that ‘the first and foremost considerable [expense] is that of remunerating the men and women who sing, their pretensions having become excessive’.9 Something quite a lot closer to opera as we know it had arrived. Why did this happen in Venice? What was special about the city that caused this remarkable flowering of a new genre?
After centuries of literary and then cinematic mythmaking, even people who have never set foot in Venice can understand the city’s uniqueness; and its attractions as a modern-day tourist centre, a kind of city-wide heritage site, were part of what made it such fertile ground for the emergence of opera. Almost all the operas that sprang up in the decades after 1637 were performed in the carnival season, from 26 December until Shrove Tuesday. During that period the city became a magnet for tourists and, in their wake, visiting theatrical troupes. Venice’s population of about 50,000 could double in carnival, guaranteeing an audience for those first operatic impresarios. Just as important, though, was the city’s political structure. Venice was, at least in theory, a republic: a place where a relatively large number of noble families had influence over the election of their ruler, and where wealth was more than usually well-distributed. Despite its decline as an international power during the seventeenth century, the greatest of these noble families were anxious to compete in patronage of the arts, and one result was a proliferation of theatres. However, many of these noble families had elevated themselves through trade and other entrepreneurial activity, and were not willing to lay down money simply to impress others. The new genre of opera thus became a business, something that could be run by impresarios and could attract a paying public who might even lease a box for the entire season, consuming the product again and again. In other words, opera became such a successful public genre in Venice in part because it could boast a balance sheet.
These circumstances fostered a new brand of operatic entertainment, one very different from Monteverdi’s favola in musica. True, there were resemblances to previous court spectacles such as those in Florence by Peri, Caccini and others. Sometimes (certainly more often than they would have liked) the noble families who owned the theatres had to bail out the impresario and subsidize the season, making the enterprise closer to the economic model of court entertainment. There were also artistic continuities. These new Venetian musical dramas continued to use the idea of recitar cantando, as always interspersed with songs, instrumental interludes and dance; and there was still an emphasis on shock-and-awe scenic spectacle (although, for financial reasons, never quite on the scale of those Medici intermedi). But the whole genre now needed to please a more diverse and in some ways more demanding audience; in response it took on some of the spirit of Venice’s carnival – of the excess, pageantry and bad behaviour that carnival celebrates.
This freewheeling stance is evident in new types of operatic plot. At least by 1650, many aspects of libretto writing had established routines. A standard genre designation began to be used: an opera now tended to be called a dramma per musica (drama for or through music; a theatre piece written for the addition of music). A three-act format with prologue also became the norm. Although ancient mythology still featured in the plots (prologues often involved deities discoursing about human foibles), both historical romances and political events from classical antiquity – stories in which human characters predominate – edged out gods, goddesses, shepherds and nymphs. What’s more, the range of plots expanded. Now we find stories in which, as well as lovers lamenting against pastoral backdrops, servants can make fun of their masters; in which virtue will not necessarily be rewarded as the plot unravels; in which, to be brief, the whole messy business of human fallibility is explored. Although exclusively comic opera did not begin until later in the century, injections of comedy became an important means by which opera expanded its tone. As with the scene between Orfeo and Charon in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, it is the contrasting registers – boredom and myth, suicide and farce, existential crisis and buffoonery – that perpetually startle us in early Italian opera. Only at the beginning of the eighteenth century did there emerge a more rigid division between the antic and the tragic.
It soon became clear that a major attraction in this new, staged version of carnival excess would be vocal virtuosity, the singing voice in full flood. The account books make this plain. The opera industry may have been fuelled by librettists and composers, and it may have been decorated by scene painters and scenic engineers; but the top wages went to (and have remained with) the star vocal soloists, the performers who don’t just impersonate a god or goddess, but who for a brief time become one through sheer force of vocal virtuosity. In 1658 Cavalli, a conspicuously high-earning composer, got 400 ducats for writing his new opera, Antioco; but the leading soprano (‘Signora Girolama’) was paid 750 ducats for singing in it. And singers’ wages continued to spiral: in 1685 a top singer (Margherita Salicola) could command an individual fee that fifty years earlier would have financed an entire production.10 These virtuoso singers, trained to perform at a level of difficulty unprecedented in musical history, also began to have power and influence over the events in which they starred. Opera began to feature more elaborate arias, with music whose formal design became the scaffold for their crowning glory.
Vocal virtuosity is not just a matter of pure voice appealing directly to pure emotion, there is an aspect of magic that comes into play. Once singers are trained to overcome the limits of what was thought possible – in terms of pitch, speed, agility, power, endurance – they pass beyond what the audience can plausibly imagine itself capable of doing, to the point where listeners cannot connect ordinary human effort to what they hear. A tale repeated about Farinelli, one of the most famous and gifted of eighteenth-century singers, was that he kept a mechanical whistle or flute in his pocket and that his most sustained long notes were produced by this instrument. No one could believe that a human being could have so much breath in him.11 The moral of the story is clear: the appeal of singers was, at its extreme, not unlike the appeal of circus performers, magicians, professional athletes, indeed of all performers who seem to be going beyond the physical capabilities of real humans or beyond the physical limitations of reality.
Who were these singers, and how did they make a living? The two most popular types at this early stage, and for some time to come, were both high voices: one was female; the other was a surgically altered male, a castrato such as Farinelli. Much horrified fascination and breathless mythmaking has collected and continues to collect around the phenomenon of the castrato. Briefly (we go further into the subject in the next chapter) the practice of castrating young boys with promising voices before they reached puberty, thus preserving their high voices into adulthood, was almost exclusive to Italy. It was primarily done in order to provide high voices for church, where women were forbidden to sing; it flourished in opera only secondarily, and became unacceptable there in the early nineteenth century whereas the church variety, the so-called ‘sacred capons’, continued into the early twentieth century. The acceptance of castrati in Venetian opera – often as the virile male lead, but sometimes cross-dressed as the female principal – is certainly another example of ‘carnival misrule’, but seventeenth-century audiences were far less concerned about realism in our modern sense. Cross-dressing was readily accepted in serious as well as comic situations; often women would alternate with castrati in playing the leading male roles.
Given the newness of the genre, opera singing as a sole occupation was not yet possible: in spite of high wages for the most sought-after performers, no one in Venice could hope to make a living from it. So singers had alternative employment. The castrati could find work in the multitude of church choirs in the city and elsewhere, and often both they and the women relied on a noble protector – a sponsor who would provide them with residence and employment as ‘court singer’ in an aristocratic household. A good case in point are the Manelli family, who in 1637 were largely responsible for that inaugural production of Andromeda at the Teatro San Cassiano. Francesco Manelli, the composer, also sang two roles; his wife Maddalena, a Roman, sang two others. After Andromeda, they and their troupe embarked on other operatic ventures, but at the same time they held other positions. Francesco had started life as a church singer, and in 1638 became a bass at Venice’s most famous church, the San Marco; Maddalena held a series of court positions (notably with the Orsini family in Rome). Some years after Andromeda, although still involved in occasional operas, the Manellis moved to Parma. Francesco and his son (also a singer) were employed in a church choir, Maddalena was a performer at the ducal court.12 As the market for opera increased, there could be tension between these various occupations (some the product of a nearly modern market economy, others ancient and intimately involved with aristocratic or ecclesiastical privilege). Such conflicts of interest could result in undisguised threats. When in 1667 the Duke of Savoy summoned back two of his singers who had decamped to perform opera in the Venice carnival season, he threatened one of them (a castrato) with ‘the effects of our rightful indignation’, adding with sinister overtones that ‘princes like us have long arms’.13
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The actual voices of these singers are impossible to re-create. What we can glean from (rare) contemporary accounts is usually so vague as to be merely frustrating. One famous early Venetian singer, Anna Renzi (c. 1620–after 1661), had an entire volume dedicated to her in 1644. Among numerous general encomiums there are passages of surprising detail, but they are couched in now-alien notions of human biology: ‘She has a fluent tongue, smooth pronunciation, not affected, not rapid, a full, sonorous voice, not harsh, not hoarse, nor one that offends you with excessive subtlety; which arises from the temperament of the chest and throat, for which good voice much warmth is needed to expand the passages, and enough humidity to soften it and make it tender.’14 More surprisingly, the music these singers performed has for the most part disappeared. Our musical knowledge of this new Venetian dramma per musica is limited to a few works from among the literally hundreds we know to have been performed: even those by the most famous and successful composers, such as Monteverdi, Cavalli and Cesti, are often lost. The musical scores of this period were not regarded as precious; they were the seventeenth-century equivalent of today’s film scripts, constantly changed or replaced to adapt to new circumstances. Few people imagined them as works in our contemporary sense, let alone thought them worth careful preservation. They were a means to an end – operatic performance, live in the theatre. Once that end had been attained, they were dispensable.
There were of course exceptions. Certain operas acquired something approaching repertory status, being revived and enjoyed in several seasons. But only two operas have established a firm place in the modern repertory, and these are the two that survive by Monteverdi. Neither is entirely typical of Venetian opera in the period, and they may initially have been revived because of their composer’s fame in other genres. In 1613 Monteverdi left Mantua to become maestro di cappella at the San Marco, which was home to a magnificent, centuries-old musical tradition. During his long career in Venice he further confirmed his reputation, writing music in many genres and adding several more theatrical pieces, most of which are now lost. By the time ‘public opera’ hit Venice in the late 1630s he was in his seventies and a distinguished elder statesman of Italian music. All the more remarkable, then, that he embraced the new genre, writing three operas (one lost) for Venetian theatres. The last of these, L’incoronazione di Poppea, was premiered during the carnival season of 1642–3 at the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, which had been built and was owned by the famous Grimani family, one of the noblest in Venice. It had been the second venue to stage opera in Venice (after the Teatro San Cassiano) and was described as the city’s most magnificent, boasting seventy-seven boxes in four rows, most of them leased to wealthy patrons for the entire season. Poppea, like Orfeo, is now a repertory opera. Although buried in obscurity for centuries, revivals of the opera began in the early twentieth century and have continued to the present day.
Like many in the new Venetian genre, Poppea’s libretto, by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, does not deal principally with the mythological characters of the earlier court entertainments; instead, historical figures tread the stage. The setting is Rome, AD 65; Nero is Emperor. The presence of historical characters is likely to have been Monteverdi’s choice, and has implications for the drama. In a letter to fellow composer Alessandro Striggio in 1616, Monteverdi made his feelings clear about what he valued in musical characterization:
How can I imitate the speech of the winds, if they do not speak? And how can I, by such means, move the passions? … Orfeo moved us because he was a man, not a wind. Music can suggest, without any words, the noise of winds and the bleating of sheep, the neighing of horses and so on and so forth; but it cannot imitate the speech of winds because no such thing exists.15
This is remarkably modern-sounding, and makes us aware that Monteverdi wanted to write operas that, as well as amazing us with scenic splendour, make an Aristotelian attempt to ‘arouse sympathy’ – to persuade us, through the power of music, to feel some emotional kinship with the characters onstage.
The opera is in the Venetian norm of three acts and involves a tangled web of emotional and dynastic ties. Emperor Nerone is married to Ottavia but loves Poppea and wants to make her Empress. These three are the principals, and are all cast as sopranos (Nerone was probably a castrato role, Ottavia was first played by Anna Renzi). The plot is thickened by further love entanglements and by a disapproving moral philosopher, Seneca (bass). Eventually Nerone precipitates Seneca’s suicide, exiles everyone else and crowns Poppea, allowing the two lovers to end the opera in blissful union. This strangely amoral farrago nevertheless permits a vast range of human emotions, particularly those that make the best music: love, hate, jealousy, fear and (last and by no means least) rampant sexual desire. Equally important is that the tussles of the noble principals are periodically commented upon, and often ridiculed, by a layer of lower-class comic characters. The latter are, if you will, the carnival element of the plot. As well as sleepy soldiers and cheeky pages, this satirical angle is represented by Arnalta (alto, or possibly a cross-dressed high tenor), Poppea’s ancient nurse, who never fails to see the grotesque side of the amorous encounters of her betters.
The Act 1 scene between Nerone and Poppea is a good introduction of the opera’s musical manners. There’s a fair amount of Peri’s recitar cantando. The words are commonplace and mostly unpoetic – simply two lovers who cannot bear to part company – but the dialogue is constantly interrupted by snatches of melody and instrumental interludes. What’s more, the mixture of musical styles is intimately tied to the unfolding relationship between the lovers. The scene closes with a remarkable passage of recitar cantando. Poppea keeps repeating the teasing question ‘Tornerai?’ (Will you return?); Nerone seems almost desperate to reassure her. And then, at the end, comes a more rapid dialogue of verbal fragments, which ends with slow, languorous exchanges of the word ‘addio’, interspersed by breathless repetitions of the beloved’s name: ‘Nerone, Nerone’, ‘Poppea, Poppea’. The simple musical cadences are loaded with erotic charge and expressed with a directness that, even today, is somehow shocking.
It’s entirely typical of the opera that immediately after this intimate scene comes an extended dialogue between Poppea and Arnalta, in which all this steamy wooing is mercilessly lampooned. Indeed, so relentlessly does the comic mingle with the serious that, at this distance of time, it’s often hard to gauge the tone of Poppea. The treatment of Seneca is a case in point. Mostly he offers sententious advice, a high point coming later in Act 1, in a tremendous confrontation with Nerone. But moments before this scene Seneca has been comically caricatured by one of those cheeky pages, who even makes musical fun of the philosopher’s ponderous diction. We can think of this as another example of carnival misrule, of the opera reflecting the Venetian season in which it was performed. But there are moments when we may nevertheless be confused. For example, in Seneca’s death scene in Act 2 the opening recitative seems to have a comfortingly plain relationship between words and music. ‘Breve angoscia è la morte’ (Death is but a brief torment), the philosopher sings, and obligingly sinks to his lowest register; but then ‘se ne vola all’Olimpo’ (we fly to Mount Olympus), and the word ‘vola’ (fly) has a long flight of rising vocal ornamentation. The ensuing chorus of friends (just three of them) takes up this solemn tone in earnest. In what must have seemed at the time an old-fashioned (and perhaps for that reason particularly sombre) musical style, that of the contrapuntal madrigal, the friends intone a painful chromatic line: ‘Non morir, non morir Seneca’ (Don’t die, don’t die Seneca). A powerful sense of tragedy is, it seems, being created. But then something extraordinary happens. The middle section of the friends’ chorus completely changes tone, both verbally and musically. To a nonchalant, modern-sounding musical figure, they confide to their beloved sage: ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to die; life is too sweet, the sky is too clear; every bitterness, every poison, is, in the end, rather slight’. And then, after this sprightly interlude, the tragic madrigal returns, and the scene ends with more portentous recitative from Seneca. What are we to make of this chorus? Monteverdi’s setting of its middle section (which is long and lovingly developed) seems like another lampoon, another sending up of the serious, another carnival gesture, this time uncomfortably inserted in the middle of the tragic. Performers and producers today must make their own decisions about how best to deliver the passage, but its difficulties are a reminder of the fact that we should never take for granted the emotional charge of music so distant from us in time.
Discussion of what we don’t know about such an historically famous work as Poppea could go on and on, and small surprise: during the 1642–3 Venetian carnival season no one had any idea how permanent the new genre of opera might be. Although Monteverdi was commonly considered Italy’s most famous living composer, no one thought to make a permanent record of his Poppea music. Had the opera not been revived in Naples in the 1650s, we might have no score at all. What’s more, neither of the two manuscripts that report its music gives much sign of which instruments should play which musical lines, mostly reporting just a melody and bass. We know from various documents that Venetian theatres of the period contained numerous continuo instruments (harpsichords and large lutes in particular), and given the preponderance of recitar cantando in the opera such variety is certainly needed. But which instruments are supposed to play the solo lines is anyone’s guess.
The most serious doubt of all hovers over the basic matter of authorship. We have so far been referring to Poppea as ‘by’ Monteverdi, but evidence that he is indeed its composer is very thin (no contemporary printed sources mention him, and the manuscript copies of the music, which do, are from a decade later).16 The vagueness of the surviving sources tells us a great deal about the relatively lowly status of composers in the operatic economy. What is particularly in doubt is whether Poppea’s most famous number, the closing love duet between Poppea and Nerone, is by Monteverdi or by one of his younger contemporaries. Whoever wrote it, its presence is probably bound up with emerging operatic conventions: closing love duets became a popular way to end Venetian operas of the period, and for very practical reasons. With, as ever, economy an important factor, these operas rarely include choruses, so to end with a duet was the most obvious way to close the drama with some kind of sonic climax. The vogue for finishing with two lovers was surely to do with the sheer pleasure of hearing two high voices weave in and out of each other and end in blissful union. Lovers, particularly operatic lovers, often sing about ‘melting into each other’, and the closing duet in Poppea is a wonderful musical depiction of that ultimate loss of identity. And so, either when Poppea first appeared or when it was revived after the composer’s death, a closing love duet became its finale. We don’t know for sure who wrote it, or even whether it was intended to end this particular opera; we don’t know what instruments should accompany it or how it was first staged or by whom it was first sung. What we do know is that it provides an opportunity for one of those moments that make us return to opera – an opportunity to hear the sheer sensuous beauty of mingled voices.
GENERIC OPERA
About 1650 the first serious objections to opera on the grounds of realism begin to circulate.17 Why should characters be singing? Wasn’t it ridiculous or distasteful to see such illogical goings on? In 1670 Charles de Saint-Évremond, writing about Italian operas he had seen in Paris (among them several by Cavalli), gave voice to this discomfort:
There is another thing in Operas so contrary to Nature, that I cannot be reconciled to it; and that is the singing of the whole Piece from beginning to end, as if the Persons represented were ridiculously match’d, and had agreed to treat in Musick both the most common, and most important affairs of life. Is it to be imagin’d that a master calls upon his servant, or sends him on an errand, singing; that one friend imparts a secret to another, singing; that men deliberate in council, singing; that orders in time of battle are given, singing; and that men are melodiously killed with swords and darts?18
The French were particularly quick to object to Italian opera’s foundational lack of realism – its continual music. But such discomfort was more widespread, and also relates to the differences between the earliest operas of Caccini, Peri and Monteverdi, and those of the Venetian and post-Venetian phases. Arias in which virtuosity triumphed over recitative-like clarity, or in which emotion was tailored to the demands of a particular genre, seem to have become an irritant that raised new aesthetic issues for opera.
What is more, the vocal writing – both its virtuosity and (soon) the greater formal complexity of the arias that showcase it – changed in response to multiple pressures, not all of them strictly musical. One point a modern operagoer tends to forget is how noisy audiences once were. In Venice, contemporary accounts repeatedly mention the rowdiness and rudeness of the public: in many theatres, boxes were fitted with shutters so that occupants could close out the opera and dally as they pleased, talking as loudly as they saw fit. One way to view the evolving formulas for opera may therefore be as a way to assert music against noise. The preference for high voices would continue in serious Italian opera until the early nineteenth century, and may have been another weapon in opera’s acoustic warfare. We know, for instance, that pitting the voice against ambient noise was a factor in outdoor performances of opera and oratorio in Rome: to raise the volume, multiple singers could be assigned to an aria, all firing off together in unison. Singers also learned to perform more elaborately; arias became individual gems for the executants to polish, allowing their music to compete for attention in this loud arena.
Indeed, a key aspect of opera from 1650 to the end of its first century is the way composers, librettists, scene designers and performers negotiated (with each other, but also – crucially – with an audience that was paying at least part of the bill) a series of operatic conventions: standard forms of communication, some of which would then last for centuries. The most important of these is seen only fleetingly in Poppea: the gradual emergence of a more obvious distinction between recitative and aria – a distinction between moments in which the plot could be advanced and musical conversation occur, and those in which virtuoso singing could be enjoyed. This process had at its base the issue of verisimilitude. Monteverdi was a conservative: there are lyrical passages in Poppea, but they tend to flow seamlessly in and out of the old recitar cantando, never stopping the action for long. The next generation (Cavalli prominent among them) opened up further dramatic possibilities in which extended solo song became acceptable: there could, for instance, be solo numbers at moments that naturally called for song, such as lullabies or incantations. More significant, though, was a steady increase in soliloquies: moments in which characters might be released from dialogue to muse internally, and thus be thought able to indulge in more regular musical periods. These moments came to be placed at the ends of scenes, allowing the singer to depart after the moment of solitary reflection. In this way, that stock-in-trade of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called exit aria, gradually took shape.
As might be expected, the formal shape of these arias was at first extremely varied. An early favourite was the ABB type: the last lines of text would underpin a more developed musical period in which melody could be expanded and repeated, with individual words and phrases stretched across the musical canvas. This end-based musical expansion clearly meshed well with the idea of arias as the expanded final moments of a soliloquy. But ABB slowly gave way to something with even greater possibilities of musical development: the ABA or ternary form, which would become standard in the eighteenth century. This idea – of making a musical statement, going on to something contrasting, then returning to the first idea – made eminent sense in terms of purely musical balance, and had long been used in instrumental music; but at first it did not seem suitable for operatic arias, at least in serious contexts. Comic characters, it was thought, might indulge in such obviously static musical constructions; but for those whose aim was to move the listeners, such surrender to musical elaboration was deemed too frivolous. Eventually, though, the attractions of musical expansion and repetition for singers and their audiences made ABA arias the convention, and as they became so, their lack of verisimilitude was mostly forgotten. Musical elaboration gained a further foothold on the operatic stage.
This process – in which the strangeness of continuously (and ever more elaborately) sung drama was accepted – saw the emergence of many conventions, not just aria forms. There were also scenic regulars: operatic action took place against increasingly sophisticated backdrops, and these could if necessary be recycled and become the object of renewed wonder. Elaborate perspective painting on both the wings and the backdrop presented magnificent gardens or woodlands or palaces; through the new technology of wing flats that could be rapidly interchanged, these sets could be alternated at great speed. Typical operatic interiors tended to be courtly in the manner of the old intermedi, flattering the audience by involving them in a world of unabashed magnificence. In one particularly lavish production (Nolfi’s Bellerofonte – Bellerophon – Venice, 1642), the city of Venice herself was proudly displayed to the audience – patrons could see their city laid out in idealized form, made splendid and newly alluring by its representation on the operatic stage. As a contemporary reported, ‘Everybody acclaimed [it] as a tour de force: the eye was deceived by the Piazza, with its public buildings imitated to the life, and it delighted increasingly in the deception, almost forgetting where it actually was thanks to that fiction.’19
Further conventions emerged in the forms of situations thought particularly conducive to musical and scenic elaboration. We have already mentioned the final love duet in Monteverdi’s Poppea, a type of ending that became standard procedure, and kept a form of ensemble singing alive in Italian opera when solo singing (arias) was otherwise taking up more and more of the territory. Other stock situations included the mad scene, in which any amount of extravagant vocal effect could be accepted as true-to-life; or scenes in the underworld, which acquired a special type of poetry and a battery of unusual instruments. Underworld and magic scenes went back as far as the intermedi, and were of course central to all those Orpheus operas. Elaborate laments, with characters prostrated by grief, were at first done as recitar cantando, but shifted to aria in mid-century, gradually becoming moments at which extravagant vocalization was the norm. Once such scenes and numbers became de rigueur, librettists and composers had an easier time. Making an opera became analogous to making a movie sequel, or writing the next mystery in a series where your detective already has all his attractive quirks in place. The sequel may still be marvellous, but the content has been industrialized. It goes faster.
Cavalli’s Giasone (Jason, 1649) – libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, based on the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece – includes a good deal of such content, and often plays a starring role in accounts of seventeenth-century Italian opera at its most extravagant.20 Given that there are four somewhat interchangeable lovers, we get multiple love duets. Medea as a sorceress has special access to the dark arts and uses them in her incantation scene in Act 1, where an otherworldly chorus serves as her backup. There is a mad scene in Act 2 (though Isifile, the madwoman in question, is angry rather than crazy). There are sleep scenes, where dozing off provides the same opportunities for musical strangeness as do insanity or the supernatural. There is, though, one wonderful dramaturgical oddity: cameos by puppet-master Gods that are not restricted (as would be usual) to the prologue, or some deus ex machina finale. In the middle of Act 2, Giove (Jupiter) and Eolo (Aeolus) appear, meeting in the ‘Cave of the Winds’ to discuss whether they should interfere in the plot. This pulls the plot focus back from the doings of the human cast, making a breathing space in which the music sounds unlike any other in the opera, since Gods have a special licence to sing as they please, especially in a cave where hurricanes meet. That the Gods take an interest in the mortals comes from the source myth, and functions as always in such myths to universalize mortal travail. This very same gesture, a midway pullback from Giasone and company, is used in the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, where the analogous breathing space in Olympus shows Zeus and Hera (Niall MacGinnis and Honor Blackman) playing a game with mortal chess pieces – demonstrating that effective dramaturgy will repeat itself over the centuries.
The component parts that went into the makeup of something like Giasone remained robust operatic currency for many decades, their progeny even surviving into operas of the twentieth century. They remind us that artistic conventions have astonishing longevity and persistence, above all when they work for all concerned – librettists, composers, producers, singers, and audiences. And they demonstrate that the operatic passions of early Venetian audiences have something in common with our own.
POSTLUDE: THE DIASPORA
Venice, which was central in the early establishment of public opera, did not retain a unique place in its history. For one thing, public opera found another happy home in Rome (although female singers were prohibited from appearing on stage, which made for strict gender homogeneity in casting). The Barberini Palace, completed in 1639, included a performance space for opera that could hold more than 3000 spectators, which puts it on a par with the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, also 3000 plus, and with twentieth-century barns such as the old and new Metropolitan Opera houses in New York. Opera production in Rome was inflected by the tastes of prelates and the strictures of the Church, an interesting mix that produced such notorious oddities as Sant’Alessio (Saint Alexis, 1632), an opera on a Catholic topic with a libretto by the future Pope Clement IX. As one eyewitness of the first performances told it, there was scandal aplenty, although not to be found anywhere within the opera’s squeaky-clean plot or sedate musical aesthetic:
The entire spectacle was recited in music with those stili recitativi they use in Italy, and one understood all the words as distinctly as if they had been merely spoken. All the voices were excellent, being the elite of the musicians of the Palace and of Rome. The actors who played women were beautiful, being either young pages or young castratos di cappella, so that muffled sighs were heard in the hall, which admiration and desire drew forth from the peacock breasts; the men of the purple, having more authority, behaved with greater freedom, so much that the Cardinals San Giorgio and Aldobrandini, with puckered lips and frequent and sonorous clucking of the tongue, invited those beardless actors to come and be kissed.21
Rome is here a site where ecclesiastic naughtiness and operatic decadence meet and kiss – something that would become a literary cliché. It is the basis for Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine (1830), whose main plot is as follows: a naïve and impressionable French sculptor goes to Rome in 1758, falls in love with a beautiful (apparently) female opera singer but is warned that Cardinal Cicognara is her protector; ‘she’ turns out to be a castrated male who is a transvestite on and off duty; the sculptor is murdered by the jealous prelate’s henchmen, general horror being conveyed at the prelate’s unspeakable tastes, Rome’s wicked ways and castrati as a species.
Opera was also flourishing (if less colourfully) in Naples, at the small Teatro San Bartolomeo (built in 1620), where operas deriving from Venice were taken up in local productions. In Venice itself, an economic decline in the latter part of the seventeenth century put further strain on operatic finances. As Saint-Évremond’s diatribe shows, there was continuing disapproval of Venetian opera’s cavalier disregard of realism, in particular its move away from the spare, elegant, intimately expressive recitar cantando to the extravagance of extended arias. Before the end of the seventeenth century, the disapproval would swell into a diapason of heckling and complaining, causing the first of what would turn out to be opera’s periodic reforms to be set in train.
But opera was anyway on the move, carried to other Italian towns by travelling troupes, crossing borders into France and then England and further afield, finding its most famous homes in other wealthy cities. In most of these new venues, whether pushed by reform or not, opera acquired its own peculiarities and local traditions. The German-speaking lands were the least rebellious, generally welcoming Italian incursions: Vienna established court adaptations of opera that retained the Italian language, as did Munich and other centres. In a parallel development, though, German-language opera found an audience. For a long time, the historical ‘first’ in this genre was said to be Heinrich Schütz’s Dafne of 1627. Whether or not this (now lost) work is a genuine contender for the title is still a matter of dispute, and the fact that scholars argue about it illustrates how thoroughly operatic history can become intertwined with a broader sense of cultural nationalism (at stake with Dafne was the identity of the ‘inventor’ of German opera, and the fact that Schütz was an established master of severe church music made him a particularly attractive candidate).22 But whether or not the great Schütz did indeed deserve this title, German opera’s progress in the seventeenth century was always stuttering.
Much more distinctive were the various solutions found in France, in which a curiously productive love–hate relationship with Italian opera would run for centuries. In Paris the court of Louis XIV at first welcomed the exotic Italian import; Cardinal Mazarin (himself an Italian, born Mazzarini) introduced six operas between 1645 and the early 1660s. In each case they were modified somewhat to suit French taste, not least with the addition of ballet (which had long been established in France as a tragic genre) and in some cases by replacing the castrati with baritones. However, with the death of Mazarin in 1661 the fortunes of Italian opera waned. The scene was soon dominated by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), an expatriate Italian who progressed to opera through instrumental music and then ballet, in the latter via a collaboration with Molière. Lully and Molière produced a series of comédies-ballets: pieces that inserted singing and dancing into comic plays and were one precursor of the type of comic opera in French (and then German) that mixed musical numbers into spoken drama. In 1672 Louis granted Lully the exclusive rights to an ‘Académie Royale de Musique’, in effect allowing him personally to invent and patent the genre of French-language serious opera. This highly distinctive brand was called tragédie en musique or tragédie lyrique and (as those names suggest) was strongly influenced by France’s powerful and prescriptive tradition of spoken drama.
One of the important ways in which French opera distinguished itself from the Italian version – apart from the integral ballets – was in matters of verisimilitude (as we shall see in the next chapter, French polemics about this topic were much more common than Italian ones, and often turned on the distinction between spoken and sung drama). The Lullian tragédie lyrique tended to avoid long, elaborate arias with instrumental accompaniment, generally showing a far less rigid distinction between recitative and aria, and a distrust of anything approaching Italian vocal virtuosity. It also favoured natural voices rather than those of castrati, and moved the plot forward by means of lengthy recitatives that tried hard to preserve the rhythms of spoken language (at least as that language was declaimed in classic French drama). Each act of this aria-less – or at least aria-shy – brand of opera was then enlivened by a divertissement (literally a ‘diversion’) in which plot was abandoned in favour of an elaborate ballet on a mythological subject, the dancing accompanied by scenic splendours that often rivalled the old intermedi. The King himself danced in these ballets on many occasions, obliging the entire court to sit through them. Another fixed feature of this emphatically court entertainment was a lengthy Prologue in which, although the subject matter was ostensibly mythological, explicit homage was made to the King. As this brief description implies, many of the developments of Venetian opera were reversed in Lully’s tragédie lyrique, which did not have to cater to mass audience taste and could concentrate on maintaining the classical decorum suitable to glorification of the royal dynasty. Lully’s works continued to be performed even after his death in 1687; they were not seriously challenged for another forty years, and remained in the repertory until as late as the 1770s.
The third country to open its doors to opera was England, but here (as in France) a strong tradition of spoken theatre ensured that entirely sung drama was slow to gain acceptance: the English retained a notably ambiguous position towards opera, in particular its more flamboyant manifestations. However, the Jacobean period (1603–25) saw a great flowering of the court masque, an intermedio-like extravaganza mixing song, dance and elaborate scenery, often loosely based on some allegorical subject. Many of these were granted added literary respectability by the involvement of the great playwright Ben Jonson, who in the preface to one masque, Lovers Made Men (1617), wrote that the masque was ‘sung after the Italian manner, stile recitativo’,23 which suggests that developments in Italy were already having some influence. There was, though, a further aspect of the English scene, one that eventually made the capital an excellent place to foster extravagant theatrical entertainment, but that also led to its periodic downfall: the relationship between the nation and its monarchy. Many petty states in Italy had rulers who played an important part in artistic display of many kinds, and the operatic spectacles arranged by Louis XIV were legendary; but England’s royal family suffered a catastrophic civil war in the middle of the seventeenth century, between supporters of the crown and rebellious subjects. At the climax of this conflict, in 1649, Charles I was beheaded and the symbolic position of his office drastically reduced. In spite of the royal Restoration, in which his son Charles II regained the throne in 1660 after a period of rule by what was nominally a republic, nothing was ever the same again in matters of kingly sway, whether cultural or otherwise.
Perhaps not surprisingly given the strength of its spoken drama tradition, the issue of operatic verisimilitude – of characters singing rather than speaking – proved particularly troublesome in England, and the preferred forms of drama with music through most of the seventeenth century were either masques or so-called ‘semi-operas’, in which music did not have to bear the full burden of dramatic narration, and could be reserved for special scenes such as those featuring the supernatural. William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (given during the republican period, in 1656) is usually called the first full-length English opera, and was set to music (now lost) by Henry Lawes and William Locke, two of the most famous composers of the period. But this experiment in what was called ‘Recitative Musick’ seems to have come into being as a way to avoid the republic’s ban on theatrical entertainments, and did not have significant progeny until much later in the century. One of those progeny, indeed one of the most famous examples of English-language opera, is Dido and Aeneas (1689?) by Henry Purcell (1658?–95). Dido is very hard to categorize, as the version that has survived is one arranged for performance at a girls’ boarding school in London. Although there are signs of both French and Italian influence (the former in an allegorical Prologue, whose music is now lost; the latter in the shape and style of some of the arias, particularly the famous ‘Lament’ that Dido sings near the end, ‘When I am laid in earth’), the music is unusually simple in comparison with Purcell’s other creations around the same time. Some have even suggested that Dido may have started life as a rather different (and more elaborate) court entertainment; but the evidence is frustratingly incomplete.
By the end of its first century, opera had established roots across and then outside Italy: in France, England, various parts of the German-speaking lands and central Europe, and in Spain. In most places it assumed an indigenous form to suit the new terrain. Although its development in the early days as court entertainment had been tenuous, the buoyancy and adaptability of the Venetian model, pioneered by travelling theatrical-musical troupes and exported around the country, were by now proven. Opera’s historical progress would take many more turns during the next 300 years; but through most of this history it would retain some of those characteristics we have found during its first centennial. These characteristics caused courts and noble families, and later the paying public, to lay down improbable amounts of money in order to witness unprecedented vocal feats set against moments of dazzling visual splendour: to draw prestige and, lest we forget, sheer pleasure from a new form of drama, one in which a fantastic story was told through singing.