A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

WE HAVE SEEN HOW, from its earliest beginnings at Florence and Rome, Italian opera in the course of the seventeenth century passed out of the experimental stage. Radiating from Venice with its public opera houses, it established itself on a firm basis of public interest and support that made it by the end of the century the most widespread and most popular of all musical forms. We have also seen how, in the course of this development, three important national schools of opera rose outside Italy. One of these, the French, maintained its existence and individuality; the English school died with Purcell, while the German gradually lost its identity by absorption into the Italian style. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, it is possible practically to perceive one single operatic type that dominated all western Europe except France—a type that, despite variations in different countries and composers, showed certain fundamental common features everywhere. From the standpoint of the libretto, we identify this type as the opera of moods or affects. Its intention was to present a series of discrete expressive moments, each devoted exclusively to a particular mood. In order to call forth the necessary variety and intensity of moods, situations were contrived with little attention to unity or consistency of plot and with corresponding indifference to realism either in subject matter or in details of dramatic development. The form in which this intention was realized was one that we may call the “aria opera”; musically speaking, that is to say, it consisted of a series of arias separated by passages of recitative. Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, the tendency had been more and more to differentiate these two styles and, in general, to concentrate the musical interest more and more on the aria. Ensembles, ballets, and instrumental pieces were of only incidental importance.

Within this general type of Italian opera, two distinct directions were perceptible by the beginning of the eighteenth century, corresponding to common divisions of music history, as the “late Baroque” and the “pre-classical” styles of opera. The distinction involves many criteria, applying to both libretto and music.¹ The aim of Baroque opera had been to excite admiration and astonishment, to overwhelm, far stupire, hence the machines and marvels, the multitude of characters, the sensational disorderly plots, extravagant language, and comic episodes. The newer style came to be refined, polished, regulated; poets envisioned the drama as a school of virtue, teaching devotion to duty and loyalty to the higher impulses of man’s nature. They eschewed supernatural interventions and miracles; comic scenes were abolished; the cast was reduced to six stereotyped personages; plots became orderly and formalized, emotions restrained, language conventional and courtly.

No less sweeping were the differences in the music. In the older style, the harmony was comparatively rich and changeable, the bass lines fairly active, the melody spun out in long phrases of variable length (except in pieces based on dance rhythms), and the forms still somewhat free despite the tendency toward exclusive use of the da capo pattern. In the newer style, harmony was simplified to a few fundamental chords with the bass changing relatively seldom and the whole texture functioning solely as a support for the melody; the latter came to be organized in symmetrical short phrases, though with considerable variety of rhythmic patterns within the phrase. Variety of form gave way to the almost exclusive dominance of the full five-part da capo scheme.² The older style admitted the orchestra as a more nearly equal partner with the voice, aiming at a contrapuntal kind of bass and, in the case of composers like Steffani, Keiser, or Handel, sometimes interweaving the vocal line with one or more strands of instrumental melody; the newer style tended to relegate the orchestra to a subordinate position, with a bass whose function was entirely harmonic, concentrating all musical attention on the singer. Mattheson remarks on the contrast in this respect between his own time and the seventeenth century: in the earlier period “hardly anyone gave a thought to melody, but everything was centered simply on harmony.”³ Quantz laments that, though most Italian composers of the day (that is, 1752) are talented, they start writing operas before they have learned the rules of musical composition; that they do not take time to ground themselves properly; and that they work too fast.⁴ To these criticisms, with their implications of frivolousness and lack of counterpoint in Italy, may be opposed, as representing the Italian viewpoint, Galuppi’s classic definition of good music: “Vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione,” which Charles Burney translates “beauty, clearness, and good modulation,” though there are really no words in English capable of conveying the exact sense of the original.⁵

The older style of opera was represented by Legrenzi, Steffani, Keiser, Handel, and, to a considerable extent, Scarlatti; the newer tendencies were developed in the works of most Italian composers after 1700 and became dominant by 1720. One way to illustrate the distinction is to consider the contrasting types of operatic overture associated with each of the two schools. The older type was the French ouverture, first outlined by the early Venetians, given definitive form by Lully, and adopted in its essential features by Steffani, Keiser, and Handel; the newer type was the Italian sinfonia, first established by Scarlatti about 1700, and gradually ousting the French overture everywhere as the eighteenth century went on.⁶ The difference between these two kinds of overture is usually stated in terms of the order of movements—the French beginning (and often also ending) in slow tempo, whereas the Italian began fast, had a slow movement in the middle, and ended with an allegro or presto. This distinction, however, is superficial; the essential difference was a matter of musical texture. The French overture was a creation of the late Baroque, having a rich texture of sound, some quasi-contrapuntal independence of the inner voices, and a musical momentum bound to the non-periodic progression of the bass and harmonies. The Italian overture was a characteristic pre-classical form, light in texture, with busy activity of the upper voices accompanied by simple, standardized harmonic formulas. The French overture looked to the past, the Italian to the future; the latter represented those principles of texture, form, nature of thematic material, and methods of motivic development that were to lead eventually to the style of the classical symphony.⁷

Both the older and the newer type of Italian opera existed in the early part of the eighteenth century, but the former was obviously on the decline as far as popularity was concerned. The general change in the language of music that took place in the middle of the century and that led through the rococo or galant style to the later classical idiom was evident in opera as it was everywhere else. The growing taste for simplicity, ease, lightness of texture, tuneful melody, and facile ornamentation brought to the fore a kind of opera, Italian in origin but international in practice, that heretofore was referred to as Neapolitan, a descriptive term that came into use because many of the composers associated with early eighteenth-century opera lived or were trained in Naples.⁸

One division within the general field of eighteenth-century Italian opera, however, must be kept in mind, namely that between the serious opera (opera seria) and the comic opera (opera buffa). The latter is, at least in the beginning, a quite distinct form that will be treated later. At present we are concerned exclusively with the opera seria, the characteristic type of the age, cultivated in all countries by imported Italians as well as by native composers and singers imitating the Italian style, maintaining itself throughout the eighteenth century and continuing its influence far into the nineteenth.⁹ We shall attempt first to give a general idea of this operatic type and to dispose of certain misconceptions regarding it; afterward, we shall study the music of particular composers. The latter undertaking is still hampered by the paucity of available scores. Almost none of this music was printed. Hundreds of manuscripts have been lost; hundreds of others exist only in rare manuscript copies, and of these, only a small percentage is accessible in modern editions.

The foundation of the eighteenth-century opera seria rests upon a literary reform movement that developed at the end of the seventeenth century.¹⁰ The principal target of this reform was the eroicomico libretto that had dominated the Venetian stage throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Led by Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664–1708) and supported by other members of the Arcadian academy in Rome, this reform movement sought, among other things, to reduce the multiplicity of arias and to eliminate the intermingling of tragic-heroic and comic elements—characteristics of the librettos of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and his contemporaries. First steps toward the reform were taken by Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725).¹¹ He tightened the structure of his librettos by limiting the number of acts, scenes, and characters, and he heightened the dramatic action through a more creative use of language. Stampiglia was reluctant, however, to eliminate the servants and their integral comic scenes, to discard the happy ending, and to reverse the dominant role of music over poetry. As a result, he succeeded merely in remolding rather than reforming the eroicomico libretto, replacing it with his tragicommedia. In so doing, he kept alive a type of libretto that was to remain in vogue for several decades in the eighteenth century, most especially in Vienna, where Pietro Pariati (1665–1733) was active as court poet.¹²

The two poets chiefly associated with actually enacting the “reform” as set forth by Gravina were Apostolo Zeno (1688–1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782).¹³ Zeno, under the influence of the French dramatists, favored historical subject matter and sought to purge the opera of erratically motivated plots, supernatural interventions, machines, irrelevant comic episodes, and the bombastic declamation that had reigned in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ This movement was brought to fulfillment by Metastasio, the guiding genius of eighteenth-century Italian opera and a literary figure of such stature that his contemporaries seriously compared him with Homer and Dante.

Metastasio became court poet at Vienna in 1730, succeeding Stampiglia and Zeno, who had held that position since 1705 and 1718, respectively. His twenty-seven drammi per musica and other theater works were given more than a thousand musical settings in the eighteenth century, some of them being set to music as many as seventy times. The composers chiefly associated with his works were Leo, Vinci, and Hasse. A modern reader is apt to find Metastasio’s plays mannered and artificial, elegant rather than powerful; his characters seem more like eighteenth-century courtiers than the ancient Romans they were supposed to be; “sentimental quandaries” make up most of the situations in these dramas of amorous and political intrigue; there is almost always a happy ending (lieto fine), and the stock figure of the magnanimous tyrant is often in evidence. Yet in spite of all this, if one is willing to allow for the dramatic conventions of the time, some of Metastasio’s plays may still be read with pleasure. His achievement consisted in the creation of a consistent dramatic structure conforming to the rationalistic ideals of the period, but incorporating lyrical elements suited for musical setting in such a way as to form an organic whole.

A representative example of a Metastasian libretto is Attilio regolo (1740). Attilio, having been taken captive by the Carthaginians, is offered his freedom if he will use his influence with the Roman Senate to obtain certain advantages for Carthage. Under parole to return if unsuccessful, he is permitted to go to Rome, but once there, he urges the Senate to stand firm, scorning to purchase his own life by betraying the interests of his country. Resisting the entreaties of his friends and family, of the Senate (which is willing to make national sacrifices to save him), and of the entire populace, he voluntarily boards the ship that will take him back to captivity and death. This tragic ending was something of an innovation with Metastasio; it had appeared in only two other works of his, Didone abbandonata (1724) and the original version of Catone in Utica (1728; revised in 1729), and is exceedingly rare in earlier Italian opera—Busenello’s Didone of 1641 (music by Cavalli) being one instance.

One may well ask where, in such a drama as this, there is any place for lyricism. The answer is to be found in the peculiar construction of the scenes. In seventeenth-century opera, recitatives, arioso passages, and arias were intermingled according to the composer’s fancy or the requirements of the action. There was no standard procedure; very often a scene might end with a recitative. Metastasio standardized the form. In his operas, a typical scene consists of two distinct parts: first, dramatic action in recitative, and second, expression of sentiments by the chief actor in an aria. In the first part of the scene, the actor is a character in the drama, carrying on dialogue with other actors; in the second part, he is a person expressing his emotions or conveying some general sentiments or reflections appropriate to the current situation—not to his fellows on the stage but to the audience. While this goes on, the progress of the drama usually comes to a complete stop. Consequently, the play is made up of regularly alternating periods of movement and repose, the former representing the rights of the drama (recitative) and the latter the rights of the music (aria): the former occupying the larger part of the scene in the libretto, but the latter far exceeding it in the score, by reason of the extended musical structure of the aria, usually built on only two stanzas of four lines each. There results from this scheme an endlessly repeated pattern of tension and release, each recitative building up an emotional situation that finds an outlet in the following aria. “The recitative loads the gun, the aria fires it.”¹⁵ This is the classical compromise of operatic form, in which drama and music each yield certain rights and thereby find a means of living together compatibly. It permits free development of both elements within conventional limits. So long as these limits were tolerable (as they were to the early and middle eighteenth century), the form was found satisfactory; it lost favor only when other ideals of drama began to prevail. Moreover, the stiffness of the scheme was mitigated in Metastasio’s operas by the naturalness of the transition from recitative to aria, by the musical quality of the language in the recitative, and by the variety of verse forms in the aria.

It may be remarked that, whereas with respect to the dramatic action tension is greatest in the recitative and least in the aria, with respect to the music the exact opposite obtains. Musical tension is at a minimum in recitative and becomes strongest in the aria. Thus the two forces, drama and music, tend to “cancel” one another and the result is a certain neutrality, a remoteness or generality of expression in these works, which agrees well with the highly formal pattern of their design.

One paramount fact emerges: the central position of the aria as a musical unit. Musically speaking, that is to say, an opera is a succession of arias; other elements—recitatives, ensembles, instrumental numbers—are nothing but background. From this fact stem certain consequences: (1) the variety and degree of stylization of aria types, (2) a corresponding looseness of structure in the opera as a whole, and (3) the importance of the singer not only as an interpreter but also as a creative partner of the composer.

Eighteenth-century writers on opera classified arias into certain well-defined types, having distinct characteristics. For example, the Englishman John Brown mentioned five traditional varieties:

Aria cantabile—by pre-eminence so called, as if it alone were Song: And, indeed, it is the only kind of song which gives the singer an opportunity of displaying at once, and in the highest degree, all his powers…. The proper subjects for this Air are sentiments of tenderness.

Aria di portamento … chiefly composed of long notes, such as the singer can dwell on, and have, thereby, an opportunity of more effectually displaying the beauties, and calling forth the powers of his voice…. The subjects proper to this Air are sentiments of dignity.

Aria di mezzo carattere … a species of Air, which, though expressive neither of the dignity of this last, nor of the pathos of the former, is, however, serious and pleasing.

Aria parlante—speaking Air, is that which … admits neither of long notes in the composition, nor of many ornaments in the execution. The rapidity of motion of this Air is proportioned to the violence of the passion which is expressed by it. This species of Air goes sometimes by the name of aria di nota e parola, and likewise of aria agitata.

Aria di bravura, aria di agilita—is that which is composed chiefly, indeed, too often, merely to indulge the singer in the display of certain powers in the execution, particularly extraordinary agility or compass of voice.¹⁶

A less scientific tabulation is given by the Frenchman Charles de Brosses, writing from Rome around 1740:

The Italians … have airs of great agitation, full of music and harmony, for brilliant voices; others are of a pleasant sound and charming outlines, for delicate and supple voices; still others are passionate, tender, affecting, truly following the natural expression of emotions, strong or full of feeling for stage effect and for bringing out the best points of the actor. The “agitato” airs are those presenting pictures of storms, tempests, torrents, thunderclaps, a lion pursued by hunters, a war-horse hearing the sound of the trumpet, the terror of a silent night, etc.—all images quite appropriate to music, but out of place in tragedy. This kind of air devoted to large effects is almost always accompanied by wind instruments—oboes, trumpets, and horns—which make an excellent effect, especially in airs having to do with storms at sea.

Airs of the second kind are madrigals, pretty little songs with ingenious and delicate ideas or comparisons drawn from pleasant objects, such as zephyrs, birds, murmuring waves, country life, etc….

As to airs of the third kind, which express only feeling, Metastasio takes great care to place them at the most lively and interesting point of his drama, and to connect them closely with the subject. The musician then does not seek for embellishments or passage-work, but tries simply to portray the feeling, whatever it may be, with all his power…. I should also place in this class the airs of spectres and visions, to which the music lends a surprising power.¹⁷

It goes without saying that these and similar classifications cannot always be applied in all their details to the actual music, but their very existence is of interest as showing the high degree of organization—of stylization—that the aria reached in this period. There were other conventions as well, notably the one that decreed that practically every aria must be in the da capo form. Even the order and distribution of the different types were prescribed: every performer was to have at least one aria in each act, but no one might have two arias in succession; no aria could be followed immediately by another of the same type, even though performed by a different singer; the subordinate singers must have fewer and less important arias than the stars; and so on.¹⁸ At first glance, the whole system seems artificial to the point of absurdity; later in the century, in fact, it was attacked on this very ground. Yet given the postulates of early eighteenth-century opera aesthetic, it was quite logical, and justification could be found for every rule. (Moreover, the composers did not hesitate to break the rules if it suited their purposes to do so.) It was one of the secrets of Metastasio’s success that he could construct a drama that met these rigid requirements without being too obviously constrained by them.

A second consequence of over-concentration on the aria was a certain looseness of structure in the opera as a whole. With few exceptions, the composer’s responsibility for formal unity was limited to each single number. Apart from the libretto, there was nothing to bind these into a larger musical unit except the general requirements as to variety and the custom of placing the two most important arias at the end of each of the first two acts. To use familiar analogies, the arias were not like figures in a painting, each fulfilling a certain role in the composition and each in some measure conditioned by the others; rather, they were like a row of statues in a hall, symmetrically arranged but lacking any closer bond of aesthetic union. The conception corresponded to the Baroque ideal of dynamics, where the various degrees of loudness or softness were distinct, without transitions of crescendo or diminuendo; or to forms such as the sonata and concerto, in which each movement was a complete, thematically independent unit. The arias were like Leibniz’s monads, each closed off from the others and all held together only by the “preestablished harmony” of the libretto. Thus their order could be changed, new numbers added, or others taken away, without really doing violence to the musical plan of the opera as a whole—though, needless to say, the drama might suffer. Composers therefore freely substituted new arias for old in revivals of their works, or for performances with a different cast. A composer at Rome, for example, who had orders to revise a Venetian opera to suit the taste of the Roman singers and public, would have no compunction about replacing some of the original composer’s arias with some of his own, perhaps taken from an earlier work where they had been sung to different words. Indeed, it was exceptional for an opera to be given in exactly the same form in two different cities.

This working of new materials into old garments, if carried far enough, resulted in a kind of opera known as a pasticcio—literally, a “pie,” but perhaps translatable more expressively for modern readers as a “patchwork.” There are several kinds of pasticcio. One is illustrated by the opera Muzio Scevola (London, 1721), the first act of which was composed by Filippo Amadei (c. 1665–c. 1725), the second by Giovanni Bononcini, and the third by Handel.¹⁹ A second type of pasticcio was the result of a more haphazard process; it was an opera or intermezzo that had migrated from city to city, undergoing patching and alteration at every stage, until it might one day arrive at London (its usual final home) with a libretto in which Metastasio shared honors with “Zeno, Goldoni, Stampighia, Rossi, and other librettists,” while “Gluck, Ciampi, Galuppi, Cocchi, Jommelli, Latilla, Handel and several more might be pasted together” in the same musical score. An example of this type is Orazio, an opera originally composed solely by Pietro Auletta for Naples in 1737, but then drastically transformed over the course of the next twenty years (1740–58), with the substitution of arias by Jommelli, Pergolesi, and Leo, among others.²⁰ A third type is represented by a composer creating a new opera by drawing upon material from his own previously completed works. Handel was known to have done this for several of his operas staged in London, among them Oreste (1734).

Although the pasticcio was a very popular form of operatic entertainment, especially in London throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, its manner of composition was sometimes derided, as in these words taken from the “Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England,” appended to an anonymous English translation of François Raguenet’s Paralèle des Italiens et des François, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (1709): “Pick out about an hundred Italian Airs from several Authors, good, or bad, it signifies nothing. Among these, make use of fifty five, or fifty six, of such as please your Fancy best, and Marshall ’em in the manner you think most convenient. When this is done, you must employ a Poet to write some English Words, the Airs of which are to be adapted to the Italian Musick.”²¹

A third effect—which operated at the same time as a cause—of the importance of the aria was the glorification of the singer. The virtuoso singer was to the eighteenth century what the virtuoso pianist was to the nineteenth, or the virtuoso conductor to the twentieth. The operatic songbirds of that age have been so often and so unsparingly condemned that it seems worthwhile to try to correct this judgment by quoting a passage from Vernon Lee’s Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, a book naive in many of its musical opinions and perhaps too uncritical in its enthusiasm for everything Italian but that nevertheless states the case for the singer with sympathy and insight:

The singer was a much more important personage in the musical system of the eighteenth century than he is now-a-days. He was not merely one of the wheels of the mechanism, he was its main pivot. For in a nation so practically, spontaneously musical as the Italian, the desire to sing preceded the existence of what could be sung: performers were not called into existence because men wished to hear such and such a composition, but the composition was produced because men wished to sing. The singers were therefore not trained with a view to executing any peculiar sort of music, but the music was composed to suit the powers of the singers. Thus ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when music first left the church and the palace for the theater, composition and vocal performance had developed simultaneously, narrowly linked together; composers always learning first of all to sing, and singers always finishing their studies with that of composition; Scarlatti and Porpora teaching great singers, Stradella and Pistocchi forming great composers; the two branches … acting and reacting on each other so as to become perfectly homogeneous and equal.

The singer, therefore, was neither a fiddle for other men to play upon, nor a musical box wound up by mechanism. He was an individual voice, an individual mind, developed to the utmost; a perfectly balanced organization; and to him was confided the work of embodying the composer’s ideas, of moulding matter to suit the thought, of adapting the thought to suit the matter, of giving real existence to the form which existed only as an abstraction in the composer’s mind. The full responsibility of this work rested on him; the fullest liberty of action was therefore given him to execute it. Music, according to the notions of the eighteenth century, was no more the mere written score than a plan on white paper would have seemed architecture to the Greeks. Music was to be the result of the combination of the abstract written note with the concrete voice, of the ideal thought of the composer with the individuality of the performer. The composer was to give only the general, the abstract; while all that depended upon individual differences, and material peculiarities, was given up to the singer. The composer gave the unchangeable, the big notes, constituting the essential, immutable form, expressing the stable, unvarying character; the singer added the small notes, which filled up and perfected the part of the form which depended on the physical material, which expressed the minutely subtle, ever-changing mood. In short, while the composer represented the typical, the singer represented the individual.²²

We read much about abuses on the part of the eighteenth-century opera singers, but we are seldom told why these abuses were tolerated, being tacitly allowed to infer that audiences and composers were either blind to the evil or too supine to resent it. This was not so. The abuses were recognized, but they were endured because they seemed to be inseparable from the system out of which they grew and because, on the whole, people liked the system. The principle of absolute dominance of the aria in the form entailed the absolute dominance of the singer in performance, and in their submission to this principle, audiences, composers, and poets alike allowed excesses on the part of the singers that would not have been endured in another age. Only rarely was even an autocrat like Handel (who had the incidental advantage of combining the offices of composer and manager in one person) able to control them, and then only by an extraordinary combination of tact, patience, humor, personal force, and even threats of physical violence. But usually the singers reigned supreme. Metastasio might insist all he pleased that poetry should be the “dictator” in opera, and complain of the mutilation of his dramas by “those ignorant and vain vocal heroes and heroines, who having substituted the imitation of flageolets and nightingales for human affections, render the Italian stage a national disgrace,” but he was powerless to alter a situation that his own works had contributed so much to bring about.²³

A lively, though unquestionably exaggerated, picture of the singers may be drawn from the critical and satirical writings of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.²⁴ The most famous satire was Il teatro alla moda, by Benedetto Marcello (1686–1739), himself a composer.²⁵ Marcello’s work is in the form of ironically worded counsels to everyone connected with opera, from the poets and composers down to the stagehands and singing teachers. The composer, he says, “will hurry or slow down the pace of an aria, according to the caprice of the singers, and will conceal the displeasure which their insolence causes him by the reflection that his reputation, his solvency, and all his interest are in their hands.”²⁶ As for the director, he “will see that all the best songs go to the prima donna, and if it becomes necessary to shorten the opera he will never allow her arias to be cut, but rather other entire scenes.”²⁷ If a singer

has a scene with another actor, whom he is supposed to address when singing an air, he will take care to pay no attention to him, but will bow to the spectators in the loges, smile at the orchestra and the other players, in order that the audience may clearly understand that he is the Signor Alipi Forconi, Musico, and not the Prince Zoroaster, whom he is representing…. All the while the ritornello of his air is being played the singer should walk about the stage, take snuff, complain to his friends that he is in bad voice, that he has a cold, etc., and while singing his aria he shall take care to remember that at the cadence he may pause as long as he pleases, and make runs, decorations, and ornaments according to his fancy; during which time the leader of the orchestra shall leave his place at the harpsichord, take a pinch of snuff, and wait until it shall please the singer to finish. The latter shall take breath several times before finally coming to a close on a trill, which he will be sure to sing as rapidly as possible from the beginning, without preparing it by placing his voice properly, and all the time using the highest notes of which he is capable.²⁸

The cadenzas and ornaments to which Marcello here alludes were carefully prepared beforehand:

If [a singer] have a role in a new opera, she will at the first possible moment take all her arias (which in order to save time she has had copied without the bass part) to her Maestro Crica so that he may write in the passages, the variations, the beautiful ornaments, etc.—and Maestro Crica, without knowing the first thing about the intentions of the composer either with regard to the tempo of the arias, or the bass, or the instrumentation, will write below them in the empty spaces of the bass staff everything he can think of, and in very great quantity, so that the Virtuosa may be able to sing her song in a different way at every performance … and if her variations have nothing in common with the bass, with the violins which are to play in unison with her, or with the concertizing instruments, even if they are not in the same key, that will be of no consequence, since it is understood that the modern opera director is both deaf and dumb.²⁹

More serious critics also viewed with alarm the overemphasis on vocal virtuosity, as attracting attention at the expense of both drama and music. Thus Metastasio writes:

The singers of the present times wholly forget, that their business is to imitate the speech of man, with numbers and harmony: on the contrary, they believe themselves more perfect, in proportion as their performance is remote from human nature…. When they have played their Symphony with the throat, they believe they have fulfilled all the duties of their art. Hence the audience keep their hearts in the most perfect tranquillity, and expect the performers merely to tickle their ears.

—to which Burney adds, “If forty years ago, Metastasio speaks with so much indignation of the abuse of execution, which has been increasing ever since, what would he say now?³⁰

The technique of singing seems to have reached a level in the eighteenth century that has never since been equaled. In the nature of things, it is difficult to find out much about the details of this art in specific cases, for the singers’ greatest displays of skill were improvised, and consequently almost no examples of written-out da capo ornamentation remain in the scores. In general, however, it may be said that there were two related practices, one having to do with ornamentation of the given melodic line (coloratura), and the other with the insertion of improvised passages at the cadences (cadenzas). Both these practices can be observed in a unique example afforded by an early eighteenth-century manuscript containing the aria “Sciolta dal lido” by Giuseppe Vignati. Notated below the vocal staff is an ornamented version of the soprano part, believed to represent a 1720 performance by Faustina Bordoni.³¹

Ornamentation of the melodic line by solo singers was a custom inherited from the Renaissance and carried on through the whole Baroque period.³² It rose to special prominence in the latter part of the seventeenth century in Italy, as the aria was coming into its commanding position at the expense of the accompaniment. The climax was reached in the eighteenth century, the age of the great Italian singing schools. Particularly in the da capo repetition of the first part of an aria, the singer was expected to show his full powers:

Among the Things worthy of Consideration, the first to be taken Notice of, is the Manner in which all Airs divided into three Parts are to be sung. In the first they require nothing but the simplest Ornaments, of a good Taste and few, that the Composition may remain simple, plain, and pure; in the second they expect, that to this Purity some artful Graces be added, by which the Judicious may hear, that the Ability of the Singer is greater; and, in repeating the Air, he that does not vary it for the better, is no great Matter.³³

In the rapid bravura arias, opportunity for improvised ornamentation was less than in arias in slower tempo. The well-known “Largo” from Handel’s Serse would probably have been ornamented by the singer somewhat as shown in example 12.1.³⁴

The practice of improvising cadenzas likewise originated in the sixteenth-century solo song and was revived in the eighteenth-century opera. Examples are found in Scarlatti. The natural place for a cadenza was on the equation

chord of an important cadence, just as we find it commonly in the concertos of the classical period. Inserted in arias, where they served par excellence for the display of the singers’ powers, the cadenzas were often extended to ridiculous lengths. Ange Goudar quotes a burlesque petition supposed to have been presented to the management of the Paris Opéra “by the Italian eunuchs” (i. e., the castrati), which includes this statement: “A cadenza, to be according to the rules, must last seven minutes and thirty-six seconds, all without drawing breath; for the whole of this must be done in one breath even though the actor should faint on the stage.”³⁵ Tosi criticizes the cadenzas in these words: “Every Air has (at least) three Cadences, that are all three final. Generally speaking, the Study of the Singers of the present Times consists in terminating the Cadence of the first Part with an overflowing of Passages and Divisions at Pleasure, and the Orchestre waits; in that of the second the Dose is encreased, and the Orchestre grows tired; but on the last Cadence, the Throat is set a going, like a Weather-cock in a Whirlwind, and the Orchestra yawns.”³⁶ Examples of cadenzas sung by Farinelli in Giacomelli’s Merope (Venice, 1734) have been preserved in a manuscript dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa that is now in the Vienna library; one of them, shown in example 12.2, well illustrates these remarks of Tosi.³⁷

All this outburst of virtuosity was bound up with the peculiar seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italian institution of the castrato.³⁸ There are many references to the presence of eunuchs among the singers of Italian and German chapels of the sixteenth century; they are found at Florence in 1534 and in the papal chapel at Rome by 1562. They came into opera during the first decade of the seventeenth century, most notably with Monteverdi’s Orfeo. By the end of that century they were a usual feature in Italian churches, despite periodic pronouncements by the popes against the custom. Castrato singers flourished especially during the period 1650 to 1750, both male and female roles in the opera being entrusted to them. Their popularity began to decline in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the last Italian opera castrato died in 1861.³⁹ Their extraordinary vogue was due in part to the shortage of women singers after the first few years of the seventeenth century, coupled with the fact that for a long time (especially at Rome) women were forbidden to appear on the public stage, and where women did take part in opera, as at Paris (there were no castrati in the French opera), they were generally regarded as morally outside the pale of respectable society.⁴⁰

But the castrati held their ground even in the eighteenth century, a period when there was no dearth of first-rate women singers (such as Faustina Bordoni, wife of the composer Hasse, and Francesca Cuzzoni), by reason of the sheer excellence of their art. Educated as the castrati were from early childhood in the famous conservatories of the Italian cities, their long training gave them a solid grounding in musicianship, in addition to developing a miraculous vocal technique. Their voices (known as voci bianche, literally “white voices”) were more powerful and flexible, if less sweet and expressive, than those of women, and the quality often remained unimpaired after as many as forty years of singing. So great were the rewards of a successful career that even the slightest sign of a promising voice was often sufficient to induce hopeful parents to offer a boy for emasculation, with the inevitable result that (according to Burney) in every great town in Italy could be found numbers of these pathetic creatures “without any voice at all, or at least without one sufficient to compensate for such a loss.”⁴¹

One of the most renowned Italian castrati was Carlo Broschi (1705–82), known as Farinelli, who had a legendary career in Europe.⁴² Brilliantly successful as a singer in many countries, the friend of princes and emperors, for twenty-four years the confidant of two successive Spanish kings, the hero of popular tales, and the subject of an opera—he was a figure in the public imagination of the eighteenth century comparable to Liszt or Paganini in the nineteenth.⁴³ An example of the manner in which he ornamented his vocal part can be seen in “Son qual nave che agitata,” an aria composed by his brother, Riccardo Broschi (b. 1698), in 1734 for insertion in Hasse’s Artaserse. The surviving manuscript contains passaggi and cadenzas that Farinelli intended to perform, all marked in red.⁴⁴

The number of operas written by eighteenth-century composers testifies to the popularity of this form of entertainment. A tabulation of forty leading composers of the period shows nearly two thousand works, or an average of about fifty operas each. The sum total of the production of all composers would, of course, be much greater. One reason for this was that audiences insisted on new music each season, while they also welcomed the old familiar librettos year after year. Then, too, the writing out of the score was not the time-consuming process that it is in modern days, since so much was left to be improvised. The score was really little more than a memorandum of the composer’s intentions, to be filled in by the performers.

Contemporary audiences, far from regarding the opera as a serious dramatic spectacle, looked upon it merely as an amusement. Brosses reports that the performances in Rome began at eight or nine in the evening and lasted until midnight. Everyone of any consequence had a box, which was a social gathering place for friends. “The pleasure these people take in music and the theater is more evidenced by their presence than by the attention they bestow on the performance.” After the first few times, no one listened at all, except to a few favorite songs. The boxes were comfortably furnished and lighted so that their occupants could indulge in cards and other games. “Chess is marvellously well adapted to filling in the monotony of the recitatives, and the arias are equally good for interrupting a too assiduous concentration on chess.”⁴⁵ Burney mentions the faro tables at the Milan opera;⁴⁶ at Venice, where the pit was usually filled with gondoliers and workmen, “there is a constant noise of people laughing, drinking, and joking, while sellers of baked goods and fruit cry their wares aloud from box to box”;⁴⁷ at Florence, it was the custom to serve hot suppers in the boxes during the performance.⁴⁸

This description of the manner in which operas were performed will explain why we of today often fail to see what it was that aroused enthusiasm on the part of the audiences. We must realize that those things that were the very life of the performance were just the things that could never be written in the score—the marvelous, constantly varied embellishments by the singers, the glamour of famous names, the intoxication of the lights and scenery, above all the gay, careless society of the eighteenth century, the game of chess during the recitatives, and the gabble of conversation, hushed only for the favorite aria and the following rapturous applause.

Although the arias were the chief musical feature, there were a few other elements. The chorus was limited in its function, especially in operas based upon librettos by Zeno and Metastasio.⁴⁹ Besides occasional interjections into the dramatic action, most often immediately preceding or following a change of scenery, the chorus was used at the end of an opera to provide a festive conclusion. The only theater works that used choruses at all extensively were of the type known as feste teatrali, written for special occasions like the festival operas of an earlier period (see chapter seven). Hardly more important than the chorus was the overture, since the composer knew there would be too much noise in the house for it to be heard. (A notable exception to this situation was the atmosphere in the court theater of Vienna, which differed markedly from the clamor in the public theaters of Venice.) The orchestral accompaniments for the arias, however, were carefully managed so as to support the singer without obscuring the vocal line. The first violins frequently played in unison with the voice—or rather, they played the simple written version of the melody that the singer was ornamenting. Ensembles were few; in the early part of the century; there was usually no more than a perfunctory closing number for all the singers, though later this feature took on more importance, largely under the influence of the comic opera ensembles. Duets were more common, but even here much of the writing was a mere alternation rather than a combination of the two voices; a duet would be placed, like an aria, at the close of a scene, and was usually in da capo form.

Two distinct types of recitative in eighteenth-century opera were inherited from the preceding age. The recitativo semplice (“simple”), later called secco (“dry”), was accompanied only by the continuo instruments. Its function was to carry on the action in dialogue with the slightest possible musical accompaniment.⁵⁰ Although audiences as a rule gave it little attention, the recitativo semplice was not altogether a perfunctory matter. Certain conventions of harmony and certain melodic formulas appear in it regularly, in accordance with the fluctuating emotions of the text. Since the singers allowably took all sorts of rhythmic and melodic liberties with the score in the interest of “natural” expression, it is probable that the secco recitative had in performance considerably more dramatic impact than the bare written notes suggest.

The other kind of recitative was the recitativo accompagnato or stromentato (accompanied recitative), so called because it was accompanied either by the strings or the full orchestra in addition to the continuo. These recitatives were reserved for the two or three most dramatic points in the opera, such as monologues expressing strong emotion at the climaxes of the action. The voice, declaiming in flexible, varied, and expressive phrases, alternated with orchestral outbursts of chords, tremolando figures, or rhythmic motifs. Sudden changes of mood, abrupt modulations, were featured. The essential function of the orchestra, indeed, was not so much to accompany the singer as to express, during the pauses in the song, the emotions that words were insufficient to convey—to suggest, in combination with the attitudes and gestures of the actor, those further depths of feeling that only music and movement, transcending the too-definite ideas and images of a text, could adequately render.⁵¹ The close union between words and music, together with the natural freedom of form, gave these places great dramatic power, and all contemporaries speak of them with enthusiasm. They were almost the only relief from the monotony of the semplice recitative on the one hand and the strict formality of the aria on the other, and it is significant that the accompanied recitative was especially cultivated by such later composers as Hasse, Graun, and Terradellas, and above all by Jommelli, Gluck, and Traetta, who were striving to break down the rigidity of the old operatic framework.

1. See Downes, “The Operas of Johann Christian Bach,” which includes a survey of Italian opera seria between 1720 and 1730.

6. For modern editions of representative overtures by A. Scarlatti, see Grout, ed., The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti, and Brook, ed., The Symphony 1720–1840.

7. This trend can be observed in the opera overtures of Francesco Conti, especially those exhibiting the basic elements of sonata forms. See Brook. ed., The Symphony, ser. B, vol. 2, for examples of his music. On the early history of the Italian overture, see Heuss, Die lnstrumental-Stücke die venetianischen Opern-Sinfonien, 88–92.

8. See Downes, “The Neapolitan Tradition in Opera,” and Hucke, “Die neapolitanische Tradition in der Oper.” The implications of Neapolitan, when used to denote a certain type or style of opera, can lead to confusion; it therefore seems best to discontinue the use of the word as a descriptive term.

9. It should be noted that opera seria does not appear as a title on librettos until the latter half of the eighteenth century. Prior to that time, the most commonly used term to denote a “serious” text was dramma per musica. For a discussion of the use of these terms, see Strohm, “Towards an Understanding of the Opera Seria.”

10. Giazotto, Poesia melodrammatica; Burt, “Opera in Arcadia”; Vetter, “Deutschland und das Formgefuhl Italiens”; R. Freeman. Opera without Drama; Strohm, Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert.

11. Cf. Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, vol. 38, part 2, 117–34; Giazotto, Poesia melodrammatica; Kanduth, “Silvio Stampiglia, poeta cesareo.”

12. See Campanini, Un precursore del Metastasio; Williams, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, 130–37; Seifert, “Pietro Pariati, poeta cesareo.”

13. On Zeno, see Fehr, Apostolo Zeno,1669–1750, und seine Reform des Operntextes. On Metastasto, see Muraro, ed., Metastasio e il mondo musicale.

14. Metastasio, letter of Fabroni, December 7, 1767, in Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writing of the Abate Metastasio, 3:19. See also Wellesz’s introduction to Fux’s Costanza e fortezza, DTOe, 37:xiii.

15. Flemming, ed., Die Ope, 58. See also the admirably clear exposition of this aesthetic in Grimm, “Poëme lyrique.”

17. Brosses, Lettres familières sur i’ltalie, 2:348–51 (translation by Grout).

18. Hogarth, Memoirs of the Opera, vol. 2, chap. 3; Goldoni, Mémoires, chap. 28. See also the letter of Giuseppe Riva to Muratori in 1725, on the requirements for a London libretto, quoted in Streatfeild, “Handel, Rolli”; Hucke, “Die neapolitanische Tradition,” 262ff.

19. Another example of a pasticcio in which composers were responsible for specific parts of the operatic production is L’Atenaide (Vienna, 1714): Act I, M. A. Ziani; Act II, A. Negri;Act III, A. Caldara; intermezzos, F. B. Conti; ballet music, N. Matteis.

20. See Walker, “Orazio: The History of a Pasticcio”; Strohm, “Handels Pasticci”; Lazarevich, “Eighteenth-Century Pasticcio:The Historian’s Gordian Knot.”

21. [Galliard (?), trans.]. A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Opera’s Translated from the French; with Some Remarks. To which is added A Critical Discourse upon Opera’s in England, and a Means proposed for Their Improvement.

A work that may have prompted these remarks by the anonymous author and translator (believed to be J. E. Galliard) is Thomyris, Queen of Scythia, performed at Drury Lane in 1707. It was fashioned by the impresario J. J. Heidegger, who selected arias by several different composers (Scarlatti, Gasparini, Albinoni, Bononcini, et al.) and then presumably had J. C. Pepusch weave them together with newly composed recitatives. Although Pepusch wrote several masques that were performed at Drury Lane between 1715 and 1716, it is not possible to confirm that he indeed was the person who arranged the airs for either Thomyris or The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. See Cook, “The Life and Works of Johann Christoph Pepusch.”

24. Muratori. Della perfetta poesia, 2:30–45 (but see the refutation in Mattheson, Die neueste Untersuchung); Rosa, “La musica”; Adimari, “Satira quarta”; and the memoirs of Da Ponte and Goldoni. See also Goldschmidt, “Die Oper und ihre Literature bis 1752,” in his Die Musikästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts, 272–87; Cametti, “Critiche e satire”; Frati, “Satire di musicisti.”

25. See Pauly, “Benedetto Marcello’s Satire.” Modern editions of Il teatro alla moda are available in Italian (E. Fondi, 1913;A. D’Angeli, 1927), French (E. David, 1890), German (A. Einstein, 1917), and English (R. Pauly, 1948); selections also in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 518–31.

28. Ibid., 26–27. The singer would be able to “complain to his friends” while walking about the stage by virtue of the eighteenth-century custom of seating spectators on the stage.

31. See Buelow, “A Lesson in Operatic Performance Practice,” with its illustrative musical examples. See also Rogers, “A Neglected Source of Ornamentation,” for a discussion of “Cara sposa” from Handel’s Radamisto, which has written out ornamentation and is the sole example of a continuo realization in Handel’s hand.

32. For a general survey of this subject, see Haas, Aufführungspraxis. See also Aldrich, “The Principal Agréments,” which gives full reference to the sources, and Goldschmidt, Die Lehre von der vokalen Ornamentik.

34. For this realization of an ornamented melodic line, I [Grout] am indebted to Dr. Putnam Aldrich. An example of vocal embellishment supplied by Handel can be seen in Dean, “Vocal Embellishment in a Handel Aria.” For examples of elaborate bravura arias, see Haböck, Die Gesangskunst der Kastraten; Burney, A General History of Music, 2:833–37; OHM, 4:221–32.

35. “Une cadenza, pour être dans les règles, doit durer sept minutes & trente-six seconds, le tout sans prendre respiration; car il faut que toute cette tirade soit d’une seule haleine, l’acteur en dût crever sur Ia scene.” Goudar, Le Brigandage, 127.

37. An autograph manuscript page of Mozart’s cadenzas and ornaments for arias from the operas of J. C. Bach (K. 293 e), formerly preserved in the Mozarteum at Salzburg, disappeared during World War II. Fortunately, however, it had previously been photographed by Edward Downes, who, in “The Operas of Johann Christian Bach,” appendix B, reproduces and transcribes Mozart’s embellishments for the aria “Cara la dolce fiamma” from Bach’s Adriano in Siria (London, 1765).

38. Haböck, Die Kastraten und ihre Gesangskunst; Raguenet, Defénse du Parallèle des Italiens et des François; [Villeneuve], Lettre sur le méchanisme de l’opéra italien (1756); Lalande, Voyage d’un François en ltalie, vol. 6, chap. 16; Heriot, The Castrati in opera; Mamy, Les Grands Castrats napolitains; Rosselli, “The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 1550–1850”

39. Parolari, “Giambattista Velluti.” See also Hogarth, Memoirs of The opera, 2:306–13

41. Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 303. See also Lalande, Voyage, vol. 6, chap. 10.

42. Other famous Italian castrati include Caffarelli, Carestini, Nicolini, Senesino, and Siface.

43. For an account of Farinelli’s performances, see Burney, Present State of Music in France and Italy, 202–17. See also Monaldi, Cantanti evirati celebri; Barbier, Farinelli: Le Castrat des lumières; R. Freeman, “Farinelli and His Repertory”; and studies by Haböck.

45. Brosses, Lettres … sur l’Italie, 2:36 and passim. But see also Lalande, Voyage, vol. 5, chap. 10.

49. The function of the chorus in these librettos is discussed in R. Freeman, opera without Drama, 240–51.

50. On the performance of such accompaniment in the eighteenth century, see M. Schneider, “Die Begleitung des Secco-Rezitativs um 1750”; Downes “Secco Recitative.”