The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century
IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY OPERA, comic episodes of all kinds were regularly mingled with serious scenes. The comic scenes, dramatically related to the operas with which they were performed, could also be excerpted and performed as if they were independent intermezzos.1 The practice of commingling comic and serious scenes continued into the eighteenth century, especially in Naples and Vienna. At the same time, comic and serious operas were emerging as separate types. The separation of styles was brought about, in part, by Zeno and Metastasio, in whose reform of the opera libretto in the early eighteenth century the comic was considered to be irrelevant to the plot and incongruous with the tragic style.
Comic opera grew up independently in each country, creating a number of quite diverse national forms, such as the Italian opera buffa, the French opéra comique, the English ballad opera, and after the middle of the century, the German Singspiel and the Spanish tonadilla.2 These forms held certain features in common in the early stages of their history. For example, they showed signs of their humble origin in the choice of light or farcical subjects and the preference for scenes, personages, and dialogue taken from familiar popular comedies or from the everyday life of the common people. They used spoken dialogue (except in the Italian opera buffa) and were performed by comparatively unskilled singers, often by inferior actors for whom music was, to say the least, only an avocation. They occasionally parodied the serious opera, and cultivated a simple, easily grasped musical style in which national popular idioms played a prominent part, and if fantasy was present, it was treated comically.3 Finally, in the course of the eighteenth century, these forms underwent a radical change in character, from low-class farce to middle-class comedy of various sorts, acquiring in the process so many new features, both in the libretto and in the music, that by the end of the century the original distinction between serious and comic operas no longer had much meaning. Comic opera in its beginning was regarded by opera-goers as “low-brow” entertainment; within a little over fifty years it became of equal respectability and importance with serious opera; and in less than fifty years more, it dominated the stage, having supplanted or absorbed the old opera seria almost completely.
Opera Buffa and Intermezzo
The term opera buffa is used somewhat loosely as a general designation for Italian operas of the early and middle eighteenth century that cannot be classified as opera seria.4 Two distinct kinds of comic opera existed in Italy at the beginning of the century. First, there were full-length operas based on non-serious librettos, works similar to Rospigliosi’s Dal male il bene (1653) and other comic and pastoral pieces that had been produced. Most composers of Italian opera seria also produced works in the comic genre. Alessandro Scarlatti exemplifies this well with his Il trionfo dell’onore, a “commedia” in which the roles range from serious to farcical. Although this comic opera had a text in Italian, it nevertheless was composed specifically for the Teatro dei Fiorentini, a small theater in Naples known for its productions of a special type of commedia in musica, one using Neapolitan dialect and drawing some of its character types from the commedia dell’arte.5 Vinci and Leo each produced a half-dozen or more pieces of this sort in the 1720s.6 Li Zite ’ngalera (1722), with music in a simple style, is the only one of Vinci’s works in this genre known to survive. Pergolesi also contributed to the Teatro dei Fiorentini repertoire with his Lo frate ’innamorato (1732), a three-act commedia musicale that makes use of Neapolitan dialect.7
The second kind of Italian comic opera at the beginning of the eighteenth century was in the form of intermezzos, intended to be performed between the acts of a serious opera. These intermezzos were, in a way, descendants of the comic scenes that had been scattered through the plots of seventeenth-century operas. Although the reforms of Zeno and Metastasio eliminated comic episodes from the opera seria libretto, the comic element continued to find refuge in the intermezzos and in various other dramatic forms.
Between 1700 and 1730, a sizable repertoire of intermezzos dramatically independent of the host operas with which they were performed developed first in Venice and then a decade later came to the stage in Naples, Vienna, Dresden, and Hamburg.8 It was the custom for intermezzos presented with an opera seria to form a continuous plot, so that performances in effect consisted of two operas, one serious and one comic, in alternation. Understandably, foreigners sometimes complained of the resultant confusion.9 Subdivision of the intermezzos into two or three, rarely four parts was often determined more by local preference than by the number of acts in the attendant opera seria. In Naples, for example, preference for the two-part intermezzo was well established by 1730. Sometimes the intermezzos were performed at the end of the opera as an afterpiece, thus becoming to all intents and purposes independent works, or were intentionally staged as self-contained dramatically independent works. Some of the best known sets of intermezzos were based upon the writings of Molière, published in Italian translation shortly before the beginning of the eighteenth century.10 Others were extracted from comic scenes in preexisting opera librettos.
Among the hundreds of intermezzos produced by famous as well as obscure composers in the first half of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona has deservedly maintained its popularity down to our own time. This intermezzo, set to an original libretto by Gennar’Antonio Federico, was first performed between the acts of the composer’s opera Il prigionier superbo (Naples, 1733).
The maid-mistress theme was popular with librettists writing intermezzos in the 1700s, many of whom may have drawn inspiration from a play written at the turn of the century by Jacopo Angelo Nelli entitled La serva padrona.11 Examples include Pietro Pariati’s Pimpinone, or Vespetta e Pimpinone (1708), set by composers in Venice (Albinoni), Vienna (Conti), and Hamburg (Telemann), and Bernardo Saddumene’s La fantesca, or Carlotta e Pantaleone (Naples, 1728), set by Hasse. In his play, Nelli moves away from the use of commedia dell’arte characters and instead follows Molière’s lead in introducing his audiences to a study of characters and manners as they relate to contemporary society.
Pergloesi’s setting of Federico’s La serva padrona is characteristic of such works in its economy of musical resources: only two singers (soprano and bass) and a third mute character, with an orchestra of strings and continuo. The musical style is likewise typical: predominantly major tonalities; rapid in movement, with much repetition of short motifs; disjunct melodic lines; comic effects produced by sudden offbeat accents, wide skips, and an infectious gaiety and vigor of utterance, offering much to the tone and gesture of the actor (example 15.1).
La serva padrona brought posthumous fame to Pergolesi during its numerous revivals throughout Europe, especially those staged in Paris between 1752 and 1754 in the midst of the controversy commonly known as the Querelle des Bouffons (also as known as Guerre de Bouffons). On the occasion of its first performance in Paris by a troupe of traveling comedians under the direction of Eustachio Bambini, La serva padrona was presented with but one minor change, the substitution of the duet “Per te ho io nel core” from Pergolesi’s comic opera Il Flaminio (1735) for the original concluding duet “Contento tu sarai.” 12 Many subsequent performances, however, strayed considerably from the intermezzo as originally composed. Those given in London between 1750 and 1783, for example, show that although several adhered closely to the Italian original, most were English adaptations with new music and even new characters.13
In addition to the more common allegro arias, intermezzos composed prior to 1750 frequently contained a slower, cantabile style, sometimes in minor, which often featured chromatic melodies and harmonies for mock-pathetic effects. Folksong-styled canzonettas and buffo-bass patter songs frequently appear; duets conclude the structural divisions within the intermezzos. Throughout the scores, one is impressed by the absolute fidelity of music to text; the singing seems to be simply a highly flexible, sensitive, melodic declamation of the words, preserving and heightening every detail that might contribute to the comic effect. At the same time, there is never a suggestion that the words impede the spontaneous flow of the music. Textual repetition is a constant feature but somehow never gives the impression of artificiality. One consequence of this perfect union of text and music is the extraordinary variety of forms in the arias of the intermezzos, in marked contrast to the stock da capo pattern of the opera seria of the time. This variety is well represented in Johann Adolf Hasse’s eight intermezzos, composed between 1726 and 1730.14
EXAMPLE 15.1 La serva padrona, Act I
Around 1750 new kinds of comic opera librettos began to appear—works that must be called dramas rather than farces—and were often sentimental or even pathetic in character. These newer tendencies did not replace the old comic elements altogether but rather existed side by side or intermingled with them, so that the comic opera libretto in the second half of the century was distinctly varied and, on the whole, much more interesting than that of the opera seria. One traditional characteristic of the comic scenes and intermezzos of the first half of the century had been the use of the bass voice, noticeably absent from the casts of many opere serie.15 The presence of basses along with the higher voices made possible one of the most distinctive features of Italian drammi giocosi—the ensembles, particularly those at the end of each act.16 Opera seria, with its emphasis on solo singing, had not developed the ensemble forms, with the notable exception of the duet.
A composer who is reputed to have made important contributions to the ensemble finale is Nicola Logroscino (1698–c.1765); he produced a considerable number of comic operas at Naples in the 1740s and 1750s, but so little of his music has been preserved that it is difficult to know how far his reputation as one of the founders of the buffo finale is deserved.17 The ideal aim in these comic operas was an ensemble finale that would not be a mere closing set-piece but rather would carry on the action of the drama while at the same time evolving a satisfactory musical form. Although this aim was not to be fully achieved before Mozart, considerable progress was made toward it after the middle of the century.
One of the most prolific composers of the day was Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85), called “Il Buranello” from the name of his birthplace, an island near Venice. Although Galuppi’s serious and comic operas, nearly a hundred in number, were presented for the most part at Venice, they nevertheless achieved fame all over Europe. Galuppi spent two years in London (1741–43), supervising the staging of several works, including four of his own creation, and he also worked at the court of St. Petersburg from 1765 to 1768.18
About the middle of the century, at Venice, Galuppi began an association with the dramatist Carlo Goldoni (1707–93), the leading figure in the reform of Italian drama in the eighteenth century.19 Goldoni’s influence on the libretto marked a turning point in the history of the opera buffa, which from this time on became more dignified, more orderly in structure, and more refined in action and language. His own drammi giocosi per musica, which reject the stock character types and plots as well as the improvised dialogue of the old commedia dell’arte, are models of natural characterization and spontaneous action.20
Goldoni’s librettos were intended solely for entertainment rather than literary purposes. They contain a very important element that was to forever change the nature of how composers would conclude the first and second acts of the dramma giocoso, namely, action-packed finales of considerable length that permitted continuous musical treatment. Galuppi responded to this new format by frequently composing the finales of his comic operas in the form of a chain of short sections. By means of these multi-sectional finales, he was able to relate the music closely to the ongoing action. One of the most successful of the Goldoni-Galuppi productions was Il filosofo di campagna (1754).
Among the best and most popular comic operas of this period was La buona figliuola, composed by Niccolò Piccinni for Rome in 1760. It enjoyed a two-year run there and soon became known all over Europe. The opera is based on La Cecchina, ossia La buona figliuola, a libretto that Goldoni wrote in 1756, soon after his arrival in Parma.21 The story for this melodramma giocoso was taken from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, which had become a favorite novel of readers in every country since its publication in 1740.22 Piccinni’s score is remarkable for the long, complex, and carefully planned finales of each act. Piccinni was probably the first composer to try to unify these sections by means of a recurring musical theme (rondo finale), thus taking a step toward the highly organized symphonic finale, which was to be perfected by Mozart. In other ways also—for example, in the assigning of independent motifs to the orchestra and in the relatively greater continuity and self-sufficiency of the instrumental parts—Piccinni advanced the style of opera buffa.
During the second half of the century, the music of comic opera grew more ambitious, broadening its range of expression in accordance with the broadening subject matter of the librettos. One notable work of the 1770s was L’incognita perseguitata (Rome, 1773)23 by Piccinni’s pupil Pasquale Anfossi (1727–97). A more important composer of the late eighteenth century was Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), who worked principally at Naples, except for a period at St. Petersburg from 1776 to 1784 during which time he composed one serious and six comic operas.24 Of these comic operas, Gli astrologi immaginari (1779), later retitled I filosofi immaginari, was a favorite of Catherine II. Another was Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782), which later became such a favorite in Italy that even in 1816 Rossini had to overcome popular prejudice against the presumption of any other composer attempting to set the same libretto. Paisiello’s Il re Teodoro in Venezia, first given at Vienna in 1784, had many performances over the next thirty years; among its most remarkable features are the lively ensemble finales.25 Socrate immaginario (1775) is an example of parody, a frequent resource of comic opera librettists. The objects in this case are the classicist movement in general and Gluck’s Orfeo in particular—the scene between Orpheus and the Furies being burlesqued in broad, though clever, fashion. In L’amor contrastato, ossia La molinara (1788), Paisiello displays many of those expressive qualities and turns of phrase that we are accustomed to associate with Mozart, and his Nina (1789) is one of the best examples of sentimental comedy in this whole period (example 15.2).26 Paisiello was a master of musical characterization, perhaps the most important figure in eighteenth-century opera buffa next to Mozart himself and one who exercised a strong influence on the musical style of the latter.27 Paisiello’s gifts are apparent in his orchestral writing, which is more varied and more important dramatically than in any earlier buffo composer. In his finales, Paisiello rivaled Piccinni, both in scope and in the skill with which musical forms were adapted to the action of the text. He also was one of the first composers to introduce into the opere serie the type of ensemble finales that advanced the action of the drama.
An immediate forerunner of Mozart at Vienna was Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729–74), whose two most celebrated comic operas were L’amore artigiano (1767) and La contessina (1770), both on librettos by Goldoni. Gassmann’s ensemble finales are remarkable for the way in which the orchestra carries on the music in continuous fashion, giving unity and direction to the entire scene. The orchestral part is important also in the arias, sometimes even having greater melodic interest than the voice.28
Gassmann’s successor was Antonio Salieri, whose operatic productions at the Burgtheater caused considerable competition for Mozart. From 1766 until 1776 the court theaters were under the management of impresarios who favored productions of Italian opere buffe. In the late 1770s, however, Joseph II dismissed the impresarios and placed the management of the theaters under imperial control. He established a theater for spoken German drama and replaced the Italian buffa troupe with a German Singspiel troupe, all in an effort to have German be the predominant language of his realm. Some opere buffe, albeit in German translation, continued to be presented in the court theaters under the terms of the “Schauspielfreiheit” policy,29 but not until 1780 did the emperor become an advocate of Italian comic opera. His acceptance of this genre came by way of several productions of opere buffe by Paisiello, including his I filosofi immaginari. Three years later, the emperor brought back to the Burgtheater an Italian troupe led by Francesco Benucci and he appointed Lorenzo da Ponte as theater poet. The initial production by the Italians was a revival of Salieri’s Scuola de’ gelosi (Venice, 1778), followed by a succession of outstanding opere buffe productions (revivals and newly commissioned works) throughout the remaining years of Joseph II’s reign, including Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Il re Teodoro in Venezia and Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio (1785), a “black magic” comic opera.30
EXAMPLE 15.2 Nina
Another of the composers whose comic operas not only influenced but also provided considerable competition for composers in Vienna was Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806), a native of Madrid, where his first opera was produced c. 1776. For most of his career, Martín y Soler served in various capacities at the court in Munich, eventually being named Kapellmeister.31 He, however, was granted extensive leaves from his Munich post in order to create operatic productions in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London. For example, in 1785 he moved to Vienna, where he, together with his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, produced three outstanding operas that enjoyed exceptional success at the Burgtheater: Il burbero di buon cuore (1786), Una cosa rara (1786), and L’arbore di Diana (1787).32 By 1788 he had accepted an invitation to go to Russia, where he set two librettos by Catherine the Great, and five years later he spent some time in London, again working in collaboration with Da Ponte. Martín y Soler’s operas proved to be very popular, for although they lacked the dramatic intensity of Mozart’s productions, they had characteristics that readily appealed to the general public. These included simple textures, lyrical melodies, extensive vocal ensembles, and, most especially, a faithful adherence to the social conventions of his era.33 Another distinctive characteristic was the waltz, which Soler had incorporated into the second-act finale of Una cosa rara—a “rare thing” that caught the attention of Mozart. He, in turn, decided to capitalize on this single item that had caused a furor among opera audiences and included a waltz in his Don Giovanni. The waltz was soon to gain in popularity at public dances, eventually leading to the so-called concert waltzes of Strauss.
Also active as a composer of Italian operas was Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), whose works for the theater are, relatively speaking, little known today in comparison with his symphonies, quartets, and oratorios.34 Yet among Haydn’s prime concerns during his long years of service under Prince Esterhazy were the preparation and conducting of operas, the creation of new arias to be inserted in other composers’ operas performed at Eszterháza, and the composition of new operas of his own.35 Nor did he lack success. More performances of Haydn’s operas took place during his lifetime than of Mozart’s during his lifetime.
After Haydn concluded his early music training as a chorister at St. Stephen’s in Vienna, he remained in the imperial city, taking up residence in the Michaelerhaus near the Hofburg. The significance of this site for Haydn’s career rests in the fact that Pietro Metastasio also resided in this building. Through his contact with the court poet, Haydn not only became acquainted with the Italian language but he also had an opportunity to meet the venerable Kapellmeister Nicola Porpora, who regularly came there to give singing lessons to a young girl for whom Metastasio was a benefactor. According to Haydn’s autobiographical sketch,36 Porpora not only taught him the fundamentals of composition but also introduced him to other well-established Viennese composers, among them Gluck and Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715–77). While living in Vienna, Haydn was inevitably influenced by the “Volkstheater” tradition. Although information about his relationship with Hanswurst and Bernardon is extremely limited, there is evidence to support the claim that Haydn composed music for the Hanswurstian-styled productions—among them, Der krumme Teufel and Der neue krumme Teufel (c. 1759), the latter brought to the stages of the Burgtheater and the Kärnerthor Theater—before he embarked on his lifelong association with the Esterhazy family.37
Of the many buildings that comprised the Eszterháza palace complex, two had special significance for Haydn: the opera house, inaugurated in 1768 with his Lo speziale, and the marionette theater. The two theaters were designed to balance one another architecturally, and therefore when the original opera house burned in the latter part of 1779, it was rebuilt according to a similar design so that this symmetry could be retained.
The music of Haydn’s six Singspiele and of at least two of the four or five pieces he composed for marionettes no longer survives. The rest of his operatic works are all on Italian librettos. In addition to the comic operas, Haydn composed several operas of semi-serious or serious character, of which the most successful were Orlando paladino and Armida, staged for the Esterhazy family in 1782 and 1784, respectively, and Orfeo ed Euridice (also known as L’anima del filosofo), a dramma per musica, for London in 1791, but not performed.38 Orfeo contains some beautiful music, but the libretto by C. F. Badini is certainly one of the worst specimens of its kind in the whole history of opera—no mean distinction.
Armida was Haydn’s first full-length opera set to a serious libretto, but it was also the last he composed for his patron of more than twenty years. Armida was well received and had numerous performances beyond the confines of the Esterhazy court. The militant nature of the opera, which is based on Tasso’s epic poem about the First Crusade, is mirrored in music of a martial character that appears in the overture and in the accompaniments to various numbers, such as in Rinaldo’s initial aria and in the duet that concludes the first act. Haydn’s evocation of nature in the woodland scene in Act III and his effective use of the orchestra in the accompanied recitatives to advance the dramatic action are aspects of the score that deserve closer study.
The most satisfactory of Haydn’s operatic works as far as balance of interest between text and music goes are those composed in the 1760s and 1770s. They include three set to librettos by Goldoni—Lo speziale (1768), Le pescatrici (1770), and Il mondo della luna (1777).39 These particular librettos, written for Venice in the early 1750s, had been set by other composers prior to the 1760s, then disappeared from the stage for about a five-or six-year period before being revived in new settings by Haydn. These three operas, along with others he composed in this same period, abound with examples of how Haydn availed himself of every opportunity to heighten the wit and humor of the text. He accomplished this by illustrating specific words and emotions with dynamic extremes, rhythmic devices, and other instrumental effects. Since Haydn did not have to adhere to the operatic conventions of works staged in Italy, wherein operas were expected to be composed in as simple a style as possible, he was free to develop his own distinctly personal style, replete with the musical complexities that abound in such scenes as the finale to his Il mondo della luna.
La vera costanza, a dramma giocoso performed at Eszterháza in 1779 and revived there in 1785, is a good example of the way Haydn could combine comic and serious elements in the new kind of mixed musical drama that, over the course of the last three decades of the eighteenth century, was gradually replacing both the strictly comic opera buffa and the old-fashioned opera seria.40 Of particular interest are the two large-scale ensemble finales, which invite comparison with those composed by Anfossi in his setting of this same libretto in 1777 and those by Mozart in Le nozze di Figaro.41
The comic opera in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century is perhaps best represented by Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801), a prolific composer with some eighty operas to his credit.42 Like many of his compatriots, Cimarosa was called for a time to St. Petersburg (1787–91). On his return, he was invited to reside in Vienna and there produced his masterpiece, Il matrimonio segreto, in 1792. Featured in this opera are the ensemble numbers; they range from duets, trios, a quartet, and a quintet to the two finales that are scored for six singers. The success of this work was immediate and has continued to the present day. Cimarosa’s music fairly rivals Mozart’s in tunefulness and spontaneity, though lacking Mozart’s profundity and musical constructive power. But profundity was far from being an Italian ideal in this field; the qualities of wit, liveliness, melodic flow, and a never-ending vein of loquacity and good humor constituted the charm of Cimarosa as of his Italian confreres. He continued the tradition of Paisiello and the other eighteenth-century buffo composers in that inimitable musical style that led in the nineteenth century to Rossini and Donizetti, and ultimately to Verdi’s Falstaff.
In particular, Cimarosa was committed to continuing a type of intermezzo that originated in Rome during the second half of the eighteenth century. This Roman intermezzo differed from its Neapolitan counterpart in that it was primarily performed between the acts of a play rather than an opera, required a cast of four or five singers instead of two or three, and usually concluded with an elaborate finale. Some of the earliest examples of the Roman intermezzo were staged at Rome’s Teatro Valle, beginning in the 1740s, and within a short time many other theaters in Rome were also presenting this type of intermezzo. Among the many popular settings of Roman intermezzo librettos are Sacchini’s La contadina in corte (1766), Paisiello’s Le due contesse (1776), and Cimarosa’s L’italiana in Londra (1779); all three enjoyed considerable success when staged in Vienna. Viennese composers also were attracted to set these Roman librettos, as exemplified by Salieri’s popular Il barone di Rocca Antica (1772).43
Opéra Comique
The founders of the French comic opera were Molière and Lully, whose comedy ballets, pieces in which spoken dialogue alternated with songs and dances, were presented before Louis XIV during the 1660s.44 When Lully assumed control of the Academy of Music in 1672, his monopoly cut off all but the barest musical resources from other Paris theaters, and the death of Molière in the following year put an end to the first stage of the comedy ballet.45 At this juncture, the Italian Theater, which had been established on a permanent basis at Paris in 1661, began to intermingle French scenes, including music, with its improvised Italian comedies. In the course of the next two decades, the French language gradually replaced Italian; eventually, the “Italian” troupe gave nothing but comedies and farces (of a rather low sort) in French, which still retained many traces of their commedia dell’arte predecessors and which were embellished by fanciful displays with ballets and songs.46 After the Italians were expelled from Paris in 1697, their repertoire was taken over, in a still cruder form, by various small popular theaters, which played a few weeks in each year at the two large fairs of Paris. Practical exigencies forced these groups to simplify their music to an extreme degree. They used for the most part little popular tunes called vaudevilles (example 15.3), to which the authors adapted new words—a process known technically as “parody.”47
Little by little, the fortunes of the “fair theaters” improved, until in 1715 they were brought under one management and formally established as the Opéra-Comique company. For a long time, they continued presenting popular comedies in which the vaudevilles were the principal source of music and the burlesque of serious operas a frequent device.48 They had a competitor in the so-called Comédie-Italienne, which had been reestablished in Paris after the death of Louis XIV in 1715.49 In 1762 the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne merged and performed in the Théâtre Italien.
EXAMPLE 15.3 Vaudevilles from Théâtre de la Foire, vol. I
This first part of the example is taken from Lully’s Atys. (cf. example 9.2a)
Among the literary talents attracted to the Théâtre Italien was Charles-Simon Favart, who during the 1740s raised the vaudeville comedy to its highest level and at the same time encouraged the introduction of new music—arias parodied from operas and even some originally composed songs—in place of the old-fashioned vaudevilles.50 From 1752 to 1754 the performance at Paris by a visiting troupe of a dozen Italian buffo operas, including Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, gave rise to the famous Querelle des Bouffons (quarrel of the Bouffons), in the course of which the relative merits of French and Italian music were argued ad nauseam.51 One of the peculiar features of this quarrel was that no one seemed to realize that all the comparisons were being made between French serious opera and Italian comic opera, and therefore the real point at issue was missed. The results of the Italians’ visit, however, were important, for they led a new generation of French composers to create a national comic opera with original music, in which the native popular idiom of the vaudeville was overlaid and enriched by a more refined, varied, and expressive style.
A forerunner of the new opéra comique was Le Devin du village, which was performed at the Académie Royal de Musique (known simply as the Paris Opéra) in 1752 and remained in the repertoire for sixty years.52 This charming little work by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is Italian in form—that is, it has continuous music, with recitatives—but French in style and feeling. The melodies show kinship with both the vaudevilles and the popular romances of the day, while the harmonizations are amusingly naive. Rousseau’s attempt to found a French comic opera had no immediate results; he himself, with typical inconsistency, declared in the following year that “the French have no music and never can have any—or if they ever do, so much the worse for them.”53
Yet after a few years of experimentation, the new French comic opera came to full growth in the works of three composers: Egidio Romualdo Duni (1708–75), an Italian who came to Paris in 1757 after having tried his hand at French comic operas at the court of Parma; François-André Danican Philidor (1726–95), the last of a distinguished family of musicians and equally renowned as a chess master; and Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817), who, though not a trained musician, succeeded on the strength of his natural melodic gift, which lay in the direction of tender and sentimental expression. While these three composers were writing opéras comiques at Paris, Gluck was producing a series of similar pieces at Vienna.
The new opéra comique differed in many ways from both the earlier vaudeville comedies and the Italian opera buffa.54 The form was known as a comédie mêlée d’ariettes, a “comedy [in spoken dialogue] mingled with songs.” The term ariette was used as the diminutive of the Italian “aria” to distinguish a newly composed song from the traditional vaudeville melodies. The subject matter was varied: Gluck’s La Rencontre imprévue, given at Vienna in 1764, was a romantic comedy in an oriental setting; Duni’s Isle des foux (1760) and La Fée Urgèle (1765) were respectively farce and fairy tale;55 Philidor’s Tom Jones (1765) was based on Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel;56 Monsigny in On ne s’avise jamais de tout (1761) produced an intrigue comedy of the Italian sort and in Le Déserteur (1769), his best work, a sentimental drama. An important class of opéras comiques were those with scenes and characters representing an idealized peasantry, with a naive heroine (a character type inherited from Favart) and a manly young hero who, oppressed by a wicked noble, are finally saved either by virtue of their own innocence and honesty or by the intervention of a more powerful noble or the king himself. Monsigny’s Le Roy et le fermier (1762) was of this type, and the same motif entered into many other opéras comiques. The “advanced” ideas of the day, the currently fashionable criticism of the social order, and the doctrines of Rousseau and the other encyclopedists were reflected, though in a harmless enough fashion, in these works.
The music of the opéra comique was seldom profound but often tuneful and charming (example 15.4). Ensembles, especially duets, were common, though the French never developed the dramatic ensemble finale to the extent the Italians did. Short descriptive orchestral background pieces were frequent—a heritage from Lully and Rameau. Most opéras comiques ended with a vaudeville final, a strophic song with refrain, the tune either a popular vaudeville or in imitation of that style. The form of the vaudeville final established itself not only in the later French opéra comique but in other countries as well; the finales of Gluck’s Orfeo, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia are of this type.
The leading composer of opéras comiques in the latter part of the eighteenth-century was André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1741–1813).57 He was a Belgian who, after studying at Rome, came to Paris in 1767 and there produced over forty opéras comiques, of which the chief ones are Le Tableau parlant (1769), Zémire et Azor (1771), and especially Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784).58
EXAMPLE 15.4 Le Déserteur, Act I, scene i
Le Tableau parlant, with its mixture of buffoonery and nobility, exemplifies well Grétry’s ability to enliven the libretto with witty music. The plot unfolds in the house of Cassandra, a middle-aged tutor whose unfinished portrait is on an easel. Cassandra has proposed to his pupil, the young Isabella, but she is secretly in love with Léandre, who has been abroad for two years. Cassandra pressures Isabella to accept his marriage proposal, and although she finally agrees, Cassandra suspects she is not being truthful. To put her to the test, Cassandra tells her that he is going away on business, when in reality he intends to spy on her. He hides in a cupboard and overhears Isabella confess to Léandre (who has returned from his travels) what has transpired. Léandre convinces Isabella that she will have to be truthful with Cassandra about their relationship. Before the lovers leave the stage to walk in the garden, they move the portrait of Cassandra forward toward the audience. Cassandra bursts forth out of his hiding place, enraged with the thought of losing Isabella. He cuts out the face in the portrait and hides behind the canvas so he can fully observe the lovers upon their return. When they reappear, Isabella decides to practice what she will say to Cassandra in front of his portrait. She directs a request to the portrait to allow her to accept Léandre’s proposal for marriage. To her amazement, the face in the portrait grudgingly agrees, and the opéra comique concludes with the singing of a simple vaudeville.
Grétry’s music happily combines the melodic grace of the Italians with the delicate imagination, simplicity, lyricism, and rhythmic finesse of the French. Richard Coeur-de-Lion is a landmark of early Romantic opera, based on the legend of the rescue of King Richard from prison by his faithful minstrel Blondel. The rescue plot was a favorite in operas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blending the emotions of suspense, personal loyalty, and triumph of virtue over evil in an effective dramatic pattern, familiar to us still through Beethoven’s Fidelio. By way of added romantic color, Grétry introduced in Richard an imitation of a simple troubadour song, which pervades the work almost like a leitmotif. The ballad “Que le sultan Saladin” in Act I, introduced simply as a song external to the action, is the type of many such interpolations in later operas. Blondel’s air “O Richard, O mon roi” (Act I), by its elevated, earnest, and ardent expression, lifts this opéra comique into the realm of serious romantic drama, setting an ideal to which many later composers paid homage (example 15.5).
Other early composers who contributed works in which the comic elements were secondary to the romantic ones were Nicolas Dezède (c. 1740–92), who produced about fifteen opéras comiques at Paris, including Les Trois Fermiers (1777), and Nicolas Dalayrac (1753–1809), an unusually prolific and popular composer whose Nina (1786) furnished the libretto for Paisiello’s work of the same title, and whose Les Deux Petits Savoyards (1789) made its way all over Europe and lasted well into the nineteenth century.59
The opéra comique continued to flourish during the revolution and the early years of the nineteenth century, though it had no composers comparable to Grétry either in ability or popularity until François Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834), whose greatest success was his Jean de Paris (1812).60 Like the Italian opera buffa, the French opéra comique in the course of the eighteenth century had undergone a transformation from low popular comedy to varied, semi-serious human drama, from the music of popular song to the effort of able composers. It was destined for greater triumphs in the nineteenth century and for such further changes of style and subject matter as to leave the designation “comique” merely a memento of its origin and a conventional indication of one vestige of its early days, the use of spoken dialogue.
EXAMPLE 15.5 Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Act I scene ii
English Comic Opera
When Addison complained in 1711 that “our English Musick is quite rooted out,” he uttered no more than the melancholy truth, so far as the theater was concerned. Yet the enthusiasm for Italian opera that prevailed during the first quarter of the eighteenth century eventually provoked a reaction. The English, unable to compete with foreign opera seria on its own ground, took revenge by creating the ballad opera, which ridiculed Italian music and at the same time originated a national comic type as distinctive and popular for the British as opera buffa was for the Italians or opéra comique for the French.61 The best known of these works, and one that has survived to our own time, was The Beggar’s Opera, written by John Gay and first performed at London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields theater in 1728, with music possibly arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667–1752), who at the time was the conductor of the theater’s musicians.62 The characters are pickpockets, bawds, convicts, and similar gentry (in keeping with Swift’s suggested title, “The Newgate Pastoral”); the language is low and racy; and the play is full of satirical thrusts both at the absurdities of Italian opera and at the reigning Whig politicians of the day. The songs, which alternate with spoken dialogue, are for the most part familiar ballad tunes (example 15.6), though there are some borrowings from other sources (such as works by Purcell, Bononcini, and Handel, including his march from Rinaldo).63 The motifs of political and musical satire are particularly congenial to the English in comic opera, as witness Gilbert and Sullivan; neither in the eighteenth nor the nineteenth century were Londoners inclined to take opera seria with complete seriousness.
EXAMPLE 15.6 The Beggar’s Opera, Air XVI, Over the Hills and Far Away
A year after The Beggar’s Opera was staged, Henry Carey (1687–1743), a house composer for the Drury Lane Theater, brought a revised version of his 1715 farce, The Contrivances, into production, a work that is an important early example of English comic opera, for the score contains songs, spoken dialogue, and most importantly, ten da capo arias, written in the Italian manner. Carey was both a dramatist as well as a composer, and in the years that followed his 1729 production, he used his influence to bring similar works—in other words, theatrical pieces that were not ballad operas—to the London theater. He was joined in this effort by Thomas Arne and J. C. Smith, among others, but had only limited success. Although he showed interest in the Italian form of entertainment, Carey did not wholly turn away from the ballad opera repertoire, as evidenced by his arrangements of songs for W. R. Chetwood’s The Generous Freemason (1730),64 performed at the Bartholomew Fair, and for Colley Cibber’s Love in a Riddle.
The popularity of the ballad operas that were produced in the next ten years combined with the success of The Beggar’s Opera struck a blow at the fortunes of Handel and marked the beginning of the decline of Italian opera in England. In fact, the ballad opera continued to be produced throughout the century, albeit in various guises, as the form underwent an evolution similar to that of the vaudeville comedy in France. When audiences tired of the same old tunes, composers turned to other sources or began to introduce their own songs into the scores, though keeping in general to the ballad style. Indeed, the typical English comic opera of the later eighteenth century is such a hodgepodge of popular tunes, songs from favorite operas, and original music that the elements are hard to disentangle, though the genuine folk ballads of the early days gradually disappeared. The influence of the opera buffa and opéra comique is increasingly apparent after the middle of the century, not only in the outright appropriation of both librettos and music but also in the whole trend from broad comedy and burlesque toward a semi-serious, sentimental type of plot with simple half-Italian, half-English music—a singularly innocent, naive kind of entertainment that was tremendously popular in its day and is still not without a certain appeal.
Scene from Love in a Village (London 1762) by Thomas Arne.
(COURTESY OF HAROLD ROSENTHAL)
Somewhat atypical of the English opera of the period is The Happy Captive (1741), a three-act comic opera with libretto by Lewis Theobald and music by John Ernest Galliard (c.1687–1749).65 Included with the production of this opera, when it was staged at the Little Theater in the Haymarket, was an intermezzo, Capoccio and Dorinna, that was intended to poke fun at Italian opera.66 What is particularly distinctive about The Happy Captive is that it is one of the earliest known examples of an “abduction” or “Turkish” opera and one of the earliest examples of “true exoticism” in operas written prior to 1750.67 It is set in Algiers and has some of the ingredients of a typical late eighteenth-century “Turkish” opera, such as the musical exoticism found in the garden scene of Act II that depicts the Turks’ acts of revelry.68 The score calls for trumpets and tambours to be played, along with strings, oboes, bassoons, flutes, and horns. In addition to the “exotic” instrumentation, Galliard is able to accentuate the non-Western flavor of this scene by his use of irregular phrasing, open-fifth harmonies, and a drone bass in an instrumental interlude.69 One important ingredient of a typical “abduction” opera that The Happy Captive lacks is a final scene, in which the sultan pardons the young lovers and allows them their freedom. In Galliard’s opera, the lovers have devised a successful plan for their escape, thereby depriving the sultan of his magnanimous gesture. Also lacking is any mention of the seraglio.70
Another composer of comic opera was Thomas Augustine Arne (1710–78), the most eminent English composer of his generation.71 His Thomas and Sally (1760), on a libretto by Isaac Bickerstaffe, was one of his most successful comic operas and has had frequent revivals up to the present day. Love in a Village (1761), also with words by Bickerstaffe, was a typical pastiche work of the period, drawing on music by sixteen different composers; Arne, besides arranging the work, contributed more than a dozen new airs of his own. Incidentally, Arne was the composer of the only successful English serious opera of the eighteenth century, Artaxerxes (1762), on a libretto from Metastasio, translated and adapted by the composer, with music that is quite a fair specimen of the contemporary Italian style. Artaxerxes is sung throughout, a novelty that perhaps contributed to the performances it continued to receive in England through the early years of the nineteenth century. The opera has also had at least one modern day revival (London, 1962).
Riot protesting increased prices for Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes, London, 1763.
(COURTESY OF HAROLD ROSENTHAL, FROM HIS
TWO CENTURIES OF OPERA AT COVENT GARDEN,15)
Among the most popular English pasticcio operas of the eighteenth century was The Duenna; or, The Double Elopement (1775). Based upon Richard Sheridan’s comedy, with music selected, arranged, and in part composed by Thomas Linley the Elder (1733–95) and Thomas Linley the Younger (1751–78), The Duenna was successfully staged in London, Dublin, and the American colonies for more than a quarter of a century, with several hundred performances to its credit.72 Equally popular was Midas, an English burletta in which Kara O’Hara’s rhymed verses were set to music with recitatives, arias, and ensembles, the whole constituting a comic satire of classical mythology and a burlesque of opera seria. It was produced in both a three-act and a two-act “afterpiece” version.73
The principal later composers of English comic opera were Charles Dibdin (1745–1814), William Shield (1748–1829), and Stephen Storace (1763–96).74 The most successful of Dibdin’s operas were Lionel and Clarissa (1768), The Padlock (1768), The Waterman (1774), The Quaker (1775), and The Seraglio (1776). Shield was the most gifted, though not the most popular, of these three composers. His Rosina (1782) is an excellent example of the English comic opera of this period. Shield’s librettos, like those of Storace (The Haunted Tower, 1789; The Pirates, 1792; The Cherokee, 1794), show an expansion of subject matter to include popular supernatural and adventurous tales in the early Romantic taste. Storace’s music betrays to some extent the influence of Mozart, especially in the use of the concerted finale (as in Act I of The Pirates). His operas were by far the most popular produced at Drury Lane in the late 1789s and early 1790s, with Italian stylistic elements prominent in his main works and English elements in his “afterpieces.”75 The comic opera was continued in the early nineteenth century by Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855), of whose 120 dramatic compositions or arrangements probably nothing is known to present-day audiences except his setting of Shakespeare’s “Lo, here the gentle lark” and the melody of “Home, sweet home,” from the comic opera Clari, the Maid of Milan (1823).
English opera, unlike that of either Italy or France, remained a local development, with little influence on the course of serious opera anywhere. Although it flourished for a time in Ireland, most notably from 1770 to 1777, it was of greatest historical consequence for opera in the American colonies. Beginning in the 1730s, the majority of operas staged in America were either from England or written by Americans in the style of English opera. In a century that, to speak mildly, was not the golden age of British music, the ballad opera appeared as a vigorous but solitary gesture of revolt against foreign musical domination, but it lacked a principle of growth within itself, nor did external conditions favor the rise of an independent serious national opera on the basis of the popular comic-opera style.
The Singspiel
The collapse of German opera in the first half of the eighteenth century discouraged any systematic attempt at native musical drama for many years. Even the regular theater, though spurred on by the reforms of Gottsched, did not succeed in shaking off its Baroque crudities and its later subservience to French tragedy until after the middle of the century. As for opera, with a few insignificant exceptions, nothing corresponding to the Italian opera seria or the French tragédie lyrique appeared. Yet the seeds of a new growth were present, and the soil in which they were to flourish was the same that had nurtured comic opera in Italy, France, and England—namely, the theater of the common people. Bands of strolling players discovered that they could attract larger audiences by mingling music with their plays, and so the new German Singspiel arose, somewhat like the French opéra comique, as a spoken comedy with interspersed lyrical songs.76 The latter, since they were to be performed by actors not skilled in music, had to be of the simplest possible kind. A model was at hand in the German lied, which, from the publication of Sperontes’s collection Die Singende Muse an der Pleisse (1736–45), entered upon a revival destined to continue uninterruptedly through the century and eventually lead up to the works of Schubert.77
Although there were earlier instances of popular comic music in cantatas, school dramas, and intermezzos, the first definite impulse to the new Singspiel came from England. In 1743 Charles Coffey’s ballad opera The Devil To Pay; or, The Wives Metamorphos’d (1731), was performed at Berlin with the text in German translation as Der Teufel ist los; oder, Die verwandelten Weiber, but with the original English music as arranged by Seedo (c. 1700–c. 1754).78 In a new arrangement by Christian Felix Weisse, and with new music by J. C. Standfoss (d. after 1759), it was given again at Leipzig in 1752 with great success.79 Another Singspiel by Weisse and Standfuss, likewise based on a ballad opera, The Merry Cobbler (1735) by Coffey, was presented at Lübeck in 1759 as Der lustige Schuster. The music of Standfuss is fresh and jolly, with the true breath of German folksong. His successor, and the most important early composer of the Singspiel, was Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804), who was the first conductor of the famous Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig and editor of an important musical periodical, the Wöchentliche Nachrichten. Hiller’s Singspiele were produced in collaboration with Weisse at Leipzig, beginning with a new version of Der Teufel ist los in 1766 and climaxing with Die Jagd in 1770, the most popular German opera before Weber’s Der Freischütz. Although Hiller’s early works show some Italian influence, the music of Die Jagd is characteristically German; the score is filled with melodies of the purest folksong type, contrasting (as in all his Singspiele) with the intentionally more elaborate and Italianate arias that Hiller considered appropriate for kings and other highly placed characters.80 Some of the songs, without departing from the prevailing simple style, have a sweep of line that almost reminds one of Beethoven (example 15.7). There are nine ensembles, including three with chorus, and an orchestral “storm,” in addition to the usual three-movement overture.
The success of Hiller’s Singspiele was not due to the music alone. Weisse’s librettos, nearly every one adapted from contemporary French opéras comiques, reflected the same preoccupation with scenes and characters from common life, the same touches of romantic fancy, the same exaltation of sentiment and glorification of the peasantry, the same inevitable triumph of simple virtue over the wickedness of the nobles, and the same motif of devotion to the king as protector and father of the innocent—in short, all those ideas that made such a deep appeal to the feelings of the people in this pre-revolutionary period and that made the comic opera of both nations a genuine popular manifestation.81 The folk basis is even more pronounced in Germany than in France; many of Hiller’s melodies became national folksongs. French opéras comiques, or translations and imitations, with the original music or in new settings by German composers, appeared in Germany with considerable frequency after 1770.82 The growth of the Singspiel went hand in hand with the ever-increasing popularity of the lied; authors and composers, professional and amateur alike, all over the country, joined in a universal outpouring of song. For sheer quantity, it was one of the most productive periods in the history of German music.
EXAMPLE 15.7 Die Jagd, Act II
Two distinct branches of the Singspiel developed—one in the north, the other in the south. In the north, where the influence of Weisse and Hiller predominated, the literary framework remained that of the idyllic, sentimental, lyrical comedy on the model of the French opéra comique, with music of a simple melodic type closely allied to folksong. The adherence to a national musical language and the increase of romantic elements in the libretto led naturally in the nineteenth century to the German Romantic opera of Weber.83
Of the many north German composers after Hiller, we may mention particularly Georg Benda (1722–95), who was noted not only for his Singspiele but also for his “melodramas.”84 A melodrama is a stage piece without singing, but with action and speaking by one or two performers accompanied by or alternating with the orchestra (there may also be choral interludes). An early example of a melodrama is Rousseau’s Pygmalion (with music by Coignet), which was staged in 1770.85 Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1775), however, was the first important German work in this genre and had many successors.86 The chief historical importance of the melodrama lay in the effective use made of the style by later composers for special scenes in opera: the grave-digging scene in Fidelio and the “Wolf’s Glen” scene in Der Freischütz are familiar examples. Beethoven also has a melodrama in his music to König Stephan, and Schubert makes good use of the technique in his operas Die Zauberharfe and Fierrabras.
Other notable north German Singspiele include Die Dorfgala (1772) by Anton Schweitzer (1735–87); Das tartarische Gesetz (1789) by Johann André (1741–99); and Die Apotheke (1771) by Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748–98), pupil of Hiller and teacher of Beethoven. Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), Goethe’s favorite composer and an important figure in the history of German song, invented a new form, which he called the Liederspiel, a comedy with familiar popular songs, similar to the early French vaudeville comedy or English ballad opera. Reichardt was also of some importance for the development of opera at Berlin; his Claudine von Villa Bella (Goethe’s text) and his Italian opera Brenno were presented there in 1789. A revival of the latter in 1798, in translation and in concert form, was the first occasion on which opera was sung at Berlin with German words.
In south Germany the Singspiel took on a different character, owing in part to the strong influence of Italian opera buffa. The Viennese, for example, found the quiet, lyrical melodies of the north “too Lutheran” and demanded more liveliness and display. Hence, the librettos at Vienna tended to be gay and farcical, with not a hint of social significance; the supernatural, which in the north was an accepted means of romantic expression, here became usually an object of spectacle or of ridicule.
In 1778 a court-sponsored German Singspiel company made its debut with a performance of Die Bergknappen, a one-act opera by Ignaz Umlauf (1746–96), staged at Vienna’s Burgtheater. So successful was this initial venture that a repertoire for this company was quickly developed with Umlauf’s Die schöne Schusterin (1779); Salieri’s Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), an opera in three acts; and most importantly of all, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782).87
The leading Viennese Singspiel composer, however, was Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–99), composer of fifteen Italian and twenty-nine German comic operas, as well as a huge amount of symphonic and other instrumental music.88 Dittersdorf’s Singspiele show traces of the Italian comic style in their vivacious rhythms, bravura passages, chromatic touches, short-phrased interjectional melodic lines, long ensembles that continue the action, and lively comic details of all sorts. Good examples are his Doktor und Apotheker (1786), his first German opera and also his greatest triumph, and Das Gespenst mit der Trommel (1794).89 Yet Dittersdorf is no mere imitator of the Italians; many of his melodies, as in his Das rote Käppchen (1788), are unmistakably Viennese (example 15.8). His facility, energy, and humor, together with his melodic gift, his imaginative use of the orchestra, and his grasp of formal structure, make it easy to understand the success of his works at Vienna and show him as a composer of comic opera not unworthy to be named along with Mozart.
EXAMPLE 15.8 Das rote Käppchen, Act II, Finale
At the beginning of the 1790s, when the court theaters were under the direction of Prince Rosenberg, operas in German were noticeably absent from the stage. All that changed, however, with the appointment of Baron Peter von Braun as director, who in turn appointed Franz Xaver Süssmayr director of the German opera company and engaged singers who could sing both the German and Italian repertoire. Among the operas presented after 1794 was Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796), a Mozartean Singspiel by Peter Winter (1754–1825) that proved to be one of the most successful German operas to be staged in Vienna around the turn of the century. Other works in this genre composed by Winter include his Der Bettelstudent oder Das Donnerwetter (1785), fashioned from the writings of Cervantes, and Der Sänger und der Schneider (1820), both of which were staged in Munich, where Winter was court conductor and Kapellmeister.90 Viennese Singspiel composers whose works were staged at the imperial court theaters in the late 1790s include Johann Schenk (1753–1836), whose Dorfbarbier (1796) looks forward to the comic style of Gustav Albert Lortzing, and Wenzel Müller (1767–1835), in whose works there is apparent an increasing popularization of both libretto and musical idiom, in a manner destined to lead to the nineteenth-century Viennese operetta. The operetta is, indeed, the natural successor of the lighthearted melodious Singspiel of the eighteenth century.
1. A representative collection of scene buffe, excerpted from eighteen different operas, originally performed in Naples from 1697 to 1702, is contained in two manuscript volumes at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden. The contents of these volumes are cited in Troy, The Comic Intermezzo, 23–24.
2. See chapter twenty-four for a discussion of the tonadilla in the context of the development of Spanish opera.
3. The castrato, that symbol of opera seria, appeared only rarely in comic opera, but male roles were sometimes sung by women.
4. Other terms used for the genre include commedia per musica and dramma giocoso. Carlo Goldoni used dramma giocoso to indicate an opera buffa that combined parti serie with parti buffe. See Heartz, “Goldoni, Don Giovanni, and Dramma Giocoso.” Some general works on the opera buffa are Della Corte, L’opera comica italiana; Scherillo, L’opera buffa napoletana; Osthoff, “Die Opera Buffa”; Kimbell, Italian Opera (Part IV).
5. Among the earliest known comic operas in Neapolitan dialect are La CilIa (1706), with libretto by F. A. Tullio and music (lost) by M. Fazzioli (1666–1733), and Patrò; Calienno de la Costa, a three-act opera staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in 1709, with music by Antonio Orefice (fl. 1708–34) and other composers. The music for Patrò; Calienna is lost, but for a discussion of the libretto, see Scherillo L’opera buffa napoletano. For some of the earliest extant examples of music from a comic opera in Neapolitan dialect, see the seven arias from Orefice’s Le finte zingare (1717).
6. Hardie, “Leonardo Leo (1694–1744) and His Comic Operas Amor vuol sofferenza and Alidoro
7. Stravinsky drew five of the twenty-one tunes for Pulcinella from this opera. See Brook, “Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: The ‘Pergolesi’ Sources.” See also Brook, “Neapolitan Specialty” on the revival of Lo frate ’nnamorato at La Scala in Milan (December 22, 1989).
8. Lazarevich, “The Role of the Neapolitan Intermezzo”;Troy, The Comic Intermezzo. For a discussion of the first independent intermezzos introduced to Vienna and Dresden, see Williams, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti: His Life and Music, chap. 10.
9. Cf. Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling, 85.
10. One such example is L’ammalato immaginario.
11. For a synopsis of Nelli’s libretto and its relationship to other maid-mistress librettos of the period, see Toscani, “La serva padrona: Variations on a Theme.”
12. This intermezzo was presented at the conclusion of a production of Lully’s Acis et Galatée. For more about the reuse of Pergolesi’s music in other pasticcios produced for Paris by Bambini’s troupe, see Lazarevich, “Pergolesi and the Guerre des Bouffons.”
13. These English adaptations were staged at Marybone Gardens, where heretofore the concert programs were confined to vocal and instrumental, not dramatically staged, works. See Owens, “La serva padrona in London, 1750–1783.”
14. For a representative sample of Hasse’s intermezzos, see those edited by Lazarevich in Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era (1979) and Concentus Musicus (1985). See also Lazarevich, “Hasse as a Comic Dramatist”; idem, “Pasticcio Revisited.”
15. The 1967 and 1988 editions of A Short History of Opera stated that the bass voice “practically never appeared in opera seria.” For examples that contradict this statement, see, in particular, operas composed by Francesco Conti for Vienna (1711–32), for they frequently include both serious and comic bass roles, along with baritone roles designed specifically for Francesco Borosini (a tenor, whose range was such that he could sing roles notated in either the tenor or bass clefs). See Williams, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, 40–42, 153.
16. Fuchs. “Die Entwicklung des Finales”; Dent, “Ensembles and Finales”; Heartz. “The Creation of the buffo Finale.”
17. See Kretzschmar, “Zwei Opern”; Prota-Giurleo, Nicola Logroscino.
18. Bollert, Die Buffoopern Baldassare Galuppis; Della Corte, Baldassare Galuppi. Mooser, Annales, 2:69–86.
19. See Goldoni, Mémoires; Mangini, “I teatri veneziani al tempo della collaborazione di Galuppi e Goldoni”; Galuppiana 1985: Studi e recerche.
20. An early appearance of the term dramma giocoso can be found in the preface to G. C. Villifranchi’s 1695 libretto, L’ipocondriaco. Dramma giocoso was used interchangeably with commedia per musica until the middle of the eighteenth century.
21. Egidio Duni set Goldoni’s La Cecchina for the Parma stage in 1756, a production that concluded the Italian phase of Duni’s operatic works. See Smith, “Egidio R. Duni.” On Piccinni’s setting of this same libretto, see Stenzl, “Una povera ragazza: Carlo Goldonis La buona figliuola in Niccolo Piccinnis Vertonung.”
22. See Holmes, “Pamela Transformed.”
23. Piccinni had set this same libretto in 1764.
24. See Hunt, Giovanni Paisiello: His Life as an Opera Composer; H. Abert, “Paisiellos Buffokunst und ihre Beziehungen zu Mozart”; Della Corte, Paisiello; Mooser, Annales, 2:191–244, 355–62.
25. New York witnessed a successful modern-day revival of this opera in 1961.
26. Both Nina and Socrate immaginario had their premieres in Naples.
27. More operas by Paisiello were brought to the stage in Vienna in the 1780s than by any other composer.
28. Donath, “Florian Gassmann als Opernkomponist.”
29. The “Schauspielfreiheit” policy permitted anyone desiring to put on plays, concerts, or operas in Vienna to use the court theaters (Burgtheater and Kärntnertor Theater) whenever court sponsored productions were not being held there.
30. La grotta di Trofonio has the distinction of being one of the few eighteenth-century Italian comic operas to be published in full score during Salieri’s lifetime. For more on this opera and its distinctive features (such as timpani tuned to a tritone to accompany the chorus of spirits in Act I and the use of a long slow introduction in a minor key as a beginning movement for the overture), see Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera, 362–76.
31. Mooser, “Un Musicien espagnol en Russie”; idem, Annales, 2:455–61; Link, “The Da Ponte Operas of Vicente Martín y Soler.”
32. Da Ponte borrowed a duet text from Haydn’s Orlando paladino and used it in Martín y Soler’s L’arbore di Diana.
33. For more on Una cosa rara, see chapter sixteen.
34. Lawner, “Form and Drama in the Operas of Joseph Haydn”; Bartha and Somfai, Haydn als Opernkapellmeister; Landon, “Haydn’s Marionette Operas;” and section III of the international congress report, Joseph Haydn: Vienna, 1982, which has some eighteen presentations in English and German; Landon and Jones, Haydn: His Life and Music. See also Feder, “A Special Feature of Neapolitan Opera Tradition in Haydn’s Vocal Works,” and Lazarevich, “Haydn and the Italian Comic Intermezzo Tradition.”
35. Haydn wrote insertion arias for operas by Paisiello, Anfossi, Naumann, and Martín y Soler, among others. On the importance of Prince Esterhazy’s theater, see Landon, “Out of Haydn”; Bartha, “Haydn’s Italian Opera Repertory at the Eszterháza Palace.”
36. For a translation of this autobiographical sketch, see Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, II: 397–99. See also Mayeda, “Nicola Antonio Porpora und der junge Haydn” and Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits. A Translation with Introduction and Notes by Vernon Gotwals, 12.
37. Hanswurst (created by Joseph Stranitzky) and Bernadon (created by Johann Kurz) were the main characters associated with the Viennese tradition of improvised comedy that was in vogue for the greater part of the eighteenth century.
38. The score was reconstructed and the opera recorded by the Haydn Society in 1950. Haydn’s extant operas have enjoyed revivals since that date.
39. The versions of these librettos that Haydn chose to set were considerably altered from the originals created by Goldoni. For example, Haydn eliminates the two parti serie of Goldoni’s Lo speziale.
40. La vera costanza was the focus of discussions about Haydn’s operatic works at an international congress held in Vienna in September 1982. The Proceedings from that event offer several excellent presentations on this opera by Badura-Skoda, Melkus, and Strohm, among others. See Joseph Haydn:Proceedings of the International Joseph Haydn Congress, Vienna, 1982.
41. Another comparison is invited by Haydn’s La fedeltà premiata (1784), which contains two exceptionally fine finales in Acts I and II. The initial performance of this opera took place at Vienna and was attended by Mozart, raising the likelihood that these finales, in particular, influenced those Mozart composed one year later for Figaro. For more on the interrelationship between Haydn and Mozart, see studies of both composers by H.C. Robbins Landon.
42. See Rossi and Fauntleroy, Domenico Cimarosa, His Life and His Operas. See also essays in Per il bicentenario della nàscita di Domenico Cimarosa; Chailly, Il matrimonio segreto; Mooser, Annales, 2:451–55.
43. For more about Roman intermezzos and its impact upon Viennese comic opera, see Rice, “The Roman Intermezzo and Sacchini’s La contadina in corte.”
44. Cucuel, Les Créateurs de l’opéra-comique; idem, “Sources et documents”; Grout, “The Origins of the Opéra-comique”; Cooper, Opéra comique.
45. Bötther, Die “Comédie-Ballet” von Molière-Lully.
46. Parfaict, Histoire de l’ancien théâtre italien; Gherardi, Le Théâtre italien; Grout, “The Music of the Italian Theatre at Paris, 1682–1697.”
47. Grout, “Seventeenth Century Parodies of French Opera.”
48. Carmody, Le Repertoire de l’opéra-comique en vaudevilles; Parfaict, Mémoires; Le Sage, Le Théâtre de la foire; Calmus, Zwei Opernburlesken; Grannis, Dramatic Parody.
49. Le Nouveau Théâtre italien; Les Parodies du nouveau théâtre italien (with supplement); Cucuel, “Notes sur la comédie italienne de 1717 à 1789.”
50. Favart, Théâtre; idem, Mémoires; Font, Favart; Iacuzzi, The European Vogue of Favart.
51. See Launay, ed., La Querelle des Bouffons (which contains most of the original sources of the famous polemic war); Richebourg, Contribution à l’histoire de la “Querelle des Bouffons” (contains a bibliography of the principal documents in this affair). See also Grimm, “Lettre sur Omphale”; idem, Le Petit Prophète de Boemischbroda; Kretzschmar, “Die Correspondance littéraire”; Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau; La Laurencie, Les Bouffons; Boyer, La Guerre des Bouffons; Oliver, The Encyclopedists as Critics; Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 619–55.
52. Tiersot. Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Arnheim, “Le Devin du village”; Strauss, “Jean Jacques Rousseau”; Lowinsky, “Taste, Style, and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Music.”
53. The ending of his “Lettre sur la musique française.”
54. Although the term opéra comique is applied to works with music that retain spoken dialogue and are comic, it can also refer to similarly constructed works on more serious subjects as well.
55. Smith, “Egidio R. Duni and the Development of Opéra-Comique”
56. Tom Jones includes both a septet and an unaccompanied quartet, perhaps the first of its kind in the opera literature. See Carroll, “François-André Danican-Philidor: His Life and Dramatic Art.”
57. See Pendle, “The Opéras comiques of Grétry and Marmontel”; Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique.
58. Richard Coeur-di-Lion underwent several revisions after its premiere, with a four-act version staged once on December 22, 1785 and a three-act version staged successfully a week later. It was this three-act version that was translated into other European languages and remained in the repertoire until the end of the next century.
59. Act I of Nina contains a scene in which the heroine, having been denied access to her lover by her father, loses her mind—a forerunner of the “mad scenes” in later Italian operas.
60. Pougin, L’Opéra-comique pendant la révolution.
61. Squire, “An Index of Tunes in the Ballad-Operas”; Tufts, “Ballad Operas”; Gagey, Ballad Opera; Fiske, English Theatre Music; Rubsamen, ed., The Ballad Opera.
62. For works on Gay and The Beggar’s Opera, see studies by Kidson, Schultz, and Berger. See also Calmus, Zwei Opernburkesken; Kephart, “An Unnoticed Forerunner.” On Pepusch, see Hughes, “John Christopher Pepusch”; Cook, “The Life and Works of Johann Christoph Pepusch.”
63. William Russell, in his History of Modern Europe (5:440–41), first published in 1763, makes the following observation about Gay’s music: “Gay adapted the words of his songs to native tunes…. Every tune recalled some agreeable feeling or former happy state of mind. The effect of the music was accordingly altogether magical; and it would have been still greater, if the airs had been sung by persons whom the audience could have loved or respected. But as this was not the case, the Beggar’s Opera, in consequence of its musical enchantment, had a very immoral tendency…. The author, by putting into the mouths of such wretches not only the tunes, but a parody upon the words of some of our most admired lovesongs, threw a stronger ridicule upon genuine passion and virtuous tenderness than upon the Italian opera.”
64. John Sheeles and Richard Clarke also arranged songs for this ballad opera. Chetwood later took the most humorous portions of The Generous Mason and created The Mock Mason, an operetta performed at Covent Garden in 1733. Both works constitute some of the earliest examples of “Masonic” works for the theater.
65. Although Galliard’s year of birth is usually cited as around 1687, new evidence suggests that he may have been born as early as the 1660s. S. v. “Galliard,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music (2001).
66. The text of the intermezzo is drawn from a translation of Metastasio’s L’impresario delle Canarie. The music does not survive for Galliard’s Capoccio and Dorinna, considered to be the first known example of a true English intermezzo, nor does it for two other musical settings of the text by Thomas Arne.
67. See R. King, “The First ‘Abduction’ Opera: Lewis Theobald’s and John Ernest Galliard’s The Happy Captive (1741).” For more on “abduction” operas, see W Wilson, “Turks on the Eighteenth-Century Operatic Stage and European Political, Military, and Cultural History” and chapter sixteen of this book, where “abduction” operas of the 1760s and 1770s are discussed in relation to Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
68. R. King, “The First ‘Abduction’ Opera,” 146.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 155.
71. Arne wrote almost one hundred works for the theater—plays, operas, masques, and pantomimes—but few of his manuscripts survive. Notable exceptions include his full score for Milton’s Comus.
72. See Fiske, “A Score for The Duenna”;Walsh, Opera in Dublin; Virga, The American Opera to 1790; Beechey, “Thomas Linley, Junior, 1756–1778.”
73. Performances of the three-act version occurred in Belfast (1760), Dublin (1762), and London (1764); the two-act version was first staged in London (1766). See Rubsamen, ed., The Ballad Opera, vol. 23.
74. Dibdin published a five-volume History of the Stage (1795), as well as memoirs and several novels. See Sear, “Charles Dibdin”; Hauger, “William Shield”; Fiske, “The Operas of Stephen Storace”; Gridham, English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane. See also Kelly, Reminiscences, which gives many interesting details on the state of the English stage at the end of the eighteenth century.
75. An “afterpiece” was a short dramatic work with music that was performed after the “mainpiece,” which was usually a play. Types of afterpieces include: burletta, farce, pantomime, and serenata.
76. For the use of the term Singspiel in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see chapter eight. See also Schusky, ed., Das deutsche Singspiel; Gruenter, ed., Das deutsche Singspiel; Wade, The German Baroque Pastoral Singspiel.
77. Friedländer, Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert.
78. The Devil To Pay, in its shortened “afterpiece” version, enjoyed almost as much success as The Beggar’s Opera. Its American premiere occurred in 1736 in Charleston, South Carolina, along with John Hipplesley’s Flora, another highly successful ballad opera. For facsimile editions, see Rubsamen, ed., The Ballad Opera. See also Boer, “Coffey’s The Devil to Pay, the Comic War, and the Emergence of the German Singspiel” and Virga, The American Opera to 1790. Melodies, but not the accompaniments, for the songs in The Devil to Pay were published anonymously, but it is believed they were composed by [Mr.] Seedo. See Rubsamen, “Mr. Seedo, Ballad Opera, and the Singspiel.”
79. Der Teufel ist los has the distinction of being the earliest known German Singspiel. See Calmus, Die ersten deutschen Singspiele; Minor, Christian Felix Weisse; and studies of the German Singspiel by H. A. Koch, Gruenter, ed., and Schusky, ed.
80. The complete score and libretto for Die Jagd are included in Bauman, ed., German Opera 1770–1800. For a comprehensive study of North German opera composers, see Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe.
81. The derivation of the principal librettos is as follows: Lisuart und Dariolette (1766) from Favart’s Fée Urgèle, ou Ce qui plaît aux dames, music by Duni, 1765; Lottchen am Hofe (1767) from Favart’s Ninette à la cour, pasticcio, 1755; Die Liebe auf dem Lande (1768) from Mme Favart’s Annette et Lubin, music mostly from vaudevilles, 1762, and Anseaume’s Clochette, music by Duni, 1766; Die Jagd (1770) from Sedaine’s Le Roi et le fermier, music by Monsigny, 1762; Der Dorfbarbier (1771) from Sedaine’s Blaise le savetier, music by Philidor, 1759.
82. Theater-Kalendar, passim.
83. One example of this development is Kunzen’s Holger Danske (Copenhagen, 1789), from Wieland’s Oberon. See L. Schmidt, Zur Geschichte der Märchenoper.
84. See Istel, Die Entstehung des deutschen Melodrams; musical examples in Martens, Das Melodram; Garrett, “Georg Benda”; Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe.
85. Cf. Cherubini’s opera-ballet, Pygmalion. See Selden, “Pygmalion: A Little Known Opera by Cherubini.”
86. On the debated question of Rousseau’s own music for his Pygmalion, see Waeber, “Pygmalion et J. J. Rousseau.” Cf. Istel, Studien zur Geschichte des Melodrams.
87. On the history of the Singspiel at Vienna, see R. Haas’s introduction to Umlauf’s Bergknappen in DTOe, vol. 18, Part 1; idem, “Die Musik in der Wiener deutscher Stegreifkomodie”; idem, “Wiener deutsche Parodieopern um 1730”; Helfert, “Zur Geschichte des Wiener Singspiels.” For examples of the music, see (in addition to the works of individual composers) Deutsche Komödienarien, 1754–1758 (DTOe, vol. 33) and Glossy and Haas, eds., Wiener Komödienlieder.
88. See Dittersdorf’s autobiography and studies by Riedinger, Horsely, and Unverricht.
89. For more on Das Gespenst mit der Trommel, see Bauman, North German Opera, 296.
90. For more on Winter, see chapter twenty-one.