A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

THE CUSTOM OF USING MUSIC in connection with dramatic presentations is universal. It is found throughout the history of all cultures. This is perhaps because the desire to add music to drama is really part of the dramatic instinct itself and may have as its end either edification or entertainment.

An opera, briefly defined, is a drama in music: a dramatic action, performed on a stage with scenery by actors in costume, the words conveyed entirely or for the most part by singing, and the whole sustained and amplified by orchestral music. It is conditioned poetically, musically, scenically, and to the last details by the ideas and desires of those upon whom it depends, and this to a degree and in a manner not true of any other musical form. The opera is the visible and audible projection of the power, wealth, and taste of the society that supports it. Thus, study of its history is of value for the light it sheds on the history of culture in general.

One of the earliest examples of the term opera used as a descriptive subtitle for a “drama in music” can be found in the first volume of Raccolta de’ drammi, a collection of Venetian librettos that includes Malatesta Leonetti’s La Deianira, subtitled Opera recitativa in musica (1635).¹ Another example can be found in both the libretto and scenario of Orazio Persiani’s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639).² In the mid-seventeenth century, Blount’s Glossographia included the term opera and defined it as “a Tragedy, a Tragi-Comedy or Pastoral which … is not acted in a vulgar manner, but performed by Voyces in that way, which the Italians term Recitative, being likewise adorned with Scenes by Perspective and extraordinary advantages by Musick.”³ From that time forward, the term came into general use in England, and in the next century was adopted by France and Germany. Its use in Italy, especially in the period prior to the nineteenth century, remained relatively infrequent because descriptive subtitles such as favola in musica, favola pastorale, dramma per musica, feste teatrale, tragedia, tragicommedia, and the like were preferred.

Even though the term opera was not readily adopted in seventeenth-century Italy as a subtitle for dramatic works with music, it nevertheless seems to have been used there in common parlance during that era. Evidence for this comes from two entries in a diary kept by John Evelyn during his travels in Italy. When he was in Siena, he wrote the following on October 13, 1644: “There is in this Senate-house a very faire hall, where they sometimes recreate the People with publique Shews and Operas, as they call them.”⁴ A month later during a visit to Rome, his entry for November 19 reads: “The Worke of Cavaliero Bernini, A Florentine Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet: who a little before my Comming to the Citty, gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind).”⁵

Opera is an art form laden with certain conventions, which people agree to accept while at the same time acknowledging them to be unnatural or even ridiculous. Take, for example, the practice of singing, instead of talking. Nothing could be more “unnatural,” yet it is accepted as a matter of course, just as the equally “unnatural” blank verse is accepted as the form of speech in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Not only are there such timeless conventions in opera, but every age has a set of them peculiar to itself, which the second or third generation following begins to find old-fashioned and the generation after that finds insupportable. It is not that the music of these operas is inferior; rather, it is bound up with a hundred details that interfere with our understanding of it—operatic conventions that, passing out of knowledge, all too often carry the music with them to oblivion.

All of this points to the necessity for approaching the study of an opera, particularly one of a past period, with especial care. An opera score must be studied with imagination as well as attention. It will not do merely to read the music as if it were a symphony or a series of songs accompanied by an orchestra. One must also imagine the work as it appeared in performance, with the stage action, the costumes, and the scenery. One also must be aware of the operatic conventions by which librettist and composer were governed, so as not to judge them according to the conventions of a different period, committing the absurdity, for example, of condemning an opera of Lully or Handel merely because it is not like an opera of Verdi or Wagner.

There is an essential difference between a good opera libretto, as the words of the action are called, and the script of a good play. A play centers about characters and a plot; it may contain episodes that could be omitted without damaging its unity or continuity, but if this is the case, it is, strictly speaking, a defect in the structure. An opera libretto, however, may almost be said to center about the episodes; at the very least, it admits and even requires many portions that contribute little or nothing to characterization or to development of the action, such as dances, choruses, instrumental or vocal ensembles, and spectacular stage effects. Even the solo songs (arias) are often, from the dramatic point of view, mere lyrical interruptions of the plot; they correspond, in a way, to soliloquies in spoken drama. All these things, which (on a comparable scale) would be out of place in a spoken drama, are the very lifeblood of opera. Composers may accept them frankly as episodes or may try to make them contribute in a greater or lesser degree to the depiction of character or the development of the dramatic idea, but they are so much a part of opera that it is difficult to find an example that does not include them to some extent, even among the so-called realistic operas of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Plot and characterization in an opera libretto are likely to be sketched in broad outline rather than in detail. The action is usually simpler than in a play, with fewer events and less complex interconnections among them. Subtle characterization, if it exists at all, is accomplished by means of music rather than dialogue. Most important of all, the entire dramatic tempo is slower, so as to allow time for the necessary episodic scenes and especially for the deployment and development of the musical ideas.

There is another kind of difference between a play and a libretto, one which has to do with the poetic idiom employed, the choice of words and images. It is a commonplace that not all poetry is suitable for music; it would require a composer of genius equal to Shakespeare’s to add music to such lines as

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

When I am laid in earth, [may] my wrongs create

No trouble in thy breast. Remember me, but ah!

Forget my fate.

Judged merely as poetry, this passage from Nahum Tate’s Dido and Aeneas could hardly merit high praise. Yet it is excellent poetry for music. It suggests in simple terms the image of a woman desolated by an emotion that the words by themselves cannot completely convey, an emotion so overpowering that only with the aid of music can it be given full expression. Moreover, the passage has a maximum of the appropriate dark vowel sounds and liquid consonants, with few sibilants. The important words (laid, earth, wrongs, trouble, remember, fate) not only are well adapted for singing but also are full of emotional suggestion. The very imperfections of the passage considered purely as poetry are its great merit for singing, so strongly do they invite completion by means of music.

Making due allowance for the special requirements of the form, an opera libretto will usually reflect the prevailing ideas of its time with regard to drama. Similarly, opera music will be, in general, very much like other music of the same period. It must be remembered that in an opera, music is only one of several factors. It is necessarily always a kind of program music, in that it must (even if only to a slight degree) adapt itself to the dramatic and scenic requirements instead of developing in accordance with purely musical principles. As a rule, it is somewhat simpler, more popular in style than contemporary larger forms of nondramatic music, more tuneful, more obvious in its rhythms, less contrapuntal in texture—though there are some exceptions to this, notably the music dramas of Wagner. On the other hand, an opera score is apt to be more varied and original in instrumental color, partly because an opera is so long that more variety is needed, and partly in consequence of the composer’s constant search after new dramatic effects by means of instrumentation. Thus trombones had been used in opera two hundred years before they were admitted to symphonic combinations; the devices of string tremolo and pizzicato were first used in dramatic music; and Wagner introduced a whole new group of instruments, the so-called Wagner tubas, in his Ring.

Neither the poetry nor the music of an opera is to be judged as if it existed by itself. The music is good not if it happens to make a successful concert piece but primarily if it is appropriate and adequate to the particular situation in the opera where it occurs, and if it contributes something which the other elements cannot supply. If it sounds well in concert form, so much the better, but this is not essential. Similarly, the poetry is good not because it reads well by itself but primarily if, while embodying a sound dramatic idea, it furnishes opportunity for effective musical and scenic treatment. Both poetry and music are to be understood only in combination with each other and with the other elements of the work. True, they may be considered separately, but only for purposes of analysis. In actuality they are united as the elements of hydrogen and oxygen are united in water. “It is not simply the combination of elements that gives opera its peculiar fascination; it is the fusion produced by the mutual analogy of words and music—a union further enriched and clarified by the visual action.”⁶

Throughout the history of opera, in all its many varieties, two fundamental types may be distinguished: that in which the music is the main issue, and that in which there is more or less parity between the music and the other factors. The former kind is sometimes called singer’s opera, a term to which some undeserved opprobrium is attached. Examples of this type are the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, and indeed of most Italian composers. Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte also is a singer’s opera, in which a complicated, inconsistent, and fantastic libretto is redeemed by some of the most beautiful music ever written. The latter kind, represented by operas such as those of Lully, Rameau, and Gluck, not to mention the music dramas of Wagner, depend for their effect on a balance of interest among many different factors of which music is only one, albeit the most important.

Theoretically, it would seem that there should be a third kind of opera, one in which the music is definitely subordinated to the other features. As a matter of fact, the very earliest operas were of this kind, but it was found that their appeal was limited and that it was necessary to admit a fuller participation of music in order to establish the form on a sound basis. Consequently, an opera is not only a drama but also a type of musical composition, and this holds even for those works that include spoken dialogue. The exact point at which such a work ceases to be an opera and becomes a play with musical interludes is sometimes difficult to determine. No rule can be given except to say that if the omission of the music makes it impossible to perform the work at all, or alters its fundamental character, then it must be regarded as an opera.

Throughout its career, opera has been both praised and censured in the strongest terms. It was lauded by its creators as “the delight of princes,” “the noblest spectacle ever devised by man.”⁷ In contrast, Saint-Evremond, a French critic of the late seventeenth century, defined an opera as “a bizarre affair made up of poetry and music, in which the poet and the musician, each equally obstructed by the other, give themselves no end of trouble to produce a wretched work.”⁸ Opera has been criticized on moral as well as on aesthetic grounds; the respectable Hugh Haweis in 1872 regarded it “musically, philosophically, and ethically, as an almost unmixed evil.”⁹ Despite both enemies and friends, however, it has continued to flourish and indeed shows every sign of vitality at the present time; there is every reason to expect that opera, in one shape or another, will be with us for a long time to come. Like all other forms of art, it contains many things today that cannot be understood without a knowledge of its history. It is hoped that this book will not only serve as an introduction to the opera of time past but also may contribute to an understanding of the opera of the present.

1. Leonetti’s dedication for La Deianira is dated September 8, 1631, but the printed libretto, intended for a production in Venice, is dated 1635. The Raccolta de’ drammi is a collection of 1,286 opera librettos held by the University of California, Los Angeles. See Pirrotta, Music and Culture in Italy, 317.

2. Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947 ed.), 3. This libretto was set to music by Francesco Cavalli.

5. Ibid., 261. For other entries where Evelyn uses the word opera, see 2:229, 449, 503.

6. Cone, “Music:A View from Delft,” 447. On this whole subject, see also the introductory chapter in Kerman, Opera as Drama.

7. Marco da Gagliano, preface to Dafne, in Solerti, comp. and ed., Le origini del melodramma, 82.