Up until now, the role of opera in the history of music has been largely neglected in this book, not due to its lack of importance, but because of the opposite: its long, lasting, and rich tradition. While most opera history is beyond the scope of this book, opera played such an important role in the music of the nineteenth century that it would be a major oversight to exclude a discussion of the effect it had on not only the opera world, but also music in general. In this chapter we will take a look at the leading composers of opera throughout the century, noting specifically the innovations and developments they contributed to music.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the leading Italian composers were Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, creating new works that have been performed annually since their first performances. Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) enjoyed immense popularity, fame, and importance throughout Europe, even more so than Beethoven, which is difficult to believe! While he is best known today for his comic operas such as L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Woman in Algiers) and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), his reputation came from serious operas, such as Otello. He also is well known for the development of the bel canto (“beautiful singing”) style, which refers to elegant, fluid, and lyrical delivery of all melodies, with the voice taking precedent over all other elements of the opera, including the orchestra, story, and visuals.
Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835), a younger contemporary of Rossini, grew in reputation after Rossini's retirement from opera composition. Bellini, who died at the age of thirty-four, composed ten operas in all, of which the best known are La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), Norma, and I Puritani (The Puritans). His music is marked by the long-breathed, intensely emotional, and highly ornamental character of his melodies. Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) was a contemporary of both Bellini and Rossini, and he proved to be one of the most prolific Italian composers of the early nineteenth century, having composed oratorios, cantatas, chamber and church music, about one hundred songs, and a few symphonies—all of this in addition to his more than seventy operas.
Later in the century, Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) would prove to be the dominant composer of Italian music for the fifty years after Donizetti. In all, he composed more than twenty-six operas, including Rigoletto, La Traviata (The Fallen Woman), and Falstaff. His music has been described as the epitome of Romanticism, both in drama and passion. While he continued working within established opera traditions, he worked his entire life to put his own mark on the music world. Verdi's heightened sense of drama and passion is seen not only in his operas but in his other works as well. His Messa da Requiem, a large-scale choral-orchestral mass for the dead, incorporates many dramatic elements of opera and elevates that genre to a new echelon.
The most important and successful Italian composer of opera after Verdi was Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924). His highly individual personal style blended Verdi's attention to melody and drama with Richard Wagner's approach to recurring melodies (don't worry—we'll discuss Wagner very soon). His operas juxtaposed contrasting musical styles and harmonies to accentuate the contrasting characters in the stories. One of Puccini's most beloved and recognized operas is La bohème, a look at the lives of starving artists in the Parisian Latin Quarter. In addition to becoming a staple in opera houses around the world, La bohème would go on to influence the hit Broadway musical Rent.
Meanwhile in Germany, music and literature were busy interacting, a typical feature of nineteenth-century Romanticism. This ideal was most fully developed in the German-speaking lands in the genres of song, instrumental music, and opera. The opera that established Germany as a contender in the world of Romantic opera was Der Freischütz (The Rifleman) by Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826). The innovative feature of this opera was not only the composer's usual choice of instruments in the orchestra, but also the concept of a story focused on the daily lives of ordinary people. Further emphasizing the Romantic nature of the opera, the libretto dealt with typical Romantic topics of the supernatural and the wilderness as a place of mystery.
Following von Weber was Richard Wagner (1813-1883), one of the most crucial (and infamous) composers in nineteenth-century culture and all of music history. An outstanding composer of German opera, his philosophies transcended music into all areas of the arts, with the arts scene as a sort of religion in and of itself. In music he took German to a new level, he created a new genre called the music drama, and he developed harmonies that eventually influenced composers to abandon tonality entirely.
The music drama was based on Wagner's philosophy that drama and music were inextricably connected, and the two together organically express a unified dramatic idea. His earlier operas, such as The Flying Dutchman, were modeled in the vein of von Weber's operas, but Wagner's famed Ring Cycle established the innovative genre he called music drama. Wagner wrote four librettos for a cycle of four operas with the collective title of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs). His operas had a sense of continuity not only because of the music-drama union, but also because of his use of the Leitmotiv, a recurring theme or musical motive that is associated with a character or subject. One of the best examples of the power of the leitmotive is Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, which tells the story of a secret love incited by a potion that ultimately leads to the lovers' demise.
Although now widely performed in opera houses, public and critical reception of Tristan und Isolde was initially quite unfavorable. Why? Wagner in many ways abandoned many aspects of tonality, the system of harmonies that had defined Western art music for the past two hundred and fifty years. Reactions ranged from utter disgust (Clara Schumann wrote that the opera was “the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life.”) to negative visceral reaction (German Bohemian music critic Eduard Hanslick said that it “reminds one of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.” Wagner's contrasts between tonally stable and unstable passages of music were the hallmark of his compositional language, and his ideals would have a more far-reaching effect than he might have imagined.