The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (2 page)

In the early years of the eighteenth century, the young German-born composer George Frideric Handel travelled to Italy, where he imbibed the innovations developed by composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti: these included the use of a larger, more varied orchestra and an extended form of aria.
The latter became the building block for a style which would dominate the genre for the best part of a hundred years – ‘
opera
seria
’, meaning not ‘serious opera’, as is often thought, but opera based on arias illustrating a series of stock emotions (unfulfilled desire, vengeful anger, painful remorse and so forth).
These almost always follow the tripartite
da
capo
(or ‘from the beginning’) form, in which a first melody is
followed by a second melody of contrasting mood and pace, with a final return to the first melody, embellished with ‘ornaments’ or ‘decorations’, added according to the singer’s fancy.

In 1710, Handel came to London and for the next thirty years produced an astonishing succession of operas based on this principle.
The
da
capo
aria requires singers of great technical stamina and precision, especially female sopranos and castrati.
These were men, almost all of them Italian, whose seminal cords had been severed in pubescence, resulting in a hormonal development which gave them large pigeon chests (allowing vast intake of breath) and a hauntingly beautiful, other-worldly timbre.
Today the roles written for castrati are taken by either female mezzo-sopranos or male countertenors, who can only approximate the freakish feats of the castrati.

The Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi also wrote over forty operas in the
opera
seria
mode; they are not easily distinguishable.

In the 1760s, in a preface written to the score of
Alceste,
Christoph Willibald von Gluck attacked the domination of the virtuoso singer and the ever more formulaic convention of the
da
capo
aria, proposing a return to a musical simplicity which could be more directly expressive of real emotions: ‘I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression,’ he wrote, ‘and I have avoided making displays of difficulty at the expense of clarity.’ His example would prove enormously influential on the next generation of composers.

Meanwhile, as another antidote to the tragic, tangled and mythological plots of
opera
seria,
there developed a genre of short and sharp comic opera, generally known as
opera
buffa.
Avoiding both the exoticism of the castrato and the excess of the
da
capo
aria,
opera
buffa
presented contemporary characters in some light-hearted marital or amorous intrigue, usually involving a master and servant, or a mistress and a maid, either disguised or mistakenly identified: Giovanni-Battista
Pergolesi’s
La
Serva
Padrona
(
The
Maid
who
is
Mistress,
1733) and Domenico Cimarosa’s
Il
Matrimonio
Segreto
(
The
Secret
Marriage,
1766) are outstanding examples of this.

Joseph Haydn wrote several operas on both the
seria
and
buffa
models, but their occasional modern revivals have fallen flat.
The work of Haydn’s young friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, on the other hand, has remained universally popular, and in the second half of the twentieth century he is ranked among the supreme opera composers.
Without setting out to be so, he proved a revolutionary, embracing the traditions of
seria
(in
Idomeneo
) and
buffa
(
Le
Nozze
di
Figaro
) as well as the reforms of Gluck, but introducing a fresh urgency, vitality, flexibility and subtlety of dramatic tone in mature masterpieces such as
Don
Giovanni
and
Così
fan
tutte.
Perhaps his greatest innovation was his sophisticated use of the contrapuntal ensemble, in which three or more characters simultaneously express various feelings within one musical number.

Claudio Monteverdi

(1567–1643)

Orfeo
(
L’Orfeo
)

Prologue and five acts. First performed Mantua, 1607.

Libretto by Alessandro Striggio

‘It should be most unusual as all the actors are to sing their parts.’ Thus wrote Francesco Gonzaga, son of the Duke of Mantua, to his brother Ferdinando on the subject of an entertainment which he had asked the court composer Monteverdi to prepare for the carnival of 1607.
Opera was still an experimental novelty at this point, although Monteverdi plainly knew of another musical staging of the Orpheus legend, performed in Florence five years previously.

The Mantuan performance took place in the private apartments of the duke’s sister.
There would have been little or no scenery, and there is evidence that the opera was played without an interval.
The cast consisted of singers permanently employed by the court, with four of the female roles taken by castrati – only the Orfeo, also a castrato, was borrowed from the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Copies of the libretto were handed to the small private audience of courtiers, and the performance was so successful (‘women wept because nothing like this had been heard before’, reported the court chronicle) that it was repeated a few days later.

Plot

Orfeo (Orpheus), the renowned Thracian singer, rejoices in his love for his wife Euridice.
When a messenger brings news that she has died of a snake bite, he is so grief-stricken that he resolves to venture into Hades and plead with Pluto to restore her to life.
Using all his musical powers, he lulls Charon, who ferries the dead across the river Styx, to sleep and makes his way into Pluto’s domain.
When he presents his case, Pluto’s wife Proserpina is so moved that she persuades
her husband to break the immutable law of death and restore Euridice to life.
Out of love for Proserpina, Pluto agrees, on condition that Orfeo does not turn to look at Euridice on the journey back.
But Orfeo, always ruled by emotion rather than reason, cannot resist the temptation, and Euridice is lost to him again.
Disconsolate, he returns to Thrace.
The god Apollo intervenes, and turns both Orfeo and Euridice into stars in the night sky.

 What to listen for

As in early Greek tragedy, the chorus plays the dominant role, framing the soloists’ monologues and dialogues with a series of madrigals and dances.

Two episodes exemplify aspects of Monteverdi’s dramatic genius.
The Messenger (mezzo-soprano) who brings Orfeo news of Euridice’s death recounts the incident in extraordinarily varied music which vividly evokes the scene and the emotions which the tragedy provokes.
The plea that Orfeo (tenor) makes to Charon, ‘Possente spirto’, doesn’t have a story to tell, but is charged with a high pitch of intensity, and decorated with the vocal ornaments and flourishes that mark this phase of baroque music – one of the most obvious being the ‘goat trill’, in which the same note is repeatedly hammered at the end of a phrase.

For singers, the major challenge presented by Monteverdi is that of drawing out the emotional nuances while keeping the line classically clean and clear.
In
Tosca
or
Madama
Butterfly
, an effect can be made by sobbing, rasping, shrieking or holding a note longer than the score indicates, but such tricks don’t work in an opera like
Orfeo.
Monteverdi’s operas require lighter, sweeter, more flexible voices than those of Puccini, and although they make no great demands in terms of physical range or volume, they provide an acid test of the capacity to sustain a vocal line through smooth breath control.

Although musicologists disagree about the precise balance of instruments and the details of what and how they should
play, the opera’s orchestration can broadly speaking be said to consist of keyboards (chamber organ or harpsichord) and both bowed (violins, violas and cellos) and plucked (lutes and harp) strings, with recorders and brass instruments such as cornets and sackbutts being added for dances, fanfares and processions.
On first hearing, the carpet of sound can seem rather threadbare and monochrome, but familiarity will reveal the richness of the palette.
Every syllable of the text should be immediately audible.

 In performance

This opera appears to have been occasionally performed in Italy until the mid-seventeenth century, but its first full-scale modern revival took place in Paris in 1911.
Since then, the sketchy indications of instrumentation and harmonization in the score published in 1609 have allowed free play of interpretation.
Broadly speaking, the fashion for modern composers (Orff, Hindemith, Dallapiccola, Berio and Henze among them) fleshing Monteverdi’s bare bones out with music composed in their own idioms has passed, and the trend now is for scholar-conductors (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner among them) to aim at the maximum degree of historical ‘authenticity’, using reconstructions of baroque instruments and following original performance practice – though the surviving evidence for this is often so ambiguous and scanty that what constitutes this ‘authenticity’ remains hotly contested and conjectural.

Most productions aim to recreate either the splendours of seventeenth-century baroque or the simplicity of Ancient Greece, but the most successful recent staging is probably that of David Freeman at ENO, which presents the opera as if it was being enacted by a community of Balkan peasants.
They appear to devise the performance before the audience’s eyes, dancing as well as singing, with the soloists also part of the chorus.
The action gains in spontaneity and emotional immediacy whatever it loses in ‘authentic’ courtly formality.

 Recording

CD: John Mark Ainsley (Orfeo); Philip Pickett (cond.).
L’Oiseau Lyre 433 545 2

Il
Ritorno
d’Ulisse
in
Patria
 
(
The
Return
of
Ulysses
to
his
Homeland
)

Prologue and three acts. First performed Venice, 1640.

Libretto by Giacomo Badoaro

Unlike the courtly and dignified
Orfeo,
this is an opera composed for a sophisticated public of merchants and entrepreneurs.
By the late 1630s, opera had become a popular form of commercial entertainment in the wealthy republic of Venice, and its paying audiences demanded something other than the ethical seriousness of the earliest operas – hence the introduction of elements of spectacle and knockabout humour.