OPERA

OPERA. For much of the first three centuries of opera—from the early Renaissance to the time of Mozart—the art was never far from the seat of power. With few exceptions, the scale and expense of operatic productions required significant patronage from either the state or the moneyed few, an investment that in return elevated the prestige of regimes and sweetened the constraints of rule. From the mid-sixteenth century, rulers of Italian city-states sponsored intermedii, dramatic musical interludes that appeared alongside a welter of other entertainments such as banquets, balls, hunts, and ballets intended to commemorate, celebrate, and on occasion intimidate. A committee of poets recast Girolamo Bargagli's 1564 play La pellegrina, dedicated to Ferdinando de' Medici, as six intermedii for the 1589 marriage of the duke to Christine of Lorraine, which the maestro di capella at the Florence Cathedral, Cristofano Malvezzi, set to music. Other such intermedii marked similarly important events in the city throughout the sixteenth century. At the same time, a group of Florentine intellectuals called the Camerata set about re-creating ancient Greek drama, which they believed to have been a blend of chant, declamation, and dance. Funded by patrons like the wealthy Florentine humanist Giovanni de' Bardi and silk merchant Jacopo Corsi, the Camerata experimented with setting classic myths to music. This was the context that produced Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), a large-scale work of sophisticated design and dramatic mastery that many have called the first true opera. Initially staged "as a casual entertainment for courtiers" around Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, Orfeo was later staged to celebrate Margherita of Savoy's entry into the city before her marriage to Ferdinando Gonzaga.

The grandest alliance of opera and power came during the reign of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), whose musicians went well beyond the associations implicit in intermedii to cast the king himself in productions. Cardinal Jules Mazarin introduced Italian opera to France in the 1640s, and the Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) later received carte blanche in the title of surintendant de la musique. Lully was decisive in forging the "French style," a stately aesthetic of pomp and magnificence that depended more on sensuous vocal and stage effects than on taut drama. Lully's most enduring operatic form, the tragédie lyrique, took its subjects from chivalric tales and ancient myths, with simple plots that turned on the loves of kings, queens, and divinities. Audiences were overwhelmingly noble, and the atmosphere both on the stage and in the hall radiated the Sun King's glory. The prologue to Lully's Thésée (1675) is set in the gardens of Versailles as Mars sings of the king's victories in battle, and Love, Grace, and Pleasure regret his absence; in Isis (1677) Neptune sings of struggles with Holland and Spain. With the eighteenth-century operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), references to the French monarchy receded, but the Opéra—officially called the Académie Royale de Musique—remained closely identified with the state.

A more popular aesthetic developed elsewhere, with the state less decisive in operatic production. The first public opera house in Europe opened in Venice in 1637 with the help of private sponsorship. By 1700 there were ten theaters in the city, with a keen entrepreneurial competition fueling new productions. The luster of Venetian power and the renown of its culture drew composers and performers. Its annual Carnival season, running from just after Christmas to Lent, brought reliable audiences that were well-to-do and ready to be entertained. The absence of a Venetian court and the city's mercantile character helped to account for its more earthbound productions, with fewer stage machines, less scenic grandeur, and more historical and comedic subjects than in France or other Italian city-states. The cult of personality prevailed particularly where commercial interest was present, and prima donnas and castrati (especially numerous in Rome, where by papal decree women were banned from the stage) reversed the priority given to the text over the music.

Political and social factors that encouraged early Italian and French opera did not prevail in England, where the Protectorate's ban on public entertainments and a limited monarchy in the later seventeenth century slowed the appearance of opera and hampered its progress well into the eighteenth century. The Restoration's entertainments bore little trace of the Stuart masque, an opulent and thoroughly aristocratic mixture of dance, song, and instrumental music staged at court and in great houses for weddings, receptions, and royal visits. With a few notable exceptions, government support was minimal. Attempting to replicate the French model, Charles II commissioned Albion and Albanius (1685), with text by John Dryden and music by Louis Grabu, to celebrate the naming of the duke of York as his successor. As England's first Continental-style opera, it left little trace: Its premiere was overshadowed by news of the Monmouth Rebellion, and it quickly fell into neglect. More common were so-called semi-operas, which mixed singing, dancing, and dialogue, often in fantastical settings. Armed with a royal patent to "reform" the plays of Shakespeare, the composer William Davenant, working with John Dryden, produced some of the earliest semi-operas in Macbeth (1663) and The Tempest (1667). Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), a miniature tragedy written for performance at a girls' school in Chelsea, was a rare instance of a fully sung work.

London's first public opera house, Dorset Garden Theatre (1671), depended heavily upon semioperas and comédies-ballets in the French style. Charles II's efforts to bring an Italian company to London in the 1670s met with public indifference, but thirty years later Italian opera seria came to dominate the English lyric stage. Advanced by the Italian dramatist Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), opera seria reduced the baroque extravagances of courtly opera by streamlining plots, eliminating extraneous love intrigues, and peopling the stage with historical rather than mythic heroes. George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), drawn to London on the urging of the English ambassador to Venice, used the conventions of opera seria to fashion a highly individual idiom that combined a quickened dramatic pace with stunning vocal displays.

Italy continued to set the terms for operatic development elsewhere in Europe. Inspired by the irreverence of commedia dell'arte, comic intermezzi and buffa operas mocked the arrogant with fast-paced patter, sprightly tunes, and simple plots involving ordinary mortals. The appearance of a buffa troupe from Italy at the French Opéra in 1752 produced outrage and indignation among France's cultural conservatives and gave the philosophes an opportunity to bait their opponents. Citing Italian intermezzi as his standard, and with the ideological apparatus of the Académie Royale his unnamed target, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, "I conclude that the French do not have music and can never have it; if they ever do, it will be all the worse for them." In the German-speaking lands, opera buffa fused with an older tradition of mystery plays in the form of the Singspiel, a blend of highbrow and common that combined spoken dialogue, dances, marches, and narrative song. Die Zauberflöte (The magic flute, 1791) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) is in this tradition, and its popularity is in part a reflection of the genre's enormous popular success: In its first ten years at Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden, it enjoyed 223 performances.

Mozart's operas, without precedent and unrivaled in so many aspects, cannot be called revolutionary in either dramatic content or musical execution. In Le nozze di Figaro (The marriage of Figaro, 1786), called by Mozart an opera buffa, Count Almaviva, the nobleman thwarted in his attempt to exercise his droit du seigneur, is more laughable than tyrannical. Whatever reversals might be implied in Figaro's menacing vow to teach the count to caper are quickly erased with the opera's happy ending, which articulates a moderate, secular view that affirms social differences and sanctifies forgiveness. Don Giovanni (1787), whose original title was Il dissoluto punito, o sia Il Don Giovanni, ultimately depicts the limits of radical Enlightenment sensualism, a message that Mozart's richly seductive and resolutely nonmoralizing music does much to complicate.

OPERA

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