Exploring opera with a companion (original) (raw)
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The study of opera in the second half of the eighteenth century has ourished during the last several decades, and our knowledge of the operas written during that period and of their aesthetic, social and political contexts has vastly increased. Much of what we have learned in these and other areas of scholarship has been recorded in the form of articles published in scholarly journals and in collections of essays. This volume will explore opera and operatic life in the years 1750–1800 through several English-language essays, in a selection intended to represent the last few decades of scholarship in all its excitement and variety. This introduction provides some context for the essays that follow. It briey discusses some of the institutional developments and intellectual trends that have informed scholarship in eighteenth-century opera and mentions some of the criteria that have guided my choice of the essays reprinted here. In following the publisher's policy of limiting this collection to essays written in English, I did not mean to suggest that these essays were in any way superior to the best essays of my colleagues writing in other languages.
The Enlightenment witnessed the rise of a public whose role as sovereign arbiter of operatic taste irreversibly changed the processes by which fame and renown were bestowed upon composers. The public sphere – a conceptual space in which texts (including music) were disseminated and debated – emerged as an expansive intellectual forum in which composers, performers and works could be evaluated. In spite of opera’s long-standing association with fame and renown, its role in the processes leading to ascriptions of musical value and fame in the Enlightenment public sphere is a significant dimension of canon formation that has yet to be fully investigated. This article offers a case-study of Electress Maria Antonia of Saxony (1728-1780), whose mutually beneficial relationship with the Breitkopf firm, coupled with its redesigned ‘movable type’ in 1755, prompted a new mode of opera criticism, one that focussed sharply on the music itself. Maria Antonia’s Il trionfo della fedeltà (1754) and Talestri (1762) were the first operas to receive reviews featuring in-text musical examples, fuelling the public’s quest to monumentalize Maria Antonia as celebrated composer. Ultimately, the inclusion of musical excerpts in opera criticism was an important step toward the construct of the work as separate from individual localized performances.
Eighteenth Century Music, 2004
Writing a history of an important and complex operatic repertory spanning three dynamic centuries is a daunting task, one that is perhaps better suited to several specialists than a single author. While an individual rarely possesses the scholarly breadth to write with expertise and authority on so much music, he or she can impart a unifying perspective and a consistent set of goals. But this advantage can also prove to be a limitation. John Warrack, a skilled critic and able scholar of German romantic opera, has written the first comprehensive history of German opera. His ambitious book is divided into eighteen chapters, the last ten treating the nineteenth century to Wagner. This division reflects the author's own scholarly interests, and it is understandable that the strongest chapters would be devoted to later repertory while the material in the first eight chapters, treating the development of German opera through the eighteenth century, is mostly derived from secondary sources. Thus the strength of this book resides in its discussion of nineteenth-century German opera and its influences. The author has accomplished this in an impressive manner. Most of the chapters also include useful discussions of the ideas that informed the aesthetic issues of the repertory in question. One might have expected a discussion of method, approach or goals, but all that appears in this regard is a statement opposite the flyleaf giving an idea of the scope of the work: the trajectory of German opera from its 'primitive origins up to Wagner'. This most grandiose of composers would be pleased with the locution; indeed, he himself advanced a similar view, as if music history logically led to him. But the drawbacks of this approach extend beyond the unfortunate characterization of earlier repertory as 'primitive'. An overriding teleological theme permeates the narrative, interpreting phenomena by final causes and making aesthetic judgments accordingly. Early works are said to 'anticipate' later works (180); Mozart is praised for his 'developing Romantic awareness' and 'chromatically advanced harmony' (160). This is perhaps understandable given the book's emphasis on the romantic era, but the pitfalls of this approach require that it should have been discussed and defended. In treating the eighteenth century the author provides a competent rendition of the 'received wisdom' on this repertory, that is to say, traditional scholarly opinion. This is also understandable, given Warrack's expertise in nineteenth-century music. But the secondary literature cannot offer an accurate picture of the repertory. With a few exceptions, such as Thomas Bauman's North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), the state of research on German eighteenth-century opera remains preliminary at best. For example, scholars have left the important Viennese repertory largely unexplored and new insights will come only after basic research on primary sources. (This is also true for opera in Germany in the late eighteenth century.) Because the secondary literature cannot yet provide a comprehensive account of eighteenth-century German opera, the conventional approach has been to select a few exemplary 'masterpieces' (and perhaps a 'non-masterpiece' to affirm that we do not need to study the work of hacks) that illustrate the trajectory of music history. So it is not surprising that the examples in this book are the usual suspects, reflecting modern taste in repertory (particularly Mozart) more than that of the eras in question. The short statement at the beginning of the book also notes that the author 'traces the growth of the humble Singspiel into a vehicle for the genius of Mozart and Beethoven'. The unexamined notion of 'genius' enters the discussion of music in several chapters. Eighteenth-century composers other than Mozart are mentioned briefly and their music is often left unexplored. I would have hoped for more on skilled composers such as Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Johann Baptist Henneberg, Franz Anton Hoffmeister,
Eighteenth Century Music
For a long time, research into the history of opera during the eighteenth century focused mainly on groundbreaking works that were entirely original, as they were assigned the greatest value in narratives of the development of the genre. The reality of opera during the Settecento, however, was that the genre was dominated by the practice of pasticcio (from the Italian meaning 'pie'a dish with many different ingredients), involving a compilation of extracts from various operas by different composers. Medleys of this kind were assembled under a single title by impresarios, singers or composers. This was made possible by the convention of the 'number opera', in which arias articulated standard affects or emotions. Hence numbers could be moved from one opera to another with no detriment to the latter work's dramatic structure, so long as they still reflected the emotions expressed by the original. This convention partly explains the phenomenon of travelling singers taking copies of numerous arias with them in their baule, or trunks (hence the name 'aria di baule'), as they journeyed around Europe, treating them as artistic calling cards and incorporating them into the works in which they performed. The mobility of musicians thus meant that the operatic pasticcio became the most popular stage genre in European musical life of the eighteenth century. It was precisely with the aim of identifying the ways in which pasticcio functionedanalysing the repertory and compositional output linked to it, reconstructing performance practices and understanding the mechanisms behind the presence of this genre in eighteenth-century operatic theatres (court and public)that in 2018 the Polish-German research project 'Pasticcio: Ways of Arranging Attractive Operas' (www.pasticcio-project.eu) was initiated, led by musicologists from the Uniwersytet Warszawski and the Universität Greifswald, funded by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Centre) of Poland and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It was run by Aneta Markuszewska (Uniwersytet Warszawski) and Gesa zur Nieden (Universität Greifswald). Another aim of the project was to create a digital-source database of works representative of pasticcio and to make selected contemporary editions available online. The project was summed up by the online conference 'Opera Pasticcio in Eighteenth-Century Opera: Work Concept, Performance Practice, Digital Humanities', hosted on 13 and 14 May 2021 by the Uniwersytet Warszawski. Initially planned as an in situ event, the Covid-19 pandemic meant that it took place online, whichdespite the lack of human contacthelped boost the number of observers and the reception of the event among opera and theatre scholars. Over those two days, some twenty-two papers and two keynote addresses were presented. An excellent introduction to both the conference as a whole and the first group of papers (under the common title 'Pasticcio and Work Concept in 18[th-]Century Italian Opera') was the keynote presentation given by Giovanni Polino (Conservatorio Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, Potenza). Polino stressed the significance of theatrical and musical practice for defining the dramma per musica and
The Eighteenth-century Opera and the Search for a Meeting Point between Music and Declamation
Barok. Historia-Literatura-Sztuka, 2019
The fulfilment of the operatic reform, managed by Christoph Willibald Gluck and his librettist Ranieri Calzabigi in 1760s’ Vienna, is a well-known topic. This event, whose seeds date back to the 1740s, has been examined according to theatrical and literary experiences in France and Italy. However, the question of acting influence on opera can be reconsidered at the light of the latest discovery of symbols collected and labelled as drammatica – metodo italiano. Engraved in some writings, this set of signs is often connected to music and offers the matter for a new critical survey about the discourse on music declamation before and after Calzabigi. From the 1830s onwards the theory of acting in Italy was supported by handbooks which gathered symbols of pronounce, expression, gesture and, most important, tone of voice. Apart from the effort to establish a supranational graphic system in Italy and abroad, another common trait, which could be recognized in the treatises, concerns the deemed rules useful not only for actors, but also for orators and opera singers. In relationship to the aforementioned reform of Gluck and Calzabigi, running from 1762 to 1784 via Vienna, Paris and Naples, it is interesting to focus on Calzabigi’s theory, who claimed his primacy for the creation of the so-called music of declamation (musique de déclamation). In 1784, the Italian poet reasserted his experience in “trying” the symbols of acting for his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and five years later for his Alceste (1767). Aiming to outline the slides and the nuances of the voice, Calzabigi interspersed between the lines of his librettos a lot of symbols, and then he “invented” other signs to give evidence to the melody of verses on which the composer could write the score. Where could Calzabigi find that semiography? Probably in the unique source of his time, i.e. the performing practices of actors, unfortunately not yet recorded by 18th- century Italian treatises, even though the symbols are retraceable in the contemporary theatrical and rhetorical tradition of Great Britain. The article deals with the various meeting points between acting tragedies and singing operas, as testified by playwrights and musicographers, at the time when the Italian “dramma per musica” was conceived as an unlikelihood mixture of arias and recitatives sung by virtuoso-singers, who usually disregarded the narrative. To point out the reaction to this unacceptable trend there are some books of Benedetto Marcello (Il teatro alla moda, 1720), Luigi Riccoboni (Dell’arte rappresentativa, 1728), Gianvito Manfredi (L’Attore in scena, 1734), Gianrinaldo Carli (L’indole del teatro tragico, 1746 and Osservazioni sulla musica antica e moderna, 1744-1786), Giuseppe Tartini (Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’armonia, 1754), Francesco Algarotti (Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, 1755), who claimed the dramatic superiority of recitativo secco or obbligato, and the beauty of the aria parlante. Owing to its particular speaking tone linked to declamation, the aria parlante was the preferred dramatic tool by a group of theorists like Algarotti, Milizia and Planelli. At the same extent it is described in detail by John Brown in his own Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (1789). The book of the Scottish painter and music amateur is the unique source that explains the features of the aria parlante as follows: “Aria parlante,—speaking Air, is that which, from the nature of its subject, admits neither of long notes in the composition, nor of many ornaments in the execution. The rapidity of the motion of this Air is proportioned to the violence of the passion which is expressed by it. This species of Air goes sometimes by the name of aria di nota e parola and likewise of aria agitata”. At the end of the century this kind of aria represented an ideal conjunction between the emotional unmeasured intonation of the words and the regular beats of the song. To clarify this difficult compromise there are some articles written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Dictionnare de musique, 1768). Nevertheless his Italianized taste, the philosopher refused the Italian recitative preferring that of the domestic tragédie lyrique. The reason of Rousseau’s choice is recognizable in the articles Accent and Acteur. The verses, as Rousseau affirms, contain three kinds of accent: the grammatical one is the result of the alternation of low and high sounds depending on the rhythm of short and long syllables, the logique one is related to the sequence of the words, and finally the pathétique one which takes its shape from the dynamic quality of declamation. Denis Diderot, in the third Entretien of his Le fils naturel (1757), affirms that the composer can help the actor if only he is able to imagine the nature of declamation. In his famous dialogue Le neveu de Rameau (1765) he defines melody as a line flowing over declamation, so the composer is obliged to grasp the sound of words and transform it into music. During his stay in Naples Calzabigi pursued his project of music declamation. In 1784 he wrote the libretto of Ipermestra in collaboration with the composer and castrato Giuseppe Millico, a follower of Gluck. Alike in Vienna at the time of Orfeo, once again he joined to the libretto the symbols of declamation in connection to verses and acted them for the composer. Further, in 1792 he addressed to count Alessandro Pepoli a letter in form of pamphlet for his opera Elfrida (music of Paisiello). In this essay he clarifies that the authentic melody is embodied in the verses, and the task of the composer is to discover the true music of the poem. In view of this paradox, what remains unexplained is the reason why the Italian thinkers, at the end of the century, were not able to develop a debate like that of the colleagues in Great Britain: among them the actor Joshua Steele, author of the meaningful Essays Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (1775), and the theorist John Walker who edited in 1787 the book Melody of Speaking Delineated, or Elocution Taught like Music by Visible Signs.