POSTED JUNE 29, 2019
Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are among the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world.
Traditions of staged sung music and drama go back to both secular and religious forms from the Middle Ages. An important predecessor of the opera was the intermedio, a theatrical performance or spectacle with music and often dance which was performed between the acts of a play to celebrate special occasions in Italian courts.
Dafne (c.1598) by Jacopo Peri is the earliest composition considered opera. Most of that opera is lost, but Peri produced several other operatic works. Peri's works did not arise out of a creative vacuum. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, and is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century.
The theme of Orpheus, the demi-god of music attracted Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) who wrote his first opera, La Favola d'Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus), in 1607 for the court of Mantua. Monteverdi insisted on a strong relationship between the words and music. When Orfeo was performed in Mantua, an orchestra of 38 instruments, numerous choruses and recitatives were used to make a lively drama. Opera had revealed its first stage of maturity in the hands of Monteverdi. L'Orfeo also has the distinction of being the earliest surviving opera that is still regularly performed today.
Within a few decades opera had spread throughout Italy. When it reached the Republic of Venice, opera took an important new direction. It was here that the first public opera house was opened in 1637. Its success moved opera away from aristocratic patronage and into the commercial world. In Venice, musical drama was no longer aimed at an elite of aristocrats and intellectuals and acquired the character of entertainment. Soon many other opera houses had sprung up in the city, performing works for a paying public during the Carnival season.
By the Baroque era (1600–1750), opera had taken all of Europe by storm "and was a spectacular, expensive affair full of florid arias and ornate stage sets with moving parts".**
The word “overture” comes from the Latin word “apertura.” You may be familiar with the English word “aperture,” which refers to an opening or a hole. Considering the origins of the word, it comes as no surprise that “overture” is often used to describe the instrumental opening of an opera prior to the beginning of Act 1.
The aria is a solo melody performed with musical accompaniment during the body of the opera itself, and Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo was the first to employ aria as we know it. After that, arias became a staple of the opera genre.
Recitative refers to the parts of an opera in which a performer imitates the rhythm of the spoken word. Recitative passages are usually sung on a repeated note or just a few notes, and there is no melody. Furthermore, the singer doesn’t repeat any words or sections of a recitative as he would in an aria.
Opera would get pretty bland if only one character sang at a time for the duration of the performance. Fortunately for us listeners, composers have always employed ensembles as parts of an opera. Technically, an ensemble can refer to a duet, trio, quartet, chorus, or any group of performers singing together. More often than not, the word “ensemble” refers to a time in the opera when multiple characters are portraying conflicting emotions at the same time.
* Adapted from various Wikipedia articles
** San Francisco Opera Association.
‘O mio babbino caro’ is one of the most performed arias of the last 100 years (lyrics).
Montserrat Caballé, the great Spanish soprano, passed away at the age of 85 last October. She's with Freddie now. Here's a link to their phenomenal "Barcelona" duet.