Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(iii) Opera.

Opera was the most widespread artistic form; no other cultural expression had the same capacity to reflect social life, the same cultural prestige or comparable turnover. Opera as a whole had a double social and cultural function: its social function was as an instrument of moral and civil education (Zeno), the vehicle of the dominant ideology (Metastasio), and as social critique (comic opera); its cultural function was to disseminate ‘high’ culture and language and to convey classical subjects or, later on, otherwise unknown ones from fiction. Hence Strohm's assertion (1991, p.19) that ‘Italian opera, good and bad, was a school for the nation, precisely as cinema and television are today’. At the beginning of the century opera divided into two genres: opera seria (dramma per musica) and comic opera (intermezzo, commedia per musica, dramma giocoso per musica, opera buffa). This division made it possible for opera to be widely disseminated and carry out multiple functions. The two genres constituted two alternative systems with mechanisms of production, performance and reception that rarely intersected, but which influenced each other to a great extent in dramaturgy, versification, musical language and structure.

Max Fehr and Hermann Abert were the first to recognize that the men of letters rather than the composers played the leading role in the ‘reform’ of 17th-century Venetian opera into the rational dramma per musica. The first reformers, besides Zeno, were Silvio Stampiglia, Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti, Antonio Salvi and Pietro Pariati, who all shared the same Arcadian ideals. Another member of the Accademia dell'Arcadia was the poet Metastasio, the most pervasive figure in the history of 18th-century opera.

The first Arcadian operas were created in Venice: La forza della virtù by Domenico David to a libretto by Zeno (1693), and Gli inganni felici (1695) and Lucio Vero (1700) by C.F. Pollarolo, also to librettos by Zeno. At first literary reform had little influence on the music: Alessandro Scarlatti, Giovanni and Antonio Bononcini and Gasparini continued the 17th-century legacy of contrapuntal writing, concertante instrumental parts, and arias accompanied only by basso continuo. The spread of Arcadian and rationalist opera coincided with Metastasio's first libretto (Didone abbandonata, 1724, Naples) and the first operas by the composers of his generation: the Neapolitans Porpora, Feo, Pergolesi, Leo, Hasse and Vinci (the first ‘classical’ composer, according to De Brosses, Algarotti, Burney and Grétry), and the Venetians Albinoni, Orlandini, Caldara and Vivaldi. The anti-Baroque reforms of Zeno and Metastasio covered a number of elements: the revival of the Aristotelian unities, the elimination of comic elements, marginal episodes and spectacular stage effects, and a reduction of the number of scenes from 60 or 70 to between 20 and 30. The composition followed the dramatic form, divided into repeated sequences of recitative (or multiple recitatives) and da capo aria. The recitatives, generally dialogues for up to five characters, set up the motivation for the subsequent aria, in which the character stepped outside the real time of the action for a personal, reflective reaction. At the end of the aria, the character left the stage. This recitative and aria structure remained dominant until 1770 and suited the ‘tyranny of the text’ over the music. Such a word-centred concept was in line with the classical idea of tragedy in which events did not take place on stage but were referred to by characters who brought their personal reactions on stage instead. The 19th century's charges against Metastasian opera derived in large part from an inability to understand these assumptions, which have their roots in the Enlightenment.

During the Metastasian period (by extension, from 1700 to 1770) only the drama was a work of art, the music having a simple auxiliary value. The ‘author’ was thus the dramatist, while it was the responsibility of the singer to create the performance; the composer had a subordinate role, vaguely comparable to that of the modern-day director. This is the reason why in 18th-century Italy it was the libretto, not the score, that was printed, and on the title-page, as on the theatre poster, the name of the composer was not given (in 1842 the title-page of the libretto of Nabucco still gave only Solera's name, not Verdi's). This also explains the practice of continual resetting of the same Metastasio librettos: Didone abbandonata was set to music about 60 times; Olimpiade about 50, Achille in Sciro about 30. Opera seria, at least until the last quarter of the century, was an established genre and the tendency was for each musical and dramatic realization to be a one-off, a costly undertaking incompatible with the emerging commercial nature of opera.

During the 1750s even faithful supporters of Metastasio such as Hasse and Jommelli reacted against the ‘tyranny of the text’. At this time the text had a conservative function and a high prestige stemming from tradition, while the music had a contrasting evolutive function: arias broke free from the da capo form, the overture acquired greater interest (as in Piccinni's Catone in Utica), and accompanied recitative became predominant (Traetta, Ifigenia in Tauride). Sacchini, Traetta (Antigona) and Salieri (L'Europa riconosciuta) show in different ways the influence of French tragédie lyrique in the increasingly spectacular nature of opera and the greater use of chorus and orchestra. Another evolutionary impulse came from opera buffa, especially in the use of ensembles: in Artaserse (1749) Galuppi brings together in a final quartet what the Metastasio original had as a sequence of five separate arias. Dance became a source of new subjects: with Noverre and Angiolini in Milan from the 1770s onwards, the ‘ballo pantomimo’ proved more popular than opera, prompting lamentations from Metastasio. Of all the 18th-century trends in opera, only the reform of Gluck and Calzabigi had no great effect in Italy, except in those states with Habsburg connections.

In the last third of the century many new librettists (no longer autonomous playwrights like Metastasio) came to the fore, including Calzabigi, Da Ponte, Coltellini, De Gamerra, Sografi and Verazi. During this phase it was the composers who made operatic history: Anfossi, Sacchini, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Tritto, Zingarelli (the ‘late Neapolitans’), Sarti, Salieri, Paer and Mayr. Metastasian opera was based on a range of conventions which were utterly clear to his contemporaries: the post-Metastasian phase (1770–1800) was multiform, sometimes experimental, but the tendency was towards an acceleration of the dramatic rhythm. New subjects and a new vocabulary implied new metres, with frequent breaks and a preference for lines with an even number of syllables. New types of scene were introduced (dungeons, oracles, executions, cemeteries, eerie forests, ghosts and skeletons), and there was greater dependence on spectacular effects and the use of the chorus even during arias (Traetta's Ifigenia in Tauride, Paisiello's Elfrida and Cimarosa's Gli Orazi ed i Curiazi). The orchestra acquired greater importance: in his Nitteti (1756) Metastasio had already imagined the ‘din of tumultuous symphonies’ in the battle scene. The number of arias was reduced and the scenes were extended: sequences of solo scenes were transformed into ensembles (like the final sextet of Cimarosa's L'olimpiade): this brought about a reduction of exit arias, and Paisiello, for example, wrote only four exit arias in Elfrida and none at all in Elvira. The same composer reached a new level in Pirro in 1787; contemporary periodicals (Gazzetta Universale and Gazzetta Toscana) and direct documentation (G.G. Ferrari, Hadrava) reveal how much the dramatization of the solo scenes and the elaborate ensemble finales were admired. Singers were asked to interpret with greater realism and fidelity, as Burney documented when he praised the Florentine Guarducci for his expressivity and because he ‘adds but few notes’ to the melody.

Comedy, which had been banished from opera by Zeno's reform, began a history of its own. The first comic operatic forms were the commedia per musica and the intermezzo, neither of them popular art forms – indeed, in some cases, they were quite erudite – and they shared in the same anti-Baroque reaction as Zeno's reforms. The intermezzo, which grew out of the comic scenes in 17th-century opera, sprang from collaborations between the librettist Pariati and Gasparini and Albinoni and the buffo bass G.B. Cavana in Venice (the first printed librettos date from 1707). Cavana is responsible for the intermezzo being exported from Venice to Naples, where it was taken up by Scarlatti, Leo, Sarro, Vinci, Hasse and Pergolesi. The most frequently performed intermezzo of the century was Bacocco e Serpilla by G.M. Orlandini (1715, Verona). But posterity remembers the intermezzo (suppressed in Naples by royal decree in 1736) only by Pergolesi's La serva padrona (1733, Naples), which sparked the Querelle des Bouffons when it was performed at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris in 1752. There were some forward-looking elements in the style of a typical intermezzo: music which stays close to the text, short, unadorned vocal phrases, a simple plot with two or three characters, a recognition scene set as a duet, and middle-class, popular subject matter.

The commedia per musica had a more complex genesis: in Naples, after the private experiment of La Cilla (1706), the Teatro dei Fiorentini organized the first public season of commedeje pe' museca, all in Neapolitan dialect, in 1709. There were companies active in Rome performing Neapolitan commedie, and in 1717 Florence saw a scholarly attempt to revive the 17th-century ‘civili e rusticali’ operas of Moniglia and Villifranchi, while the librettist, impresario and composer G.M. Buini had a company working in Bologna and Venice. Only Neapolitan comedy, translated into Italian, went on to long-lasting success; the buffo bass Francesco Baglioni was responsible for the genre's decisive step forward in popularity, in Rome. Here in 1729 there were performances of La costanza (from Vinci's Li zite 'ngalera) and La somiglianza (from Leo's Lo simmele) at the Teatro Capranica; in 1738 La finta cameriera (Latilla) and La commedia in commedia (Rinaldo di Capua) were given at the Teatro Valle. La finta cameriera had been performed more than 20 times in northern Italy by 1750. Neapolitan opera buffa continued on its way in Florence, where it was performed by the singers Pertici, Laschi, Brogi and Querzoli. Goldoni was living in Florence until 1748; when he returned to Venice his collaboration with Galuppi produced the two examples of dramma giocoso per musica, L'Arcadia in Brenta (1749; see fig.11) and Il filosofo di campagna (1754), the first pan-Italian comic operas.

The golden age of opera buffa lasted from 1770 until about 1820, significantly, from Piccinni to Rossini. Although more ambitious in scope, the genre has similarities with the intermezzo: the various characters are stylized in music that has a new, imitative quality; each text was set only once, and operas were frequently revived, but the text was not printed, as yet; ensembles are used and secco recitative retained in response to the need to present the action as succinctly as possible; multiple musical forms and linguistic registers are employed, from dialect to Latinate Italian for parody purposes, and a range of vocal writing from parlando to the decorative melismas of opera seria; many more voice types are used, and the leading role is always taken by a buffo bass (the famous performers were G.B. Cavana, Gioacchino Corrado, Filippo Laschi, Pietro Pertici, Francesco Baglioni and Antonio Lottini) while the higher voices are expected to be more actors than virtuoso singers. In 1760 La buona figliuola by Piccinni, to a libretto by Goldoni, marked the change to a pathetic, sentimental genre; the success of this work can be measured both in the influence it had on opera seria and in the dissemination of some of its techniques, such as the rondo finale.

Venice was the centre of the operatic market both for its high rate of consumption and because it provided the link to posts in northern Europe; Bologna was where the agencies that looked after the engagements of singers, composers and designers were concentrated, and Naples was the centre for the training of operatic composers. This division, already clear to De Brosses (1799) and Archenholz (1787), reflects the system of Italian opera production, based not on permanent service, as in the courts of northern Europe, but on itinerant singers, composers, designers and choreographers. The mobile work force was coordinated by the impresarios, who belonged to the urban middle class, and who directed the theatres with public and private money. The great cities had many theatres: usually the political authority controlled and financed the leading theatre, devoted to opera seria for celebrations and during the Carnival seasons (averaging two new operas a year), and occasionally a minor theatre, giving commedie or opera buffa; these two organizations had the characteristics of civic institutions. For example, in Naples the leading theatre of S Bartolomeo (S Carlo from 1737) was linked to the Fondo; in Milan the Ducale (La Scala from 1778) was associated with the Cannobiana; in Turin the connected theatres were the Regio and the Carignano, and other financed theatres were found in Rome, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Parma and Reggio nell'Emilia. Many smaller theatres were not subsidized and were in competition with one another: the Fiorentini and Nuovo theatres in Naples, for example, and many others in Venice, Rome, Bologna and Florence; smaller cities, finally, were connected to the dominant centres by the impresario network (in 1785 about 80 cities had a theatre). The private minor theatres favoured comic opera, which meant that impresarios could economize on the production and choose operas with a wider audience appeal. In these cases it was more economical to revive tried and tested scores. The smaller business corresponded to more moderate payment to the singers; opera buffa was performed by more or less stable companies when the market in opera seria was already operating on an individual basis (this could be a practical reason why there are more ensembles in comic opera). The business of the leading opera seria theatres involved greater outlay, but survival was guaranteed by government support: the business of the minor theatres was subject to the risks of the free market: this contrast reveals another aspect of the bourgeois nature of opera buffa.

In opera seria the long survival of castratos (Guadagni, Farinelli, Senesino, Caffariello and Gizziello) and the stardom of the great virtuosos (Bordoni, Gabrielli, Cuzzoni, Raaf and Carlani) meant that the profession never became one transmitted from generation to generation (in fact, singing was considered extremely specialized); in comic opera, in contrast, skills were passed down through entire family trees (descendants of the Laschi and Baglioni families appeared in the first performances of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni). The abstract, idealized tone of opera seria allowed unnatural voice types to survive for quite some time; the realistic, middle-class tone of opera buffa required only natural voices and the entire range of voice types to differentiate between the characters.

When it first appeared, comic opera was musically and dramatically progressive, but the financial basis on which the opera house was organized meant that within 30 years the situation was reversed. Being less exposed to market forces, opera seria had greater freedom to experiment and develop, while opera buffa, subject to public approval, maintained its original features up to the 19th century; for this reason, the eclecticism of opera seria from the 1780s onwards (in the work of Paisiello, Sarti, Paer and Mayr) enabled it to develop continually, while the growing success of opera buffa meant that it became a conservative genre.

Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music