Opera

[It., fr. opera work, composition, opposed to an improvisation, fr. L. opera pains, work, fr. opus, operis, work, labor: cf. F. opéra. See Operate.]

1. A drama, either tragic or comic, of which music forms an essential part; a drama wholly or mostly sung, consisting of recitative, arias, choruses, duets, trios, etc., with orchestral accompaniment, preludes, and interludes, together with appropriate costumes, scenery, and action; a lyric drama.

2. The score of a musical drama, either written or in print; a play set to music.

3. The house where operas are exhibited.

||Opéra bouffe [F. opéra opera + bouffe comic, It. buffo]
||Opera buffa [It.]
, light, farcical, burlesque opera. -- Opera box, a partially inclosed portion of the auditorium of an opera house for the use of a small private party. -- ||Opéra comique [F.]
comic or humorous opera. -- Opera flannel, a light flannel, highly finished. Knight. -- Opera girl or Opera girls (Bot.), an East Indian plant (Mantisia saltatoria) of the Ginger family, sometimes seen in hothouses. It has curious flowers which have some resemblance to a ballet dancer, whence the popular name. Called also dancing girls. -- Opera glass, a short telescope with concave eye lenses of low power, usually made double, that is, with a tube and set of glasses for each eye; a lorgnette; -- so called because adapted for use at the opera, theater, etc. -- Opera hat, a gentleman's folding hat. -- Opera house, specifically, a theater devoted to the performance of operas. -- ||Opera seria [It.]
serious or tragic opera; grand opera.

A musical dramatic work in which the actors sing some or all of their parts; a union of music, drama and spectacle, with music normally playing a dominant role.

Antecedents of opera include the intermedio, but the earliest operas staged by the group of ‘camerata’ around patrons in Florence were courtly entertainments in the form of the pastorale. The spread of the new stile rappresentativo to other Italian courts began with Monteverdi's Orfeo (Mantua, 1607). As opera became a public entertainment, from 1637 at Venice, its content and structure changed to meet the demands of new audiences. A more accessible type of opera can be seen in the romantic dramas of Faustini which Cavalli set in 1642-52 with expressive recitative and fluid arias.

By the 1660s the aria structure in opera had become standardized as either ABA or ABB; the proportion of arias increased as arioso became less prominent and recitative less melodic. Plots and action became more varied and violent and spectacular stage effects were featured. The Venetian repertory and the operatic style of Cavalli, Sartorio, Pallavicino, Legrenzi and others spread elsewhere, partly through the activities of travelling troupes. In 1650 one of these, the Febiarmonici, took opera to Naples, a city soon to rival Venice as a centre for and disseminator of opera. By 1700 opera in Italy had been more or less standardized in a form familiar from the middle-period works of Alessandro Scarlatti: a three-movement overture followed by three acts, each consisting of a succession of sharply differentiated recitatives and arias (almost invariably ternary ABA, in structure), with the occasional duet or ensemble and a final coro for the entire cast.

The situation in France was somewhat different. French opera, as seen in the tragédies lyriques of Lully, was essentially a court spectacle, predominantly on legendary or mythological themes, and in five acts, with big choral and ceremonial scenes reflecting the magnificence and social order of the age of Louis XIV. France and Germany both imported Italian opera in the later 17th century, and there were attempts at German-language opera, especially at Hamburg, where an opera house had opened in 1678, Keiser was the leading figure and Handel wrote his first operas. In England, French influence was at first dominant in the ‘semi-opera’ with spoken dialogue; all-sung English operas, of which Purcell's Dido and Aeneas is the outstanding 17th-century example, were to be a rarity until well after 1900.

In the early 18th century there was a reaction in Italy against the alleged extravagance, over-elaboration and confusions of the 17th-century libretto; this was initiated by Zeno and completed after 1720 by Metastasio, whose opera seria librettos were set by numerous composers throughout the 18th century, including Vinci, Leo, Porpora, Hasse, Jommelli, Paisiello and Cimarosa. (Handel, whose mature operas were written for London and lie off the mainstream of the Italian tradition, set only three of them, adjusted to his requirements.) Metastasio's librettos serve as a model of the prevailing rationalist philosophy, the action moving through conflicts and misunderstandings to an inevitable lieto fine (happy ending), in which merit receives its due reward, often brought about through an act of renunciation by a benevolent despot. The music is equally orderly, largely an alternation of recitatives (in which the action takes place) and arias (in which the characters give vent to their emotional states). It is, however, important to realize that in 18th-century opera, particularly as given in public opera houses, the composer was not the dominant figure he was to become: operas were usually put together by house composers and poets, often drawing on several composers music, old and new, to suit the available singers, who (then as now) were the chief draw - above all the castratos and the sopranos.

As the century went on, the structure of opera seria was again challenged, this time from below. Lighter forms of opera, such as opera buffa in Italy, opéra comique or comédie mêlée d′ariettes in France, ballad opera or comic opera in England and Singspiel in Germany, came from humble beginnings to flourish alongside opera seria and even to penetrate its substance. Serious opera began to change in the direction of freer choice and more imaginative treatment of subject matter, reflected in the music by modifications of the strict da capo and the rise of new aria forms, greater use of accompanied recitatives and of the chorus, and in the end a virtual fusion of the formerly distinct French and Italian characteristics. The ‘reforms’ of Traetta, Jommelli and especially Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice, 1762) were stages in this process; the final stage is best represented by the operas of Mozart from Idomeneo (1781), including his three with Da Ponte with their many ensembles (including extended act finales, following the Venetian reforms of the poet Goldoni and the composer Galuppi) which bring a new emotional weight to comic opera. Two-act form came to be preferred, especially in comic opera, at this period.

By the early 19th century, even ‘serious’ opera had moved from its earlier aristocratic milieu into the great public theatres with their mass audiences. One manifestation of this was the popularity of ‘rescue’ operas, of which Beethoven's Fidelio (1805) is the best known. Popular audiences were undoubtedly an influential factor in the growth of French grand opera, with its emotion-charged plots, colourful orchestration and massive choral numbers; this is seen at its most successful in the collaboration between the librettist Scribe and the composer Meyerbeer. Nature and the supernatural entered into the substance of the drama, particularly in Germany with Weber, Marschner and others.

While Italian serious opera as cultivated by Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi remained relatively conservative, there was a move towards greater musical continuity during the 19th century. The rigid separation of recitative and aria was gradually broken down, and virtually eliminated in the Wagnerian music drama, with its ‘endless melody’ and elaborate system of leitmotifs, and (in a different way) in the final works of Verdi and the verismo operas of his Italian successors, above all Puccini.

Characteristic for the age was the rise of new types of opera based on national history, legends and folklore and drawing on national idioms in the music. Russia took the lead with works such as Musorgsky's Boris Godunov; similar examples in the 20th century were the operas of Janáček and, on an epic scale, Prokofiev's War and Peace. The underlying note of 20th-century opera is tragedy, whether conveyed in terms of symbolism (as in Debussy's Pelléas et Mé1isande), expressionism (Strauss's Salome and Elektra, Schoenberg's Erwartung) or naturalism (Peter Grimes and other operas by Britten). At the same time composers have engaged in fantasy (e.g. Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, Ravel's L′enfant et les sortilèges), allegory (Tippets's The Midsummer Marriage), grotesque comedy (Shostakovich's The Nose), patriotism (Prokofiev's War and Peace), irony (Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the last and greatest neoclassical opera), political or philosophical tract (Henze's Der junge Lord and The Bassarids) and personal epic (Stockhausen's cycle on the days of the week). New operas continue to be composed; but the expense of staging them and the difficulty of reconciling advanced forms of musical utterance with the requirements of the traditional opera house and its audience have induced many composers to prefer chamber opera or other kinds of music theatre susceptible to concert, ‘workshop’ or experimental production.

See also Azione teatrale, Ballad opera, Farsa, Festa teatrale, Intermedio, Intermezzo, Melodrama, Music drama, Number opera, Opéra comique, Opera semiseria, Operetta, Pasticcio, Puppet opera, Semi-opera, Singspiel, Tragédie lyrique and Zarzuela.

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The French operatic tradition that dates from Lully persists into the 20th c. It is characterized by the emphasis placed on ballet, the merveilleux, sensuous textures, and most importantly the subordination of the music to the text. A related feature is the use of a clear declamatory vocal style, in order that the text be understood [see also Words and Music]. An ironic fact about this French tradition is that, starting with Lully himself, through Gluck, Cherubini, Spontini, Meyerbeer, and Stravinsky, so many of its principal protagonists have been foreigners.

Opera was slow to develop in 17th-c. France because of the firm entrenchment and success of both dramatic theatre and ballet. Lully's tragédies en musique of the 1670s successfully incorporated both these elements, by emphasizing the tragédie and featuring substantial ballets in all his works. From the 17th c., when Mazarin tried to convert the French to Italian opera, to Boïeldieu's chauvinistic clinging to le genre national (opéra-comique) in the early 19th c., the French resisted domination by Italian opera and maintained their distinctive national style. The respective values of Italian and French opera were one of the subjects of a continual stream of polemical literary debates that began in 1700 and were continued throughout the 18th c., more by men of letters than by composers [see Guerre des Bouffons]. The largely pro-Italian philosophes contributed numerous significant articles to the debate. Lully's operas remained in repertory well into the 18th c. and both Rameau and Gluck continued in essence the tradition of giving central importance to the text. Gluck, with his emphasis on dramatic naturalness and simplicity, continued the aesthetics of the French tradition in both his operas and writings (see his preface to Alceste of 1769).

19th-c. Paris was very cosmopolitan. The Opéra was a fashionable place to visit and the majority of significant works performed there were not French. Although Italian opera had now fully infiltrated France, it was still performed in a separate theatre, the Théâtre Italian, where Rossini was for a time director, and drew a more aristocratic audience than the Opéra. Stendhal was perhaps Italian opera's most passionate follower and wrote extensively on its attractions. The Opéra was also extremely popular with contemporary writers of the day and features frequently in works by both littérateurs and serious novelists: e.g. ‘Gambera’ (1837), a short story by Balzac, has a lengthy discussion of Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable. By mid-century Grand Opera, a form popularized by Meyerbeer, indulged spectacle to the point where it almost ran out of control; immense sums were spent on costumes and stage sets, while the standards of libretti deteriorated dramatically. The majority were written by Eugène Scribe. For most of the 19th c. Paris was the musical capital of the world, and for a composer of any nationality the ultimate achievement was to have a work performed at the Paris Opéra. Verdi and Donizetti wrote works to French libretti, and even Wagner agreed to reorganize Tannhauser for what turned out to be the débâcle of 1861.

Gluck's tradition, however, continued in Berlioz's epic opera Les Troyens (partially staged 1863). The emphasis on spectacle is still a major feature (the opera incorporates ballets into the dramatic action) but the libretto, written by Berlioz himself, is once again of great importance. Berlioz did not agree, however, with Gluck's theory of the subordination of music to poetry, nor did he believe that Gluck had achieved it.

France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was followed by a nationalistic upsurge and fostering of French music by composers such as Saint-Saëns. However, the influence of Wagner's music and writings was also felt in France at this time, reaching a peak in the 1880s. Although Wagner influenced opera composition, he also had a remarkable effect on poets and writers, in particular Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Gautier and, slightly later, the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé.

In the late 19th to early 20th c. there were a large number of French operas with libretti either specifically written by or based on works by important writers of the time. Often the collaboration between writer and composer was extremely close, as in the collaborations between Massenet and Catulle Mendès, Bruneau and Zola, Debussy and Maeterlinck, Honegger and Claudel, Poulenc and Apollinaire, and Milhaud and Claudel. The most important 20th-c. French opera is undoubtedly Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), based on a play of the same name by Maeterlinck. Debussy set Maeterlinck's play to music with very few alterations, and it could be argued that no other opera has managed so successfully to wed literature and music. His vocal line aims to capture the inflections and natural rhythms of the French language, and the musical techniques manage not only to capture the essence of the drama but also the Symbolist aesthetic underlying the play.

Works of mixed genres—theatre, opera, oratorio, ballet—became popular in the 20th c. One of the most important literary collaborators on works of mixed genre and on operas in the first half of the century is Cocteau: Milhaud's opera Le Pauvre Matelot (1927) is a setting of a three-act Cocteau play; Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) is a Latin translation of a text by Cocteau; Honneger's opera Antigone (1927) has a Cocteau text, as does Poulenc's opera La Voix humaine (1959). Poulenc's Dialogues des carmélites (1957), based on a libretto by Bernanos, is another example of an opera in which minute attention is paid to the vocal line following the natural accentuation of the French language.

Henri Pousseur's opera Votre Faust (1969) questions the myth of Faust but also opera as a genre, and some of France's important contemporary composers have deliberately turned against opera for ideological reasons. Pierre Boulez, for instance, although a famous conductor of opera, has never written one himself. On the other hand, Olivier Messiaen's three-act, five-hour-long Saint François d'Assise was performed at the Paris Opéra in 1983. The fact that Messiaen wrote the libretto, basing it on the saint's writings, is evidence of the continued importance of the next to French opera.

[Kerry Murphy]

Bibliography

• J.-M. Bailbé, Le Roman et la musique sous la monarchie de juillet (1969)
• D. Launay (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons (1973)
• J. F. Fulcher, The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera (1988)

Opera performance in America has predominantly consisted of works imported from Europe. The earliest operas heard were English ballad operas brought over from London in the 1730s. French opera flourished in New Orleans from the 1790s through the nineteenth century. Italian opera was more popular in the north, first heard in English adaptations and then introduced in the original language in 1825. After the 1850s, German opera, particularly that of Richard Wagner, became more prevalent until it dominated the repertory toward the turn of the century. Twentieth-century audiences enjoyed a wide variety of foreign works in many languages as well as a growing number of American operas, particularly after the 1960s.

Early opera performances were typically produced by touring companies in temporary quarters until such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera (established 1883) were founded. The twentieth century saw the development of organizations including the San Francisco Opera (1923), the New York City Opera (1944), the Lyric Opera of Chicago (1954), and dozens of other regional companies, as well as summer festivals and opera workshops. Radio broadcasts since 1921 and television brought opera to a growing audience.

Opera composed by Americans prior to the twentieth century adhered to the style of imported works popular at the time, as illustrated by Andrew Barton's ballad opera, The Disappointment (1767), or the first grand opera, William Henry Fry's Leonora (1845), composed in the style of Vincenzo Bellini or Gaetano Donizetti. A number of operas acquired an American identity through plot or setting and often include indigenous musical elements, such as jazz and spirituals in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) or Appalachian folk style in Carlisle Floyd's Susan-nah (1956). Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) exhibited a new musical style modeling the inflections of American speech. Many other composers did not attempt to develop a dramatic or musical style identifiable as "American" but pursued a variety of individual, even eclectic, approaches to opera on a wide variety of subjects.

Bibliography

Dizikes, John. Opera in America: A Cultural History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Kirk, Elise K. American Opera. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 4 vols. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1992.

Sadie, Stanley, and H. Wiley Hitchcock, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. 4 vols. New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1986.

Opera reached Russia in 1731, when an Italian troupe from Dresden visited Moscow. In 1736 it was established at the tsarist court in St. Petersburg. Early Russian opera was mostly in Italian and French. Works in Russian were usually set in Russia, but representations of Russian history on the operatic stage began only in 1790 with The Early Reign of Oleg, a collaboration of the court composers Vasily Pashkevich (a Russian), Carlo Canobbio, and Giuseppe Sarti (both Italians) on a Russian libretto written by Catherine II.

The popularity of the court theaters in the early nineteenth century made their stages a possible venue of propaganda. This potential was fully realized in Mikhail Glinka's first opera (1836), with a libretto written by Baron Rosen, secretary of the successor to the throne. Initially named for its protagonist, Ivan Susanin, the opera was renamed A Life for the Tsar when Glinka dedicated it to Nicholas I (Soviet legend had it that the new title was imposed against Glinka's will). In its wholesale affirmation of the doctrine of "official nationality" as proclaimed by Nicholas, the opera became a symbol of Russian autocracy.

Opera was now the most popular form of entertainment in Russia, but apart from Glinka there were no notable domestic composers. To satisfy the demand, a new Italian troupe was established in St. Petersburg in 1843. Its repertory was the same as that of other Italian enterprises abroad; except for censorial changes to libretti, there was nothing Russian about it. This artistic showcase, cherished not only by the aristocracy but also by the radical intelligentsia, slowed down the development of Russian opera (and Russian music in general). Russian musicians, then mostly amateurs (composers and performers alike), even suffered from legal discrimination: Until 1860, "musician" was not a recognized profession; moreover, for a long time a limit was imposed on the yearly income of Russians (but not of foreigners) in the performing arts, and Russian composers were expressly forbidden to write for the Italian company. Only after the establishment of conservatories in the 1860s did Russian opera become really competitive; performance standards rose, and gradually a Russian repertory accumulated.

The first successful Russian opera after Glinka was Alexander Serov's Rogneda (1865). Its fictional plot unfolds against the background of the "baptism of Russia" in 988. As affirmative of the official view on Russian history as A Life for the Tsar, it earned its creator a lifelong pension from Alexander II. Soon after, three composers from the "Mighty Handful" embarked on operas based on Russian history: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov (based on Ivan IV, after Lev Mey, 1873), Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov (after Alexander Pushkin's play, 1874), and Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor (premiered posthumously, 1890). While Prince Igor affirmed autocracy, the other two works did not; furthermore, their protagonists were Russian tsars, whose representation on the operatic stage was forbidden. The ban was partly lifted, which made the production of the two operas possible. It remained in force for members of the House of Romanov, however, and that is why, in Musorgsky's second historical opera, Khovanshchina (unfinished; produced posthumously in 1886), the curtain falls before an announced appearance of Peter I; the same happens with Catherine II in Peter Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (1891). The representation of Orthodox clergy was also forbidden; while the Jesuits in Boris Godunov presented no problem, the Orthodox monks had to be recast as "hermits," and a scene set in a monastery was omitted. But before 1917 no Russian composer ever withdrew an opera instead of complying with the censor's demands, nor did anyone try to circumvent the censorship by having a banned Russian opera performed abroad.

After the accession of Alexander III, the crown's monopoly of theaters was revoked (1882), and private opera companies emerged; Savva Mamontov's in Moscow became the most famous. In 1885 the Italian troupe was disbanded. Russian opera took over its representative and social functions as well as its repertory. While opera continued to be a favorite of the public, leading Russian composers gradually lost interest in it, turning to ballet and instrumental genres instead. Fairy-tale operas were favored over depictions of Russian history, but Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera, The Golden Cockerel (after Pushkin, Moscow 1909), is often seen as a satire on Russian autocracy.

Censorship was restored after the 1917 revolution, although it took a different turn. A Life for the Tsar was banned until revised as Ivan Susanin with a new libretto by Sergei Gorodetsky (Moscow 1939). Other pre-1917 operas underwent minor modifications. There were also new operas interpreting history in Soviet terms and even "topical" operas intended to educate the public. Ivan Dzerzhinsky's "song opera" Quiet Flows the Don (Moscow 1934, after Mikhail Sholokhov's novel) was held up as a model against Dmitry Shostakovich's anarchic Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934; not based on history, but in a realistic historical setting), which was banned in 1936. Josef Stalin's megalomania shows through Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace (after Leo Tolstoy's novel). Composed in response to the German invasion of 1941, this most ambitious of Soviet operas was revised several times and was staged uncut only after the deaths of Stalin and Prokofiev (Moscow 1959).

During the Stalinist era an effort was made to establish national operatic traditions in the various Soviet republics. Russian composers were sent to the republics to collaborate with local composers on operas based on local folklore (and sometimes on local history) that generally sound like Rimsky-Korsakov.

In the post-Stalinist decades, major composers rarely tried their hand at opera. In the late 1980s Alfred Schnittke wrote Life with an Idiot, a surrealist lampoon on Vladimir Lenin after a story by Viktor Yerofeyev. It was premiered abroad (Amsterdam 1992), but in Russian and with a cast including "People's Artists of the USSR." Since the fall of the Soviet Union the musical has superseded opera as the leading theatrical genre. It even serves as a medium for patriotic representations of Russian history, such as Nord-Ost, the show staged in Moscow whose performers and audience were taken hostage by Chechen terrorists in 2002.

Outside Russia, Russian history has rarely served as the subject matter for opera. The earliest example is Johann Mattheson's Boris Goudenow (sic, Hamburg 1710), while the best-known is Albert Lortzing's Tsar and Carpenter (Leipzig 1837). Lortzing's comic opera exploits the sojourn of Peter I in the Netherlands disguised as a carpenter's apprentice. Because of its depiction of a tsar from the Romanov dynasty, it did not reach the Russian stage until 1908.

Bibliography

Buckler, Julie A. (2000). The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Campbell, Stuart, ed. (1994). Russians on Russian Music, 1830 - 1880: An Anthology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Campbell, Stuart, ed. (2003). Russians on Russian Music, 1880 - 1917: An Anthology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Morrison, Simon Alexander. (2002). Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sadie, Stanley, ed. (1992). The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. London: Macmillan.

Taruskin, Richard. (1993). Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s, 2nd ed. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—ALBRECHT GAUB

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.

Bibliography

Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. Portland, Ore., 1997.

Charlton, David. French Opera, 1730–1830: Meaning and Media. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1999.

Heartz, Daniel. Mozart's Operas. Edited by Thomas Bauman. Berkeley, 1990.

Isherwood, Robert M. Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1973.

Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, 1991.

Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas. London and Boston, 1992.

Tomlinson, Gary. Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. Berkeley, 1987.

—JAMES JOHNSON

A musical drama that is totally or mostly sung. Aïda, Carmen, and Don Giovanni are some celebrated operas. A light, comic opera is often called an operetta.

A musical play, usually entirely sung, making use of costumes, staging, props, sets, and dramatic elements. Operas usually consist of two types of musical elements, the aria, which primarily expresses a single idea or theme, and the recitative which advances the story.

A type of stage performance, usually a drama, in which the dialogue is sung. Classic examples of opera include Giuseppi Verdi's La traviata, Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme, and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Major twentieth-century contributors to the form include Richard Strauss and Alban Berg.

n.

A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but attitudes. All acting is simulation, and the word simulation is from simia, an ape; but in opera the actor takes for his model Simia audibilis (or Pithecanthropos stentor) -- the ape that howls.

    The actor apes a man -- at least in shape;
    The opera performer apes an ape.