Opera in the
course of time

The gentleman behind you complains, “We are in the opera house, show some respect, please be quiet”. Although the gentleman’s reaction you find a bit over the top, you remember that the theatre is usually a quiet place, you remove your hat so as not to disturb those behind you, and you withhold your enthusiasm until the interval.

As many important dates as we may try to remember when we read the history of opera, it is equally useful to remember that even our habits in the opera house form part of the history of the art. Read the previous paragraph again and try to guess how the experience of attending the opera might have been different in the past.

Even if you don’t look at the modern costumes and you don’t listen to the music, the environment of the theatre, the position of your seats and the fact that you have removed your hat show, not only that you bought your ticket in 2023, but also how operatic traditions determine the way we enjoy the art. As strange as it may appear today, it has not always been quiet at the opera. In fact, many operatic works have been composed explicitly to combat the noise that used to prevail in the auditorium.10Abbate, C., Parker, R. 2012. A history of opera: the last 400 years, p. 59 Therefore, while the way we see opera betrays that we live in the 21^st century, the way we listen to it can “transfer” us directly into the past.

This venue was intended for compositions of the highest standard, presented as  ‘complete’ musical, theatrical, poetic, scenic and ideological spectacles; ‘Perfect’ operas for a ‘perfect’, silent and serious audience. A few years earlier, an absolutely unserious audience in Paris had heckled Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser because he had placed the ballet in the wrong part of the performance. And since a significant part of the audience only came to the opera house for the second act and then walked in and out of the auditorium at will, they missed the ballet, heckled the performance, and exposed something that composers and art critics had been complaining about for years;12Abbate, C., Parker, R. 2012. A history of opera: the last 400 years, p. 282 opera was more often a place of socialization and entertainment than a space where audiences listened attentively (and seriously!) to music.

Music lovers may have been partly justified in their complaints, yet the incredible variety of operatic works and the popularity of the spectacle in the 19th century show the public to have been far from indifferent to the art. As you will notice from the titles of the works in the following list, apart from the variety of nationalities of the featured composers, opera in the 19th century had emerged as a cultural sector that supplied its eager audience with works for all kinds of tastes. In Romantic opera, emphasis was put on emotions rather than rationalism, the characters became entangled in supernatural encounters, and traditional music was often used to highlight the national identity of the locality where the work was set.13Arnold, D. (ed.) 1983. The New Oxford Companion to Music, vol. 2, pp. 1581- 1582

Opera, they said, had become light entertainment, the audience was enchanted by the sets and popular melodies, singers were little more than well-paid superstars, and no one paid attention to poetry and ethics; a total depreciation of literature in favour of music, and a society on the verge of collapse. The movement that gave birth to opera seria – ‘serious opera’ – in the 18th century aspired to reform opera but to the opposite direction from Mr Wagner’s push for more music. With themes drawn from ancient Greek and Roman myths, characters experiencing moral dilemmas and struggling with their emotions on stage, strictly structured arias, more poetry, less music and fewer comic characters; a didactic, artistic and moralizing spectacle. Musically, this was expressed through the use of the recitativo secco, the reduction of duets and ensembles, and in many cases through the absence of a choir. And while this significant reduction of musical variety may have had you – and certainly me – avoid opera, the clear moral and political messages, the presentation of benevolent monarchs, and the development of the aria structure made opera seria one of the most successful opera genres in Europe.14Abbate, C., Parker, R. 2012. A history of opera: the last 400 years, pp. 77-78

Most works of opera seria from this period are not performed often today. An exception to this are the works of Christoph Willibald Gluck, who introduced major reforms to opera seria, and like all men of his social class he wore a white wig with little curls.

Influenced by the French genre of opéra comique, in the opera Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck and librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi presented a work with a simpler and more direct text, and music that emphasized this directness in the recitative and arias.15C. Abbate – R. Parker 2012, A History of Opera. The last 400 years, σ. 108-109. As you can see, things were now both very serious and more immediate. Of course, theatres do not appear to have been at all more quiet – they were still places for socialising and the audience played chess while waiting for their favourite aria – but the genre of opera seria had taken over the minds of 18^th century composers.16D. Grout 2003 (4η έκδ.), A Short History of Opera, σ. 222. Or maybe not?

As we saw previously, in order to bring the moral messages and the poetry at the centre of the audience’s attention, the creators of opera seria proposed a form of opera with fewer comic roles and less ‘light’ music. After this sharp division between serious and comic characters, the comic roles and their ‘light music’ acted accordingly: they packed up their stuff and moved into their own kind of opera. In other words (more serious), the creation of the strictly defined opera seria resulted in the development of its comic parts (intermezzi) into an independent genre of opera. The genre of opera buffa (later dramma giocoso) gradually managed to surpass opera seria in popularity, presenting a wide range of characters from different social classes, who expressed their identity through diverse musical textures.17Abbate, C., Parker. 2012. A history of opera: the last 400 years, pp. 122-123 It was through this style that perhaps the most important opera composer in history expressed himself, combining humor with poignant political and moral commentary in his works. And he also wore a white wig with curls.

For Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, music was the most important component of opera, the expressive means that gave life to the characters of his works and communicated his social and political ideas directly to the audience. Mozart ‘spoke’ through his music, that is, he portrayed the personalities of his heroes in the music rather than rely on the text or their stage presence. Mozart’s talent is particularly evident in the opera buffa Le nozze di Figaro, with Lorenzo Da Ponte as librettist, and in the Singspiel Die Zauberflöte with Emanuel Schikaneder as librettist.

In the opera Le nozze di Figaro, all sorts of things happen: love affairs, power games, intrigue, reconciliations and farces. The ideas of the Enlightenment about equality are reproduced in a mixture of musical humor and social commentary on the relationship between servants and the aristocracy. The characters present realistic human complexity, as Mozart’s musical representation lends them emotional depth and a personality that makes them into something more than ‘social models’ or theatrical characters.18Grout, D. 2003 (4th ed.) A short history of opera, p. 315 Listen for example to the following excerpt from the opera Le nozze di Figaro. What do you understand about the central character of the opera from this short fragment?

This opera, along with the dramma giocoso Don Giovanni and the opera buffa Così fan tutte ossia La scuola degli amanti, are Mozart’s three collaborations with Da Ponte, which stood out among the other operas of the period for their musical and literary genius. They are works in which the music and the text communicate the ideas and the humor of their creators through great craftsmanship.

In Mozart’s last opera, the ‘Singspiel’ Die Zauberflöte, the composer’s Freemason ideals gave symbolic dimensions to the main characters and expressed the core ideas of the Enlightenment. In this imaginative adventure about the rescue of princess Pamina, equality between genders and social classes is emphasized, and there even appear to be some traces of racial equality. The genre of ‘Singspiel’ itself adheres to the ideals of the Enlightenment as well, as it was not performed in High German, but rather in the language that ordinary people spoke and understood, and it was considered the most inferior among the opera genres.19Taruskin, R. 2009. Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pdf p. 529 [βρες hardcopy]

As you saw in the section “The birth of opera”, the beginnings of opera are conventionally placed between 1573 and 1587. This was when Camerata‘s experiments led to the first musical dramas and the first operatic works were presented after the influence of composer Claudio Monteverdi.

And here we can finally admit it: the supporters of opera seria were right after all. During the 17^th century, opera was a great musical celebration. Not because the public did not respect poetry, but because it was in part its contact with the public that gave opera the form in which we understand it to this day. So, while the theoretical experiments of Camerata were indeed important, the results of these experiments were “academic” and only concerned the limited audience that attended them, i.e. the aristocracy in theatres within palaces.20R. Τaruskin 2009, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pdf, σ. 23. [βρες hardcopy] This situation was to change radically after the creation of Teatro San Cassiano in Venice in 1637, a theatre that relied on the financial support of the public and catered to their preferences.

The mid-17th century may feel like a different world from our perspective but you will certainly recognise some similarities with our modern society in the way opera was treated. Just like today when a popular film is released most people who can afford a ticket go to the cinema, so was the case in 17th century Venice. Between 1637 and 1700 more than 350 operas were staged in the 9 theatres that were operating especially for this purpose, while from 1680 onwards, the city ­–which had a population slightly larger than that of Volos today­– maintained 6 opera companies.21Grout, D. 2003 (4th ed.) A short history of opera, pp. 83- 84 In this public space, opera was shaped to satisfy its wider audience, the theatre became a venue of musical entertainment with the preferences of the public determining the development of the genre, while at the same time its relative autonomy from aristocratic preferences allowed the development of anti-aristocratic political elements in the genre.22Τaruskin, R. 2009. Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pdf p. 25 [βρες hardcopy] From the middle of the century onwards, many more Italian cities acquired theatres that presented opera, and the genre soon spread to the neighbouring Germany and to France, where it was adapted to the respective local musical culture and the taste of the audience. Thus, opera, born as an experiment borrowing elements from Italian musical culture, soon spread throughout Europe and its colonies, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and to the Kingdom of Greece in the 19th century.

The case of conductor Arturo Toscanini, who introduced new rules in Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1898 to achieve long-term changes in the behaviour of the audience, is illustrative. Toscanini dimmed the lights in the auditorium to direct the audience’s attention to the stage and he banned spontaneous applause and elaborate hats that blocked the view.23Cowart, G. “Audiences” in Greenwald, H. M. (ed.), 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Opera, pp. 670- 671

In the quiet theatre of the 20th century, after 300 years of operatic tradition and numerous musical conflicts, the silent audience witnessed incredible musical opulence, which partly reflected the monumental political and cultural developments of the past century. The European National Schools of music, which demanded the recognition of the value of works that did not belong to the Italian, French or German traditions, highlighted other local musical idioms from around the continent and the traditional music of their respective countries. Notable among those are Antonín Leopold Dvořák’s musical fairy tale Rusalka (1901), the operas Jenufa (1904) and The Cunning Little Vixen (1924) by Czech composer Leoš Janáček, and the opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.

From the point of view of compositional techniques through which composers attempted to experiment on the texture of the music, Claude Debussy presented his impressionistic opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Alban Berg staged the operas Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937), which were composed according to the principles of the twelve-tone technique. In the first decade of the century, the Romantic and early-modern music composer Richard Strauss presented the operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). In Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich was politically persecuted for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1934, while in the field of politicised music Kurt Weill presented the popular Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, based on a text by Bertolt Brecht. In the last quarter of the century, American composers such as Philip Glass and John Adams began to represent minimalism in their operas Einstein on the beach (1976) and Nixon in China (1987), respectively. If you are curious to see what has been happening in the world of opera in recent decades, you can try the Shakespearean The vision of Lear (1998) by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa or the opera L’amour de loin (2000) by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Similarly to the past, contemporary opera borrows themes from literature, the everyday life, and the world of imagination to present extravagant shows on stage, in order to entertain, stimulate and inspire the audience. From the very beginning of opera’s existence, opera producers have used the most advanced technologies of their time to captivate audiences with spectacular sets and stage mechanisms that seem to make the impossible possible. Nowadays, with the development of information technology, modern opera productions use 3D holograms, on-stage projections and spectacular lighting to offer the music and text additional dimensions. Opera works from the world’s greatest opera houses are now available online and are more accessible than ever.